A relational framework. By clicking accept or continuing to use the site, you agree to the terms outlined in our. In the late 1970s, Stephen Jay Gould (1978) reviewed the notes used by Samuel George Morton to support his 1839 classification of races (1839) and found what he considered to be serious, In the 19th century measurements of cranial capacity by Morton and others supported a Caucasoid > Mongoloid > Negroid hierarchy of intelligence. For overviews of the French school of anthropology, see, for instance, Kremer-Marietti (1984), Stocking (1968), and Williams (1985). To determine cranial capacity, he stuffed each skull with pepper seeds to determine the volume and meticulously jotted down the. Craniometry - Wikipedia Lewis, J. E., DeGusta, D., Meyer, M. R., Monge, J. M., Mann, A. E., & Holloway, R. L. (2011). Parsons, F. G. (1919). 2013 Jun;5(2):79-80. doi: 10.1007/s12552-013-9096-8. Harvard University Press. According to Gould, the earlier seed-based procedure left more room for Mortons own bias to produce unsystematic measurement errors (for instance, by compressing seeds in African skulls more than in others), therefore leading to a larger increase in the 1849 African averages, where the measurements were taken by using the less malleable lead shot. After his death in 1851, his collection continued to be studied, added to, and displayed. Morton's ranking of races by cranial capacity. 1, p. 012001). Thanks largely to Stephen Jay Gould's book The Mismeasure of Man, Morton's, View 3 excerpts, cites background and methods. (1977). Article MeSH (2016). Banton, M. (2007). Although these two aspects of calibration are not separate in practice, for the purposes of my analysis I will refer to the former as calibration in the narrow sense, and to the latter as calibration in the broader sense. This essay is one of a series of "Participant Observations" on the removal of the Samuel Morton Cranial Collection from public display and legacies of scientific racism in museums. The collapse of the craniological research program and its failure at quantifying intelligence by means of physical measures did not prevent the assumption of quantitativity of psychological attributes from making its way into the development of early psychological testing, most importantly intelligence testing (Boring, 1961; Carson, 2007, 2014; Gould, 1981). Philosophy of Science, 81(5), 10391052. Morton, gould, and bias: A comment on the mismeasure of science. PLoS Biology, 14(4), e1002444. The Mismeasure of Man. Lectures on man: His place in creation, and in the history of the earth. Gould, 1981). Open access publication has been provided by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. ), Histoires de lAnthropologie: XVIXIX sicles (pp. Morton's work was hailed as a jewel of American science. ), Aller Mnnerkultur zum Trotz: Frauen in Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften (pp. Morton's ranking of races by cranial capacity. Morton's Ranking of Races by Cranial Capacity | Science Home Science Vol. Would you like email updates of new search results? All of these alternative scales shared the common purpose of preserving the traditional rankings of intelligence among human groups by shifting to a measure that would accommodate recalcitrant data, as it has been adamantly shown by historians and sociologists (Carson, 2007; Fee, 1979; Gould, 1981; Russett, 1991; Tuana & Peterson, 1993). In other terms, Morton showed little awareness of the fact that, for measured data to mean something, it is not sufficient to operate a selection and abstraction of certain parameters, but that justification is required for narrowing down their range of possible meanings. Most craniologists were mainly interested in ranking the (average) intelligence of different human groups, a purpose for which an ordinal scale of intelligence would suffice. Craniologists preoccupation with improving the precision and reliability of their physical procedures and material instruments was not counterbalanced by an equal attention to the assumptions embedded in their measurement process, which surreptitiously transformed their very selected set of physical features into bearers of meaning. Luchetti, M. The quantification of intelligence in nineteenth-century craniology: an epistemology of measurement perspective. Beginning in 1775, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) suggested that the four races in the taxonomy of Linnaeus (including, African, American, Asian, and European) could be expanded to five, with somewhat different terminology: Europeans as Caucasians, Africans as Aethiopians, Asians as Mongolians, as well as Americans and Malays (who were Polynesians and other South Pacific Peoples). Tal, E. (2019). Even when measures of intelligence by means of standardized testing started to appear, independent evidence of its quantitative structure proved far from easy to obtain (Michell, 1997). Yet, the fact that the readings of volume from the graduated containers were taken directly as values of cranial capacity does not mean that no inferential step was required. Yet, it is with craniology that skull volume and other cranial features became veritable measurement parameters and, as such, extremely powerful tools to classify human kinds via a single, measurable, naturalistic criterion of mental ability. Morton made his first measurements of 256 skulls in 1839. ), Race and Racialization: Essential Readings (pp. A model-based epistemology of measurement. However, the circularity result could not be avoided even by those craniologists who embraced a different strategy, since they tried to preserve the preferred ordering relations of intelligence in the face of unwelcome evidence by shifting the physical parameter taken as a measure. These factors, in parallel with the birth of mental testing and of more refined statistical techniques, led craniology to lose its evidential grip compared to the performance-based measures developed by the emerging science of intelligence at the beginning of the twentieth century (Carson, 2007; Gould, 1981).Footnote 3. (2002). Cite this article. Morton's Ranking of Races by Cranial Capacity Author(S): Stephen Jay In fact, craniologists attributed a central place to measurement and quantification very much in line with the positivistic spirit of the time as the source of incontrovertible evidence for their claims. Front Integr Neurosci. Schmutz, H. K. (1990). Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part c: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 52, 2231. Socit dAnthropologie de Paris: Bulletins et Mmoires, n.s., 1, 165202. The discovery of nearly 180-year-old cranial measurements in the archives of 19th century American physician and naturalist Samuel George Morton can address a lingering debate about the unconscious bias alleged in Mortons comparative data of brain size in human racial groups. In the waning decades of the 18th century, the collection, trade, dissection, and study of bodies and bones provided an anatomical basis for racial divisions. Morton's Ranking of Races by Cranial Capacity Author(S): Stephen Jay Gould Reviewed Work(S): Source: Science, New Series, Vol; Crania Aegyptiaca, by Samuel George Morton File:///E:/MOVIES/Morton, Crania gyptiaca, 1844.Htm; Varieties of Human Species Human Races and Polygenism in Samuel George Morton'S Crania Americana (1839) PLoS Biology, 9(6 . The naturalist and anatomist Georges Cuvier [17691832] introduced his facial angle scale based on the relative proportion of the cranial bones to the facial bones exactly to get away with the elephant problem (Cuvier, 1837).Footnote 20 However, the rate of appearance of alternative measures spiked starting from the early 1870s, when craniology entered its Baroque phase (cf. More precisely, Kaplan and colleagues emphasize that Gould himself failed to offer a better answer to Mortons question, because Given how the skulls were actually collected, there are no interesting ways to summarize the dataset in order to draw broader conclusions about the world (2015: 23). intelligence, a notion imported from zoology and then progressively used to arrange humans and animals on a unitary, hierarchical, and gradual scale of mental ability (Blanckaert, 1987; Carson, 1999, 2007: ch. In particular, he argues that Morton included or excluded certain racial subgroups from their larger families to match his expectations concerning the ranking of averages. The history and development of physical anthropology. This is certainly due to the lack of precise definitions of the quantity of interest that, ideally, would require reference to independently established empirical regularities. Princeton University Press. Broca, P. (1868). A structural model of direct measurement. Classic philosophical works on the theory-ladenness of measurement and more recent contributions on data-intensive science (e.g., Leonelli, 2012, 2015; Pietsch, 2015) have emphasized how theory plays multiple roles in the production, dissemination, and curation of data. Even if nineteenth-century craniologists had had biologically and statistically appropriate evidence for their presupposed kinds, as well as for the representativity of their sampling and of their averages, the question they wanted to ask concerning the relationship between skull size and intelligence differences across human groups could not have been answered. The site is secure. Weisberg, M., & Paul, D. B. Attention to old measures of brain size and facial angle were augmented with considerations of nose and ear shape, detailed descriptions of hair texture and color, and more. Norton. Nineteenth-century craniology: The study of the female skull. Not until Franz Boass (1858-1942) study of immigrant parents to the United States and their American-born children, which showed that there was very low inheritance of the cephalic index, did discussion of racial characters of the cranium begin to recede.36 Once racial categories were recognized as changing through time, even in one generation, the older typological model of race which had characterized craniological study to that point became increasingly untenable.37 Even so, in the popular imagination, craniology remained an easy explanation for human differences. Kaplan, J. M., & Winther, R. G. (2013). Morton's ranking of races by cranial capacity: unconscious manipulation of data may be a scientific norm. Expedition Magazine - Penn Museum Oxford University Press. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 53(3), 415433. However, identifying that there is some empirical relationship between the representing and the represented quantity seems crucial to get measurement started in the first place. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 162(2), 267284. Unconscious manipulation of data may be a scientific norm. In fact, while both of them worked on very similar samples, obtained very similar measurement results and carefully explained their methods of measurement, neither of them justified their respective choices of statistics upon which to base their differing interpretations, whether ranges or averages (Mitchell, 2018: 9), but they only implicitly held assumptions about the explanatory validity of the different statistics of variation justifying their inferences. Tal, E. (2013). Boring, E. G. (1961). Outline of a general model of measurement. Tuana, N., & Peterson, M. J. Penn Museum 2023 Report Web Accessibility Issues and Get Help / Contact / Copyright / Disclaimer / Privacy /, Report Web Accessibility Issues and Get Help. As we have seen, in a measurement process where we infer measurement outcomes of one quantity (e.g., temperature) from instrument readings of another quantity (e.g., length), the identification and modeling of possible measurement errors partly depends on how accurately the empirical relationship between the two quantities has been captured (Tal, 2017a).