Thursday, January 24, 2013
Gould's science
Chapter 1 was focused on attempting to distinguish and define "science" and I feel that we adequately covered the subject during Tuesday's discussion. While perusing through chapter two again though, I noticed something that originally stood out as extremely politically incorrect and seemingly ignorant. While critiquing Morton's 'science', Gould referred to the subject groups in the exact same way as did Morton: "large-brained Iroquois" and "small-brained Inca". I felt that the terms implied intelligence, or lack thereof. And who were either of them to quantify intellectual capacity based on skull measurements? In either case, Gould's faux pas really rubbed me the wrong way; wasn't he supposed to be correcting the many errors made by this fellow Morton? After thinking about it a bit longer, I came to see that Gould was only following the definition of science and rules that he had set himself. Via the rules of Morton's 'science', he was proving that the same science did not follow it's own rules. I believe that this is also why he did not discuss median or standard deviation; because Morton and the other scientists of the age did not use them.
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I don't think Gould was implying that Iroquois or Incans are more or less intelligent than anyone else, or that he considers craniometry to be a legitimate measure of intelligence at all; I think he's literally saying that Iroquois tend to be larger people, and Peruvians tend to be smaller people, so the fact that Morton used mostly Peruvian Incans to rank all American Indians lower than Caucasians was an example of his picking and choosing a skewed set of data that would support his conclusions.
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