Was Dr.Gould correct in his analysis?

Although we have already touched on the subject of Dr. Gould not being 100% correct in his analysis of Morton’s skulls, I wanted to go more in depth. As we all know, Morton believed that brain size was a measure of intelligence and Gould believed that Morton subconsciously manipulated his results to favor his hypothesis. However, physical anthropologists at the University of Pennsylvania own Morton’s collection of skulls and have remeasured them. After remeasuring these skulls, they have concluded in a short article that the majority of Gould’s analysis was wrong. Below is a quote from what they wrote in the current PLoS Biology:

“Our results resolve this historical controversy, demonstrating that Morton did not manipulate his data to support his preconceptions, contra Gould.”

The Pennsylvania team believed that Morton was not trying to correlate brain size and intelligence. In fact, they say that he was using the skulls to measure human variation, as part of his inquiry that God did not create one human race, but created the human races separately. Also, Gould claims that Morton “fudged” his results to match his previous beliefs. However, the Pennsylvania team remeasured the skulls and found that only 2% of Morton’s measurements differed significantly from their own. All in all, I think it is funny that although Gould is criticizing bias, he makes the same mistakes. In fact, after reading the article, it seems like Gould is a better representation of one who falls victim to these biases, not Morton.

The link to this article is below:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/science/14skull.html?_r=0