Gould's Best Argument Was Made Against Him

2026-09-15 · AI-generated insight

The central thesis of The Mismeasure of Man is that scientists unconsciously bend their measurements toward their prior convictions — that Samuel Morton, believing in white superiority, found it in his skulls without ever knowing he'd put his thumb on the scale. The strange afterlife of that book, as Warne recounts, is that Gould himself became its best evidence. The anthropologists who re-examined Morton's craniometry concluded that the fudging Gould detected may have been Gould's own: a scientist so convinced of Morton's bias that he manufactured it in the data. Whatever one makes of the follow-up literature — Weisberg defending Gould, Kaplan splitting the difference, Mitchell exonerating Morton's numbers — the episode confirms the mechanism Gould described while stripping away his implicit assumption about who it applies to. Bias in measurement is not a pathology of racists that anti-racists are immune to. It is a symmetric hazard of caring about the answer.

This matters for reading the first note, where Gould argues that race is literally skin deep — visible traits like skin color and hair form mislead us into overestimating small overall genetic differences. That claim may well be true; it rests on genetic evidence independent of Morton's skulls or Gould's rhetoric. But the Morton affair teaches us we can't take Gould's word for it because his heart was in the right place. Sanders's charge — that Gould used anti-racism as a moral shield, casting critics as villains rather than answering them — describes exactly the move that insulated the Morton analysis from scrutiny for thirty years. Who wants to audit the numbers of the man fighting racism?

The uncomfortable synthesis: the case against biological racism is strongest when it's made by people who would accept the opposite finding, and Gould, by his own theory of science, may not have been one of them. The 'skin deep' claim deserves to be tested by someone with no stake in it being true — which is precisely the kind of scientist Gould's framework suggests doesn't exist.

Woven from these notes

obvious: As long as most scientists accepted the ancient division of races, they expected important genetic differences. But the recent origin of races… squares well with the minor genetic differences now measured. Human groups do vary strikingly in a few highly visible characters (skin color, hair form)—and this may fool us into thinking that overall differences must be great. But we now know that our usual metaphor of superficiality—skin deep—is literally

— Gould 2026-07-20

Many scholars have criticized The Mismeasure of Man periodically throughout its 38-year history. For example, James T. Sanders stated that Gould’s attempt to link his argument to anti-racism was a ploy to smear intelligence scholars and Gould’s enemies as evil people. Arthur Jensen argued in 1982 that Gould misrepresented Jensen’s ideas and often demolished strawmen that no intelligence scholar believes, including the boogeyman of “biological determinism.” John Carroll showed that Gould understood neither the purpose nor interpretation of factor analysis (a statistical procedure often used to evaluate data from psychological tests) and that Gould’s attacks on factor analysis do nothing to alter the importance of intelligence tests, nor the mass of evidence—impossible to dispute—that they predict real-life outcomes. Most criticism of The Mismeasure of Man was confined to the recherché world of psychologists who study intelligence. However, a new debate opened up in 2011 when a team of anthropologists argued that Gould’s analysis of the data on cranium measurements from 19th century scientist Samuel George Morton was flawed. Gould cast Morton as a racist who fudged his data to match his beliefs about white racial superiority because of a supposed larger skull capacity. Instead, the anthropologists argued, it was Gould who manipulated the data to support his biases. This ignited a series of follow-up articles in the scholarly literature by authors taking a variety of positions regarding Morton’s data and Gould’s interpretations. Weisberg believed that the re-analysis was flawed and Gould was mostly correct. Kaplan and his colleagues claimed that Morton’s interpretations were flawed, but that Gould was incorrect in believing that he could discern Morton’s actions and motivations. Finally, Mitchell believed that Morton’s data were accurate and that the interpretations were colored by the racism of the era, but the claim that Morton subtly manipulated the data was a fiction created by Gould.

— Russell T. Warne The Mismeasurements of Stephen Jay Gould 2026-07-20