Abstract
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, begun in the late 20th century by paleontologist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould, about the unconscious bias alleged in Morton’s comparative data of brain size in human racial groups. Analysis of Morton’s lost data and the records of his studies does not support Gould’s arguments about Morton’s biased data collection. However, historical contextualization of Morton with his scientific peers, especially German anatomist Friedrich Tiedemann, suggests that, while Morton’s data may have been unbiased, his cranial race science was not. Tiedemann and Morton independently produced similar data about human brain size in different racial groups but analyzed and interpreted their nearly equivalent results in dramatically different ways: Tiedemann using them to argue for equality and the abolition of slavery, and Morton using them to entrench racial divisions and hierarchy. These differences draw attention to the epistemic limitations of data and the pervasive role of bias within the broader historical, social, and cultural context of science.
Highlights
Samuel George Morton (1799–1851, Fig 1) and his collection of hundreds of human skulls are foundational to the history of scientific racism
Inferring the mean seed-to-shot correction for the other four races requires reconstructing which crania were measured in 1839, which Gould did by working from the information recorded in the third edition of the Catalogue (1849) about the timing and ordering of Morton’s acquisition of crania
Probably not entirely accurately (S2 Text), identifies only 18/29 of the African crania and 19/49 of the Caucasian crania as having been re-measured, while the rest were borrowed from Morton’s associates in 1839 and not later re-measured. In calculating his “seed-to-shot corrections,” Gould compares the shot internal capacity” (IC) means of the re-measured Africans and re-measured Caucasians to the seed IC means for 29 Africans and 49 Caucasians measured in Crania Americana
Summary
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, begun in the late 20th century by paleontologist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould, about the unconscious bias alleged in Morton’s comparative data of brain size in human racial groups. Inferring the mean seed-to-shot correction for the other four races requires reconstructing which crania were measured in 1839, which Gould did by working from the information recorded in the third edition of the Catalogue (1849) about the timing and ordering of Morton’s acquisition of crania Thereby, he could presumably account for the crania in Morton’s collection by the time of Crania Americana’s publication.
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