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Stephen J Gould was a scientific fraud, with an ideological axe to grind, and repeatedly lied and misrepresented reality to smear what he saw as his ideological

by xyzzyz 5y ago

Stephen J Gould was a scientific fraud, with an ideological axe to grind, and repeatedly lied and misrepresented reality to smear what he saw as his ideological opponents. His most famous work on the topic, The Mismeasure of Man, for example, discussed Morton’s skull measuring experiments, who found that people of various races have different average cranial capacities. This is now a well established scientific fact, nevertheless Gould found this so offensive, that he claimed Morton fudged results by putting finger on the scale, based on no evidence whatsoever, simply disbelieving this sort of human variation between populations. Morton’s skulls have been in fact remeasured, and found to match Morton’s measurements within error margin appropriate to the method. This has been communicated to Gould himself, but he did not issue any correction or indeed mention any of it for the second edition of his book, showing clear evidence for his ideologically driven lack of scientific integrity.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago
This is a suspiciously specific rebuttle. Morton was wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_George_Morton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_George_Morton It's great that you found some super specific thing where his wrong answer isn't provably the result of fudging of numbers, but he's still wrong for various reasons. And someone else measured other skulls at roughly same time and came to the correct conclusion that you couldn't really make any such claim based on the data they had.
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  Morton was wrong on many counts, to be sure, just as any scientist worth of salt must be. However, he was not wrong on the very thing Gould accused him of, which was ideologically based fudging of data, something that Gould was in fact guilty himself.
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    He did ideologically fudge his data, though, to the point that he could, incorrectly, make the claim that he already believed, but that wasn't actually there in the data. Gould's point was about inadvertant bias in science and he was correct in this case.
runarberg 5y ago
You are doing the very thing you are accusing Gould of doing. Rebutting a claim based on the fact that the person making that claim was wrong in an unrelated claim. This is called an ad-hominen fallacy. You might be right that Gould was a fraud, however you still have to show that his claim about the fact that intelligence isn’t normally distributed is wrong. In fact the burden of proof is kind of weird here, since assuming a normal distribution is a pretty strong assumption, and rejecting that assumption based on a lack of evidence should be enough. However Gould goes further and cites evidence that intelligence has a pretty skewed distribution. If you want to reject Gould’s claim here, then do so. Don’t just say he’s a fraud and then assume his wrong about everything.

by xyzzyz 5y ago

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

This is a suspiciously specific rebuttle. Morton was wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_George_Morton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_George_Morton It's great that you found some super specific thing where his wrong answer isn't provably the result of fudging of numbers, but he's still wrong for various reasons. And someone else measured other skulls at roughly same time and came to the correct conclusion that you couldn't really make any such claim based on the data they had.

xyzzyz 5y ago
Morton was wrong on many counts, to be sure, just as any scientist worth of salt must be. However, he was not wrong on the very thing Gould accused him of, which was ideologically based fudging of data, something that Gould was in fact guilty himself.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  He did ideologically fudge his data, though, to the point that he could, incorrectly, make the claim that he already believed, but that wasn't actually there in the data. Gould's point was about inadvertant bias in science and he was correct in this case.

runarberg 5y ago

You are doing the very thing you are accusing Gould of doing. Rebutting a claim based on the fact that the person making that claim was wrong in an unrelated claim. This is called an ad-hominen fallacy. You might be right that Gould was a fraud, however you still have to show that his claim about the fact that intelligence isn’t normally distributed is wrong. In fact the burden of proof is kind of weird here, since assuming a normal distribution is a pretty strong assumption, and rejecting that assumption based on a lack of evidence should be enough. However Gould goes further and cites evidence that intelligence has a pretty skewed distribution. If you want to reject Gould’s claim here, then do so. Don’t just say he’s a fraud and then assume his wrong about everything.