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Brain Size
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In “The Mismeasure of Man,” Stephen Jay Gould asserted that Samuel George Morton, believing that brain size was a measure of intelligence, had subconsciously manipulated the brain volumes of European, Asian and African skulls to favor his bias that Europeans had larger brains and Africans smaller ones.
But now physical anthropologists at the University of Pennsylvania have remeasured the skulls, and they conclude that almost every detail of his analysis is wrong.
They identified and remeasured half of the skulls used in Morton’s reports, finding that in only 2 percent of cases did Morton’s measurements differ significantly from their own.
There is no evidence that Morton believed that brain size was correlated with intelligence or was trying to prove it.
Rather, Morton was measuring his skulls to study human variation, as part of his inquiry into whether God had created the human races separately.
The New York Times.
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