In this interview, Dr. Gould, being a historian of science, discussed the roots of racial delineations in the scientific field.
When people think of anti-non-white pseudoscience, most point to the skull measurements of Samuel Morton: he found, in his book Crania Americana, that the average size of Indian and Black skulls were significantly smaller than those of Caucasians; he then concluded that the size difference led to an intellectual inferiority among the non-white groups. Upon reading his conclusions, a natural assumption was that Morton’s data was biased, or that he intentionally fabricated his results to push a narrative. Dr. Gould argues, however, that “his errors were unconscious” and that the differences in skull size came from myriad of other factors, including body size and sex. In any case, the idea that sheer brain mass directly correlates with intelligence was born of a “human inclination to rank people in hierarchies so that they can put their own group on top,” said Gould. That inclination permeated Morton’s paper, but wasn’t limited to just science.
The term “caucasian” has its roots, again, in unconscious racist beliefs. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who coined the term, was “the most egalitarian minded of late 18th century scientists. And yet you can never escape your time.” Gould highlighted that Blumenbach, in choosing how to define ethnic groups, labelled whites as caucasian as he thought that “the Caucasian people are the most beautiful,” Gould said, therefore the skull of whites differed from their non-white counterparts because white people were “the highest manifestation thereof in terms of beauty.” There was no statistically significant difference between their skulls, which de-emphasized racism, but it was because of a belief equally, albeit unconsciously, biased.
The interview then shifted gears onto how white people came into existence. Under the pretext that “we are all Africans,” Gould pointed out that “current African peoples are as descended from that original entity as people of European extraction are… because that’s where the species started.” Differences in skin colour instead came not from a genealogical delineation, but an evolutionary one: first, “sexual selections… and different standards of beauty” favoured white mates over darker-toned counterparts; second, the relative abundance of sunlight in the equatorial and polar regions led each black and white skin to more adequately capture enough vitamin D, respectively. However, Gould pointed out, “skin colour differences are so minor with respect to the immensity of evolutionary change” that our current field of knowledge on the subject is limited: it is too controversial and insignificant a topic to have been “solved” by science.
To finalize the interview, Gould highlighted the racial classification system of the United States: “Roy Campanella… Tiger Woods, [and] Colin Powell” are as equally non-white as they are black, but we “classify” them as the latter. Our classification system, he argues, is too heavily biased towards two parties, which, although mathematically is proven to produce the most centred distribution, can be illogical and anti-science.