In this interview, Stephen Jay Gould, a famous natural historian and the author of The Mismeasure of Man, was asked questions about the skull measurement and classification “experiments” of Samuel Morton, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and Friedrich Tiedemann, as well as his thoughts on these experiments and the approach of today’s scientist to the subject.
Samuel Morton’s experiments were based on the volume measurements of the skulls of different races and his finding was that the Caucasians had the largest skull volume, hence intelligence, followed by Indians and Blacks. According to Jay Gould, along with his bias, Morton’s experiment was also affected by the unconscious errors made during the measurements since volume measurements have a big potential for error and the sample pool which did not have a good distribution for the body sizes. The volume of the skull correlates with the body stature- which Morton did not consider. Moreover, the idea of the skull volume correlating with intelligence is a baseless, naive assumption as Jay Gould emphasized.
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s classification scheme was also neither scientific nor objective despite him being a “genuine egalitarian” of the period. Jay Gould commented that one can’t escape the context of their time. Even though Blumenbach is considered “the most egalitarian-minded of late 18th century scientists”, his classification scheme based on “beauty” is totally a product of his own beauty perception. Blumenbach looked at skulls of different races and decided that the white people who lived around the Caucasus Mountains had the most beautiful skulls- the reason why we call the European and Near Eastern natives “Caucasian”. Later, Friedrich Tiedemann’s studies showed that there was no correlation between races and the volume of the skull, disputing Samuel Morton’s studies. His motivation to conduct these studies and publish his findings in English was to praise Britain’s abolition of the slave trade.
Overall, the debates about the race of the 19th century “scientists” do not come from a genuine sense of equity or an understanding of racism. Jay Gould emphasized that the debate is among white men who collectively agreed that whites are superior, even the most egalitarian of those believed that everyone is equal in a moral sense, not an intellectual one.
Today, it is scientifically proven that the human species originated from Africa, and if that was the basis of the classifications that society makes today, we are all Africans. The genetic variations between races are insignificantly small, and the way that we classify races today is totally based on visual differences. We are still not sure what caused these visual differences even though there are theories such as sexual selection and adaptation to get vitamin D, but according to Jay Gould, these differences are not even significant in evolutionists’ sense. Today, our system of racial classification is based solely on the way you look (the reason why the famous baseball player Roy Campanella, whose father is Italian and mother is Black, has always been classified as Black) and the culture. Quite a “screwed up classification”, quoting Stephen Jay Gould.