Stephen J. Gould was a Big Fat LIAR

The late biologist, Stephen J. Gould, penned the 1981 book, The Mismeasure of Man, as a polemic against IQ science and any findings that discovered physical, but especially mental differences between the races. Such findings ran counter to Gould's Marxist belief in the absolute genetic equality of all people, and the inherent racism of Western, and particularly American society.

Naturally, the book won several awards and was hailed by the leftist intelligencia as the ultimate refutation of IQ research and human biodiversity.

Over the years, however, The Mismeasure of Man has come under serious criticism for faulty scholarship. The most recent critique provides a devastating rebuke, not only of Gould's arguments, but of the manner in which he appears to have deliberately smeared those scientists whose research he disagreed with. The evidence is so convincing even the New York Times had to cover it.

In a 1981 book, “The Mismeasure of Man,” the paleontologist 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, which owns Morton’s collection, have remeasured the skulls, and in an article that does little to burnish Dr. Gould’s reputation as a scholar, they conclude that almost every detail of his analysis is wrong.

Nicolas Wade must be the most unpopular person at the Times, since he frequently shreds liberal creationist dogma [the belief that human evolution absolutely ended with the appearance of modern man in Africa] in the pages of the science section. The scientific study in question leaves little room for doubt that Gould twisted his scientific analysis to support his own assumptions - the very thing he accused Morton (and so many others) of doing.

But the Penn team finds Morton’s results were neither fudged nor influenced by his convictions. They identified and remeasured half of the skulls used in his reports, finding that in only 2 percent of cases did Morton’s measurements differ significantly from their own. These errors either were random or gave a larger than accurate volume to African skulls, the reverse of the bias that Dr. Gould imputed to Morton.

“These results falsify the claim that Morton physically mismeasured crania based on his a priori biases,” the Pennsylvania team writes.

Dr. Gould did not measure any of the skulls himself but merely did a paper reanalysis of Morton’s results. He accused Morton of various subterfuges, like leaving out subgroups to manipulate a group’s overall score. When these errors were corrected, Dr. Gould said, “there are no differences to speak of among Morton’s races.”

But Dr. Gould himself omitted subgroups in his own reanalysis, and made various errors in his calculations. When these are corrected, the differences between the racial categories recognized by Morton are as he assigned them. “Ironically, Gould’s own analysis of Morton is likely the stronger example of a bias influencing results,” the Pennsylvania team writes.

Naturally, such revelations won't stop leftists from citing The Mismeasure of Man as a great book. Most won't even consider the evidence - abundand as it is - of racial differences that appears around us every day. But Gould may now be seen as a perfect example of just how far liberal creationists are willing to go - and the intellectual fraud they must engage in - to maintain their delusions.