Stephen Jay Gould in a 1997 Simpsons episode (Pagepulp). Gould enjoys an almost iconic status in American culture.Who was the greatest evolutionary scientist of recent times? Most people would answer “Stephen J. Gould,” at least on this side of the Atlantic. With the possible exception of L.L. Cavalli-Sforza, he was the one best known to non-biologists, partly because he wrote well but also because he said the sorts of things that people in the humanities and social sciences wished to hear. My anthropology department was no exception. When I presented my dissertation proposal, one committee member launched into a criticism that he supported with a quote from one of Gould’s works. I didn’t understand the relevance of the quote—other than the banal point that many scholars are unconscious liars. But it hit home among the other people present.
And why not? When Gould died, in 2002, his reputation was unshakable. You might have disagreed with his conclusions, but his methodology seemed sound. This was particularly so with his 1978 Science paper on 19th-century physical anthropologist Samuel George Morton, which showed how a reputedly objective scientist had unconsciously fudged his data to make Europeans look larger-brained than sub-Saharan Africans.
These findings were later carried over into The Mismeasure of Man (1981), a bestseller and now required reading in many undergrad social science courses. Gould also brought up his 1978 paper in public lectures, making it a centerpiece of his attacks on the “myth of scientific objectivity.” In reviewing a posthumous Gould anthology, Richard Lewontin, underlined this point as “the one that is most important to the public understanding of science”:
Despite the myth of detached objectivity that scientists propagate, their motivations are as messy as everyone else's. In particular, they have political, social, and personal concerns that may influence what they do, how they do it, and what they say about it. Putting aside deliberate fraud, of which we have an embarrassment of examples, the gathering of data, their statistical representation, and their interpretation offer many opportunities for unconscious bias toward conclusions that we already "knew" to be true. (Lewontin, 2008)
By the time of his death, Gould had become an icon of popular culture:
Dr. Gould achieved a fame unprecedented among modern evolutionary biologists. The closest thing to a household name in the field, he became part of mainstream iconography when he was depicted in cartoon form on "The Simpsons." Renovations of his SoHo loft in Manhattan were featured in a glowing article in Architectural Digest. (Yoon, 2002)
The Simpsons episode aired in 1997 and is worth summarizing:
Lisa Simpson wants to stop a huge mall development from proceeding at "Sabertooth Ravine" because the ravine is a fossil site. As a compromise, the mall developers decide to let Lisa dig for fossils while they continue to build the mall. While digging, Lisa finds an almost human fossil. Almost, but not quite: in place of arms the fossil has wings. "It's an angel" declare the naive and religiously motivated townfolk. Lisa, who plays the scientific naturalist, will have none of it. She therefore enlists Gould to prove that the fossil is nothing of the sort. Gould claims that the DNA tests he performed proved inconclusive.
[…] In the closing scene, Lisa asks Gould why his test failed to detect that the angel fossil was a fraud. Gould (and mind you, this was Gould's actual voice--he is listed explicitly in the credits) admits that in fact he never did perform the test--even though he claimed he did earlier. (Dembski, 1997)
The Simpsons episode raised a few eyebrows. Was Gould guilty of the sort of shenanigans he had accused others of doing?
Arroseur arrosé
Yes indeed. A team of physical anthropologists recently located half of the skulls that Samuel George Morton had measured more than a century and a half ago. When they remeasured the skulls they found very few errors in Morton’s measurements. More to the point, the errors were distributed randomly. There was, in fact, a non-significant tendency to overestimate African skull size (Lewis et al., 2011).
It is also doubtful whether Morton considered Africans to be less “evolved” than Europeans. His Crania Americana was published in 1839, long before the first attempts to apply evolutionary theory to human races. Morton was in fact a devout Christian who wished to find out whether different human populations were separate species resulting from multiple divine creations or a single species created but once. He had little if any interest in research on human intelligence, which anyhow was embryonic at the time.
Needless to say, Gould never remeasured any of Morton’s skulls. His paper was at best a clumsy re-analysis of Morton’s published data. I say “at best” because Gould bolstered his argument by creating facts out of thin air. It is a wonder that he managed to get published in a first-tier journal like Science, which as a rule publishes only original data.
Further thoughts
There is another disturbing element in this affair. Many of the flaws in Gould’s paper had already been pointed out … twenty-three years ago (Michael, 1988). And they were pointed out in a first-tier journal (Current Anthropology). Yet that other paper was studiously ignored. Gould owed his reputation not so much to the quality of his work as to an academic milieu that covered for him, acting more as cheerleaders than as responsible critics. He was shielded by a personality cult. Without it, he would have been just another biology professor.
What now? Academia will likely enter a long and painful process of “de-Gouldization.” Long, because many other academics were in on the collective lying. Painful, because the lies were far from trivial.
References
Dembski, W.A. (1997). An Analysis of Homer Simpson and Stephen Jay Gould, Access Research Network.
Gould S.J. (1981). The mismeasure of man. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
Gould , S.J. (1978). Morton’s ranking of races by cranial capacity: unconscious manipulation of data may be a scientific norm, Science, 200, 503–509.
Lewis, J.E., D. DeGusta, M.R. Meyer, J.M. Monge, A.E. Mann, R.L. Holloway. (2011). The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias, PLoS Biology, 9(6) e1001071
Lewontin, R.C. (2008). The Triumph of Stephen Jay Gould, New York Review of Books, 55(2), 39-41, February 14, 2008.
Michael, J.S. (1988). A new look at Morton’s craniological research, Current Anthropology, 29, 349–354.
Pagepulp (2011). The literary world of the Simpsons, April 24
http://www.pagepulp.com/176/the-literary-world-of-the-simpsons/
Yoon, C.K. (2002). Stephen Jay Gould, Biologist and Theorist on Evolution, Dies at 60, New York Times, May 20, 2002,
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/20/obituaries/20CND-GOULD.html