from Taras

“Scientists have often been accused of letting their ideology influence their results, and one of the most famous cases is that of Morton’s skulls — the global collection amassed by the 19th-century physical anthropologist Samuel George Morton.

“In a 1981 book, ‘The Mismeasure of Man,’ the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould asserted that 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. …

“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. …

“But Dr. Gould himself omitted subgroups in his own reanalysis, and made various errors in his calculations. … ‘Ironically, Gould’s own analysis of Morton is likely the stronger example of a bias influencing results,’ the Pennsylvania team writes. …

“An earlier study by John S. Michael, then an undergraduate at Penn, concluded that Morton’s results were ‘reasonably accurate,’ with no clear sign of manipulation. …

“Ralph L. Holloway, an expert on human evolution at Columbia and a co-author of the new study … [said] ‘I just didn’t trust Gould. … I had the feeling that his ideological stance was supreme. When the 1996 version of “The Mismeasure of Man” came and he never even bothered to mention Michael’s study, I just felt he was a charlatan.'”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/science/14skull.html?_r=1

See also http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/06/gould-morton-revisited/