Samuel George Morton: Empiricist of Polygeny

Morton's ranking of races by cranial capacity. Unconscious manipulation of data may be a scientific norm.

Samuel George Morton, self-styled objective empiricist, amassed the world's largest pre-Darwinian collection of human skulls. He measured their capacity and produced the results anticipated in an age when few Caucasians doubted their innate superiority: whites above Indians, blacks at the bottom. Morton published all his raw data, and it is shown here that his summary tables are based on a patc...

Remeasuring man.

Samuel George Morton (1799-1851) was the most highly regarded American scientist of the early and middle 19th century. Thanks largely to Stephen Jay Gould's book The Mismeasure of Man, Morton's cranial capacity measurements of different races is now held up as a prime example of and cautionary tale against scientific racism. A team of anthropologists recently reevaluated Morton's work and argue...

Morton, Gould, and Bias: A Comment on "The Mismeasure of Science".

Stephen Jay Gould famously used the work of Samuel George Morton (1799–1851) to illustrate how unconscious racial bias could affect scientific measurement. Morton had published measurements of the average cranial capacities of different races, measurements that Gould reanalyzed in an article in Science [1] and then later in his widely read book The Mismeasure of Man [2]. During the course of th...

Gould on Morton, Redux: What can the debate reveal about the limits of data?

Lewis et al. (2011) attempted to restore the reputation of Samuel George Morton, a 19th century physician who reported on the skull sizes of different folk-races. Whereas Gould (1978) claimed that Morton's conclusions were invalid because they reflected unconscious bias, Lewis et al. alleged that Morton's findings were, in fact, supported, and Gould's analysis biased. We take strong exception t...

Immunoglobulin Polygeny: An Evolutionary Perspective