• When We See What We Want

    In 1981, Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould published "The Mismeasure of Man," a fierce critique of various scientific attempts to measure human intelligence. Mr. Gould began the book with a takedown of "craniometry," a popular 19th-century technique that attempted to find correlations between skull volume and intellect.

    His harshest criticisms were directed at Samuel Morton, an American physician who became famous for demonstrating, in 1839, that different human races had different skull sizes....

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