Evolutionary Psychology is the 21st Century's Craniology

I've been reading The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould. It's a detailed smackdown of the mad scientists of yesteryear, those men of the 19th and 20th centuries whose social prejudices infested their ostensibly objective research in craniometry and IQ testing. What strikes me as I read it, though, is that the same phenomenon is operating in our own century. This time it's called pop evolutionary psychology, and from advice columns to universities, people are still using it to excuse social inequality.

To see what I mean, check out this recent offering from The Advice Goddess, explaining that men are physically incapable of cleaning up after themselves:

The truth is, as you suspected, straight guys just don’t have the filth and disarray vision that women and gay men do. Studies show gay men’s attention to environmental detail is similar to that of straight women, but in general, “the female brain takes in more sensory data than does the male,” writes brain researcher Michael Gurian in “What Could He Be Thinking?”

(snip)

According to Silverman, Eals, and other researchers, a guy’s tendency to let his home become a pizza crust wilderness refuge probably traces back to our hunter-gatherer past. Men’s current visual and attentional strengths correspond to what would’ve made them successful hunters: the distance vision and mental focus needed to track and bring home dinner -- instead of being eaten by what was supposed to be dinner. Women’s superior peripheral vision and ability to process detail would’ve helped them spot the family’s favorite edible plants in a big tangle of vegetation -- while making sure the children weren’t playing in wildebeest traffic.

Just chew on that for a minute. So men don't have the same type of vision as women, unless they've been mysteriously refashioned into gay men? Is she saying that women should never have started cleaning caves because that rendered men evolutionarily unable to wield a vacuum? And that none of this has anything to do with culture?

Gould argues that it's no coincidence when scientific studies confirm cultural rules. He points out that, after all, scientists are part of their cultures, not impartial space aliens peering through the window of planet Earth. "I believe that science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots programmed to collect pure information," he writes in the introduction. Since scientists are products of their culture, their work often provides a veneer of Truth that reinforces existing social hierarchies. When it comes to political issues, writes Gould (quoting Condorcet), biological determinism in particular has made "nature herself an accomplice in the crime of political inequality."

The first section of The Mismeasure of Man describes the work of craniometrists like Broca and Galton who tried to determine which groups of people had the biggest heads. In their thinking, superior intelligence could be determined by head size, which would in turn determine which group of people was most fit to rule the world. They performed many detailed calculations of brains and skulls and ba ding! surprise! their answer was: white men.

Unfortunately for them (and us), they were completely wrong. Their interpretations of the data were heavily influenced by (as Gould says) unconscious social assumptions. When embarassing data point turned up - for instance, that the brain of the famous mathematician Gauss was only slightly larger than average - they explained it away. But when other data favored their theories they inflated and promoted it. Worst of all, their premise was flat-out incorrect. The size of the brain correlates much more closely with stature than with intelligence, so for instance, women tend to have smaller brains than men because their bodies are smaller overall. That does not mean that women are less smart than men. After all, if intelligence were determined only by brain size, we would probably have elephant overlords.

In the second part of the book, Gould deconstructs IQ tests, which are famous for being administered to poor, non-English-speaking immigrants at Ellis Island. Early psychologists used IQ tests to defend the innate inferiority of certain groups of immigrants, despite obvious environmental influences. Alas, the descendents of IQ tests are still alive as the GRE, SAT, and other standardized tests, and as recently as The Bell Curve (1996) were still being used to label groups (such as African-Americans) as inherently inferior and deserving of their social standing.

Although we still are dealing with the evil tentacles of the IQ tests, I believe that the science of social prejudice has been largely transformed into pop evolutionary psychology. How this happens in a country where a large percentage of the population does not accept the evolutionary theory is beyond me, but that is the subject of another post.

I have more to say, but I'm about to get kicked out of the library. Shoot.