“A Troublesome Inheritance” – II – Four Anthropological disasters of the past 100 years

Page 5 of Wade’s book contains two recent pronouncements from the American Anthropological Association stating that “Race is about culture not biology”. It’s time to look at anthropology’s record of the past 100 years. It isn’t pretty.

Start with the influential Franz Boas (1858 – 1942) who taught at Columbia for decades. His most famous student was Margaret Mead.

He, along with his students, felt that the environment was everything for human culture and that heredity had minimal influence. Here’s what Boas did over 100 years ago.

[ Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. vol. 99 pp. 14622 – 14623, 14436 – 14439 ’02 ] Retzius invented the the cephalic index in the 1890s. It is just the widest breadth of the skull divided by the front to back length. One can be mesocephalic, dolichocephalic or brachycephalic. From this index one could differentiate Europeans by location. Anthropologists continue to take such measurements. Franz Boas in 1910 – 1913 said that the USA born offspring of immigrants showed a ‘significant’ difference from their immigrant parents in their cephalic index. This was used to reinforce the idea that environment was everything.

Boas made some 13,000 measurements. This is a reanalysis of his data showing that he seriously misinterpreted it. The genetic component of the variability was far stronger than the environmental. Some 8500 of his 13,000 cases were reanalyzed. In a later paper Boas stated that he never claimed that there were NO genetic components to head shape, but his students and colleagues took the ball and ran with it, and Boas never (publicly) corrected them. The heritability was high in the family data and between ethnic groups, which remains in the American environment.

One of Boas’ students wrote that “Heredity cannot be allowed to have acted any part in history.” The chain of events shaping a people “involves the absolute conditioning of historical events by other historical events.” Hardly scientific statements.

On to his most famous student Margaret Mead (1901 -1978) who later became the head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1960). In 1928 she published “Coming of Age in Samoa” about the sexual freedom of Samoan adolescents. It had a big play, and I was very interested in such matters as a pimply adolescent. It fit into the idea that ” “We are forced to conclude that human nature is almost unbelievably malleable, responding accurately and contrastingly to contrasting cultural conditions.”. This certainly fit nicely with the idea that mankind could be reshaped by changing the system — see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Soviet_man one of the many fantasies of the left promoted by academia.

Subsequently, an anthropologist (Freeman) went back to Samoa and concluded that Mead had been hoaxed. He found that Samoans may beat or kill their daughters if they are not virgins on their wedding night. A young man who cannot woo a virgin may rape one to extort her into eloping. The family of a cuckolded husband may attack and kill the adulterer. For more details see Pinker “The Blank Slate” pp. 56 –>

The older among you may remember reading about “the gentle Tasaday” of the Philippines, a Stone age people who had no word for war. It was featured in the NY times in the 70s. They were the noble savages of Rousseau in the 20th century. The 1970 ”discovery” of the Tasaday as a ”Stone Age” tribe was widely heralded in newspapers, shown on national television in a National Geographic Society program and an NBC special documentary, and further publicized in ”The Gentle Tasaday: A Stone Age People in the American journalist, John Nance.

In all, Manuel Elizalde Jr., the son of a rich Filipino family, was depicted as the savior of the Tasaday through his creation of Panamin (from presidential assistant for national minorities), a cabinet-level office to protect the Tasaday and other ”minorities” from corrosive modern influences and from environmentally destructive logging companies.It appears that Manuel Elizalde hoodwinked almost everybody by paying neighboring T’boli people to take off their clothes and pose as a ”Stone Age” tribe living in a cave. Mr. Elizalde then used the avalanche of international interest and concern for his Tasaday creation to create the Panimin organization for control over ”tribal minority” lands and resources and ultimately deals with logging and mining companies.

Last but not least is “The Mismeasure of Man” (1981) in which Steven Gould tore apart the work of Samuel Morton, a 19th century Anthropologist who measured skulls. He accused Morton of (consciously or unconsciously) manipulating the data to come up with the conclusions he desired.

Well, guess what. Someone went back and looked at Morton’s figures, and remeasured some of his skulls (which are still at Penn) and found that the manipulation was all Gould’s not Morton’s. I posted about this when it came out 3 years ago — here’s the link https://luysii.wordpress.com/2011/06/26/hoisting-steven-j-gould-by-his-own-petard/.

Here is the relevant part of that post — An anthropologist [ PLoS Biol. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001071;2011 ] went back to Penn (where the skulls in question reside), and remeasured some 300 of them, blinding themselves to their ethnic origins as they did. Morton’s measurements were correct. They also had the temerity to actually look at Morton’s papers. They found that, contrary to Gould, Morton did report average cranial capacities for subgroups of both populations, sometimes on the same page or on pages near to figures that Gould quotes, and therefore must have seen. Even worse (see Nature vol. 474 p. 419 ’11 ) they claim that “Gould misidentified the Native American samples, falsely inflating the average he calculated for that population”. Gould had claimed that Morton’s averages were incorrect.

Perhaps anthropology has gotten its act together now, but given this history, any pronouncements they make should be taken with a lot of salt. In fairness to the field, it should be noted that the debunkers of Boas, Mead and Gould were all anthropologists. They have a heavy load to carry.