The Mismeasure of Man

by Stephen Jay Gould

  This was a small incident in Broca’s career, but I can imagine no better illustration of his method—shifting criteria to work through good data toward desired conclusions. Heads I’m superior; tails, you’re inferior.

  And old arguments never seem to die. Walter Freeman, dean of American lobotomists (he performed or supervised thirty-five hundred lesions of frontal portions of the brain before his retirement in 1970), admitted late in his career (cited in Chorover, 1979):

  What the investigator misses most in the more highly intelligent individuals is their ability to introspect, to speculate, to philosophize, especially in regard to onesself.… On the whole, psychosurgery reduces creativity, sometimes to the vanishing point.

  Freeman then added that “women respond better than men, Negroes better than whites.” In other words, people who didn’t have as much up front in the first place don’t miss it as badly.

  Women’s brains

  Of all his comparisons between groups, Broca collected most information on the brains of women vs. men—presumably because it was more accessible, not because he held any special animus toward women. “Inferior” groups are interchangeable in the general theory of biological determinism. They are continually juxtaposed, and one is made to serve as a surrogate for all—for the general proposition holds that society follows nature, and that social rank reflects innate worth. Thus, E. Huschke, a German anthropologist, wrote in 1854: “The Negro brain possesses a spinal cord of the type found in children and women and, beyond this, approaches the type of brain found in higher apes” (in Mall, 1909, pp. 1–2). The celebrated German anatomist Carl Vogt wrote in 1864:

  By its rounded apex and less developed posterior lobe the Negro brain resembles that of our children, and by the protuberance of the parietal lobe, that of our females.… The grown-up Negro partakes, as regards his intellectual faculties, of the nature of the child, the female, and the senile white.… Some tribes have founded states, possessing a peculiar organization; but, as to the rest, we may boldly assert that the whole race has, neither in the past nor in the present, performed anything tending to the progress of humanity or worthy of preservation (1864, pp. 183–192).

  G. Hervé, a colleague of Broca, wrote in 1881: “Men of the black races have a brain scarcely heavier than that of white women” (1881, p. 692). I do not regard as empty rhetoric a claim that the battles of one group are for all of us.

  Broca centered his argument about the biological status of modern women upon two sets of data: the larger brains of men in modern societies and a supposed widening through time of the disparity in size between male and female brains. He based his most extensive study upon autopsies he performed in four Parisian hospitals. For 292 male brains, he calculated a mean weight of 1,325 grams; 140 female brains averaged 1,144 grams for a difference of 181 grams, or 14 percent of the male weight. Broca understood, of course, that part of this difference must be attributed to the larger size of males. He had used such a correction to rescue Frenchmen from a claim of German superiority (p.121). In that case, he knew how to make the correction in exquisite detail. But now he made no attempt to measure the effect of size alone, and actually stated that he didn’t need to do so. Size, after all, cannot account for the entire difference because we know that women are not as intelligent as men.

  We might ask if the small size of the female brain depends exclusively upon the small size of her body. Tiedemann has proposed this explanation. But we must not forget that women are, on the average, a little less intelligent than men, a difference which we should not exaggerate but which is, nonetheless, real. We are therefore permitted to suppose that the relatively small size of the female brain depends in part upon her physical inferiority and in part upon her intellectual inferiority (1861, p. 153).

  To record the supposed widening of the gap through time, Broca measured the cranial capacities of prehistoric skulls from L’Homme Mort cave. Here he found a difference of only 99.5 cc between males and females, while modern populations range from 129.5 to 220.7 cc. Topinard, Broca’s chief disciple, explained the increasing discrepancy through time as a result of differing evolutionary pressures upon dominant men and passive women:

  The man who fights for two or more in the struggle for existence, who has all the responsibility and the cares of tomorrow, who is constantly active in combatting the environment and human rivals, needs more brain than the woman whom he must protect and nourish, than the sedentary woman, lacking any interior occupations, whose role is to raise children, love, and be passive (1888, p. 22).

  In 1879 Gustave Le Bon, chief misogynist of Broca’s school, used these data to publish what must be the most vicious attack upon women in modern scientific literature (it will take some doing to beat Aristotle). Le Bon was no marginal hate-monger. He was a founder of social psychology and wrote a study of crowd behavior still cited and respected today (La psychologie desfoules, 1895). His writings also had a strong influence upon Mussolini. Le Bon concluded:

  In the most intelligent races, as among the Parisians, there are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious that no one can contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth discussion. All psychologists who have studied the intelligence of women, as well as poets and novelists, recognize today that they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man. They excel in fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason. Without doubt there exist some distinguished women, very superior to the average man, but they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads; consequently, we may neglect them entirely (1879, pp. 60–61).

  Nor did Le Bon shrink from the social implications of his views. He was horrified by the proposal of some American reformers to grant women higher education on the same basis as men:

  A desire to give them the same education, and, as a consequence, to propose the same goals for them, is a dangerous chimera.… The day when, misunderstanding the inferior occupations which nature has given her, women leave the home and take part in our battles; on this day a social revolution will begin, and everything that maintains the sacred ties of the family will disappear (1879, p. 62).

  Sound familiar?*

  I have reexamined Broca’s data, the basis for all this derivative pronouncement, and I find the numbers sound but Broca’s interpretation, to say the least, ill founded. The claim for increasing difference through time is easily dismissed. Broca based this contention on the sample from L’Homme Mort alone. It consists of seven male, and six female, skulls. Never has so much been coaxed from so little!

  In 1888 Topinard published Broca’s more extensive data on Parisian hospitals. Since Broca recorded height and age as well as brain size, we may use modern statistical procedures to remove their effect. Brain weight decreases with age, and Broca’s women were, on average, considerably older than his men at death. Brain weight increases with height, and his average man was almost half a foot taller than his average woman. I used multiple regression, a technique that permits simultaneous assessment of the influence of height and age upon brain size. In an analysis of the data for women, I found that, at average male height and age, a woman’s brain would weigh 1,212 grams.* Correction for height and age reduces the 181 gram difference by more than a third to 113 grams.

  It is difficult to assess this remaining difference because Broca’s data contain no information about other factors known to influence brain size in a major way. Cause of death has an important effect, as degenerative disease often entails a substantial diminution of brain size. Eugene Schreider (1966), also working with Broca’s data, found that men killed in accidents had brains weighing, on average, 60 grams more than men dying of infectious diseases. The best modern data that I can find (from American hospitals) records a full 100 gram difference between death by deg
enerative heart disease and by accident or violence. Since so many of Broca’s subjects were elderly women, we may assume that lengthy degenerative disease was more common among them than among the men.

  More importantly, modern students of brain size have still not agreed on a proper measure to eliminate the powerful effect of body size (Jerison, 1973; Gould, 1975). Height is partly adequate, but men and women of the same height do not share the same body build. Weight is even worse than height, because most of its variation reflects nutrition rather than intrinsic size—and fat vs. skinny exerts little influence upon the brain. Leonce Manouvrier took up this subject in the 1880s and argued that muscular mass and force should be used. He tried to measure this elusive property in various ways and found a marked difference in favor of men, even in men and women of the same height. When he corrected for what he called “sexual mass,” women came out slightly ahead in brain size.

  Thus, the corrected 113 gram difference is surely too large; the true figure is probably close to zero and may as well favor women as men. One hundred thirteen grams, by the way, is exactly the average difference between a five-foot four-inch and a six-foot-four-inch male in Broca’s data†—and we would not want to ascribe greater intelligence to tall men. In short, Broca’s data do not permit any confident claim that men have bigger brains than women.

  Maria Montessori did not confine her activities to educational reform for young children. She lectured on anthropology for several years at the University of Rome and wrote an influential book entitled Pedagogical Anthropology (English edition, 1913). She was, to say the least, no egalitarian. She supported most of Broca’s work and the theory of innate criminality proposed by her compatriot Cesare Lombroso (next chapter). She measured the circumference of children’s heads in her schools and inferred that the best prospects had bigger brains. But she had no use for Broca’s conclusions about women. She discussed Manouvrier’s work at length and made much of his tentative claim that women have slightly larger brains when proper corrections are made. Women, she concluded, are intellectually superior to men, but men have prevailed heretofore by dint of physical force. Since technology has abolished force as an instrument of power, the era of women may soon be upon us: “In such an epoch there will really be superior human beings, there will really be men strong in morality and in sentiment. Perhaps in this way the reign of woman is approaching, when the enigma of her anthropological superiority will be deciphered. Woman was always the custodian of human sentiment, morality and honor” (1913, p. 259).

  Montessori’s argument represents one possible antidote to “scientific” claims for the constitutional inferiority of certain groups. One may affirm the validity of biological distinctions, but argue that the data have been misinterpreted by prejudiced men with a stake in the outcome, and that disadvantaged groups are truly superior. In recent years, Elaine Morgan has followed this strategy in her Descent of Woman, a speculative reconstruction of human prehistory from the woman’s point of view—and as farcical as more famous tall tales by and for men.

  I dedicate this book to a different position. Montessori and Morgan follow Broca’s method to reach a more congenial conclusion. I would rather label the whole enterprise of setting a biological value upon groups for what it is: irrelevant, intellectually unsound, and highly injurious.

  Postscript

  Craniometric arguments lost much of their luster in our century, as determinists switched their allegiance to intelligence testing—a more “direct” path to the same invalid goal of ranking groups by mental worth—and as scientists exposed the prejudiced nonsense that dominated most literature on form and size of the head. The American anthropologist Franz Boas, for example, made short work of the fabled cranial index by showing that it varied widely both among adults of a single group and within the life of an individual (Boas, 1899). Moreover, he found significant differences in cranial index between immigrant parents and their American-born children. The immutable obtuseness of the brachycephalic southern European might veer toward the dolichocephalic Nordic norm in a single generation of altered environment (Boas, 1911).

  In 1970 the South African anthropologist P. V. Tobias wrote a courageous article exposing the myth that group differences in brain size bear any relationship to intelligence—indeed, he argued, group differences in brain size, independent of body size and other biasing factors, have never been demonstrated at all.

  This conclusion may strike readers as strange, especially since it comes from a famous scientist well acquainted with the reams of published data on brain size. After all, what can be simpler than weighing a brain?—Take it out, and put it on the scale. One set of difficulties refers to problems of measurement itself: at what level is the brain severed from the spinal cord; are the meninges removed or not (meninges are the brain’s covering membranes, and the dura mater, or thick outer covering, weighs 50 to 60 grams); how much time elapsed after death; was the brain preserved in any fluid before weighing and, if so, for how long; at what temperature was the brain preserved after death. Most literature does not specify these factors adequately, and studies made by different scientists usually cannot be compared. Even when we can be sure that the same object has been measured in the same way under the same conditions, a second set of biases intervenes—influences upon brain size with no direct tie to the desired properties of intelligence or racial affiliation: sex, body size, age, nutrition, nonnutritional environment, occupation, and cause of death. Thus, despite thousands of published pages, and tens of thousands of subjects, Tobias concludes that we do not know—as if it mattered at all—whether blacks, on the average, have larger or smaller brains than whites. Yet the larger size of white brains was an unquestioned “fact” among white scientists until quite recently.

  Many investigators have devoted an extraordinary amount of attention to the subject of group differences in human brain size. They have gotten nowhere, not because there are no answers, but because the answers are so difficult to get and because the a priori convictions are so clear and controlling. In the heat of Broca’s debate with Gratiolet, one of Broca’s defenders, admittedly as a nasty debating point, made a remark that admirably epitomizes the motivations implicit in the entire craniometric tradition: “I have noticed for a long time,” stated de Jouvencel (1861, p. 465), “that, in general, those who deny the intellectual importance of the brain’s volume have small heads.” Self-interest, for whatever reason, has been the wellspring of opinion on this heady issue from the start.

  FOUR

  Measuring Bodies

  Two Case Studies on the Apishness of Undesirables

  THE CONCEPT OF EVOLUTION transformed human thought during the nineteenth century. Nearly every question in the life sciences was reformulated in its light. No idea was ever more widely used, or misused (“social Darwinism” as an evolutionary rationale for the inevitability of poverty, for example). Both creationists (Agassiz and Morton) and evolutionists (Broca and Galton) could exploit the data of brain size to make their invalid and invidious distinctions among groups. But other quantitative arguments arose as more direct spinoffs from evolutionary theory. In this chapter I discuss two as representatives of a prevalent type; they present both a strong contrast and an interesting similarity. The first is the most general evolutionary defense of all for ranking groups—the argument from recapitulation, often epitomized by the obfuscating tongue-twister “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” The second is a specific evolutionary hypothesis for the biological nature of human criminal behavior—Lombroso’s criminal anthropology. Both theories relied upon the same quantitative and supposedly evolutionary method—the search for signs of apish morphology in groups deemed undesirable.

  The ape in all of us: recapitulation

  Once the fact of evolution had been established, nineteenth-century naturalists devoted themselves to tracing the actual pathways that evolution had followed. They sought, in other words, to reconstruct the tree of life. Fossils might have provided the evidence, f
or only they could record the actual ancestors of modern forms. But the fossil record is extremely imperfect, and the major trunks and branches of life’s tree all grew before the evolution of hard parts permitted the preservation of a fossil record at all. Some indirect criterion had to be found. Ernst Haeckel, the great German zoologist, refurbished an old theory of creationist biology and suggested that the tree of life might be read directly from the embryological development of higher forms. He proclaimed that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” or, to explicate this mellifluous tongue-twister, that an individual, in its own growth, passes through a series of stages representing adult ancestral forms in their correct order—an individual, in short, climbs its own family tree.

  Recapitulation ranks among the most influential ideas of late nineteenth-century science. It dominated the work of several professions, including embryology, comparative morphology, and paleontology. All these disciplines were obsessed with the idea of reconstructing evolutionary lineages, and all regarded recapitulation as the key to this quest. The gill slits of an early human embryo represented an ancestral adult fish; at a later stage, the temporary tail revealed a reptilian or mammalian ancestor.

  Recapitulation spilled forth from biology to influence several other disciplines in crucial ways. Both Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung were convinced recapitulationists, and Haeckel’s idea played no small role in the development of psychoanalytic theory. (In Totem and Taboo, for example, Freud tries to reconstruct human history from a central clue provided by the Oedipus complex of young boys. Freud reasoned that this urge to parricide must reflect an actual event among ancestral adults. Hence, the sons of an ancestral clan must once have killed their father in order to gain access to women.) Many primary-school curriculums of the late nineteenth century were reconstructed in the light of recapitulation. Several school boards prescribed the Song of Hiawatha in early grades, reasoning that children, passing through the savage stage of their ancestral past, would identify with it.*