Gould's fundamental miscalculation
[[Updated on 6 July 2012, to fix a few errors or poor phrasings in my original summary of Lewis et. al.'s paper, following on a productive and private discussion I had with one of the authors. My fixes are in brackets or indicated by strike-throughs.
I encourage historians of science to read this paper. As I wrote in my personal notes on it: “This is a fascinating paper—it makes Gould’s 'summer of 1977' look rather half-hearted and inexact.” And it turns out it was even more interesting than I thought: the authors find that the Morton did in fact mismeasure some of his skulls using his shot method (which Gould, and I, and many others) generally assumed to be accurate, but even those mismeasurements do not appear rooted in bias. I misread this conclusion and misrepresented it in my post.
But my post was never supposed to be a full review of Lewis et. al. --- I intended to talk about the state of the field in science studies and I continue to argue that while Lewis et. al. sho…
I encourage historians of science to read this paper. As I wrote in my personal notes on it: “This is a fascinating paper—it makes Gould’s 'summer of 1977' look rather half-hearted and inexact.” And it turns out it was even more interesting than I thought: the authors find that the Morton did in fact mismeasure some of his skulls using his shot method (which Gould, and I, and many others) generally assumed to be accurate, but even those mismeasurements do not appear rooted in bias. I misread this conclusion and misrepresented it in my post.
But my post was never supposed to be a full review of Lewis et. al. --- I intended to talk about the state of the field in science studies and I continue to argue that while Lewis et. al. sho…