Size of skull has nothing to do with race of intelligence

For he truly believed in his science, belonging to his own race afforded him immense pleasure, and boy did he blush at his own sight! One day he was scrutinizing the unworthy skull of a brigand when he had the kind of joyous insight that occasionally. marks serendipitous discovery but more regularly signals crackpot invention. Thus was born Cesar Lambroso's celebrated theory of L'uamo delinquente, crime and the man, which posited that criminals were but evolutionary throwbacks in our midst, the straggling biologically retarded who had failed to fully traverse the distance between ape and man.

Nature however, had been merciful to the authentic Homo sapien and cursed the delinquents with visible anatomical signs that automatically revealed their atavistic criminality. Some of these giveaways included large jaws, relatively long arms, precocious wrinkles, low and narrow forehead, large ears, darker skin, thick skull and inability to blush. The theory secured Lambroso's place in history.

Biology determines society, or the credo that innate, inborn and inherited biological distinctions are accurately mirrored in society, as political, economic, cultural and most significantly racial hierarchy was a keynote in Darwin's century. Our society has always been infatuated with gradation and Darwinian advances seemed to hint that the people left in the wake by modernization must rank lower on the biological scale. The level headed Darwin himself did not escape the tenor of his times when he wrote of a future when the gap between humans and apes would increase with the extinction of such intermediaries as the Hottenentots and aborigines.

Nineteenth century was also the age of hardboiled empiricism and mere theories unsubstantiated by clinching 'facts' carried no weight. The proponents of biological determinism chose the measurement of intelligence as a single quantity as the means to establish the chasm between races and to this end generated two major sources of scientific data -- craniometry (or the measurement of skulls) and certain styles of psychological testing. The methods were clearly founded upon the gospel that all there was to intelligence was what lay in the head and external, unquantifiable vagaries like environment or culture had no say in the matter of gray matter.

The white man's burden was a popular truism at the time and most erudite hypotheses suggested the following pecking order -whites way up, the rest in the pits. To prove this, scientists scurried to their skull collection and research data and soon arrived with empirical evidence that whites had larger brains and superior cranial index (the ratio between the maximum length and width the skull) while the poor blacks were destined to slave in the fields and had their miseries compounded by mysterious diseases like ‘dyesthesia' a diseases that caused inadequate breathing and ‘drapetomania' or the insane desire to run away from their benevolent masters.

Brain size was crucial, as a diligent scholar had recently managed the impossible feat of establishing that European brain size had increased with the progress from feudalism to modernism. The jaws and facial angle of the blacks confirmed their stature as groveling idiots and IQ tests proved their moronic sensibilities. The theory of recapitulation, which showed that black adults were like white children, reinforced black imbecility and the theory of neoteny, which showed that white adults were like black children, reinforced white acumen.

Sensibly and understandably, the rigors of modern science and social education have relegated such fact finding to naught and their exponents to historical footnotes. Intelligence is not a measurable thing like height or weight and the idea of measuring heads is rather preposterous. Brain size does not vary with race or correspond to gifts. Indeed the human body can be measured in a thousand different ways and a randomly determined small scale of measures almost always toes the line of the prevalent paradigm while being purblind to alternatives.
It may embarrass scientists now but entirely specious marvels like the distance between the navel and the penis were once bruited to countenance white nobility whilst an equally ludicrous rejoinder could well have been made that whites were simian as they had thin lips -a Chimpanzee trait. IQ tests being culture specific were similarly misleading and sometimes even ‘neutral' questions were but glimmers of the examiner's biases.

Science is often a powerful ally of entrenched institutions and the quandary that is ours is whether the scientists involved were racists? Most of them were bitterly opposed to the rising ethical hopes of equality and their scientific pronouncements had several tragic consequences on state policies like slavery, immigration, colonialism etc. It is little known that millions of Jews from Central and southern Europe who, anticipating the holocaust, had sought to emigrate to the US were often denied on specious eugenic grounds, and thus virtually condemned by votaries of science.

Science, it must be remembered begins from the void of ignorance and chases the truth by ceaselessly falsifying its own assumptions. The scientist involved published all their data, hid nothing and truly believed in the validity of their assumptions. Scientists themselves are prisoners of their own cultural condition and the truth they seek can never be 'pure', sullied as it is by the vision of their times.