The Zero Room

Our federal Member of Parliament wants to establish a branch of the Australian Tax Office in Coffs Harbour. Huzzah! What makes a city truly great isn't artists, writers, and public intellectuals. The cold, dead heart of a city is it's thriving community of minor bureaucrats; people who embrace trepidation, scorn novelty or whimsy, and delight in amenities that close at 5pm sharp. With this finely-calibrated, cautious half-step Luke Hartsuyker is propelling us very gradually into the major league of truly dull cities. Where once you might have had to go to Canberra, Birmingham, or Warsaw to be really comprehensively bored, Luke's supremely modest vision seems sure to transform Coffs Harbour from merely terribly disappointing to quite utterly dispiriting. With his feet planted not just on, but in the ground, Luke Hartsuyker is a representative who is firmly rooted, as are we all.

We scientists know that we get more money if we keep telling Congress that we’re solving this terrible problem. We’ve played a less than honorable role in the war on drugs."
Carl Hart, in the New York Times

I had such fun researching and writing this essay for my science class, I had to post it online for posterity (a.k.a. the Wayback Machine).

As my tutor noted, the abstract and introduction were basically incomplete, because I had already cut the body as far as it could go in order to meet the word count restriction. I can't see any academic justification for word count limits. The university unit information guides say that these are imposed "on equity grounds", but this is bunk; every student has the same resources and the same amount of time at their disposal. If somebody manages to adequately address the subject matter in fewer words than average, good for them. If they pad out their essay with loads of irrelevant waffle, deduct marks. Equity doesn't enter into it. Furthermore, writing to a word count isn't an academic skill, it's a skill for journalism - print journalism at that, so an increasingly irrelevant one. The university should fess up and say they just don't want to pay people to mark long essays.

My inability to read French posed a bit of a problem for reasearching a debate that largely took place in 19th century Paris, hence my recourse to citing Gould almost exclusively on this, but a highlight was the charming paper that anti-racist German anthropologist Freidrich Tiedemann delivered to the Royal Society in English, as a way of saying "well done, you!" to the British for the abolition of slavery.

It's even hard to feel too much ill will towards our contemporary racist craniometrists, since they're so barking mad that it verges on the endearing. The recently-departed J. Philippe Rushton (may he rest in peace in the whites-only section of the cemetary), having decided that, due to some law of the conservation of flesh, brain size and penis size were inversely related, even went so far as to wander around his local shopping mall quizzing people about their willies. When disciplined over this behaviour by his university, he was appalled. Who were they to prevent an intellectual ubermench from conducting serious scientific enquiry into the inferior subspecies that infest his local shopping precinct?

Still, one must remember that these short-handled cranks often come dangerously close to respectability, and the sciences - indeed all fields of human endeavour - require periodic attention from philosophers so that they know when they're crossing the line between a little bit mad and altogether too mad. Unfortunately, beyond a few elite institutions, philosopy is history, as is history, and the rest of the humanities are under deathwatch, so things are likely to get a lot madder. Enjoy the ride, folks.

Abstract

The issue of bias is an important one to consider when examining the process of scientific enquiry. Culturally determined and scientifically unwarranted assumptions can lead us to seek to account for non-existenct phenomena, and to find significance in meaningless data. This report examines these problems with reference to the work of Paul Broca and his modern followers, in their endeavours to locate the varying determinants of human intelligence within biology.

1. Introduction

Paul Broca was an eminent 19th century comparative anatomist whose work on localisation of brain function is justly celebrated. He was also a product of his time, and his cultural biases led him to a misguided  attempt to demonstrate a non-existant relationship between brain size, intelligence, race, class, and gender. This dubious enterprise had devastating social and political consequences over the following century, and it's pernicious effects are still felt today.

2. Analysis

2.1. The essence of the conflict or debate.

Broca believed that by demonstrating that the brain sizes of different genders, races, and classes of human beings varied in consistent ways, one could account for the different social status of each as the inevitable result of biology. He and his colleagues “were not conscious political ideologues. They [...] confirmed all the common prejudices of comfortable white males - that blacks, women, and poor people occupy their  subordinate roles by the harsh dictates of nature." (Gould, 1996, p. 106). However this hypothesis did not go unchallenged.

In 1861, Broca and Louis Pierre Gratiolet, Broca’s collaborator in his work on aphasia, duelled over the supposed correlation of brain size and intelligence (Gould 1980, p. 145-148). German anatomist Friedrich Tiedemann had already concluded “that the opinion of many naturalists [...] that the Negro has a smaller skull and brain than the European, is ill founded, and entirely refuted by my researches.” Tiedemann also observed that, correcting for body size, “the female brain is for the most part even larger than the male” (Tiedemann, 1936). Broca’s colleague Léonce Pierre Manouvrier expressed doubts about the validity of attempting to quantify intelligence at all: “Women displayed their talents and their diplomas. They also invoked philosophical authorities. But they were opposed by numbers [...]" (Manouvrier, cited in Gould, 1980, p. 153).

Nevertheless, Broca’s hypotheses has remained resistant to refutation, forming the foundation of the eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and still retaining a vocal group of adherents in the contemporary scientific community (Rushton & Ankney, 2009).

2.2. The evidence presented on both sides of the conflict.

Broca's evidence was entirely confined to comparative anatomy; that brain size between males and females, and between different races and classes of humans, varied to a statistically significant degree. He  considered the intellectual inferiority of women to men to be self-evident (Gould, 1980, p. 154) and, arguing from consequences, claimed that brain size must be of significance if for no other reason than if this were not the case craniometry would “lose most of its interest and utility” (Gould, 1980, p. 145).

Due to limited access to non-European skulls, much of Broca's evidence rested on the assertion that the cranial capacity of African male skulls was equivalent to that of European female skulls, although Tiedemann's data strongly refutes this (Teidemann, 1836). Broca was able to discount Tiedemann's results by subjecting his methodology to a devastatingly rigorous critical review, although as Gould (1996, p. 116) observes, similarly suspect data from anthropologists whose conclusions supported Broca's were spared such scrutiny.

Tiedemann's corrections for discrepancies in male/female body mass were dismissed by Broca's a priori claim that “we must not forget that women are, on the average, a little less intelligent than men” (Gould, 1980, p. 154). This did not discourage Manouvrier from going further, observing that gross measurements of height and weight were inadequate to account for gender diffference in brain size, because body mass is distributed differently in males and females. By correcting for this factor he termed “sexual mass”, Manouvrier concluded that women actually had a slightly larger brain size on average than men (Gould, 1996, p. 138). The belief in the relationship between brain size and intelligence persists among some researchers to this day, although throughout the 20th century it was more common for the results of intelligence tests to be used as evidence for, or as a direct proxy for, intelligence than brain size. To these measurements a wide array of other quantitative observations have been brought to bear, including reaction time, genetic studies, and neuroimaging techniques (Rushton & Ankney, 2009).

2.3. Describe in detail, what part the scientific method played in the conflict.

“I have the greatest respect for Broca's meticulous procedure,” writes Gould (1980, p. 153), “His numbers are sound. But science is an inferential exercise, not a catalog of facts. Numbers, by themselves, specify nothing. All depends upon what you do with them.” Indeed a recent paper asserts that it is “unacceptably easy to publish 'statistically significant' evidence consistent with any hypothesis.”:

“The culprit is a construct we refer to as researcher degrees of freedom. In the course of collecting and analyzing data, researchers have many decisions to make: Should more data be collected? Should some observations be excluded? Which conditions should be combined and which ones compared? Which control variables should be considered? Should specific measures be combined or transformed or both?“ (Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2011.)

Gould (1996) identifies many instances where Broca and his peers employ researcher degrees of freedom to support their cause: Broca is most diligent in applying corrections to data when he finds the data uncongenial (Gould, 1996, p. 121-125), for instance against Gratiolet he applies body size correction to the case of Frenchmen versus Germans, but notably makes no such correction for women versus men (Gould, 1996, p. 136); Topinard explains away the existence of large-brained criminals by positing, without evidence, that they constitute a small minority of masterminds (Gould, 1996, p. 127); and where the contention that intelligence is determined by gross brain size is contradicted by evidence, Broca nimbly leaps to the conclusion that in these cases the distribution of brain matter between the front of the brain (where it contributes to intelligence) and the back (where it does not) is a mediating factor (Gould, 1996, p. 129-130).

The parallels between Broca and his modern counterparts in this respect are striking. For example, to explain the “paradox” of small-brained women performing as well as large-brained men on IQ tests, it is hypothesised that that the brain mass not required for “General Mental Ability” (GMA) is used for tasks requiring “the 'purest' spatial measures, such as rotating an imaginary object or shooting at a moving rather than a stationary target,” which correspond to ”intellectual abilities at which men excel” (Rushton & Ankney, 2009). The “paradox” is thereby explained away by a recapitulation of Broca's “front and back” argument; GMA is invariably determined by brain size, except where it isn't, in which case the superfluity of male brain accounts for the schoolyard taunt of “you throw like a girl”!

The problem of researcher degrees of freedom is compounded by publication bias against null results. Academic publishers typically consider nonsignificant findings difficult to interpret or otherwise problematic, and are inclined to reject them. Consequently, individual scholars may “file-drawer” studies that don't “work” “simply because they believe null results will not be published ” (Ferguson & Heene, 2012). One unintended outcome of this is that ideologically-motivated researchers can characterise their critics as themselves politically motivated and lacking empirical support, while their own arguments are backed by repeated, consistent, peer-reviewed evidence. Rushton's (1997) review of Gould is a striking example of this. According to Ferguson and Heene (2012), “if null results are summarily rejected, notions of replication and falsification are mere mockeries of what they should be in a fully functional science. What is the point of replication if all the failed rejections are dismissed out of hand?" We are left, they argue, with “virtually unkillable” theories based on false positives.

2.4. What position did the scientific community take and why?

As noted above, Gould identified a number of “black sheep” among Broca's contemporaries, including Tiedemann and Manouvrier. Educator Maria Montessori dissented along with Manouvrier on the matter of women's intelligence, but followed Broca on all else, dutifully measuring the heads of her students (Gould, 1980, p. 158). In 1883, Francis Galton sythesised Broca's work on race and intelligence with Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection into the eugenics movement, which was very influential in the early 20th century, until falling into intellectual disrepute through association with the Nazis. In the post-war period “research on brain size and intelligence virtually ceased” (Rushton & Ankney, 2009), although some of the social and political effects of the eugenics movement, such as the Australian Government's attitude towards its indigenous population, would linger for decades (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997).

Nevertheless, by the late 1970s, science writers felt able to consider Broca's folly a historical lesson rather than a matter of contemporary debate. Sagan (1979) wrote that it was “a little unfair, I think, to criticize a person for not sharing the enlightenment of a later epoch [...]”, and Gould (1980, p. 151) even asserted that “I trust that no one would now try to rank races or sexes by the average size of their brains.” Both were somewhat premature. The publication of The Bell Curve (Herrnstein & Murray, 1994) attracted an extraordinary amount of media attention for an eight hundred and forty five page review of academic literature. It's central thesis that racial biological determinism is real, and that the US ignores this fact at its peril garnered much public attention, but relatively little was given to the fact that the majority of the literature reviewed came from a small group of scholars who had all at one time or another received money from the Pioneer Fund, a foundation established in 1937 to promote eugenics research (Naureckas, 1995; Lane, 1994).

In response to this public sensation, the American Psychological Association (APA) felt obliged to publish a statement clarifying the status of the concept of intelligence within mainstream psychology. They note that “no such conceptualization has yet answered all the important questions and none commands universal assent. Indeed, when two dozen prominent theorists were recently asked to define intelligence, they gave two dozen somewhat different definitions,” and concluded “In a field where so many issues are unresolved and so many questions unanswered, the confident tone that has characterized most of the debate on these topics is clearly out of place. ” (Neisser, Boodoo, Bouchard, Boykin, Brody, Ceci, Halpern, Loehlin, Perloff, Sternberg, & Urbina, 1996). The American Association of Physical Anthropology (AAPA) was even less circumspect, saying that "Pure races, in the sense of genetically homogenous populations, do not exist in the human species today, nor is there any evidence that they existed in the past," so “it is meaningless from the biological point of view to attribute a general inferiority or superiority to this or to that race." (“AAPA statement on biological aspects of race”, 1996). This is not to say that race does not exist as a sociological phenomenon, although it has been suggested that when referring to race in this sense within the natural sciences, less misleading terms such as “ethnosocial ” or “ancestral” should be used in preference (Keita, Kittles, Royal, Bonney, & Furbert-Harris, 2004).

Regardless, the Pioneer Fund grantees continue to insist that “The preponderance of evidence demonstrates that brain size is correlated positively with intelligence and that both brain size and GMA are correlated with age, socioeconomic position, sex, and population group differences ” (Rushton & Ankney, 2009), “population group” here being a transparent euphemism.

3. Conclusion

What, then, are we to make of this seemingly intractable but ultimately nonsensical debate over the relationship between brain size (or brain shape, or some other measure), various contentious and indirect measures of an undefined psychological property (“intelligence”), and a non-existent zoological category (“race” in homo sapiens)? At best, it may serve as a cultural Rorschach test, revealing the prejudices of those who choose to participate. Gould (1996. p. 361) was forced to conclude with despair that the currency of the Bell Curve “must reflect the depressing temper of our time - a historical moment of unprecedented ungenerosity, when a mood for slashing social programs can be so abetted by an argument that beneficiaries cannot be aided due to inborn cognitive limits expressed as low IQ scores."

4. References

AAPA statement on biological aspects of race. (1996). American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 101, 569-570.

Ferguson, C. J., & Heene, M. (2012). A Vast Graveyard of Undead Theories: Publication Bias and Psychological Science’s Aversion to the Null. Perspectives on Psychological Science. doi:10.1177/1745691612459059

Gould, S. J. (1980). The panda's thumb: More reflections in natural history. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.

Gould, S. J. (1996). The mismeasure of man (2nd ed.). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.

Herrnstein, R. J., & Murray, C. (1994). The bell curve: Intelligence and class structure in American life. New Yourk, NY: Free Press.

Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. (1997). Bringing them home. Australia: Commonwealth of Australia.

Keita, S. O. Y Kittles, R. A., Royal, C. D. M., Bonney, G. E., & Furbert-Harris, P., Dunston, G. M., & Rotimi, C. N. (2004). Conceptualizing human variation. Nature Genetics, 36(11s), p. S17. doi:10.1038/ng1455

Lane, C. (1994, December 1) The tainted sources of "The Bell Curve". The New York Review of Books.

Naureckas, J. (1995). Racism Resurgent: How Media Let The Bell Curve's Pseudo-Science Define the Agenda on Race. Extra!, January/February 1995. Retrieved from http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/racism-resurgent/

Nelson, L. D., Simmons, & J. P., Simonsohn, U. (2012). Let's publish fewer papers. Psychological Inquiry, 23, 291-293. doi:10.1080/1047840X.2012.705245

Neisser, U., Boodoo, G., Bouchard, T. J., Boykin, A. W., Brody, N., Ceci, S. J., Halpern, D. F., Loehlin, J. C., Perloff, R., Sternberg, R. J., & Urbina, S. (1996).

Intelligence: Knowns and unknowns. American Psychologist, 51(2), 77. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.51.2.77

Rushton, J. P. (1997). Race, intelligence, and the brain: The errors and omissions of the ‘revised’ edition of S. J. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (1996). Personality and Individual Differences, 23(1), 169–180.

Rushton, J., & Ankney, C. (2009). Whole brain size and general mental ability: A review. International Journal of Neuroscience, 119, 692–732.

Sagan, C. E. (1979). Broca's Brain. New York, NY: Random House.

Simmons, J. P., Nelson, L. D. & Simonsohn, U. (2011, May 23). False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant. Psychological Science.

Tiedemann, F., (1836). On the brain of the Negro, compared with that of the European and the Orang-Outang. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 126, 497-527.

Do you think that heavily salted foods like popcorn and crisps might be favoured in cinemas because different channels of sense data can interfere with one another? If this were true it would seem reasonable to suppose that the barrage of visual and auditory stimulation designed to prevent you from noticing that you're in a crappy little multiplex booth theatre might also prevent you from tasting less heavily-seasoned snacks.