The Mismeasure of Man Read online

  Broca concluded triumphantly:

  In general, the brain is larger in mature adults than in the elderly, in men than in women, in eminent men than in men of mediocre talent, in superior races than in inferior races (1861, p. 304).… Other things equal, there is a remarkable relationship between the development of intelligence and the volume of the brain (p. 188).

  Five years later, in an encyclopedia article on anthropology, Broca expressed himself more forcefully:

  A prognathous [forward-jutting] face, more or less black color of the skin, woolly hair and intellectual and social inferiority are often associated, while more or less white skin, straight hair and an orthognathous [straight] face are the ordinary equipment of the highest groups in the human series (1866, p. 280).… A group with black skin, woolly hair and a prognathous face has never been able to raise itself spontaneously to civilization (pp. 295–296).

  These are harsh words, and Broca himself regretted that nature had fashioned such a system (1866, p. 296). But what could he do? Facts are facts. “There is no faith, however respectable, no interest, however legitimate, which must not accommodate itself to the progress of human knowledge and bend before truth” (in Count, 1950, p. 72). Paul Topinard, Broca’s leading disciple and successor, took as his motto (1882, p. 748): “J’ai horreur des systèmes et surtout des systèmes a priori” (I abhor systems, especially a priori systems).

  Broca singled out the few egalitarian scientists of his century for particularly harsh treatment because they had debased their calling by allowing an ethical hope or political dream to cloud their judgment and distort objective truth. “The intervention of political and social considerations has not been less injurious to anthropology than the religious element” (1855, in Count, 1950, p. 73). The great German anatomist Friedrich Tiedemann, for example, had argued that blacks and whites did not differ in cranial capacity. Broca nailed Tiedemann for the same error I uncovered in Morton’s work (see pp. 82–101). When Morton used a subjective and imprecise method of reckoning, he calculated systematically lower capacities for blacks than when he measured the same skulls with a precise technique. Tiedemann, using an even more imprecise method, calculated a black average 45 cc above the mean value recorded by other scientists. Yet his measures for white skulls were no larger than those reported by colleagues. (For all his delight in exposing Tiedemann, Broca apparently never checked Morton’s figures, though Morton was his hero and model. Broca once published a one-hundred-page paper analyzing Morton’s techniques in the most minute detail—Broca, 1873b.)

  Why had Tiedemann gone astray? “Unhappily,” Broca wrote (1873b, p. 12), “he was dominated by a preconceived idea. He set out to prove that the cranial capacity of all human races is the same.” But “it is an axiom of all observational sciences that facts must precede theories” (1868, p. 4). Broca believed, sincerely I assume, that facts were his only constraint and that his success in affirming traditional rankings arose from the precision of his measures and his care in establishing repeatable procedures.

  Indeed, one cannot read Broca without gaining enormous respect for his care in generating data. I believe his numbers and doubt that any better have ever been obtained. Broca made an exhaustive study of all previous methods used to determine cranial capacity. He decided that lead shot, as advocated by “le célèbre Morton” (1861, p. 183), gave the best results, but he spent months refining the technique, taking into account such factors as the form and height of the cylinder used to receive the shot after it is poured from the skull, the speed of pouring shot into the skull, and the mode of shaking and tapping the skull to pack the shot and to determine whether or not more will fit in (Broca, 1873b). Broca finally developed an objective method for measuring cranial capacity. In most of his work, however, he preferred to weigh the brain directly after autopsies performed by his own hands.

  I spent a month reading all of Broca’s major work, concentrating on his statistical procedures. I found a definite pattern in his methods. He traversed the gap between fact and conclusion by what may be the usual route—predominantly in reverse. Conclusions came first and Broca’s conclusions were the shared assumptions of most successful white males during his time—themselves on top by the good fortune of nature, and women, blacks, and poor people below. His facts were reliable (unlike Morton’s), but they were gathered selectively and then manipulated unconsciously in the service of prior conclusions. By this route, the conclusions achieved not only the blessing of science, but the prestige of numbers. Broca and his school used facts as illustrations, not as constraining documents. They began with conclusions, peered through their facts, and came back in a circle to the same conclusions. Their example repays a closer study, for unlike Morton (who manipulated data, however unconsciously), they reflected their prejudices by another, and probably more common, route: advocacy masquerading as objectivity.

  Selecting characters

  When the “Hottentot Venus” died in Paris, Georges Cuvier, the greatest scientist and, as Broca would later discover to his delight, the largest brain of France, remembered this African woman as he had seen her in the flesh.

  She had a way of pouting her lips exactly like what we have observed in the orang-utan. Her movements had something abrupt and fantastical about them, reminding one of those of the ape. Her lips were monstrously large [those of apes are thin and small as Cuvier apparently forgot]. Her ear was like that of many apes, being small, the tragus weak, and the external border almost obliterated behind. These are animal characters. I have never seen a human head more like an ape than that of this woman (in Topinard, 1878, pp. 493–494).

  The human body can be measured in a thousand ways. Any investigator, convinced beforehand of a group’s inferiority, can select a small set of measures to illustrate its greater affinity with apes. (This procedure, of course, would work equally well for white males, though no one made the attempt. White people, for example, have thin lips—a property shared with chimpanzees—while most black Africans have thicker, consequently more “human,” lips.)

  Broca’s cardinal bias lay in his assumption that human races could be ranked in a linear scale of mental worth. In enumerating the aims of ethnology, Broca included: “to determine the relative position of races in the human series” (in Topinard, 1878, p. 660). It did not occur to him that human variation might be ramified and random, rather than linear and hierarchical. And since he knew the order beforehand, anthropometry became a search for characters that would display the correct ranking, not a numerical exercise in raw empiricism.

  Thus Broca began his search for “meaningful” characters—those that would display the established ranks. In 1862, for example, he tried the ratio of radius (lower arm bone) to humerus (upper arm bone), reasoning that a higher ratio marks a longer forearm—a character of apes. All began well: blacks yielded a ratio of .794, whites .739. But then Broca ran into trouble. An Eskimo skeleton yielded .703, an Australian aborigine .709, while the Hottentot Venus, Cuvier’s near ape (her skeleton had been preserved in Paris), measured a mere .703. Broca now had two choices. He could either admit that, on this criterion, whites ranked lower than several dark-skinned groups, or he could abandon the criterion. Since he knew (1862a, p. 10) that Hottentots, Eskimos, and Australian aborigines ranked below most African blacks, he chose the second course: “After this, it seems difficult to me to continue to say that elongation of the forearm is a character of degradation or inferiority, because, on this account, the European occupies a place between Negroes on the one hand, and Hottentots, Australians, and eskimos on the other” (1862, p. 11).

  Later, he almost abandoned his cardinal criterion of brain size because inferior yellow people scored so well:

  A table on which races were arranged by order of their cranial capacities would not represent the degrees of their superiority or inferiority, because size represents only one element of the problem [of ranking races]. On such a table, Eskimos, Lapps, Malays, Tartars and several other peoples of the Mong
olian type would surpass the most civilized people of Europe. A lowly race may therefore have a big brain (1873a, p. 38).

  But Broca felt that he could salvage much of value from his crude measure of overall brain size. It may fail at the upper end because some inferior groups have big brains, but it works at the lower end because small brains belong exclusively to people of low intelligence. Broca continued:

  But this does not destroy the value of small brain size as a mark of inferiority. The table shows that West African blacks have a cranial capacity about 100 cc less than that of European races. To this figure, we may add the following: Caffirs, Nubians, Tasmanians, Hottentots, Australians. These examples are sufficient to prove that if the volume of the brain does not play a decisive role in the intellectual ranking of races, it nevertheless has a very real importance (1873a, p. 38).

  An unbeatable argument. Deny it at one end where conclusions are uncongenial; affirm it by the same criterion at the other. Broca did not fudge numbers; he merely selected among them or interpreted his way around them to favored conclusions.

  In choosing among measures, Broca did not just drift passively in the sway of a preconceived idea. He advocated selection among characters as a stated goal with explicit criteria. Topinard, his chief disciple, distinguished between “empirical” characters “having no apparent design,” and “rational” characters “related to some physiological opinion” (1878, p. 221). How then to determine which characters are “rational”? Topinard answered: “Other characteristics are looked upon, whether rightly or wrongly, as dominant. They have an affinity in negroes to those which they exhibit in apes, and establish the transition between these and Europeans” (1878, p. 221). Broca had also considered this issue in the midst of his debate with Gratiolet, and had reached the same conclusion (1861, p. 176):

  We surmount the problem easily by choosing, for our comparison of brains, races whose intellectual inequalities are completely clear. Thus, the superiority of Europeans compared with African Negroes, American Indians, Hottentots, Australians and the Negroes of Oceania, is sufficiently certain to serve as a point of departure for the comparison of brains.

  Particularly outrageous examples abound in the selection of individuals to represent groups in illustrations. Thirty years ago, when I was a child, the Hall of Man in the American Museum of Natural History still displayed the characters of human races by linear arrays running from apes to whites. Standard anatomical illustrations, until this generation, depicted a chimp, a Negro, and a white, part by part in that order—even though variation among whites and blacks is always large enough to generate a different order with other individuals: chimp, white, black. In 1903, for example, the American anatomist E. A. Spitzka published a long treatise on brain size and form in “men of eminence.” He printed the following figure (Fig. 3.3) with a comment: “The jump from a Cuvier or a Thackeray to a Zulu or a Bushman is not greater than from the latter to the gorilla or the orang” (1903, p. 604). But he also published a similar figure (Fig. 3.4) illustrating variation in brain size among eminent whites apparently never realizing that he had destroyed his own argument. As F. P. Mall, the man who exposed Bean, wrote of these figures (1909, p. 24): “Comparing [them], it appears that Gambetta’s brain resembles the gorilla’s more than it does that of Gauss.”

  Averting anomalies

  Inevitably, since Broca amassed so much disparate and honest data, he generated numerous anomalies and apparent exceptions to his guiding generality—that size of brain records intelligence and that comfortable white males have larger brains than women, poor people, and lower races. In noting how he worked around each apparent exception, we obtain our clearest insight into Broca’s methods of argument and inference. We also understand why data could never overthrow his assumptions.

  BIG-BRAINED GERMANS

  Gratiolet, in his last desperate attempt, pulled out all the stops. He dared to claim that, on average, German brains are 100 grams heavier than French brains. Clearly, Gratiolet argued, brain size has nothing to do with intelligence! Broca responded disdainfully: “Monsieur Gratiolet has almost appealed to our patriotic sentiments. But it will be easy for me to show him that he can grant some value to the size of the brain without ceasing, for that, to be a good Frenchman” (1861, pp. 441–442).

  Broca then worked his way systematically through the data. First of all, Gratiolet’s figure of 100 grams came from unsupported claims of the German scientist E. Huschke. When Broca collated all the actual data he could find, the difference in size between German and French brains fell from 100 to 48 grams. Broca then applied a series of corrections for nonintellectual factors that also affect brain size. He argued, quite correctly, that brain size increases with body size, decreases with age, and decreases during long periods of poor health (thus explaining why executed criminals often have larger brains than honest folk who die of degenerative diseases in hospitals). Broca noted a mean French age of fifty-six and a half years in his sample, while the Germans averaged only fifty-one. He estimated that this difference would account for 16 grams of the disparity between French and Germans, cutting the German advantage to 32 grams. He then removed from the German sample all individuals who had died by violence or execution. The mean brain weight of twenty Germans, dead from natural causes, now stood at 1,320 grams, already below the French average of 1,333 grams. And Broca had not even yet corrected for the larger average body size of Germans. Vive la France.

  Broca’s colleague de Jouvencel, speaking on his behalf against the unfortunate Gratiolet, argued that greater German brawn accounted for all the apparent difference in brain and then some. Of the average German, he wrote (1861, p. 466):

  He ingests a quantity of solid food and drink far greater than that which satisfies us. This, joined with his consumption of beer, which is pervasive even in areas where wine is made, makes the German much more fleshy [charnu] than the Frenchman—śo much so that their relation of brain size to total mass, far from being superior to ours, appears to me, on the contrary, to be inferior.

  3.3 Spitzka’s chain of being according to brain size.

  3.4 Spitzka’s depiction of variation in brain size among white men of eminence.

  I do not challenge Broca’s use of corrections but I do note his skill in wielding them when his own position was threatened. Bear this in mind when I discuss how deftly he avoided them when they might have challenged a congenial conclusion—the small brains of women.

  SMALL-BRAINED MEN OF EMINENCE

  The American anatomist E. A. Spitzka urged men of eminence to donate their brains to science after their death. “To me the thought of an autopsy is certainly less repugnant than I imagine the process of cadaveric decomposition in the grave to be” (1907, p. 235). The dissection of dead colleagues became something of a cottage industry among nineteenth-century craniometricians. Brains exerted their customary fascination, and lists were proudly touted, accompanied by the usual invidious comparisons. (The leading American anthropologists J. W. Powell and W J McGee even made a wager over who carried the larger brain. As Ko-Ko told Nanki-Poo about the fireworks that would follow his execution, “You won’t see them, but they’ll be there all the same.”)

  Some men of genius did very well indeed. Against a European average of 1,300 to 1,400 grams, the great Cuvier stood out with his topheavy 1,830 grams. Cuvier headed the charts until Turgenev finally broke the 2,000 gram barrier in 1883. (Other potential occupants of this stratosphere, Cromwell and Swift, lay in limbo for insufficiency of record.)

  The other end was a bit more confusing and embarrassing. Walt Whitman managed to hear America singing with only 1,282 grams. As a crowning indignity, Franz Josef Gall, one of the two founders of phrenology—the original “science” of judging various mental capacities by the size of localized brain areas—weighed in at a meager 1,198 grams. (His colleague J. K. Spurzheim yielded a quite respectable 1,559 grams.) And, though Broca didn’t know it, his own brain weighed only 1,424 grams, a bit above average to be
sure, but nothing to crow about. Anatole France extended the range of famous authors to more than 1,000 grams when, in 1924, he opted for the other end of Turgenev’s fame and clocked in at a mere 1,017 grams.

  The small brains were troublesome, but Broca, undaunted, managed to account for all of them. Their possessors either died very old, were very short and slightly built, or had suffered poor preservation. Broca’s reaction to a study by his German colleague Rudolf Wagner was typical. Wagner had obtained a real prize in 1855, the brain of the great mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss. It weighed a modestly overaverage 1,492 grams, but was more richly convoluted than any brain previously dissected (Fig. 3.5). Encouraged, Wagner went on to weigh the brains of all dead and willing professors at Göttingen, in an attempt to plot the distribution of brain size among men of eminence. By the time Broca was battling with Gratiolet in 1861, Wagner had four more measurements. None posed any challenge to Cuvier, and two were distinctly puzzling—Hermann, the professor of philosophy at 1,368 grams, and Hausmann, the professor of mineralogy, at 1,226 grams. Broca corrected Hermann’s brain for his age and raised it by 16 grams to 1.19 percent above average—“not much for a professor of linguistics,” Broca admitted, “but still something” (1861, p. 167). No correction could raise Hausmann to the mean of ordinary folks, but considering his venerable seventy-seven years, Broca speculated that his brain may have undergone more than the usual amount of senile degeneration: “The degree of decadence that old age can impose upon a brain is very variable and cannot be calculated.”

  3.5 The brain of the great mathematician K. F. Gauss (right) proved to be something of an embarrassment since, at 1,492 grams, it was only slightly larger than average. But other criteria came to the rescue. Here, E. A. Spitzka demonstrates that Gauss’s brain is much more richly convoluted than that of a Papuan (left).