In a predictably excellent essay reviewing The Richness of Life: The Essential Stephen Jay Gould (Ed: Steve Rose) and Punctuated Equilibrium by Gould, Lewontin offers two valuable reminders. One is the essential and important difference between a “public intellectual” like Gould who works to disseminate knowledge of his field to the general public and someone like Dawkins who (my words) is after slick overarching ideas that can be turned into bestsellers or service personal aggrandisement. The second, perhaps more important (and quoted below) is a reminder of the nature of scientific activity:

Free Expression: The Triumph of Stephen Jay Gould, By Richard C. Lewontin

There is hardly a chapter in the main body of The Richness of Life that does not repay a careful reading. Of all the essays in it the one that is most important to the public understanding of science is “Measuring Heads: Paul Broca and the Heyday of Craniology,” for it deals with an issue that is so discomfiting for scientists that they avoid it when they can. Despite the myth of detached objectivity that scientists propagate, their motivations are as messy as everyone else’s. In particular, they have political, social, and personal concerns that may influence what they do, how they do it, and what they say about it. Putting aside deliberate fraud, of which we have an embarrassment of examples, the gathering of data, their statistical representation, and their interpretation offer many opportunities for unconscious bias toward conclusions that we already “knew” to be true.

In particular, scientists have repeatedly reported that whites have larger brains than blacks. Gould shows that when the preserved brain is measured before the race of its former owner is revealed, this difference disappears completely. Similarly, claims of larger heads of professionals as compared to laborers are not statistically significant because of very large variation from individual to individual. What is important about this essay is not that it reveals what we already know to be true about the existence of racism and sexism, but that it shows how any claim that something is “scientifically demonstrated” should be treated with the same skepticism that we invoke when there is any reason to think that the investigator has something to gain, either ideologically or professionally, as we do when financial gain is involved.

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