New blog bundle on Google Reader

I was recently made aware via Neuroanthropology of a great new blog bundle on Google Reader.  The Bioanthropology bundle brings together posts from a number of prominent bioblogs for your easy perusal.  The result is impressive, although it did have the effect of depressing me by pointing out this story about the Miss America pageant.

Gould, Morton and Anthropology

This story has already been around the blogosphere (particularly the bioanthropology blogs) but it does bear some further comment.  In a nutshell, the late Stephen Jay Gould had frequently commented on the work of 19th century researcher Samuel Morton as an example of how personal bias can skew scientific data.  Morton was famous for measuring the skulls of individuals from various world populations ("races"), which Gould claimed was intended to justify a racial hierarchy based on skull size.  Gould claimed, via re-examination of Morton's data, that Morton had fudged the numbers in order to justify Caucasian superiority.  Gould made this claim both in a 1978 article in Science and in his famous 1981 work The Mismeasure of Man.  What is often lost in Gould's narrative is that his conclusions are based on Morton data tables, NOT any reexamination of the original skulls.  Now, a team of anthropologists led by Jason Lewis has reexamined the skulls using Samuel Morton's methods, and the results don't bode well for Gould's legacy on this point.  It appears that Morton accurately measured the skulls in his collection, while it was Gould who fudged the numbers in order to paint Morton as a biased researcher.

The importance of these results cannot be overemphasized, since Gould's conception of Morton's work as an example of racial bias have become part of the popular narrative of the impossibility of "value-free science," especially when it comes to anthropometric and craniometric analysis.  I remember, as a newly minted graduate student, being essentially handed The Mismeasure of Man as required reading when the topic of race came up.  Of course, there are some very legitimate criticisms to be made of Mortons work from the standpoint of population biology and life history.  For example, many of the African skulls apparently came from slave populations, which would have been subject to greater disease load and nutritional insults.  But this only underlines the fact that Gould's fudging of data was both unnecessary and damaging to the overall cause of combating academic and pseudo-scientific racism.  I still remember a talk by intelligence researcher James Flynn at Binghamton University, where he referred to Gould's "awful" book.  Flynn, of course, is the discoverer of the "Flynn Effect" (the overall continuous rise in IQ scores worldwide), and is one of the most trenchant critics of the idea of race-based heirarchies. 

Cyark

I was just made aware of this program through the Facebook page for the Community Archaeology Program.  CyArk is a program dedicated to digitally preserving cultural heritage sites using a battery of state of the art mapping and scanning techniques.  The methods described herein are becoming more and more essential to archaeology AND biological anthropology, and should likely be required training in many four-field programs. 

The Battle of Newtown - This Summer

A combination of bad internet connections, overwork, and old-fashioned hot weather laziness has stifled the blog a bit, but not for long.  One item that I'd been waiting for confirmation of was the reopening of the Newtown Battlefield this summer.  Unfortunately, the Memorial Day Civil War event did not take place this year, but the annual re-enactment of the Revolutionary War event will happen in August.  Although I have always been a bit ambivalent about "living history" events, they are one of the primary venues for the general public to engage with history and the social sciences.  The Battle of Newtown is of particular interest to me, as it was a seminal event in the population history of the Euroamerican settlement of Chemung County, NY. 

Records don't tell the whole story

One topic that pulled me into archaeology was my fascination with the Norse exploration of North America.  Early on as an undergrad I had grand designs centered on working in this field, only to have numerous professors and teaching assistants assure me that there was zero interest and no future in this area.  Granted, Norse sites in North America are anything but plentiful, and it would have been quite a niche field to get into.  But I do wonder sometimes...

What brought about this bit of reminiscence was a recent piece in Science Daily regarding the climate history of Greenland and the effect it had on the various cultures settled there.  Recent ice core samplings appear to give credence to the "Little Ice Age" theory regarding the demise of the Norse Greenland settlements, although the proximal factors likely included conflict with the Inuit populations (as well as an unwillingness to adopt "Skraeling" survival strategies), raids from European pirates, and the erosion of the soil from over-farming.  What is interesting is that the Norse Greenland settlements represented a literate society which provided some record (albeit sporadic) of social and environmental factors relevant to its eventual demise.  For example, the Landnamabok (Book of Settlements) describes famine winters in which "the old and the helpless were thrown over cliffs."

Wealth and poverty in historical samples

Since the lightning outside seems loath to end (great for atmosphere, lousy for electronics), I will be brief and to the point with this post.  Simple premise; how do we measure relative wealth and poverty in historical populations?  Two applications that I have used both at work and in my own research come to mind.  The first is this engine for converting historical currencies into present-day value (apparently, the $20 on my desk was worth $414.63 in 1700).  Second, the University of Virginia Library has an online Historical Census Browser that includes census data down to the county level since 1790 (although it does not enable finer, census tract analysis).  I have used this particular application for assessing the relative wealth of farmsteads at the county level using the agricultural schedule function.  It is also quite useful for assessing the ethnic composition of historical populations.

Peer-review in the blogosphere

A few years ago I caught one of my favorite authors, Harlan Ellison, expounding on the virtues (or lack thereof) of the world wide web as it related to the quality of information and opinion.  This was prior to the release of the new Star Trek movie, which someone initially claimed on-line contained elements from Ellisons script of City on the Edge of Forever.  Of course, this wasn't true, and when interviewed on the picket line of the writers strike, Harlans first remark was that this is one of the reasons the Internet deserves to be bombed out of existence immediately; the fact the the Internet now gives an easy worldwide forum to any ill-informed voice where years ago they would have been limited to mimeographed handbills.

I was thinking about all of this during the latest firestorm over something ejected from the keyboard of Satoshi Kanazawa.  For those of you not in the know, Kanazawa is an evolutionary psychologist with the London School of Economics who has a blog at Psychology Today called the Scientific Fundamentalist.  Recently he published a post of his alleged research titled "Why Are Black Women Rated Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?    In a nutshell, Kanazawa uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (which included subjective measures on the part of interviewers on the physical attractiveness of the interviewees) in order to claim that African-American women are objectively less attractive than other women (based on the subjective responses of the interviewers) due to the fact that African-American women have higher testosterone levels than other women.  Don't bother looking for the original post, since apparently Psychology Today scrubbed it right quick (although you can probably find an archived copy somewhere online).

What drew me to this subject was the fact that I do have an interest is at least the idea of evolutionary psychology (lower case), in the sense that it is important to acknowledge that our behaviors are the product of an evolutionary process and should be understood and studies as such.  This view can still make large segments of the anthropological community very uncomfortable to the point of hostility.  Thus, it pains me when something like the above "research" comes out under the banner of evolutionary psychology, since it has the oroboros-like effect of engendering the kind of justifiable anti-EP backlash and then feeding on that backlash in the pose of the heroic researcher standing up to the forces of political correctness (whatever that means these days).  Fortunately, much of the initial criticism of Kanazawa appears to be coming from evolutionary biologists and psychologists, particularly bloggers such as PZ Myers over at Pharyngula.  Daniel Hawes, who also blogs at Psychology Today, published a decent criticism of the Kanazawa piece.  And Scott Barry Kaufman conducted an independent analysis of the original data, and found no statistically significant relationship between ethnicity and attractiveness. 

Beyond anything, the fairly minor controversy (in the grand scheme of academic pseudo-science) did have at least one positive effect; it demonstrated that there is a viable peer-review process operating on the science bloggosphere.