This post includes information found in Tim Wise's "Armed with a Loaded Footnote: Sloppy Statistics, Bogus Science and the Assault on Racial Equality."

Although anthropometry works well as a means of identifying someone, replicating their features, and telling you what celebrity you look like, it has always run into severe problems when some one attempts to use it to explain psychological, moral, and personality characteristics. That wouldn’t be so bad if we were talking about a dry academic premise once considered by mainstream science and, after testing, proven invalid. But its use in the eugenics movement infected the government policy of many nations, with flesh-and-bone people paying the consequences for a false assumption. Local and national governments coercively sterilized hundreds of thousands. Universities humiliated scores of thousands by forcing them to pose nude. Millions died during the Holocaust.

Yet the attempts to link physical characteristics to psychological traits and intellectual abilities to one’s appearance persist to this very day. As it turns out, a few scientists lured by easy grant money, lucrative book deals, and perhaps even their own prejudices, still try to prove that a human’s worth, goodness, and intelligence are determined by his or her body. Such scientists find support in individuals and groups that want to find some way that they, and people like them, are genetically superior to everyone else.

Eugenics studies centered on males have often attempted to correlate penis size with intelligence. An 1898 study by the French Army Medical Corps compared the genital size of Nigerian medical students and Czech soldiers. While no one really knows the purpose of this original study, the data from it became the cornerstone of Dr. J. Phillippe Rushton’s (Biology, University of Western Ontario) research. Adding to this study interview information collected from random males shopping in Toronto malls, and perhaps from other sources that correlated measurements of genitalia with a biography of the subject (perhaps the posture photos), Dr. Rushton concluded that the size of a man’s penis was in inverse proportion to his intelligence. He then figured that since Africans and their diasporal descendants possess the biggest members, they are the least intelligent people on Earth. Conversely, Asian men and their descendants have the smallest digits, and are thus intellectually superior.

Dr. Rushton’s beliefs might have languished in well-deserved obscurity had Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray not cited them in the 1994 book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which argued that genetic attributes explained ethnic disparities in intelligence and class. The book received high praise amongst many American conservative and neo-conservatives, who lauded its daring and implied repudiation of the Affirmative Action programs developed by Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Judging from its appearance on The New York Times bestseller list, a lot of people took it quite seriously as a scientific study.

As fast as it flew off of bookshelves, The Bell Curve drew criticism from virtually all scientists for its flaws in methodology, faulty analysis, and the fact that the book had a tendency to contradict its own data. Most of all, the book’s validity hinged on the largely discredited sources it cited.

The problems with The Bell Curve are too numerous and profound to cite here in detail, but we can examine a few. First off is the assumption that there is such a thing as distinguishable human races. We are all mostly clones of each other, since 68% of all human genes are identical. Secondly, an important 1982 study done by Drs. Masatoshi Nei and Arun Roychoudhury (Biological and Medical Sciences, Brown University), and later published in their 1988 book Human Polymorphic Genes: World Distribution, showed quite compellingly that two people from different ethnic groups could easily have more genetic similarity than two people within the same ethnic group. After all, only .032% (at most) of human genes separate a white person from a black one, .019% a white person from an Asian one, and .047% a black from an Asian.

Herrnstein and Murray committed a big methodological faux pas by using statistics that seemingly came from nowhere. Research demands that you cite where you get information so that future investigators can check the validity of it, or get a better understanding of its context. The authors claimed that average IQ scores for Latino immigrants and blacks were 91 and 84 respectively (i.e. at the low range of normal and slightly mentally handicapped, respectively), yet they offered no citation. We have no idea where these data come from. For all we know, they simply pulled them out of thin air.

Then again, The Bell Curve's findings contradicted many of its premises. The authors coin a term, ‘the Flynn Effect,’ a statistical curiosity in IQ testing first noted by New Zealand political scientist James R. Flynn. IQ tests are normalized, or in other words graded on a curve of sorts. You take a representative population, administer IQ tests, and then find the average number of correct responses. That average is established as an IQ of 100 points. But because of the Flynn Effect, each subsequent generation of test takers has to answer more and more questions correctly to get a score of 100.

You can debate amongst your family members whether or not this proves that children are more intelligent than their parents. I would guess that kids aren’t really getting smarter, although they are receiving more information because of the ubiquity of mass media, the Internet in particular. But even if you think you’re smarter than your ma and pa, then you would also have to concede that your intelligence is not genetic, for you have their genes—and that’s the whole premise of the study.

Murray and Herrnstein’s most egregious error was their over-reliance on shoddy research. Dr. Rushton, Dr. Richard Lynn (Psychology, University of Ulster), and eleven other scholars that formed the core of the authors’ thesis had something in common other than an interest in the subject matter. They received funding from the same source, a private organization founded in the 1930s for the sole purpose of proving racial superiority.

If you think that sounds rather Nazi-ish, stick around for the last installment in this series.