THERE ARE NO DARWINISTS:

Stephen Jay Gould, the famous 20th century paleontologist, published his most celebrated work, The Mismeasure of Man, in 1981. Gould's thesis is that throughout the history of science, prejudiced scientists studying human beings allowed their social beliefs to color their data collection and analysis. Gould believed that this confirmation bias was particularly powerful when a scientists' beliefs were socially important to them.

Gould believed this bias was rampant in particular scholarly fields, and the most prominent target for his criticism in The Mismeasure of Man was the study of intelligence, especially IQ testing and the genetics of mental ability. And his analysis was not kind. Gould believed that there was a direct connection between the discredited study of skull measurements and the dawn of intelligence testing in the following generation. "But the IQ...relies upon assumptions...as unsupportable as those underpinning the old hierarchies of skull sizes proposed by nineteenth-century participants." (Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, p. 210)

It may be surprising to readers to learn that I--a psychologist who researches human intelligence--agree with Gould's principal thesis. Scientists' pre-conceived notions about the things they study do guide their data collection and analysis. These beliefs guide scientists in choosing variables to measure, theories to test, statistical methods to employ, and more. This connection between beliefs and methods is a strong one. After all, if you believe that the universe is made of cheese, you're going to build a cosmic cheese whiz detector.

And though I wish Gould had not targeted my field, The Mismeasure of Man provides a great deal of evidence that scientists' pre-existing beliefs color their judgment--but not in the way he intended. Rather, the book is a perfect example of the sin it purports to expose in others. Gould's Marxist political beliefs made him attack intelligence research because he saw it as a threat to his egalitarian social goals. Ironically, it was this allegiance to ideology over data that made Gould himself a classic examplar of a biased scientist. [...]

If Gould's thesis is true for all scientists, and he sometimes wrote as if it is, then there is an obvious problem for him: he would be subject to the same biases, and his conclusions, like those of the scholars targeted in The Mismeasure of Man, would be inherently flawed--including his claim that all scientific analysis is biased. 

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