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skull collection with those of Caucasians, by filling the cranial cavities with mustard seed or lead BB shot, then pouring it back into a graduated cylinder and reading the volume. Steven Jay Gould has carefully examined Morton’s data, wondering how such a respected scientist arrived at a clear ranking of skull sizes (Caucasians largest, followed by so-called Mongolians and American Indians, then Africans) that cannot now be found to exist. Gould believes Morton didn’t consciously fudge his data, but did it in dozens of unconscious ways, from selectively firing his assistants to failing to notice the relationship between skull size and body size in all races, and ultimately, by looking hard for what he needed to see. “Plausible scenarios are easy to construct,” Gould writes. “Morton, measuring by seed, picks up a threateningly large [African] skull, fills it lightly and gives it a few desultory shakes. Next, he takes a distressingly small Caucasian skull, shakes hard, and pushes mightily at the foramen magnum with his thumb.”

It’s nearly a vignette of black comedy to imagine Dr. Morton hunched over his skulls, with a racket of BB’s rolling over his worktable and mustard seed crunching under his feet, as he labors to make the numbers of his science match the equations fixed in his heart. But in truth it’s a horrific moment of history, for the data from his somber skullduggery were used to justify generations of genocide and slavery.

In this century, the biological determinists have laid down skulls and taken up testing. In 1912, when racism in America swelled on a rising tide of immigration, the U.S. Public Health Service hired psychologist H. H. Goddard to help screen out the imagined menace of inferior minds that were poised to contaminate the (equally imagined) pellucid American gene pool. Goddard, who invented the term “moron,” created his own test for mental deficiency. Gould’s Mismeasure of Man gives a remarkable account of how Goddard’s test questions were fired at immigrants as they stepped bewildered and exhausted off the boat at Ellis Island. (Many had never before held a pencil, and had no possible frame of reference for understanding what was being asked of them.) Goddard arrived at these staggering results: 83 percent of Jews, 87 percent of Russians, 80 percent of Hungarians, and 79 percent of Italians were diagnosed as morons. At the time, no one paused to wonder how any nation could be carrying out its sundry business with four-fifths of its citizens punching in below the mental age of twelve; ethnic quotas on U.S. immigration were in place within the decade.

The explosive publication in 1994 of a book called The Bell Curve was an attempt to prove, yet again, the intellectual superiority of Caucasians. Written just in time to catch a new current of racism, the book drips with statistics and academic language, but its emotional heart seems bent on justifying the subordinate status of people of color in the U.S. Authors Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray have made extravagant claims linking IQ and race, frequently basing them on the work of researchers who received grants from the Pioneer Fund, a bluntly pro-white organization that has long denounced school desegregation and advocated sterilization to eliminate so-called genetically unfit individuals or races from society. It’s a case of science with the fingerprints of “motive” all over it.

No matter that The Bell Curve is made of very tired stuff, not much different from mismeasuring skulls; the book was taken seriously enough to capture the cover of Newsweek, tie up the headlines and news roundups, and sell like a house afire. The authors proved one thing, without a doubt: the privileged have not yet tired of hearing how righteously they came by their place at the table.

This whole line of inquiry, in which science is invoked to explain how we got where we are, is fatally tainted by what Hume called the “is-ought” problem. This is the philosophical error of confusing what exists with its right to exist, even though substance and scruples—what is