Stephen Jay Gould, Samuel Morton and Investigative Bias

Stephen Jay Gould, expert on snails, eminently radical political scientist and master polemicist, mistaken by many for a knowledgeable evolutionary biologist because he was a very good writer.

If you want some critiques of him you can look at this explanation of his at best extremely shoddy and more likely deliberately deceptive statistical analysis here.

http://johnhawks.net/taxonomy/term/700

It's a commentary on the paper the WSJ is talking about.

Money quote

"Here is the most sympathetic reading I can give to these facts. Gould systematically selected data from Morton's tables that tended to inflate the measured volumes of Native American crania. He did so by averaging some group means instead of overall means (although Lewis and colleagues show that Morton himself had used group means for many comparisons, contrary to Gould's claims), by excluding some small-skulled groups entirely (claiming sample size as a criterion), and by omitting crania that had not been measured in the earlier, seed-based analysis. There is no logical reason for these choices other than selection bias -- Gould began with a conclusion about Morton's unconscious motivations, and worked to confirm that conclusion by selecting some data and omitting contrary data."

Paul Krugman's takedown of Gould

http://www.pkarchive.org/theory/evolute.html

"What I encountered were quite a few references to Stephen Jay Gould, hardly any to other evolutionary theorists. Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is bevolved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about - not just the answers, but even the questions - are consistently misleading."

If you want some more this is good too.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/kv/beware_of_stephen_j_gould/

As an aside if someone can explain to me what the hell the big deal with spandrels is I'd appreciate it. AIUI they're features that arise because they're very strongly associated with something that's selected for but have no survival value themselves. They can then be co-opted for later evolution if some minor mutations make them into something that does, in and of itself, have survival value.

Its worth noting that the major example in the wsj piece above, that of clinical trials, does not say what they think it does.

Essentially, the doctors involved do not change the results magically by taking the funding. The real explanation is far simpler -only the positive trials are released (barring FOI requests). While I accept the articles major point, the examples they choose are not good exemplars for this point.

Do the magisteria of science and money overlap?