There’s new evidence confirming bias by the “father of scientific racism” | Ars Technica

In summary: insufficient sample size, missing controls, and lack of double-blind practices in experimentation all lead to questionable conclusions.

I hope I saved someone 15 minutes of reading.

The difference arises from the two approaches each man took when analyzing the data. Tiedemann presented his data as a range in each racial category. All those ranges overlapped with each other far too significantly to make any reasonable scientific pronouncement about race. Morton, on the other hand, took an average of the measurements of the groups. Intriguingly, when Mitchell applied Morton's method to Tiedemann's data, taking the averages, he wound up with the same conclusions as Morton.

In other words, "The data were mute on these questions," says Mitchell. "Had Morton had Tiedemann's data or Tiedemann had Morton's data, they could have produced the exact same conclusions that each respectively did. That fundamental fact needs to be brought to bear on how we think about what bias means in cranial race science in the 1830s and 1840s."

Morton's belief in the racial superiority of Caucasians influenced his interpretation of his data; Tiedemann's staunch anti-slavery views did the same for the analysis of his data. And that's where Lewis et al. erred in their 2011 paper: they declared that the Morton case, rather than showing the ubiquity of bias, instead showed how science can escape the "bounds and blunders of cultural contexts." This is clearly not the case, based on Mitchell's analysis. Both Morton and Tiedemann had amassed good data, but that was not sufficient to save them from their own biases when it came to interpreting that data.