The Panda’s Thumb (16 page)

IN THE PRELUDE
to
Middlemarch
, George Eliot lamented the unfulfilled lives of talented women:

Eliot goes on to discount the idea of innate limitation, but while she wrote in 1872, the leaders of European anthropometry were trying to measure “with scientific certitude” the inferiority of women. Anthropometry, or measurement of the human body, is not so fashionable a field these days, but it dominated the human sciences for much of the nineteenth century and remained popular until intelligence testing replaced skull measurement as a favored device for making invidious comparisons among races, classes, and sexes. Craniometry, or measurement of the skull, commanded the most attention and respect. Its unquestioned leader, Paul Broca (1824–80), professor of clinical surgery at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, gathered a school of disciples and imitators around himself. Their work, so meticulous and apparently irrefutable, exerted great influence and won high esteem as a jewel of nineteenth-century science.

Broca's work seemed particularly invulnerable to refutation. Had he not measured with the most scrupulous care and accuracy? (Indeed, he had. I have the greatest respect for Broca's meticulous procedure. His numbers are sound. But science is an inferential exercise, not a catalog of facts. Numbers, by themselves, specify nothing. All depends upon what you do with them.) Broca depicted himself as an apostle of objectivity, a man who bowed before facts and cast aside superstition and sentimentality. He declared that “there is no faith, however respectable, no interest, however legitimate, which must not accommodate itself to the progress of human knowledge and bend before truth.” Women, like it or not, had smaller brains than men and, therefore, could not equal them in intelligence. This fact, Broca argued, may reinforce a common prejudice in male society, but it is also a scientific truth. L. Manouvrier, a black sheep in Broca's fold, rejected the inferiority of women and wrote with feeling about the burden imposed upon them by Broca's numbers:

Broca's argument rested upon two sets of data: the larger brains of men in modern societies, and a supposed increase in male superiority through time. His most extensive data came from autopsies performed personally in four Parisian hospitals. For 292 male brains, he calculated an average weight of 1,325 grams; 140 female brains averaged 1,144 grams for a difference of 181 grams, or 14 percent of the male weight. Broca understood, of course, that part of this difference could be attributed to the greater height of males. Yet he made no attempt to measure the effect of size alone and actually stated that it cannot account for the entire difference because we know, a priori, that women are not as intelligent as men (a premise that the data were supposed to test, not rest upon):

In 1873, the year after Eliot published
Middlemarch
, Broca measured the cranial capacities of prehistoric skulls from L'Homme Mort cave. Here he found a difference of only 99.5 cubic centimeters between males and females, while modern populations range from 129.5 to 220.7. Topinard, Broca's chief disciple, explained the increasing discrepancy through time as a result of differing evolutionary pressures upon dominant men and passive women:

In 1879, Gustave Le Bon, chief misogynist of Broca's school, used these data to publish what must be the most vicious attack upon women in modern scientific literature (no one can top Aristotle). I do not claim his views were representative of Broca's school, but they were published in France's most respected anthropological journal. Le Bon concluded:

Nor did Le Bon shrink from the social implications of his views. He was horrified by the proposal of some American reformers to grant women higher education on the same basis as men:

Sound familiar?
^*

I have reexamined Broca's data, the basis for all this derivative pronouncement, and I find his numbers sound but his interpretation ill-founded, to say the least. The data supporting his claim for increased difference through time can be easily dismissed. Broca based his contention on the samples from L'Homme Mort alone—only seven male and six female skulls in all. Never have so little data yielded such far ranging conclusions.

In 1888, Topinard published Broca's more extensive data on the Parisian hospitals. Since Broca recorded height and age as well as brain size, we may use modern statistics to remove their effect. Brain weight decreases with age, and Broca's women were, on average, considerably older than his men. Brain weight increases with height, and his average man was almost half a foot taller than his average woman. I used multiple regression, a technique that allowed me to assess simultaneously the influence of height and age upon brain size. In an analysis of the data for women, I found that, at average male height and age, a woman's brain would weigh 1,212 grams. Correction for height and age reduces Broca's measured difference of 181 grams by more than a third, to 113 grams.

I don't know what to make of this remaining difference because I cannot assess other factors known to influence brain size in a major way. Cause of death has an important effect: degenerative disease often entails a substantial diminution of brain size. (This effect is separate from the decrease attributed to age alone.) Eugene Schreider, also working with Broca's data, found that men killed in accidents had brains weighing, on average, 60 grams more than men dying of infectious diseases. The best modern data I can find (from American hospitals) records a full 100-gram difference between death by degenerative arteriosclerosis and by violence or accident. Since so many of Broca's subjects were very elderly women, we may assume that lengthy degenerative disease was more common among them than among the men.

More importantly, modern students of brain size still have not agreed on a proper measure for eliminating the powerful effect of body size. Height is partly adequate, but men and women of the same height do not share the same body build. Weight is even worse than height, because most of its variation reflects nutrition rather than intrinsic size—fat versus skinny exerts little influence upon the brain. Manouvrier took up this subject in the 1880s and argued that muscular mass and force should be used. He tried to measure this elusive property in various ways and found a marked difference in favor of men, even in men and women of the same height. When he corrected for what he called “sexual mass,” women actually came out slightly ahead in brain size.

Thus, the corrected 113-gram difference is surely too large; the true figure is probably close to zero and may as well favor women as men. And 113 grams, by the way, is exactly the average difference between a 5 foot 4 inch and a 6 foot 4 inch male in Broca's data. We would not (especially us short folks) want to ascribe greater intelligence to tall men. In short, who knows what to do with Broca's data? They certainly don't permit any confident claim that men have bigger brains than women.

To appreciate the social role of Broca and his school, we must recognize that his statements about the brains of women do not reflect an isolated prejudice toward a single disadvantaged group. They must be weighed in the context of a general theory that supported contemporary social distinctions as biologically ordained. Women, blacks, and poor people suffered the same disparagement, but women bore the brunt of Broca's argument because he had easier access to data on women's brains. Women were singularly denigrated but they also stood as surrogates for other disenfranchised groups. As one of Broca's disciples wrote in 1881: “Men of the black races have a brain scarcely heavier than that of white women.” This juxtaposition extended into many other realms of anthropological argument, particularly to claims that, anatomically and emotionally, both women and blacks were like white children—and that white children, by the theory of recapitulation, represented an ancestral (primitive) adult stage of human evolution. I do not regard as empty rhetoric the claim that women's battles are for all of us.

Maria Montessori did not confine her activities to educational reform for young children. She lectured on anthropology for several years at the University of Rome, and wrote an influential book entitled
Pedagogical Anthropology
(English edition, 1913). Montessori was no egalitarian. She supported most of Broca's work and the theory of innate criminality proposed by her compatriot Cesare Lombroso. She measured the circumference of children's heads in her schools and inferred that the best prospects had bigger brains. But she had no use for Broca's conclusions about women. She discussed Manouvrier's work at length and made much of his tentative claim that women, after proper correction of the data, had slightly larger brains than men. Women, she concluded, were intellectually superior, but men had prevailed heretofore by dint of physical force. Since technology has abolished force as an instrument of power, the era of women may soon be upon us: “In such an epoch there will really be superior human beings, there will really be men strong in morality and in sentiment. Perhaps in this way the reign of women is approaching, when the enigma of her anthropological superiority will be deciphered. Woman was always the custodian of human sentiment, morality and honor.”

This represents one possible antidote to “scientific” claims for the constitutional inferiority of certain groups. One may affirm the validity of biological distinctions but argue that the data have been misinterpreted by prejudiced men with a stake in the outcome, and that disadvantaged groups are truly superior. In recent years, Elaine Morgan has followed this strategy in her
Descent of Woman
, a speculative reconstruction of human prehistory from the woman's point of view—and as farcical as more famous tall tales by and for men.

I prefer another strategy. Montessori and Morgan followed Broca's philosophy to reach a more congenial conclusion. I would rather label the whole enterprise of setting a biological value upon groups for what it is: irrelevant and highly injurious. George Eliot well appreciated the special tragedy that biological labeling imposed upon members of disadvantaged groups. She expressed it for people like herself—women of extraordinary talent. I would apply it more widely—not only to those whose dreams are flouted but also to those who never realize that they may dream—but I cannot match her prose. In conclusion, then, the rest of Eliot's prelude to
Middlemarch:

MEIOSIS, THE SPLITTING
of chromosome pairs in the formation of sex cells, represents one of the great triumphs of good engineering in biology. Sexual reproduction cannot work unless eggs and sperm each contain precisely half the genetic information of normal body cells. The union of two halves by fertilization restores the full amount of genetic information, while the mixing of genes from two parents in each offspring also supplies the variability that Darwinian processes require. This halving, or “reduction division,” occurs during meiosis when the chromosomes line up in pairs and pull apart, one member of each pair moving to each of the sex cells. Our admiration for the precision of meiosis can only increase when we learn that cells of some ferns contain more than 600 pairs of chromosomes and that, in most cases, meiosis splits each pair without error.

Yet organic machines are no more infallible than their industrial counterparts. Errors in splitting often occur. On rare occasions, such errors are harbingers of new evolutionary directions. In most cases, they simply lead to misfortune for any offspring generated from the defective egg or sperm. In the most common of meiotic errors, called nondisjunction, the chromosomes fail to split. Both members of the pair go to one sex cell, while the other comes up one chromosome short. A child formed from the union of a normal sex cell with one containing an extra chromosome by nondisjunction will carry three copies of that chromosome in each cell, instead of the normal two. This anomaly is called a trisomy.

In humans, the twenty-first chromosome suffers nondisjunction at a remarkably high frequency, unfortunately rather tragic in effect. About 1 in 600 to 1 in 1,000 newborn babies carry an extra twenty-first chromosome, a condition technically known as “trisomy-21.” These unfortunate children suffer mild to severe mental retardation and have a reduced life expectancy. They exhibit, in addition, a suite of distinctive features, including short and broad hands, a narrow high palate, rounded face and broad head, a small nose with a flattened root, and a thick and furrowed tongue. The frequency of trisomy-21 rises sharply with increasing maternal age. We know very little about the causes of trisomy-21; indeed, its chromosomal basis was not discovered until 1959. We have no idea why it occurs so often, and why other chromosomes are not nearly so subject to nondisjunction. We have no clue as to why an extra twenty-first chromosome should yield the highly specific set of abnormalities associated with trisomy-21. But at least it can be identified
in utero
by counting the chromosomes of fetal cells, thus providing an option for early abortion.

If this discussion strikes you as familiar, but missing in one respect, I have indeed left something out. The common designation for trisomy-21 is Mongolian idiocy, mongolism, or Down's syndrome. We have all seen children with Down's syndrome and I feel certain that I have not been alone in wondering why the condition was ever designated
Mongolian
idiocy. Most children with Down's syndrome can be recognized immediately, but (as my previous list demonstrates) their defining traits do not suggest anything oriental. Some, to be sure, have a small but perceptible epicanthic fold, the characteristic feature of an oriental eye, and some have slightly yellowish skin. These minor and inconstant features led Dr. John Langdon Haydon Down to compare them with orientals when he described the syndrome in 1866. But there is far more to the story of Down's designation than a few occasional, misleading, and superficial similarities; for it embodies an interesting tale in the history of scientific racism.

Few people who use the term are aware that both words, Mongolian and idiot, had technical meanings for Dr. Down that were rooted in the prevailing cultural prejudice, not yet extinct, for ranking people on unilinear scales with the ranker's group on top. Idiot once referred to the lowest grade in a threefold classification of mental deficiency. Idiots could never master spoken language; imbeciles, a grade above, could learn to speak but not to write. The third level, the slightly “feeble-minded,” engendered considerable terminological controversy. In America, most clinicians adopted H.H. Goddard's term, “moron,” from a Greek word meaning foolish. Moron is a technical term of this century, not an ancient designation, despite the length of metaphorical whiskers on those terrible, old moron jokes. Goddard, one of three major architects for the rigidly hereditarian interpretation of IQ tests, believed that his unilinear classification of mental worth could be simply extended above the level of morons to a natural ranking of human races and nationalities, with southern and eastern European immigrants on the bottom (still, on average, at moron grade), and old American WASP's on top. (After Goddard instituted IQ tests for immigrants upon their arrival at Ellis Island, he proclaimed more than 80 percent of them feeble-minded and urged their return to Europe.)

Dr. Down was medical superintendant of the Earlswood Asylum for Idiots in Surrey when he published his “Observations on an ethnic classification of idiots” in the London Hospital Reports for 1866. In a mere three pages, he managed to describe Caucasian “idiots” that reminded him of African, Malay, American Indian, and Oriental peoples. Of these fanciful comparisons, only the “idiots who arrange themselves around the Mongolian type” survived in the literature as a technical designation.

Anyone who reads Down's paper without a knowledge of its theoretical context will greatly underestimate its pervasive and serious purpose. In our perspective, it represents a set of flaky and superficial, almost whimsical, analogies presented by a prejudiced man. In his time, it embodied a deadly earnest attempt to construct a general, causal classification of mental deficiency based upon the best biological theory (and the pervasive racism) of the age. Dr. Down played for stakes higher than the identification of some curious noncausal analogies. Of previous attempts to classify mental defect, Down complained:

In Down's day, the theory of recapitulation embodied a biologist's best guide for the organization of life into sequences of higher and lower forms. (Both the theory and “ladder approach” to classification that it encouraged are, or should be, defunct today. See my book
Ontogeny and Phylogeny
, Harvard University Press, 1977). This theory, often expressed by the mouthful “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” held that higher animals, in their embryonic development, pass through a series of stages representing, in proper sequence, the adult forms of ancestral, lower creatures. Thus, the human embryo first develops gill slits, like a fish, later a three chambered heart, like a reptile, still later a mammalian tail. Recapitulation provided a convenient focus for the pervasive racism of white scientists: they looked to the activities of their own children for comparison with normal, adult behavior in lower races.

As a working procedure, recapitulationists attempted to identify what Louis Agassiz had called the “threefold parallelism” of paleontology, comparative anatomy, and embryology—that is, actual ancestors in the fossil record, living representatives of primitive forms, and embryonic or youthful stages in the growth of higher animals. In the racist tradition for studying humans, the threefold parallel meant fossil ancestors (not yet discovered), “savages” or adult members of lower races, and white children.

But many recapitulationists advocated the addition of a fourth parallel—certain kinds of abnormal adults within superior races. They attributed many anomalies of form or behavior either to “throwbacks” or “arrests of development.” Throwbacks, or atavisms, represent the spontaneous reappearance in adults of ancestral features that had disappeared in advanced lineages. Cesare Lombroso, for example, the founder of “criminal anthropology,” believed that many lawbreakers acted by biological compulsion because a brutish past lived again in them. He sought to identify “born criminals” by “stigmata” of apish morphology—receding forehead, prominent chin, long arms.

Arrests of development represent the anomalous translation into adulthood of features that arise normally in fetal life but should be modified or replaced by something more advanced or complicated. Under the theory of recapitulation, these normal traits of fetal life are the adult stages of more primitive forms. If a Caucasian suffers developmental arrest, he may be born at a lower stage of human life—that is, he may revert to the characteristic forms of lower races. We now have a fourfold parallel of human fossil, normal adult of lower races, white children, and unfortunate white adults afflicted with atavisms or arrests of development. It is in this context that Dr. Down had his flash of fallacious insight: some Caucasian idiots must represent arrests of development and owe their mental deficiency to a retention of traits and abilities that would be judged normal in adults of lower races.

Therefore, Dr. Down scrutinized his charges for features of lower races, just as, twenty years later, Lombroso would measure the bodies of criminals for signs of apish morphology. Seek, with enough conviction aforethought, and ye shall find. Down described his search with obvious excitement: he had, or so he thought, established a natural and causal classification of mental deficiency. “I have,” he wrote, “for some time had my attention directed to the possibility of making a classification of the feeble-minded, by arranging them around various ethnic standards,—in other words, framing a natural system.” The more serious the deficiency, the more profound the arrest of development and the lower the race represented.

He found “several well-marked examples of the Ethiopian variety,” and described their “prominent eyes,” “puffy lips,” and “woolly hair…although not always black.” They are, he wrote, “specimens of white negroes, although of European descent.” Next he described other idiots “that arrange themselves around the Malay variety,” and still others “who with shortened foreheads, prominent cheeks, deep-set eyes, and slightly apish nose” represent those people who “originally inhabited the American continent.”

Finally, mounting the scale of races, he came to the rung below Caucasian, “the great Mongolian family.” “A very large number of congenital idiots,” he continued, “are typical Mongols. So marked is this, that when placed side by side, it is difficult to believe that the specimens compared are not children of the same parents.” Down then proceeded to describe, with fair accuracy and little indication of oriental features (beyond a “slight dirty yellowish tinge” to the skin), a boy afflicted with what we now recognize as trisomy-21, or Down's syndrome.

Down did not confine his description to supposed anatomical resemblances between oriental people and “Mongolian idiots.” He also pointed to the behavior of his afflicted children: “They have considerable power of imitation, even bordering on being mimics.” It requires some familiarity with the literature of nineteenth-century racism to read between these lines. The sophistication and complexity of oriental culture proved embarrassing to Caucasian racists, especially since the highest refinements of Chinese society had arisen when European culture still wallowed in barbarism. (As Benjamin Disraeli said, responding to an anti-Semitic taunt: “Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages…mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.”) Caucasians solved this dilemma by admitting the intellectual power of orientals, but attributing it to a facility for imitative copying, rather than to innovative genius.

Down concluded his description of a child with trisomy-21 by attributing the condition to developmental arrest (due, Down thought, to the tubercular condition of his parents): “The boy's aspect is such that it is difficult to realize that he is the child of Europeans, but so frequently are these characters presented, that there can be no doubt that these ethnic features are the result of degeneration.”

By the standards of his time, Down was something of a racial “liberal.” He argued that all people had descended from the same stock and could be united into a single family, with gradation by status to be sure. He used his ethnic classification of idiots to combat the claim of some scientists that lower races represented separate acts of creation and could not “improve” towards whiteness. He wrote:

Down's general theory of mental deficiency enjoyed some popularity, but never swept the field. Yet his name for one specific anomaly, Mongolian idiocy (sometimes softened to mongolism) stuck long after most physicians forgot why Down had coined the term. Down's own son rejected his father's comparison of orientals and children with trisomy-21, though he defended both the low status of orientals and the general theory linking mental deficiency with evolutionary reversion: