measurements seriously enough to refute them, Gould gives them more seriousness than they deserve.
To this reader, the most interesting comments made by Gould are those which are most casually made. For example, Gould writes of one follower of Broca who used some measurements "to publish what must be the most vicious attack upon women in modern scientific literature (no one can top Aristotle)" (155). An essay on the non-scientific prejudices of Aristotle, who is taken so seriously in Western thought, would have been more interesting than one on Broca, who is so clearly a blatant, raging misogynist who abuses the name of science in order to pursue his hatred and fear of women.
As little as Broca's measurements mean to this reader, it is faintly interesting to read that he used the measurements of only thirteen skulls---seven male and six female---to come to his most important conclusions. Gould succinctly dismisses this: "Never have so little data yielded such far ranging conclusions" (156).
Again, however, Gould begins to be as boring and myopic as Broca in his attempt to refute Broca's claims. It is a waste of time to refute a scientist who did not even take into full consideration the fact that men are bigger physically than women, so certainly their brains would be bigger!
In "Death Before Birth, or a Mite's Nunc Dimittis," from The Panda's Thumb, Stephen Jay Gould explores the question of why there appears in almost every species roughly the same number of males and females. The answer "lies in a recognition that Darwin's theory of natural election speaks only of struggle among individuals for reproductive success" (70). In other words, evolution does not "work for the good of populations as a whole," but rather "by the struggle of individuals to maximize their own reproductive success" (70). If evolution did indeed work for the good of the species as a whole, then there would be far more females than males, app...