o meaning and that racial distinctions are themselves false. This is in contravention to the long-standing view that the concept of race did indeed have meaning and that there were real biological differences among the races, while now scientists say that these differences are not substantive. Prior to this, however, and in the popular view, racial distinctions are at least indicative of surface biological differences in skin color, hair type, and perhaps even body type. Ethnic differences relate more to geography and culture. To a great degree, these differences are social constructs that have real consequences as different policies are formed and implemented based on racial and ethnic classifications.
Many of those attempting to measure human traits by external evidence fail to make the distinction between racial and ethnic, whether there is such a difference or not. Some of the ideas utilized by those trying to measure human groups have been thoroughly discredited and appear foolish to us today, such as craniometry, which tries to measure the skull in order to predict intelligence. Psychological testing is another strain attempting the same sort of thing--to show through a specific measure the intelligence potential of a human population. Gould refers to such studies as measuring intelligence as a single quantity, which in fact it probably is not. craniometry may measure the shape of certain parts of the head, the size of the brain cavity in the skull, or some other characteristic which is then used as a predictor of intelligence. Some of this same effort derived from a misunderstanding of evolution and the idea that evolution was tending toward higher intelligence and a larger brian cavity. In addition, any characteristic that could be likened to an animal characteristic--such as the attempts to show that inferior peoples would have a more posterior foramen magnum as do apes and lower animals--were attempts to show tha...