iesika

Today being Sunday after the semester finally ended, I took it upon myself to have a long hot bath and read a good book (at the same time, of course, for maximum enjoyment). The book I picked was one I'd been given as a gift, which looked promising and exactly up my alley: Big brain : the future of human intelligence by Gary Lynch and Richard Granger (both Neuroscientists), which, according to the jacket, is a book about the evolution of human intelligence. Sounded like a fun read.

So, I'm in my nice hot bubble bath, reading my nice new sciencey book, of which the introduction was very promising. I get about five pages into chapter 1 before I'm flinging the book to the side and scrambling to get dry and dressed and to my computer.

Here is why.

The book starts off, almost immediately with the story of "Boskop," a species or sub-species (the authors were not clear) of hominid which lived in Sub-Saharan Africa as recently as 10,000 years ago, first found in the early 1900s. My red flags went up immediately. While I'm no expert on fossil hominids, I've a fairly good background on the subject and would like to believe I can at least recognize them all by name (This is not to claim that I can, say, tell H. floresiensis fossils from H. heidelbergensis at a glance, but I know the names, where they where found and when, by who, how they relate to each other and to us, etc). The authors did not supply a scientific name, which made me doubly suspicious, but also raised the possibility that they were talking about a fairly obscure subclass or specific collection of fossils of a known hominid and calling it by regional name (a la Java and Peking man), a practice which has fallen into disuse but which a lot of older researchers fall into by habit. In fact, "Boskop" sounded vaguely familiar to me in some way I couldn't place.

Then they got to why they were talking about Boskop in the first place - an average estimated brain volume of roughly 1800ccs. My Bullshit Sense started tingling. Most modern humans fall into the 1200-1400 cc range, with a max of about 1800ccs. My very first thought on reading the section was "What? No. I'd have heard of that. I would definitely have heard about this." But, like I said, I'm not an expert, and the authors had multiple degrees in brain related fields, so I flipped to the back and looked for endnotes (of which there were none), and then skimmed the appendix of recommended further reading (which was organized by chapter, and thus easily accessible), but which did not mention Boskop at all. So, I hit the bibliography, which was extensive, and which looked fairly sound - that is, there were a lot of papers referenced by heavy hitters. I couldn't tell, though, from the bibliography, just who they were citing for the Boskop stuff. I glanced through the table of contents and found a bit called "Why Haven't We Heard of Boskop", which insisted that there was a coverup because scientists didn't like the idea we weren't the most intelligent hominids. My Bullshit Sense went mad. This is when I got out of the bath and ran downstairs for research and corroboration/refutation from reliable sources.

Oh. My. God.

I can't believe two otherwise respected scientists would publish such CRAP.

There is no such thing as Boskop man. He was manufactured by proponents of scientific racism in order to support their hypothesis that black African peoples had much smaller brain sizes than the rest of the world. Basically, they took all the fossil skulls under a basic size and labeled them Negroid (in categories like "Hottentot" and "Strandloper"), or Boskopoid - an entirely fictional classification. They invented a subspecies of human rather than admit that they'd found fossils of ethnic Africans with large braincases. By separating the two categories, they "proved" statistically that African peoples have smaller brains than the rest of us. No one has believed them since the 1930s.

This article is not the only piece I found on the subject - but it is a good summary. In addition, I figured out where I'd heard the term "Boskopoid" before - the phenomenon is mentioned briefly in Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, a much better book on the subject and one I recommend heartily.
Let this be a lesson to us all. Just because someone has credentials doesn't mean their theory/research/medical treatment is sound. In particular, if they claim the "Scientific Establishment" (or worse, "Science" Itself) is covering up or ignoring their groundbreaking research, your own bullshit meter should start tingling. Do some research. Look at more than one source for corroboration.

This has been a public service announcement brought to you by Jessie's righteous indignation and moral outrage.