Page 5 - Biased Science

men who carried with them the biases “Man has ultimately become
and prejudices of the times and places superior to woman.” 2
where they lived. The renowned scien-
tist Charles Darwin, for example, fi rmly —Scientist Charles Darwin
believed that women were not as fully
developed as men. “Man attain[s] to
a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than woman can
attain,” he wrote. “Thus man has ultimately become superior to

2
woman.” Darwin did no formal scientifi c experiments to prove his
claim. No doubt he did not believe he needed to, for to him the
statement was obviously true. In his time and place—Victorian
England—the inferiority of women was a widely accepted view.
Similarly, scientifi c consensus for generations held that Black
people were inferior to White people both morally and intellectu-
ally. Notions of White superiority were often couched in a veneer
of scientifi c terminology—and supposed scientifi c fact. For ex-
ample, scientists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as-
serted that Black people had smaller brains than White people
and therefore were of less intelligence. In the early twentieth
century, scientists reasoned that African Americans were pre-
disposed toward criminal behavior because there were so many
Black people in American prisons. Of course, this analysis failed
to account for much more signifi cant factors such as poverty
and a biased criminal justice system. But many racist Whites of

the period were happy to use the language of science to argue
their points.

Ethics, Fraud, and Prejudice

Since the nineteenth century our scientifi c understanding of the
world has improved greatly. As a society, we also have devel-
oped a much keener ability to recognize the biases and preju-
dices of the scientists who dominated the scientifi c landscape
in the past. But that is not to say that we have reached Wein-
berg’s goal and now routinely do science in a way that is both

5