Are scientists today similarly biased?
The reason I remain so interested in the history of science is that it’s easier to flay open the biases of the past because we’ve overcome them. I think we’re largely unaware of how our own deep beliefs – which just seem either logical or necessary or proven to us – are as immersed in bias. I think it’s very hard for us to understand that. Look, it’s only when I was a graduate student that continental drift and plate tectonics, which seems so obvious in retrospect, was accepted as a major revolution in the earth sciences. Now, my older colleagues, who never accepted it to the day they died, they weren’t stupid or evil, but they were certainly wrong. On the other hand, you know, we do get better. The genetics of racial variation as we understand it today do quite conclusively show, I think, how fatuous the notion of deep, significant, ineradicable, wide-ranging differences are. We’ve measured genetic variation. Morton obviously couldn’t do it. He didn’t know about genes to begin with. A
