system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Was scientific racism actually "bad science" by the methodological standards of the time?

Apologies if this has been asked before but I have searched around and been unable to find any good discussion on this point.

Obviously the racial science conducted in the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries purporting to classify various races into scientific categories and measure them by their intelligence, brain size, savagery, etc was tremendously flawed and harmful. Today we know that our folk racial categories are very weak socially constructed proxies for complicated genetic patterns, that 'savage' and 'civilized' are not objective scientific terms, that geographic and ecological factors are mostly responsible for the technological, social and epidemiological advances which the West made over other countries, that those advances were smaller than the West realized at the time, that phrenology and craniometry do not provide any useful information, and so on. So a lot of people regard what was done in the old days as pseudoscientific.

But lots of other scientific inquiry conducted in other fields in those times was later discredited.

Obviously their conclusions were wrong, but to what extent can we actually say that their methodology was pseudoscientific by the standards of the time and rooted in racism? In other words, how do we know that they only came to the conclusions that they did because they were motivated by a desire to show that their race/country/religion was morally superior, as opposed to simply doing what made sense to them? They didn't know what we did now, and the empirical evidence available to them was that there were relatively distinct different races which had different technological and social capabilities. Is it likely that an unbiased inquirer, to the extent that we can hypothesize such a person in that historical context, would have come to similar conclusions?

Obviously I'm talking about work which was conducted in many different countries for more than a century and a half in various fields of natural and social science. So probably a generalization is not possible. But any information on this would be appreciated.
gpt
I would recommend you check out *The Mismeasure of Man* by Stephen Jay Gould.  He wrote about this topic extensively.  In his book, he analyzes the work of Samuel George Morton, a renowned race scientist of the 19th century who had the largest collection of human skulls in the United States and was dedicated to using craniometry and supposedly "objective" anthropometric methods to determine the limitations and qualities of each racial group. During his time, Morton was revered as an exemplary empiricist, relying only on the "evidence" of racial differences in the skeletal structures of human beings.  Gould's fundamental conclusion, however, showed that even though Morton used quantitative methods, both his measurements and conclusions were biased by his racial-ideological conditioning.  Though Morton measured skeletal structures, found the volume of different races' skulls, and generally took obscure measurements, Morton and his ilk failed to see the fallacies their work was based upon, however, because their social context limited their vision his set of unquestioned assumptions about what was true inevitably impacted his scientific conclusions despite the seemingly objective nature of his quantitative methods.

Gould reveals the race scientists' biases by reevalutating their measurements.  Gould goes over the multitude of methodological failures of Morton.  Firstly and most critically, Morton assumed that  intelligence could be quantified.  Since Morton believed it related to the physical size of the brain, measurements of the skull were interpreted as objective measurements of intelligence.  However, there is *absolutely no proof that this is the case.*  One's skull size holds no bearing upon one's abilities or potential.  Morton, because of his historic notions of racial hierarchy tracing back to Aristole's Great Chain of Being, Carolus Linnaeus racist categorizing of people, and his upbringing in the slavery capitalism of the US, was unable to realize this fact.  In beginning the process of measuring his subjects, Morton massaged his sampling to match his preconceptions.  He unconsciously selected for whites with large skulls, but overrepresented Inca Peruvians with smaller ones.  When measuring whites, Morton tended to sample male skulls, but mainly measured black female skulls.  His results apparently showed a large gap between the skull sizes of whites and blacks.  However, when analyzing these differences, Morton did not note that men simply have larger skulls than women.  He inflated the racial differences in skull sizes in order to epistemilogically solidify American racial hierarchy  Furthermore, Morton's measurements themself reveal a bias towards whites.  Morton remeasured the volumes of the skulls in his collection with both pieces of lead and seeds.  In the process of remeasuring, however, large discrepancies arose between his original seed measures and the newer volume readings he got using pieces of lead to take skull volume readings.  It turned out that white skulls had heavily benefited from being measured with seeds as opposed to lead, coming out with far higher volumes than black, Indian, or Asian skulls.  With seeds, skulls could potentially be shaken to settle them within the skull, or stuffed inside of the skull when measuring volumes.  Morton could not do this with his lead measurements.  However, whites always had consistently larger volumes over other races when measured with seed--a discrepancy that was largely erased when using lead.  Gould suggests that this discrepancy could have originated in Morton's assumption that whites would simply have larger skulls than others, and naturally stuffed more seeds into those skulls, but would never have bothered with a black skull.   

Gould argues that even though Morton used quantitative methods, and was in fact the standard of his time when it came to the quality of scientific endeavor, his work was nonetheless impacted by the social context of imperial racism that shaped his conclusions *and* even the measurements themselves.  Most importantly, what Gould demonstrates is that even if scientists attempts objectivity using seemingly neutral methods of quantitative inquiry, scientists are always impacted by their settings.  So to answer your question "was it bad science?" well, Morton's work was highly popular and widely accepted in academia when he was writing because he used the tools of objectivity to approve the dominant power structure of his time.  But just because he used those tools does not mean that he was doing "good science, because his reliance upon numbers and measurements did not guarantee any actual truth value in his work. Rather, he validated the social structure he grew up in.