When you say that somebody else screwed up, you have to be extra careful you’re not getting things wrong yourself! A philosopher of science is quoted as having written, “it seems best to let this grubby affair rest in a footnote,” but I think it’s good for these things to be out in the open.
It's not like Gould simply made a mistake. No, all indications are that he intentionally fudged data.
Here is a good explanation:
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/meta/gould-mor…
Gould's book Mismeasure of Man was a polemic on its face. He criticized early work in the field of psychometrics in an attempt to discredit the whole notion of general intelligence– the g factor. By Gould's logic we should be suspicious of modern surgery because early surgeons did their patients a harm. It seems to me that Gould was pretty weak in factor analysis. Early on Arthur Jensen rebutted Gould quite thoroughly, but the press ignored it as Gould's polemic against IQ fit their ideology. Now we see thirty years later just how dishonest Gould really was.
This is a blast against early smoking and lung cancer researchers, but probably best placed here. (Is it statistical?)
Poole C. On the origin of risk relativism. Epidemiology 2010;21:3-9.
with this commentary cut/copied and pasted from http://journals.lww.com/epidem/Citation/2010/0100…
"Charles Poole begins with a historical quest to understand the roots of our prejudice favoring relative contrasts, and the rationale for the common wisdom that relative effect measures are more suited for etiologic hypotheses.
His account highlights the unintentional adverse effects of “causal criteria,” such as those popularized by Bradford-Hill, and represents the kind of insightful intellectual history of our field we seldom see."
K?