HIGH BROWS AND INTELLIGENCE

Hawera Star, Volume LIII, 26 August 1933, Page 14

HIGH BROWS AND INTELLIGENCE

T HE popular ’-neTier that a high brow indicates high intelligence has been challenged by Dr Ales Hrdlicka, curator of physical anthropology of the Smithsonian Institute, in United States. For more than 30 years Dr Hrdlicka has been taking measurements of forehead heights, and has accumulated a great quantity of data on various racial and social groups. The “high brow” fallacy is an inheritance from the .phrenologists. It has generally been under suspicion by anthropologists, but up to the present, measurements have been so few and so unstandardise that it could not positively be denied. If a high brow indicated a superior brain, Dr Hrdlicka holds, the relation-

Exposure of a Popular Fallacy

ship should be plain in a comparison of the leaders of American science and the backward illiterate mountaineers. He found, to his surprise, that Hierc was no measu-rabUe difference. The mean heights for all four groups were practically identical. Among racial groups Dr Hrdlicka found that the “old Americans, ’ fairly representative of the white race, have -a trace lower forehead than the American Indian, whose forehead in turn-, is exceeded in height by that of the American Negro, and especially the Alaskan Eskimo. If intellect -were actually dependent on height of brow, the Alaskan Eskimos would rate as the world’s supreme intellects, with the members of the National Academy of Sciences trailing far behind. 1