Good blood, good bone

The vicious struggle within the field of anthropology in the second half of the last century, in which cultural anthropologists inspired by Franz Boas largely succeeded in anathematizing the formerly dominant physical anthropologists, had a striking ethnic aspect (as documented in Milford Wolpoff's book Race and Human Evolution). Much of the animus directed by the insurgent cultural anthropologists at the physical anthropologists stemmed from the fact that many of the leading experts on bones were princelings of the old WASP Ascendancy. Here, for example, is today's NYT obituary for the top expert on human skulls, who sounds like the epitome of the Protestant aristocrat's theory of "good blood, good bone:"

William W. Howells, a leading physical anthropologist who focused on the origins of humans and the evolution of races, died on Dec. 20 at his home in Kittery Point, Me. He was 97...

William White Howells was born in Manhattan on Nov. 27, 1908. His father was the architect John Mead Howells, and his grandfathers were Horace White, the journalist, and William Dean Howells, the novelist and literary critic.

That's what they used to call a "good family!" William Dean Howells was a close friend of Mark Twain and one of America's foremost men of letters. Newspaper editor Horace White was a close friend of Abraham Lincoln and accompanied him on the Lincoln-Douglas Debates tour in 1858. Later, he was a close friend of Andrew Carnegie. John Mead Howells co-designed the Chicago Tribune Tower and many other big buildings, and no doubt was the close friend of somebody really famous.

He attended St. Paul's School and graduated from Harvard in 1930... Professor Howells's wife, Muriel Gurdon Seabury, died in 2002 after 73 years of marriage.

Dr. and Mrs. Howells were married for 73 years!

(No word was available on whether he was related to the long-missing billionaire Thurston Howell III.)

Not surprisingly, these products of the Old Boys Network elicited much resentment from younger anthropologists from less privileged backgrounds. Ironically, the new meritocrats turned out, on the whole, to be lousier scientists than the old aristocrats, leading to the dismal status of anthropology today. Not long ago at Stanford, for example, the Anthropology department had become so ideologized that it split into two departments, Cultural Anthropology for the Frankfurt School-types and Anthropological Sciences for the bone and DNA scientists.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer