In recent years, media opinion has turned sharply against the study of human skulls as being icky. And racist.
And icky.
It wasn’t always this way. For instance, the standard way to represent Hamlet visually is to show a young man contemplating a skull:
You can see this from the New York Times’ highly positive obituary for physical anthropologist Ralph Holloway, the leading skull scientist of the late 20th Century. I suspect it was mostly written about 15 or 20 years ago, before most of the Great Dumbing Down:
It wasn’t the size of human brains that distinguished people from apes, he theorized, but the way they were organized. He found a creative way to prove it.
Ralph Holloway in 2012. By creating casts of the interior of skull fossils, he was able to establish conclusively that a famous two-million-year-old skull, known as the Taung child, belonged to one of mankind’s distant ancestors. Credit...via The Stone Age Institute
By Adam Nossiter
April 2, 2025
Ralph Holloway, an anthropologist who pioneered the idea that changes in brain structure, and not just size, were critical in the evolution of humans, died on March 12 at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.
His death was announced by Columbia University’s anthropology department, where he taught for nearly 50 years.
Mr. Holloway’s contrarian idea was that it wasn’t necessarily the big brains of humans that distinguished them from apes or primitive ancestors. Rather, it was the way human brains were organized.
Brains from several million years ago don’t exist. But Dr. Holloway’s singular focus on casts of the interiors of skull fossils, which he usually made out of latex, allowed him to override this hurdle. …
Of course, cultural anthropologists were already trying to cancel physical anthropologists from the 1960s onward:
Dr. Holloway was in some respects a traditional anthropologist, committed to what the discipline once called the “four fields” of anthropology: archaeology and cultural, biological and linguistic anthropology. But that multidisciplinary approach has long fallen out of favor, with biologists increasingly pushed aside.
“I was quickly isolated and marginalized at Columbia, and remain so,” he wrote in 2008.
He was further isolated when he defended the educational psychologist Arthur R. Jensen, remembered for a deeply contested 1969 Harvard Educational Review article positing a genetic explanation for a divergence in I.Q. scores between Black and white people. One fellow anthropologist called him a “racist,” Dr. Holloway wrote, after “I had the temerity to defend Arthur Jensen” from an “assertion that Jensen was a bigot.” Some who knew him said the charge was deeply unfair.
One nice thing about newspapers writing obituaries years before (hopefully) they need to run them is that they are less polluted by recent fads.
Hence, when James D. Watson, now 96, dies, the New York Times obituary will hopefully largely consist of text written before he got cancelled in 2007 for noting the IQ difference between the races.
Then again, maybe the NYT’s obituary of James D. Watson will be rewritten by American Studies major Amy Harmon …
Some notes and thoughts on the anthropologist Ralph Holloway's "place in history." With a word on the interesting pairing at Columbia University, in the mid-1960s, of two men: Holloway (a White-Protestant) and Stephen Jay Gould (Jewish). Both were then young scholars at Columbia (same time, same field, same institution), but representing such different visions of the Study of Man and our approaches to it:
_____________
RALPH HOLLOWAY
- born, Feb 1935, in Philadelphia, "to Ralph Holloway, who was in the insurance business, and Marguerite (Grugan) Holloway, a secretary. He attended high school in Philadelphia [...] He later moved with his family to Albuquerque...";
- 1956: Drexel Institute of Technology, Co-op Program in Metallurgical Engineering;
- 1959: BA, Geology and Engineering, University of New Mexico;
- May 1964: PhD, Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley;
- ca. Summer 1964? Hired by Columbia University;
- By 1969, he was "isolated and marginalized at Columbia" (by his account) but went on producing great work;
- May 2003: Retired from teaching at Columbia University.
_____________
I ask, first of all: How possible would a "Ralph Holloway" [b.1935] be, if born seventy years later (i.e., a non-elite U.S. White-male, born 2000s)? Or fifty years later (same, born 1980s)? Or even just thirty years later (same, born 1960s)?
Ralph Holloway ended up excelling in his field. He was clearly well suited and adept. An exemplar of the classic USA in many respects. Holloway didn't have any sort of particularly elite start, to believe his biography. Even if not poor, also note elite. But he went from obscurity and New Mexico to a Columbia professorship. (I ask in passing: How much money did his parents spend on test-prep, and other gamings of the "college-admissions system"? Is that number "zero"?)
The system treated Ralph Holloway FAIRLY, along the way, I think is the way to render it. Institutions identified him as adept and talented, smart, useful, potentially a great contributor. At the critical points -- such as Berkeley taking him in, around 1959; or Columbia University hiring him, in 1964 -- there were openings, possibilities.
Meanwhile (so to speak), huge numbers of Ralph Holloways in later-born decadal cohorts, in the USA and beyond, have been blocked, blocked out of "their own" institutions. That's the tradeoff with the USA's racial-favoritism policy (i.e., it is not cost-less or victim-less to affirmative-action someone up the ranks, you just never see the victims and cannot identify them).
"The Great Dumbing Down" is a new Sailerism to me. It aligns with the passing of few decades of policies, norms, and institutional cultures (and even pop-culture) discouraging or outright preventing new Ralph Holloways from emerging. Isolating, marginalizing new Ralph Holloways in ways more absolute and cruel than Ralph Holloway's own marginalization (whatever, exactly, it was). It's not down to an absolute level of zero, of course, but with far-worse probabilities of percolating up, than were available in the mid-20th century.
Ralph Holloway saw an early element of the Great Blocking-Off (to coin a term based on one of my previous sentence's wordings), with his characterization of himself as "isolated and marginalized" by the late 1960s. Maybe so, but remember that he'd been hired in the first place (in 1964)!
Ralph Holloway shares much in common, it seems to me, with classic pre-1945 racial-anthropologists like Carleton Coon; and with classic American types found commonly throughout the 18th- and 19th-century, and most of the 20th-century. He had to adapt to the late-20th-century dispensation, but remained of the classic type. The American White-Protestant tradition oriented around inquiry and drive for knowledge rather than politicized storytelling.
The late-20th century, alas, belongs not to such men as Holloway. The late-20th century belongs, rather, to such people as Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002). Gould, incidentally, was a PhD student at Columbia, 1963-1967. The two were at Columbia at the same time together: Most of Gould's tenure as a PhD-candidate at Columbia overlapped with Ralph Holloway's (early) time there as a professor. Holloway and Gould, together at Columbia. An interesting contrast-moment in the divergence of American elite-academia in the middle and later decades of the 20th century.
Stephen Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" (1981) was an agenda-setting excoriation against racial-anthropology and "HBD." The influence of that book, and others like it, over the half-century between ca.1965-2015, is enormous. That which came to be called Wokeness draws heavily from these ideas. I'd say it's not too much to say that the book was an indirect attack on Ralph Holloway himself, who was still very active in the 1980s.
In 2011, Ralph Holloway co-published a paper that refuted Gould: "The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias"
In the wider culture, or political culture, Gould won and Holloway lost. That, at least for a long while. It's not clear what comes out the other end of this strange-so-far decade of the 2020s.
Just how fully undermined, in 2025, _is_ the late-20th-century consensus about Race and physical anthropology (that both are supposedly pseudosciences and vaguely evil)? What will it by in 2035? We'd like to think Holloway Defeats Gould in the longer run, well before their 100th birthdays. It's hard to guess how much power Wokeness still has in it.
Some notes and thoughts on the anthropologist Ralph Holloway's "place in history." With a word on the interesting pairing at Columbia University, in the mid-1960s, of two men: Holloway (a White-Protestant) and Stephen Jay Gould (Jewish). Both were then young scholars at Columbia (same time, same field, same institution), but representing such different visions of the Study of Man and our approaches to it:
_____________
RALPH HOLLOWAY
- born, Feb 1935, in Philadelphia, "to Ralph Holloway, who was in the insurance business, and Marguerite (Grugan) Holloway, a secretary. He attended high school in Philadelphia [...] He later moved with his family to Albuquerque...";
- 1956: Drexel Institute of Technology, Co-op Program in Metallurgical Engineering;
- 1959: BA, Geology and Engineering, University of New Mexico;
- May 1964: PhD, Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley;
- ca. Summer 1964? Hired by Columbia University;
- By 1969, he was "isolated and marginalized at Columbia" (by his account) but went on producing great work;
- May 2003: Retired from teaching at Columbia University.
_____________
I ask, first of all: How possible would a "Ralph Holloway" [b.1935] be, if born seventy years later (i.e., a non-elite U.S. White-male, born 2000s)? Or fifty years later (same, born 1980s)? Or even just thirty years later (same, born 1960s)?
Ralph Holloway ended up excelling in his field. He was clearly well suited and adept. An exemplar of the classic USA in many respects. Holloway didn't have any sort of particularly elite start, to believe his biography. Even if not poor, also note elite. But he went from obscurity and New Mexico to a Columbia professorship. (I ask in passing: How much money did his parents spend on test-prep, and other gamings of the "college-admissions system"? Is that number "zero"?)
The system treated Ralph Holloway FAIRLY, along the way, I think is the way to render it. Institutions identified him as adept and talented, smart, useful, potentially a great contributor. At the critical points -- such as Berkeley taking him in, around 1959; or Columbia University hiring him, in 1964 -- there were openings, possibilities.
Meanwhile (so to speak), huge numbers of Ralph Holloways in later-born decadal cohorts, in the USA and beyond, have been blocked, blocked out of "their own" institutions. That's the tradeoff with the USA's racial-favoritism policy (i.e., it is not cost-less or victim-less to affirmative-action someone up the ranks, you just never see the victims and cannot identify them).
"The Great Dumbing Down" is a new Sailerism to me. It aligns with the passing of few decades of policies, norms, and institutional cultures (and even pop-culture) discouraging or outright preventing new Ralph Holloways from emerging. Isolating, marginalizing new Ralph Holloways in ways more absolute and cruel than Ralph Holloway's own marginalization (whatever, exactly, it was). It's not down to an absolute level of zero, of course, but with far-worse probabilities of percolating up, than were available in the mid-20th century.
Ralph Holloway saw an early element of the Great Blocking-Off (to coin a term based on one of my previous sentence's wordings), with his characterization of himself as "isolated and marginalized" by the late 1960s. Maybe so, but remember that he'd been hired in the first place (in 1964)!
Ralph Holloway shares much in common, it seems to me, with classic pre-1945 racial-anthropologists like Carleton Coon; and with classic American types found commonly throughout the 18th- and 19th-century, and most of the 20th-century. He had to adapt to the late-20th-century dispensation, but remained of the classic type. The American White-Protestant tradition oriented around inquiry and drive for knowledge rather than politicized storytelling.
The late-20th century, alas, belongs not to such men as Holloway. The late-20th century belongs, rather, to such people as Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002). Gould, incidentally, was a PhD student at Columbia, 1963-1967. The two were at Columbia at the same time together: Most of Gould's tenure as a PhD-candidate at Columbia overlapped with Ralph Holloway's (early) time there as a professor. Holloway and Gould, together at Columbia. An interesting contrast-moment in the divergence of American elite-academia in the middle and later decades of the 20th century.
Stephen Jay Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man" (1981) was an agenda-setting excoriation against racial-anthropology and "HBD." The influence of that book, and others like it, over the half-century between ca.1965-2015, is enormous. That which came to be called Wokeness draws heavily from these ideas. I'd say it's not too much to say that the book was an indirect attack on Ralph Holloway himself, who was still very active in the 1980s.
In 2011, Ralph Holloway co-published a paper that refuted Gould: "The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias"
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001071
In the wider culture, or political culture, Gould won and Holloway lost. That, at least for a long while. It's not clear what comes out the other end of this strange-so-far decade of the 2020s.
Just how fully undermined, in 2025, _is_ the late-20th-century consensus about Race and physical anthropology (that both are supposedly pseudosciences and vaguely evil)? What will it by in 2035? We'd like to think Holloway Defeats Gould in the longer run, well before their 100th birthdays. It's hard to guess how much power Wokeness still has in it.
Hamlet’s willingness to jump down in the grave and get his hands dirty with bones is presumably supposed to suggest his enlightened Renaissance-man status. In contrast, a host of pre-modern taboos about dead bodies seem to be returning: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/australians-are-destroying-our-ancient-past/