The Cephalic Index: A Vanished Pseudoscience

25 October 2022

The brilliant successes of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica inspired scholars in other fields to methodological contemplation. Newtonian physics emphasised, among other things, mathematical laws, empirical measurements and quantification: after all, the full title of Newton's great work translates to “mathematical principles of natural philosophy.” Subsequent scholars attempted to apply similar mathematical methods to other fields. The obsession with numerical quantification had unfortunate results when European anatomists started measuring human racial diversity. They projected their personal prejudices onto essentially meaningless data. A diverse array of harmful pseudosciences resulted. One such pseudoscience was craniometry.