When you look up the dictionary, the definition of ‘Science’ is “a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws” (Webster’s dictionary). In order to make a truth, many scientists take the time to observe or test with scientific method. In nineteenth century, there are some incorrect truths even if it looks like truths logically arranged by scientific method because the scientists understood the priori that already assumed the outcome would be the same as their predictions. As I read Stephen Jay Gould’s argument from “Women’s Brains”, he found some unequal conditions that supported scientific method for intelligence of man. Paul Broca tried to measure the inferiority of women with scientific certitudes that were invidious comparisons such as races, classes, and sexes.Gould argued about Paul Broca’s scientific procedure that men are more intelligent than women because he already assumed the outcome that men’s brains are bigger than women’s brains. Broca’s assumption comes from “the general theory that supported contemporary social distinction as biologically ordained”(157). Broca simply believed that man had socially more dominant position than woman around the 19th century. This prejudice brought his assumption that men had bigger brain than women. However, Gould believed that science is “an inferential exercise, not a catalog of facts”(153). This interpretation contains that science should have logical and reasoning data. If scientists simply assume the outcome without logical and reasoning data, the result is to come out incorrect or miscalculated data, which is totally different from the fact or truth. Gould found there are three things that all incorrect in Broca’s method such as age, height, and cause of death. These factors ...
