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Measuring people's skulls and classifying them according to race and gender has been totally invalidated by science, since skull and brain size have nothing to do with intelligence or mental capacity.
In nature, in fact, there is clearly no direct relationship between brain size and intelligence. For example, elephants and whales have much larger brains than humans. In addition, the cranial capacity of present-day human beings ranges from about 700 cc to 2,200 cc.156 Yet these differences do not establish different levels of intelligence among people.
Apart from skull measurements, genetic science has also revealed that Darwin's claims about the differences between men and women are incorrect. According to the laws of inheritance, a man passes on his genes to both his male and female offspring. If the man possesses biologically "superior" characteristics, as Darwin maintained, then his daughter will possess those same superior features. But Darwin and his contemporaries knew so little about genetics that Darwin was even able to suggest that "the characteristics of a species acquired by sexual selection are usually confined to one sex."157 Darwin also made ignorant suggestions to the effect that such superior qualities as genius, the higher powers of imagination and reason are "transmitted more fully to the male than the female offspring."158
References
- Wayne Jackson, More Skull-Duggery, October 7, 2002, http://www.christiancourier.com/penpoints/skullDuggery.htm ↩
- John Hurrell Crook, "Sexual Selection, Dimorphism, and Social Organization in the Primates," in Campbell (Ed.), Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man 1871-1971 Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1972. ↩
- Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, p. 565. ↩