New answers to old questions: Did Boas get it right? Heredity, environment, and cranial form: A reanalysis of Boas's immigrant data

Headnote

ABSTRACT Franz Boas's classic study, Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants, is a landmark in the history of anthropology. More than any single study, it undermined racial typology in physical anthropology and helped turn the tide against early-20thcentury scientific racism. In 1928, Boas responded to critics of the immigrant study by publishing the raw data set as Materials for the Study of Inheritance in Man. Here we present a reanalysis of that long-neglected data set. Using methods that were unavailable to Boas, we test his main conclusion that cranial form changed in response to environmental influences within a single generation of European immigrants to the United States. In general, we conclude that Boas got it right. However, we demonstrate that modern analytical methods provide stronger support for Boas's conclusion than did the tools at his disposal. We suggest future areas of research for this historically important data set. [Keywords: Franz Boas, cranial form, immigrant study, heredity, environment]

FROM 1908 TO 1910, Franz Boas conducted an enormous study of changes in bodily orm among descendantss of immigrants in New York City. Boas's team completed a series of anthropometric measurements on nearly eighteen thousand European immigrants and their children in order to determine the effect of the new U.S. environment on the physical type of immigrants. This classic study was the first authoritative statement on the nature of human biological plasticity, and it has had enduring importance for our understanding of human biological variation. Boas's legacy as "the man who did more than any other to lay the ghost of racism in scientific disciplines" (Gossett 1997:450) is due, in large part, to this landmark work.

The immigrant study was highly controversial, and in 1928 Boas answered his critics by publishing his raw data set as Materials for the Study of Inheritance in Man. Despite the historical significance of Boas's work, these data have been almost entirely overlooked. Now is a good time to rediscover this material. Nearly a century of developments in analytic methods facilitate the search for new answers to the old questions that motivated Boas and that remain important today. In this article, we use Boas's original measurements to reevaluate his central hypotheses regarding the influence of environment on human bodily form.1