The Answer, The Question, and The Scientific Method

I recently began reading "The Mismeasure of Man" by Stephen Jay Gould.  It is an account of, in the words of a reviewer, scientific racism.  Gould gives this a more scientific name: Biological Determinism.  This is the idea that differing social status is due to innate biological differences.  In other words, subjugation based on race, sex, or class is okay because such people (non-white, women, poor) are simply biologically inferior and are deserving of their place in society.  Gould presents and reexamines the philosophical and scientific proof collected in the 19th and early 20th centuries (focus on craniology - the study of skull shape and size - and psychological testing).  What I have found most interesting is his reexamination of the raw data and finding how a priori assumptions shaped the way data was collected and analyzed such that the "right" conclusion was supported. 

Gould brings up the argument that society and science are not separate in his introduction: science is not purely objective.  Society and culture shape the way we think and thus shape the way we carry out science.  This is illustrated quite well in his first chapter (and I'm sure throughout the book, but I have only read through the first chapter), in which Gould addresses polygeny (the idea that different human races are in fact different species with different origins) and craniometry before Darwin.  At the end of the chapter he reanalyzes brain size data collected by distinguished scientist Samuel George Morton.  Morton had a collection in excess of 1000 human skulls from around the world.  He wrote three extensive works on the size of human skulls, all of them proving that Whites have larger brains than Americans (natives from North and South American) which are larger than Blacks (from U.S. and Africa).  Morton first measured cranial size using uniform seeds - however this method did not give consistent results and he switched to led shot (BB size). Luckily, in all of his works, Morton published all the raw data enabling analysis by Gould.  Gould found right off that that in Morton's analysis was biased (I won't go into the detail of this, but feel free to read the book).  The better illustration of a priori knowledge biasing the scientific method is in the actual data collection by Morton.  Gould was able to compare the size of individuals measured using both seeds and shot.  He found that the discrepancy between seed and shot was "5.4, 2.2, and 1.8 cubic inches for blacks, Indians, and whites, respectively."  These numbers match the a priori assumptions.  As Gould states, you can imagine that Morton subconsciously packed seeds in African skulls less than in White skulls of any shape because Black skulls are smaller than White skulls.

This innate bias due to the culture in which we are raised can be a powerful thing even to this day.  How often do scientists start an experiment hoping for a particular outcome?  Many conservation ecologists want to prove that pesticides, nutrient pollution, and GE crops are bad for the environment; or than organic farming is better than conventional.  On the flip side, Monsanto and other big industry are hoping to prove just the opposite.  Do we subconsiously design studies to favor our a priori assumptions; do we take measurements unequally, run stats in a way to favor one outcome, or throw out some data, which could be an outlier, to support the result we want?  I think that these are questions we all need to ask ourselves as we conduct our studies.  Are we asking the question first or do we "know" the answer first?