Scientists have often been accused of letting their ideology influence their results, and one of the most famous cases is that of Morton’s skulls — the global collection amassed by the 19th-century physical anthropologist Samuel George Morton.

In a 1981 book, “The Mismeasure of Man,” the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould asserted that Morton, believing that brain size was a measure of intelligence, had subconsciously manipulated the brain volumes of European, Asian and African skulls to favor his bias that Europeans had larger brains and Africans smaller ones.

But now physical anthropologists at the University of Pennsylvania, which owns Morton’s collection, have remeasured the skulls, and in an article that does little to burnish Dr. Gould’s reputation as a scholar, they conclude that almost every detail of his analysis is wrong.

“Our results resolve this historical controversy, demonstrating that Morton did not manipulate his data to support his preconceptions, contra Gould,” they write in the current PLoS Biology.