The myth that writing indicates natural intelligence starts as correct writing becomes a tool for ranking students and innate ability. Consequences include limiting how we understand intelligence, trusting tests instead of teachers, and trusting test results without understanding tests. Closer to the truth is that uniform tests and scales are not fair, and they tell us a 2-dimensional story about writing. Closer to the truth is that writing is 3-dimensional – social, diverse, and unnatural – and on a continuum rather than a scale.

Chapter 5 investigates mental modularity, which is a central concept in the study of minds, i.e., the notion of mental module which, in this context, refers to a specific, specialized domain-specific mental capacity (such as for language, for vision, for music, etc.). A given module may contain several submodules. We will look at the history of this concept and how it has been understood in different approaches, such as the outdated pseudoscience phrenology, the philosopher Jerry Fodor’s nine criteria for proper modules, massive modularity in evolutionary psychology, and other views. Once modules are postulated, we can ask, separately for each module, about the interplay between nature and nurture: Different outcomes are possible for different modules. Finally, we discuss the notion of ontogenetic, developmental modules.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, phrenology as folk science featured prominently in two contrasting sites: the city, with its nooks of seamy thrills; and the bush, the stomping ground of itinerant male labourers. While phrenologists had long taken rooms in city markets and arcades, their work transformed by century’s end into a mystical hybrid of bumps, clairvoyance, palmistry and even tea-leaf reading. Urban diviners emerged concurrently with another archetype: the bush phrenologist of the new, masculinist ‘radical nationalist’ literary tradition. Bush phrenologists – real and imagined – echoed the resourcefulness of city diviners, switching between occupations and combining heads with palmistry and even water divining. But while urban divination was feminised and stigmatised, the male bush phrenologist often escaped the mark of perceived irrationality and exemplified a muscular identity. When pitted in court against working-class women or girls reporting assault, even the most disreputable bush phrenologist benefited from legalistic misogyny.

Within a tidal wave of dispossession, Indigenous performers forged livings in scientific showmanship. In 1850, ‘Jemmy’, an Aboriginal boy, starred in a Melbourne lecture series that fused phrenology with mesmerism. During the mid 1860s, Tamati Hapimana Te Wharehinaki, chief of the Ngati Ruangutu hapū of the Tapuika Iwi, toured through the Australian colonies with the infamous Thomas Guthrie Carr. Supposedly mesmerised by the lecturers, these performers demonstrated actions that corresponded with particular phrenological organs, wrapping feigned subordination in displays of cultural difference that fascinated Europeans. An ethnographic history approach to these lecture reports reveals how these performers cannily shaped these representations for personal gain. Although serving colonial fantasies of control, the stage world nevertheless allowed them to push against the constraints that bound their daily lives. The fragile relations of power that made or broke a show enabled tactical choices for fleeting material or social benefit.

How did Aboriginal audiences experience popular science when it unfolded on stage in a mission site? This chapter considers phrenological visits to Yorta Yorta country in south-eastern Australia, and particularly the lectures of JB Thomas at Maloga Mission in 1884 and John Joseph Sheridan at nearby Cummeragunja in 1892. Like other scientists and medical men who visited here, these men perpetuated scientific racism. But newspaper reports also point to the possibility of these lectures – which also included lantern slides – as moments of nuanced interaction from which Yorta Yorta and other Aboriginal residents derived value and pleasure, rather than as straightforward impositions. As participatory entertainments, such shows hinged on uncertain moments with mixed emotions on both sides. This chapter considers the possible ways that, within the local context, phrenology and rational amusement might have become items for perusal and collection by Aboriginal people negotiating two-way living in a changing world.

Popular phrenologists lecturing in the Tasman World from 1850 onwards performed head public readings, on stage or in the street. Although bump readers abounded across the Anglosphere, the region and its rapid population growth shaped a particular reception experience. The arrival of an exotic outsider provided a chance for townsfolk, often newly thrown together, to glean an objective – if chaotic – perspective on their community and neighbours. Across this patchwork of settlements, popular phrenology became a tactile lingua franca, with audiences scrutinising the lecturer to catch out humbug through the public ordeal of “trying the bumps”. Whatever the outcome, the town experienced the dual entertainment of theatre and public power-play. Here was a chance to jest about their town and pecking order under the veil of science. Inevitably, phrenologists altered the local climate. But the town always won, and a phrenologist with a crushed reputation could face disaster.

Phrenology’s enduring interest in defining national types coincided with a growing nineteenth century preoccupation with nationhood, with Australia’s Federation in 1901 seen as a move towards membership of a white imperial community. In line with debates about nationhood, some phrenologists with political or reformist leanings considered both the white Australian type and social organisation. During the mid nineteenth century, William David Cavanough offered massed nationalist head readings. In the 1880s and 1890s, phrenology appeared alongside lessons about physical fitness and therapies such as the water cure, aligning with medical interest in hygiene and population health. Phrenologist Joseph Fraser outlined utopian visions in a science-fiction novel, and American celebrity Jessie Fowler visited to offer insights about health and national type. And at the Phrenological and Health Institute of Australasia, established in early twentieth-century Melbourne, reformers shared ideas for cultivating the white Australian race in a magazine rich with metaphors of buds and seeds.

More than 140 phrenologists ascended the platform as popular lecturers in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand during the second half of the nineteenth century, seizing on scientific spectacle for their own physical and social mobility. These scientists – usually men – also often offered private consultations and blended phrenology with other forms of knowledge such as mesmerism or physiognomy. Joining waves of migration to and from new settlements, phrenologists faced harsh physical conditions, with women performers confronting the additional risks of gender-based violence. Phrenologists generally did not pursue respectability. Rather, in building up their personas, lecturers embraced the word ‘science’ as a signifier of progress and authority, policing the boundaries between the ‘valid’ science that they supposedly offered and that of their rivals. They lived in a state of tension between their public, fee-earning selves – founded on supposedly good reputations – and their private ordeals, struggling to make ends meet.

Phrenology mediated everyday moments in Aotearoa New Zealand. It became associated with the spiritual leadership and healing practised by Māori tohungas and featured in the tactics of a stage performer during a tense diplomatic exchange in Te Rohe Pōtae (the King Country) in 1878. Meanwhile, for members of the colonial government and its administrators – both Māori and Pākehā – phrenology became a symbol of the irrational and anti-modern, a smear on the idea of progress at a time of debate over Māori survival. Phrenology’s critics were right to apprehend the authority that it garnered. As an appropriated European ’science’, it became one among various practices and technologies that shaped evolving Māori cultures and polities. Although moments of phrenological encounter are pebbles in the broader terrain of Māori life during this period, they nevertheless illuminate the questions that Māori were forced to ask themselves when navigating an upturned world

More than one in ten lecturers in the Tasman World also served as lay preachers or clergyman, with Methodists particularly represented. Sometimes they occupied both roles at once as scientific men of the cloth. At other times, one identity slid away as another formed. Such preachers were almost all men, owing to the gendered nature of pulpit and platform. The configurations of authority that they navigated are best studied from the fissures revealed by court cases or scandals. In 1893, Wesleyan minister Ralph Brown benefited from gender and class advantages when charged with indecently assaulting a teenage girl after mesmerising her. At the turn of the twentieth century, Albert James Abbott, nurseryman, practical phrenologist and leader of Melbourne’s Free Christian Assembly, faced allegations related to perceived scientific powers. Layered authority helped these men to recover from the rubble of their excesses. Popular science proved a resilient safety net when God departed.

Holmes was one of the founders of the Atlantic Monthly, which quickly achieved a large readership, helped by a pithy serial that appeared in 1857–58. This was Holmes’s The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table. It involved an erudite man and others at a Boston boardinghouse, who expressed opinions on many subjects. The series proved so popular that he came forth with a sequel in 1859. He called it The Professor at the Breakfast-Table. Holmes used the Professor in the latter to pillory phrenology. He repeatedly referred to it as “pseudo-science,” explaining that it was based on only accepting positive cases and ignoring all exceptions. Using a two-column format and a lot of humor, his Professor contrasted what a phrenologist might tell a client and what he might reveal to his pupil. And he emphasized that phrenologists were not really reading heads, attending instead to other cues, such as how a client dressed and answered questions. The remainder of this chapter shows how others lampooned the head readers before Holmes, and presents his 1861 Harvard lecture, which has the same take-home message. Notably, he praises phrenologists in this lecture for helping to draw attention to human differences, inborn tendencies, and the brain.

Samuel Clemens had at least two more head readings. He might have done the 1884 reading in Cincinnati for the publicity since he was on a lecture tour. The second was in Manhattan in 1901, and it could have been to gather material for his novel Eddypus. These head readings were published. Unsurprisingly, they accounted for all Mark Twain’s known traits and “sanguine” (now presented as “mental-motive”) temperament. We also see how Twain continued to use phrenological terms and ideas to make his verbal portraits even more memorable. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, for example, he brings up “what slavery could do, in the way of ossifying what one may call the superior lobe of human feeling.” Phrenology can also be found in lesser-read works, including A Double Barrelled Detective Story, his spoof on Sherlock Holmes. The remainder of Chapter 7 presents what Lorenzo Fowler’s surviving daughter wrote about Mark Twain and his head in 1904 and what was written about him when he died in 1910, including how he “only wrote in a humorous way to make people sit up and take notice of what he wanted to tell them.”

Holmes also presented his thoughts about phrenology and its purveyors in what he called his three “medicated novels,” which also began as serials in the Atlantic Monthly before coming out as books. The first was Elsie Venner, published as a book in 1861. The Guardian Angel followed in 1867 and A Mortal Antipathy in 1885. In these three works, he asks pertinent questions, such as whether people with mental disabilities are morally responsible and are accountable for their crimes. He is bothered by how the insane rarely received proper attention from physicians or compassion and understanding from the public. Another common theme is how mental traits can be transmitted through multiple generations. These were the same issues that the founders of phrenology raised, and he is in agreement with them. Yet he also states that phrenology “has failed to demonstrate its system of special correspondences.” That is, its system of bumps is worthless or, as put by the brilliant Lurida Vincent, “nonsense.” This chapter concludes with what a leading phrenologist wrote about Holmes after he died in 1894. He felt Holmes was a gifted writer, yet, and as might be expected, one very much mistaken about phrenology being a pseudoscience.

Americans first learned about Gall’s doctrine from reviews in British periodicals and physicians returning from France, where Gall and Spurzheim had settled. After Spurzheim split from Gall in 1813 and began lecturing throughout Britain and publishing books in English, they learned more. Spurzheim made some modifications and began to call the doctrine “phrenology,” while still retaining craniological correlations as the primary method. He attracted many people to it, as did his Scottish disciple, George Combe, who started the first phrenological society and journal, emphasizing how it could be used to lead to happier, healthier lives and promote institutional reforms. In 1832, Spurzheim came to America but died in Boston that year, drawing more attention to phrenology. Soon after, Orson and Lorenzo Fowler formed a business reading heads and selling all things phrenological, including books, journals, charts, and specimens. The Fowlers were masterful at promoting phrenology. Although Gall had focused on phrenology as a science, phrenology now became synonymous with head readings, thanks in part to the Fowlers and their associates. In this era with little in the way of new research to support phrenological assertions, head readings became faddish among the laity.

Mark Twain now began to lampoon the head readers as cheats and frauds. He first did this in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which appeared in 1876, and continued to do so in its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which appeared eight years later. He described Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Polly as a believer in “phrenological frauds” and as “an easy victim” in the first of these often-paired novels. More telling, he explained how they operated in Huckleberry Finn, using a phony duke and king bilking unsuspecting victims along the Mississippi River for this purpose. These two characters mention how they rely on gathering advance information for some of their schemes, and they brag about putting on charades. As they saw it, phrenology was an easy-entry business that anyone with a good set of eyes and ears along with some acting skills could exploit. This chapter also presents Twain’s use of phrenology in Life on the Mississippi, a book he completed in 1883 after returning to St. Louis and to relive the river between it and New Orleans.

During the 1790s, Franz Joseph Gall, a German now practicing medicine in Vienna, came forth with a new way of thinking about the mind and brain. He envisioned the mind having many specialized functions, each dependent on a different part of the brain for its expression. He had a variety of methods for determining these function–structure relationships but relied most heavily on skull features. Bumps and depressions on specific parts of the skull, he reasoned, reflected the growth of the underlying parts. Hence, by studying the heads and crania of humans and animals, one could find separate organs for music, mathematics, and even color perception. Stated differently, a skilled observer could use craniology for probing the mysteries of the mind and understanding the functional organization of the brain. In 1805, Gall left Vienna with his new assistant, Johan Spurzheim, to present his “organology” in various European centers of learning. He never returned. He settled in Paris in 1807, where he lectured and published his books on his ideas. He died there in 1828, still believing in his new science of man, yet knowing that his skull-based assertions were still the most controversial features of his doctrine.

Neither Holmes nor Clemens was rejecting everything about phrenology. They were most concerned about phrenology’s craniological tenets – the unsubstantiated idea that small bumps and depressions on the skull can reliably reflect the growth and development of underlying parcels of brain tissue and reveal the organs of mind. They did, however, seem to accept the concept of many independent organs of mind, though not necessarily the ones listed by Gall or others. They also bought into the idea that the front of the brain is more intellectual than its posterior. Additionally, they agreed that character traits are inborn, stable, and run in families and that juries should consider the state of a criminal’s brain. Moreover, neither man had any use for metaphysics. Interestingly, Holmes saw phrenology as a branch of anthropology (broadly defined). As he put it: “Strike out the false pretensions of phrenology, call it anthropology; let it study man the individual in distinction from man the abstraction … and it becomes the proper study of mankind, one of the noblest and most interesting of pursuits.” Twain was also fascinated by the diversity he observed among his fellow human beings, and also felt the family of man deserved further study.

Samuel Clemens, later adopt to write under “Mark Twain,” spent his formative years in Hannibal, Missouri, a town on the Mississippi River. After his father died, he began working for printers. While just a teenager, he carefully observed various performers stopping in the town. He was especially taken by a mesmerist and tried to become his assistant. After failing to become hypnotized, he faked being in a trance and fooled everyone by “reading” the audience to guess what the mesmerist was compelling him to do and gathering advance information about people he would mention in his trance. This experience might have made him suspicious of the itinerant phrenologist he watched in 1850, one of many now visiting small towns. The townsfolk flocked to him and adored him. But what most registered on young Clemens was how the phrenologist was giving every client a glowing report, as if each was another George Washington. This observation made him wonder if there were anything to the head readings or whether the phrenologist was just out to dupe his clients. Still, he recognized that phrenology might be a quick and helpful way to judge character and of use to a writer.