Philadelphia, PA - When a Psychology Today magazine blog appeared under the headline "Why Are African American Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?", some dismissed it as an isolated incident of racism and misogyny creeping into science. But history shows that racism has poisoned certain areas of science intermittently for several hundred years.

Here in Philadelphia in the early 1800s, one of the world's leading anthropologists, Samuel Morton, was measuring human skulls and using his results to justify the continued enslavement of Africans. "Physical anthropology played a very large role in ways by which race and the institution of slavery was seen - and was either supported or argued against," said Princeton anthropologist Alan Mann.

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Mann has lectured on this, encouraging his colleagues to be mindful of their field's past. But racism, he said, has infected other fields including biology and psychology.

The post about black women appeared May 15, authored by Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist from the London School of Economics.

Kanazawa based his claim not on a published study but on his own analysis of a large survey by the Add Health group at the University of North Carolina. The vast survey started with seventh to 12th graders and followed them into adulthood, evaluating health along with social, economic, and psychological factors. For reasons that are unclear, the interviewers rated the subjects on attractiveness on a scale from 1 (very unattractive) to 5 (very attractive).

From this, Kanazawa concluded that black women are "objectively" less attractive than women of other races - despite the obviously subjective nature of the evaluation.

He also failed to mention that many of the evaluations were made while the subjects were teens, some as young as 12. The same subjects were evaluated at four intervals, and only in the last two of those were they all adults.