Craniometry

But regardless of what they made of phrenology, those who saw craniometry as a means of measuring the relative weight of intelligence and emotion in psychological makeup were generally sceptical as to whether, as Blumenbach and Camper believed, humanity had branched from one ancestral pair into varietal types as a result of colonising different continents.

Similarly, some forensic companies have started to engage in “DNA phenotyping” – e.g. predicting skin color and facial features based on DNA data – something that’s best understood as 21st century re-run of long-debunked craniometry.