from the source of truthiness:
"Sheldon's theories had popularity through the 1950s, influencing Abraham Maslow, Aldous Huxley, and Robert S de Ropp.The majority of scientists today generally consider such theories outdated.[citation needed] Some found the idea of somatotypes reminiscent of eugenics and racial hygiene; they went against the fashionable emphasis on nurture, presenting a ready-made paradigm that had strong resonates with mystical thought.
Sheldon's photographs of naked Yale undergraduates, numbered in the thousands, which had been taken under the umbrella of a pre-existing program for checking student posture, and other similar photographs that he had gathered from programs at other institutes, were eventually destroyed.[3][4]
The words endomorphic, mesomorphic and ectomorphic are still sometimes used to describe body types, as, for example, in association with weight training aimed at gaining muscle, but interest in this kind of correlation between physiology and psyche remains largely the province of the occult philosopher. The psychosomatic linkage is fairly simplistic and is seen as undemonstrated in physiological science, but the account of somatotypes is still probably a valid[citation needed], if limited, way to sort basic body types. Advanced triploblastic animals, such as mammals, or modern humans in particular, do have these three basic tissue layers.
Sheldon himself was more a behavioral psychologist than either an anatomist or a physiologist. His behavioral conclusions were based largely on interviews which he or his students carried out over a long span of time, and the actual psychometric data was often more suggestive than conclusive. The prevalence of kindred ideas in folklore and spiritual philosophy, though, suggests that ideas similar to Sheldon's will continue to be held until they are conclusively proven or disproven."