Human Origins: Scientific Racism in the Nineteenth Century

During the European Age of Exploration which began in the fifteenth century, Europeans became aware that people in different parts of the world had physical characteristics which made them look different from Europeans. These differences included such things as hair color and hair shape, eye shape, skull shape, overall stature (tall/short), amount of body and facial hair, and skin color. In addition to looking different, people in different parts of the world also behaved differently, so in the minds of some people, there seemed to be a correlation between the way people looked and the way they behaved.

As people—i.e. Europeans—began to wonder why there were physical differences and to consider how these differences might have come about, they often turned to Christian mythology for their explanations, or at least where to look for explanations. For some people at this time, one of the Christian origin stories claimed that their god had created the first man and woman and, therefore, all of these different types of humans must have descended from this original couple. The differences had come about, they argued, because people had sinned, and consequently their god punished them by making them look different.

There were also some people who argued that their god had created only one human species, the Europeans, and all others were sub-human animals. At the beginning of the Spanish invasion of Mexico, there were some theologians who argued that the Indian people were not human and did not possess souls. However, the Catholic pope ruled that Indians were human, that they had souls, and, therefore had to be converted to the Catholic faith.

While the monogeneses viewpoint envisioned only a single human creation, there were a few who felt that their god had created each of the different groups and that they had been created to reflect a hierarchy with Europeans at the top and all others subservient to humans.

Background

In the eighteenth century, the first scientific explanations of human differences were attempted. In an article in the International Socialist Review, Deepa Kumar writes:

“The shift from religious to ‘scientific’ justifications took place in the eighteenth century in the context of the Enlightenment and the growth of science.”

Out of this came scientific racism: an ideology to justify slavery and conquest.

One of the foundations of the biological sciences is the taxonomy developed by Linnaeus in the eighteenth century. In his taxonomy Linnaeus recognized four races, based on geography and skin color: Homo americanus (Native Americans), Homo europeaeus (Europeans), Homo asiaticus (East Asians), and Homo afar (Africans).  In his book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History, Nicholas Wade writes:

“Linnaeus did not perceive a hierarchy of races, and he listed people alongside the rest of nature.”

The German scholar Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) began his study of the natural history of our species by expanding on the taxonomy of Linnaeus. For data, Blumenbach studied human skulls and collected about 250 specimens from around the world. From his skull collection, Blumenbach concluded that there were five races—he added a Malay race to those described by Linnaeus. In his classification of races (On the Natural Variety of Mankind published in 1795), he grouped people from Europe, North Africa, and the Indian subcontinent as Caucasians, a term which he invented. Nicholas Wade explains the origin of the term Caucasian:

“The origin of the name was due in part to his belief that the people of Georgia, in the southern Caucasus, were the most beautiful, and in part to the then prevailing view that Noah’s ark had set down on Mount Ararat in the Caucasus, making the region the homeland of the first people to colonize the earth.”

In her book The Skull Collectors: Race, Science, and America’s Unburied Dead, Ann Fabian writes:

“He said that every visitor to his collection found the skull of a young Georgian woman his most beautiful specimen. The skull’s symmetry pushed him to an odd imaginative leap, and he named her the representative of humanity’s original form, an ancestor of the group he named with a new word, the ‘Caucasian’ race. Europe’s contemporary population had descended from original Caucasian stock.”

In his 1795 book On the Natural Variety of Mankind, Blumenbach concludes:

“That no doubt can any longer remain but that we are, with great probability, right in inferring, all and singular as many varieties of men as are at present known, to one and the same species.”

Nineteenth Century

During the first half of the nineteenth century, an era prior to the publication and popularization of natural selection as the mechanism for evolution, science—or, natural philosophy, as it was then known—was heavily impacted by religious beliefs, primarily those of Christianity. In discussing the concept of race in mid-nineteenth century America, zoologist Desmond Morris, in his 1969 book The Human Zoo, writes:

“There were two Christian attitudes towards the existence of Negroid humans: the monogenist and the polygenist. The monogenist believed that all types of men had sprung from the same original source, but that Negroes had long ago undergone a gross physical and moral decline, so that slavery was a proper role for them.”

According to one American priest, writing in the mid-nineteenth century:

“The Negro will remain where he is, unless his form is altered by intermixture, the simple idea of which is revolting; his intelligence is greatly inferior to that of the Caucasians, and he is consequently from all we know of him, incapable of governing himself.”

Desmond Morris writes:

“Opposing the monogenists were the polygenists. They believed that each ‘race’ had been created separately, each with its own special properties, its strengths and weaknesses. Some polygenists believed that there were as many as fifteen different species of man inhabiting the world.”

Like the Christian theologians, scientists in this era were also divided into monogenists and polygenists.

Blumenbach’s work influenced the work of American naturalist, Samuel George Morton (1799-1851), who also used human skulls for his data. Morton collected nearly 1,000 human skulls from around the world. In 1839, Morton published his master work, Crania Americana, an expensive, well-illustrated book. The book did not sell well: it came out at an economic downturn and few people, particularly scholars, could afford it. Those who could afford to buy the book tended to be people who supported slavery and they looked to Morton’s ideas of racial hierarchy as support of the view of slavery as both natural and divinely created. Ann Fabian writes:

“Historians turn easily to Crania Americana as a dependable cornerstone in the intellectual history of scientific racism.”

Morton rejected the concept of monogenism and felt that the data from his skull collection supported the theory of polygenism. Ann Fabian writes:

“He subscribed to the widely held belief that there were five races—the Caucasian, the Mongolian, the American, the Malay, and the Ethiopian—but then concluded that each race represented a different species created for one of the earth’s continents, an idea that set him at odds with clergymen and believers who were certain that all men were the children of Adam.”

Differences between different types of humans were an expression of divine creation. In his book Crania America, Morton writes:

“…each Race was adapted from the beginning to its peculiar local destination. In other words, it is assumed, that the physical characteristics which distinguish the different Races, are independent of external causes.”

Ann Fabian writes:

“Work comparing skulls led Morton to two conclusions, although they were not universally shared. First, that polygenism—the idea that God must have created more than one species of man—offered the best explanation for the differences among people. And second, that of the five races or species of men, Caucasians had the largest skulls and, therefore, the biggest brains.”

Regarding Morton’s work, Nicholas Wade writes:

“Morton’s views were driven into error not by prejudice but by his religious faith.” He believed that the world had been created in 4004 BC and that the ancient Egyptian art showed two races by 3000 BC. Thus, he felt, that races didn’t evolve, but were created separately.”

Samuel Morton died in 1851, but his work continued to live on. James Aitken Meigs took charge of Morton’s skull collection. He continued to revise the collection catalog to include skulls acquired after Morton’s death. Ann Fabian writes:

“Since there was no room for change or chance in the world Morton and Meigs imagined, craniology revealed the unchanging characteristics of human races. And those unchanging characteristics indicated that God had blessed a racial order that accorded the largest share of the world’s power and wealth to white men.”

Morton’s concept of polygenism was also promoted by Louis Agassiz (1807-1873). In 1846, Louis Agassiz, a Swiss-born, German-educated ichthyologist, became a Harvard professor and, for the next quarter of a century, he dominated American science. Like Morton, he promoted the theory of polygenism as a way of explaining the differences between the races. He also saw the work of a divine creator in the natural world. As the theory of evolution by means of natural selection began to dominate the world of science, Agassiz held fast to the idea of an unchanging, divine creation. In his book Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Idea, Edward Larson writes:

“Later, by championing this position even against Darwinism, Agassiz became something of a scientific saint to Christian creationists. For him, the progressive appearance of increasingly specialized species solely reflected their origin in the mind of God, not the impact of environmental factors or evolution.”

Pseudo-Science in Support of Racism

By the mid-nineteenth century, one of the controversial issues in the United States was slavery. Since American slavery tended to be based on social perceptions of race—primarily skin color—those who supported slavery looked for “scientific” principles to support their believe that people with dark skin colors were somehow inferior to people with light skin colors and therefore slavery was both scientifically and biblically justified. The works of Morton and Agassiz were often cited as scientific evidence of the natural inferiority of enslaved peoples.

Pseudo-science is an approach which attempts to look and sound like actual science, but which, unlike science, begins with a conclusion and seeks data—both real and imagined—which supports that conclusion. One of the best-known examples of pseudo-scientific racism is An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races by in 1853-1855 by Joseph-Arthur Compte de Gobineau. Gobineau assumed that there were three races, based on skin color: white (which was the superior race), yellow, and black. He argued that a pure race could conquer its neighbors, but if it interbred with them, then this would lead to degeneracy. Nicholas Wade writes:

“Gobineau’s ambitious theory of history was built on sand. There is no factual basis for his notions of racial purity or racial degeneration through interbreeding.”

In his book Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species, Theodosius Dobzhansky writes:

“The best that can be said about Gobineau’s theory is that it appears to give a scientific basis to both race and class prejudice. But it convinces only those who have already made the same discoveries all by themselves.”

Nineteenth century pseudo-scientific racism continued to influence both popular and political thought into both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, resulting in racial policies such as those of Nazi Germany and the immigration policies of the United States. Nicholas Wade writes:

“Ideas about race, many of them generated by biologists, have been exploited to justify slavery, to sterilize people deemed unfit and, in Hitler’s Germany, to conduct murderous campaigns against innocent and defenseless segments of society such as Gypsies, homosexuals and mentally ill children. Most chilling of all was the horrific fusion of eugenic ideas with notions of racial purity that drove the National Socialists to slaughter some 6 million Jews in the territories under their control.”

Nicholas Wade also writes:

“The central premise of racism, which distinguishes it from ethnic prejudice, is the notion of an ordered hierarchy of races in which some are superior to others. The superior race is assumed to enjoy the rights to rule others because of its inherent qualities.”

During the last half of the nineteenth century, evolution became the primary method for examining the origin of species. The pseudo-scientists, in their zeal for promoting the primacy and superiority of what they often called the “white” race, began to turn to evolutionary terminology to lend the semblance of actual science to their conclusions. They viewed the “white” race, as exemplified by people from northern Europe, as more evolved and therefore superior to all others. While many Americans in the twenty-first century still believe this, their arguments do not hold up as data from fields such as anthropology and genetics from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have become more widely known.

More Human Origins

Human Origins: Pseudo-Archaeology

Human Origins: Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin

Human Origins: The Great Chain of Being

Human Origins: Cultural Evolution

Human Origins: Sexual Selection

Evolution Before Charles Darwin