The first step toward understanding diversity in nature is to organize it into categories that can then be named, discussed, and perhaps studied. Historically, when different groups of people came into contact with each other, they tried to account for the physical differences they saw. Because skin color was so noticeable, it was one of the more frequently explained characteristics, and most systems of racial classification were based on it.
As early as 1350 b.c.e., the ancient Egyptians had classified humans based on their skin color: red for Egyptian, yellow for people to the east, white for those to the north, and black for subSaharan Africans (Gossett, 1963). In the sixteenth century, after the discovery of the New World, several European countries embarked on a period of intense exploration and colonization in both the New and Old Worlds. One result of this contact was an increased awareness of human diversity.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European and American scientists concentrated on describing and classifying biological variation in humans and also in nonhuman species. The first scientific attempt to describe the newly discovered variation among human populations was Linnaeus’s taxonomic classification (see Chapter 2), which placed humans into four separate categories (Linnaeus, 1758). Linnaeus assigned behavioral and intellectual qualities to each group, with the least complimentary descriptions going to sub-Saharan Africans. This ranking system was typical of the period and reflected the almost universal European view that Europeans were superior to everyone else.
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), a German anatomist, classified humans into five races. Although Blumenbach’s categories came to be described simply as white, yellow, red, black, and brown, he also used criteria other than skin color. What’s more, he emphasized that racial categories based on skin color were arbitrary and that many traits, including skin color, weren’t discrete phenomena. Blumenbach pointed out that classifying all humans using such a system would completely omit everyone who didn’t fall into a specific category. Blumenbach and others also recognized that traits such as skin color showed overlapping expression between groups.
Most Europeans ignored these complexities, so that by the mid-nineteenth century populations were ranked on a scale based primarily on skin color (along with size and shape of the head), again with sub-Saharan Africans at the bottom. The Europeans themselves were also ranked, with northern, lightskinned populations considered superior to their southern, somewhat darkerskinned neighbors in Italy and Greece.
To many Europeans, the fact that non-Europeans weren’t Christian suggested that they were “uncivilized” and implied an even more basic inferiority of character and intellect. This view was rooted in a concept called biological determinism, which in part holds that there is an association between physical characteristics and such attributes as intelligence, morals, values, abilities, and even social and economic condition. In other words, cultural variations were thought to be inherited in the same way that biological variations are. It followed, then, that there are inherent behavioral and cognitive differences between groups and that some groups are by nature superior to others. Unfortunately, many people still hold these views, and following this logic, it’s a simple matter to justify the persecution and even enslavement of other peoples simply because their outward appearance differs from what is familiar.
After 1850, biological determinism was a constant theme underlying common thinking as well as scientific research in Europe and the United States. Most people—including such notables as Thomas Jefferson, Georges Cuvier, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Lyell, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes—held deterministic (and what today we’d call racist) views. Commenting on this usually deemphasized characteristic of more respected historical figures, the late evolutionary biologist Stephen J. Gould (1981, p. 32) remarked that “all American culture heroes embraced racial attitudes that would embarrass public-school mythmakers.”
Francis Galton (1822–1911), Charles Darwin’s cousin, shared a growing fear among nineteenth-century Europeans that “civilized society” was being weakened by the failure of natural selection to completely eliminate unfit and inferior members (Greene, 1981, p. 107). Galton wrote and lectured on the necessity of “race improvement” and suggested government regulation of marriage and family size, an approach he called eugenics. Although eugenics had its share of critics, its popularity flourished throughout the 1930s. Nowhere was it more attractive than in Germany, where the viewpoint took a horrifying turn. The false idea of pure races was increasingly extolled as a means of reestablishing a strong and prosperous state. Eugenics was seen as scientific justification for purging Germany of its “unfit,” and many of Germany’s scientists continued to support the policies of racial purity and eugenics during the Nazi period (Proctor, 1988, p. 143), when these policies served as justification for condemning millions of people to death.
But at the same time, many scientists were turning away from racial typologies and classification in favor of a more evolutionary approach. No doubt for some, this shift in direction was motivated by their growing concerns over the goals of the eugenics movement. Probably more important, however, was the synthesis of genetics and Darwin’s theories of natural selection during the 1930s. As discussed in Chapter 4, this breakthrough influenced all the biological sciences, and some physical anthropologists soon began applying evolutionary principles to the study of human variation.