Race and Eugenics

Skin color is:

Adaptive

John C. Calhoun

Slavery is a good, positive thing

Arthur De Gobineau

• He became infamous for advocating developing the racist theory of the Aryan master race, in his book, An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-1855).

Japanese empire, 1938

•Comfort woman, 1945 •Nanking, China 1938

Ernst Haeckle

•German zoologist and evolutionist who was a strong proponent of Darwinism and who proposed new notions of the evolutionary descent of human beings. He declared that ontogeny (the embryology and development of the individual) briefly, and sometimes necessarily incompletely, recapitulated, or repeated, phylogeny (the developmental history of the species or race)

Modern human origins debate

•Monogenesis vs. Polygenesis

Carleton Coon, President of the AAPA 1961-1962 (The origin of races 1962)

•Argued that different races have achieved the threshold of homosapiens at different times, thereby explaining their different levels of civilization •Homo erectus then evolved into homosapiens not once, but five times, each as a subspecies, living in its own territory, passed a critical threshold from a brutal to more civilized state

Carleton Coon continued

•Coon's work was used by segregationist governors in the U.S. in the 1950's and 1960's to justify segregation •Until the 1970's Rhodesian government policy suppressed research showing that Great Zimbabwe had indigenous origins.

Origins of paleoanthropology

•Johann Friedrich Blumbenbach (1752-1840) •In 1755 living humans a single species, homosapiens, due to similar soft and hard tissue anatomy. Stressed comparative anatomy. •"White, yellow, red, black, and brown" peoples

Polygenesis

•Origination from several independent sources, in particular.

Colonization by European powers

•Ottoman Empire

The race concept

•Race is bad biology •Based on three misconceptions: -Humans can be naturally divided into one of a number of distinct races -Members of different races differ genetically substantially enough that knowing one's race gives information about intelligence, personality, etc. -The important difference between races are due to biological heritage

Francis Galton

•Strongly influenced by Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859), Galton developed his own theories on inherited traits. He studied identical twins, and worked on the first intelligence test in his exploration of the roles of "nature and nurture"—a phrase created by Galton—in human attributes. According to some sources, Galton also coined the term "eugenics," a controversial field of study about selective breeding in humans to produce preferred traits.

Ainu of Hokkaido, Japan

•The origins of Japan •Hines Ward

Monogenesis

•The theory that humans are all descended from a single pair of ancestors.

Covergence

•Tibetans, Andeanm and Amharic peoples possess different high-altitude adaptations in their blood chemistry and lung capacity