Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
break out of these imposed boundaries. Remember, every scientist (including you) is
a product of his or her own time and culture.
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Beginnings
The practice of dividing humans into discrete groups dates back to the fifteenth century,
when European explorers were encountering people who looked and acted very differently
from themselves. The prevailing thought was that there must be a reason for these clear
differences, and explaining them as distinct races made sense. Carolus Linnaeus is credited
with creating the binomial nomenclature system of Genus and species still used today. He
wrote in Systema Naturae (1759) that while humans represent one species, Homo sapiens, there
are nevertheless subspecies of humans, which he subdivided based on geography and phys-
ical characteristics as well as personality characteristics. He called these subdivisions the afri-
canus, americanus, asiaticus, and europaeus types. His classification of humans into subspecies
effectively set the stage for the emphasis on classification and taxonomy that would dominate
research on human differences for the next two centuries (
Stanton, 1960
).
Following Linnaeus, the German anatomist Johann Blumenbach was the first to lay out
five different human races in the eighteenth century. As he saw them, the Caucasian, Mongo-
lian, Ethiopian, American, and Malayan types captured the whole pattern of human races.
He was the first to propose the use of the terms “Caucasoid” and “Mongoloid” with reference
to the classification of peoples from Europe and Asia (
Brace, 2005
). While the categories
proposed by Blumenbach were subject to change over the centuries to come, the terms
Caucasoid and Mongoloid nevertheless continue to be used, albeit unadvisedly.
Monogenism and Polygenism
During this period in race research, there were attempts to explain the differences between
the various races and to understand how these seemingly disparate races came to be. Two
primary schools of thought existed: one group believed that that all human groups dated
back to the Biblical Adam and Eve, and following that “perfect” coupling, environmental
changes as well as population shifts occurred that led to the various races beyond Caucasoids
(
Brace, 2005
). This monogenistic view stemmed from the belief in The Great Chain of Being, the
idea first developed by ancient Greek philosophers and later revisited in Europe during
medieval times. The Great Chain of Being posits that all living things are arranged in a hier-
archy, with the Christian God at the top and human beings directly below (
Lovejoy, 1936
).
This view fit well with the story of creation from Genesis, and therefore was compatible
with a religious viewpoint that fit with the “scientific” view of the different races. It also hier-
archically arranged the races in a way that provided religious support for their ordered
placement.
Conversely, the polygenists believed that each race had its own unique origin. According
to the polygenists, the Caucasoid race was oldest and therefore was the most evolved;
conversely, the Negroid race was youngest and therefore was the least evolved. This view-
point was popular in the nineteenth century, especially in the United States, which led
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For example,
Kaszycka et al. (2009)
demonstrated that the disparate views on race held by contemporary
European anthropologists are both dependent on education and influenced by sociopolitical ideology.
