Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
does not exist; people are equal throughout the world in terms of intel-
lectual and cultural worth; the most important differences that you find
among peoples are due to nurture rather than nature; and so forth. The
Boasian position was vindicated and strengthened. Franz Boas in the
nineteenth century had said that race, language, and culture were sepa-
rate and independent variables.
54
The new view, at least in popular aca-
demic translation, was that race does not exist at all.
55
Historians of science are familiar with the obstructive impact of ill-
willed ideologies on science, but less familiar are examples of political
goodwill stifling science. On the question of fossil hominid phyletic diver-
sity, however, the impact of the UNESCO statement on race and the
larger population-genetics critique of racial typology must be regarded
as somewhat stifling. The most common fear seems to have been that by
allowing multiple lineages of humans, one would open the door to
racism, by excluding one or another lineage from the mainline ancestral
sequence leading to modern humans. This was clearly the case in Brace's
rejection of multiple lineages, one of his fears being that Neanderthals
would be dehumanized (and excluded from the human ancestral line) by
what he called “hominid catastrophism.”
56
Antilinearity, in his view, was
tantamount to antievolution. Tattersall has suggested that the emphasis
on population thinking in these peak prestige years of the New Synthe-
sis also helped foster the idea that “no amount of variation” was too
great to be contained within a single species.
57
The emphasis on genetic
diversity in this sense may have retarded the acceptance of new hominid
lineages; it may also have made it difficult to believe that some lineages
had perished without issue. The seeds for this myopia were already sown
in 1944, when Dobzhansky argued that “no more than a single hominid
species existed at any one time level,” a view that was taken to an
extreme in 1959, when Emil Breitinger argued that hominid evolution
was punctuated by “only one single
a priori
certain case of a complete
speciation and splitting”—the divergence of hominids from tertiary
primate species.
58
Implicit in such assertions of hominid unity was also
the idea that “our” branching point from the other apes was remote—
eleven or twelve million years even in the most conservative estimates.
59
Morphologists also had their blinders, albeit coming from quite dif-
ferent technical and conceptual traditions. Paleoanthropologists in
England in the 1960s, for example, could be heard muttering about how
