Karl Pearson, gained currency. Connecticut was the first of many states, beginning in 1896, to pass marriage laws with eugenic provisions, prohibiting anyone who was "epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded" from marrying. The noted American biologist, Charles Davenport, became the director of biological research at a station in Cold Spring Harbor in New York in 1898. Six years later the Carnegie Institute provided the funding for Davenport to create the Station for Experimental Evolution. Then, in 1910, Davenport and Harry H. Laughlin took advantage of their positions at the Eugenics Record Office to promote eugenics.
The ERO concluded after years of gathering data on families that the poor were the main source of the “unfit”. Davenport and other highly regarded eugenicists such as psychologist Henry H. Goddard and conservationist Madison Grant started a campaign to address the problem of the "unfit." Goddard, using data based on his Kallikak family research, lobbied for segregation, while Davenport preferred immigration restriction and sterilization as primary methods. Grant, the most extreme of the three, agreed with both of his colleagues, and even considered extermination as a possible solution.
A major influence on the eugenics movement was Herbert Spencer, an English philosopher and prominent political theorist. He is best known as the father of social Darwinism, a school of thought that applied the evolutionist theory of "survival of the fittest"—a phrase coined by Spencer—to human societies.
By the 1900s, the scientific community’s understanding of race was both essentialist—defining each race by certain biological and social characteristics—and taxonomic (hierarchical). Scientists were struggling with the concept of race in divergent ways. Aleš Hrdlicka and Earnest Hooten, two prominent physical anthropologists also trained as physicians, were influential at a time when the field focused mostly on anatomy and physiological variation.
Charles Davenport earned a Ph.D. in biology in 1892 from Harvard, and later became an instructor of zoology there. As a biologist, he pioneered the development of quantitative standards of taxonomy. A follower of the biometric approach to evolution which had been developed by Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, Davenport was also on the editorial committee of Pearson's journal, Biometrika. After Mendel's laws of heredity were “rediscovered”, Davenport became a strict convert to the Mendelian school of genetics. His 1911 book, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, was a major work in the history of eugenics. Along with an assistant, Davenport also studied the question of miscegenation, or, as he put it, "race crossing" in humans. In 1929, he published Race Crossing in Jamaica, which purported to give statistical evidence about the dangers of miscegenation between blacks and whites.
Madison Grant, a lawyer known more as a conservationist and eugenist created the "racialist movement" in America advocating the extermination of "undesirables" and certain "race types" from the human gene pool. He played a critical role in restrictive U.S. immigration policy and anti-miscegenation laws. His work provided the justification for Nazi policies of forced sterilization and euthanasia. He wrote two of the seminal works of American racialism: The Passing of the Great Race (1916) and The Conquest of a Continent (1933). The Passing of the Great Race gained immediate popular success and established Grant as an authority in anthropology, and laid the groundwork for his research in eugenics.
his protégé Karl Pearson, gained currency. Connecticut was the first of many states, beginning in 1896, to pass marriage laws with eugenic provisions, prohibiting anyone who was "epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded" from marrying. The noted American biologist, Charles Davenport, became the director of biological research at a station in Cold Spring Harbor in New York in 1898. Six years later the Carnegie Institute provided the funding for Davenport to create the Station for Experimental Evolution. Then, in 1910, Davenport and Harry H. Laughlin took advantage of their positions at the Eugenics Record Office to promote eugenics.
The ERO concluded after years of gathering data on families that the poor were the main source of the “unfit”. Davenport and other highly regarded eugenicists such as psychologist Henry H. Goddard and conservationist Madison Grant started a campaign to address the problem of the "unfit." Goddard, using data based on his Kallikak family research, lobbied for segregation, while Davenport preferred immigration restriction and sterilization as primary methods. Grant, the most extreme of the three, agreed with both of his colleagues, and even considered extermination as a possible solution.
A major influence on the eugenics movement was Herbert Spencer, an English philosopher and prominent political theorist. He is best known as the father of social Darwinism, a school of thought that applied the evolutionist theory of "survival of the fittest"—a phrase coined by Spencer—to human societies.
By the 1900s, the scientific community’s understanding of race was both essentialist—defining each race by certain biological and social characteristics—and taxonomic (hierarchical). Scientists were struggling with the concept of race in divergent ways. Aleš Hrdlicka and Earnest Hooten, two prominent physical anthropologists also trained as physicians, were influential at a time when the field focused mostly on anatomy and physiological variation.
Charles Davenport earned a Ph.D. in biology in 1892 from Harvard, and later became an instructor of zoology there. As a biologist, he pioneered the development of quantitative standards of taxonomy. A follower of the biometric approach to evolution which had been developed by Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, Davenport was also on the editorial committee of Pearson's journal, Biometrika. After Mendel's laws of heredity were “rediscovered”, Davenport became a strict convert to the Mendelian school of genetics. His 1911 book, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, was a major work in the history of eugenics. Along with an assistant, Davenport also studied the question of miscegenation, or, as he put it, "race crossing" in humans. In 1929, he published Race Crossing in Jamaica, which purported to give statistical evidence about the dangers of miscegenation between blacks and whites.
Madison Grant, a lawyer known more as a conservationist and eugenist created the "racialist movement" in America advocating the extermination of "undesirables" and certain "race types" from the human gene pool. He played a critical role in restrictive U.S. immigration policy and anti-miscegenation laws. His work provided the justification for Nazi policies of forced sterilization and euthanasia. He wrote two of the seminal works of American racialism: The Passing of the Great Race (1916) and The Conquest of a Continent (1933). The Passing of the Great Race gained immediate popular success and established Grant as an authority in anthropology, and laid the groundwork for his research in eugenics.
n the late nineteenth century, John Wesley Powell led the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution, which dominated the field of anthropology in the U.S. at the time. Powell and his curator for ethnology, Otis T. Mason, were proponents of Lewis Morgan’s theory of cultural evolution—the idea that the social progress of a culture is inextricably linked to technological progress. Franz Boas, often considered the father of American anthropology, opposed Morgan’s theory and introduced new ideas about the evolution of cultures, as well as organization and classification of artifacts.
By the 1930s, hereditarianism—the theory that heredity was the basis for differences in intelligence and behavior—began to fall out of favor. To counter the rise of Nazism and its racist ideologies, scientists critical of the use of race to justify oppression and discrimination published a number of important works. We Europeans: A Survey of "Racial" Problems (1935) by Julian Huxley and A.C. Haddon, sought to show that science offered a very limited definition of race. Another work during this period, The Races of Mankind by Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, argued that though there were some racial differences, they were primarily superficial, and did not justify racial prejudice. The hereditarian theory was further discredited when Boas showed significant increases in cranial size in the U.S. from one generation to the next, undermining the notion that genetics and race determined intelligence.
Appointed to Columbia University’s anthropology faculty in 1896, Franz Boas later rose in rank to consolidate and lead Columbia’s anthropology department, and is credited with creating the first Ph.D program in anthropology in the U.S. Boas played a pivotal role in forming the American Anthropological Association and promoting the "four field" concept of anthropology that includes physical anthropology, linguistics, archaeology and cultural anthropology. He established that all societies' biological characteristics, language, material and symbolic culture are autonomous areas of anthropology, and that each is equally important to human nature, and that none is subordinate to another.
In 1928, Margaret Mead published Coming of Age in Samoa.
As Mead and her advisor Boas expected, the book upset many Americans
and Western Europeans when it first appeared. Another influential book
by Mead that became a cornerstone of the women's movement was Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, which claimed that females were dominant in the Tchambuli tribe of Papua New Guinea.In 1934, Ruth Benedict published Patterns of Culture,
in which she contrasted the unique characteristics and personality
traits of various cultures. A student of Boas, Benedict emphasized
cultural relativism, in which customs and values are viewed within the
context of the entire culture. The U.S. government consulted Benedict
during World War II for an understanding of Japanese culture, and she
helped President Franklin D. Roosevelt understand the importance of
continuing the reign of the Emperor of Japan as the surrender offer was
crafted. Her 1946 book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, based
on her study of Japanese society and culture, was later questioned by
some who felt her work was shallow because her research had been
conducted from a distance, rather than directly.African
American anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston began her studies at Howard
University before transferring to Barnard College where she received her
B.A. in anthropology in 1928. Also a student of Boas, she is perhaps
best known for her ethnographic research and writing based on African
American folklore in Mules and Men (1935) and her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
William
Montague Cobb was the first African-American physical anthropologist.
He earned a medical degree from Howard University in 1929. He studied at
Case Western Reserve under physical anthropologist T. Wingate Todd,
whose progressive ideas opposed prevailing theories of racial
determinism espoused by physical anthropologists Aleš Hrdlicka and
Earnest Hooton. Cobb was known for his research on human cranio-facial
union at the Hamann-Todd Collection and the Smithsonian, and his works The Cranio-Facial Union and the Maxillary Tuber in Mammals (1943), and Cranio-Facial Union in Man (1940).British-born
anthropologist Ashley Montagu was among the first scientists to argue
against the concept of race. A student of both Franz Boas and Ruth
Benedict, Montagu studied the procreative beliefs of the native tribes
of Australia in the late 1930s. He taught anatomy at various schools in
the U.S. and became a professor of anthropology at Rutgers from 1949 to
1955. He earned fame in the 1940s by arguing that race was a social
construct, a product of perceptions, rather than a biological fact, and
he was a principal drafter of the U.N. "Statement on Race" in 1949 that
incorporated these ideas. Montagu vocally opposed anthropologist
Carleton Coon’s notion that whites and blacks evolved along separate
paths, and published in 1942 Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. In 1950, Montagu authored the UNESCO Statement on Race. His varied interests were reflected in the more than 60 published titles including, The Natural Superiority of Women (1953), in which he argued that women were in many ways biologically superior to men, and The Elephant Man
(1971), an account of John Merrick, the severely disfigured man of
Victorian England which became the basis for the Broadway play and
movie.Beginning in the 1900s, scientists began to develop different methods for measuring intelligence. These tests were used often to justify racial and ethnic discrimination. The results of these intelligence tests were influential in shaping U.S. immigration policy that limited immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, and in justifying race-based segregation in public education, and U.S. conscription during World War I. Previously, the scientific debate centered largely on perceived differences in racial intelligence based on cranial size.
French psychologist Alfred Binet is credited with creating the the first modern intelligence test, the Binet-Simon intelligence scale, in 1905. Binet's objective in developing the test was to identify students who needed special help in school. However, Binet recognized the limitations of the test in understanding cognition and intellect; he did not intend that the test be used as a measurement of intelligence. Binet and his colleague Theodore Simon published revisions of the intelligence scale in 1908 and 1911. Lewis M. Terman of Stanford University, a prominent eugenist ("eugenics" is the science of improving a human population through selective breeding) and member of the Human Betterment Foundation, published his refinement of the Binet-Simon scale in 1916. Terman incorporated German psychologist William Stern's concept that mental age/chronological age times 100 would quantify intelligence, thus creating the intelligence quotient or IQ. Terman's test, which he renamed the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, formed the basis for one of the modern intelligence tests, although IQ is calculated differently today.
Harvard-educated psychologist, ethologist and primatologist, Robert Mearns Yerkes, known for his work in Army intelligence testing in World War I and in the field of comparative psychology, was an early standout in the field of primate intelligence and chimpanzee and gorilla behavior. The theory of behaviorism was developed by Yerkes and his colleague John B. Watson.
In 1917, Yerkes, as the president of the
American Psychological Association, urged the group to initiate several
programs during World War I. The Army's Alpha and Beta intelligence
tests were his creation, and they were administered to over a million
U.S. soldiers during the war. The results of the tests led to the
conclusion that recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe had
considerably lower scores than earlier immigrants from Northern Europe.
Eugenicists relied on these results as ammunition for their campaign for
immigration restrictions. The test results, however, were later
criticized as having been more a measure of acculturation than of
intelligence, since the test scores correlated closely with the number
of years spent living in the U.S.Psychologist
Cyril Burt was influenced by the British class system, and decried what
he saw as the decline of the "British race." Influenced by Francis
Galton's work, Burt was also drawn to the theories of Charles
Spearman—and in fact tried to claim Spearman's g-factor theory of
intelligence as his own—in an effort to substantiate his theory of the
heritability of intelligence with quantitative analysis. Burt was a
member of the British Eugenics Society. He was appointed professor and
chair of psychology at University College, London, in 1931 taking over
Spearman's position. At the university, Burt influenced many students,
among them Arthur Jensen and Chris Brand.Since the 1940s, evolutionary scientists have rejected the concept of race based on physical characteristics—or phenotype—in determining the variety of races. Evolutionary and social scientists observed that established racial categories and definitions lacked taxonomic validity. They argued that definitions of race were imprecise, arbitrary, derived from customs, had many exceptions and gradations and that the number of races observed varied according to the culture examined. For example, categorizing human populations by skin color was no more useful than using hair color or hair texture, or eye color, or nose size, lip size, or height. Instead, they theorized that analyzing human genotypic and phenotypic variation was better interpreted in terms of populations and clines
One of the leading scientists in advancing modern evolutionary theory was Sewall Wright. His work on inbreeding, mating systems and genetic drift made him, along with R. A. Fisher and J.B.S. Haldane, the founders of population genetics theory. Their work was the basis of modern evolutionary synthesis also referred to as neo-Darwinian synthesis.
The inbreeding coefficient and F-statistics, which are standard tools in population genetics, were developed by Wright. His contribution to the mathematical theory of genetic drift led to its designation as the Sewall Wright effect; this theory represents cumulative changes in gene frequencies that arise from random births, deaths, and Mendelian segregations in reproduction. Wright was involved in a longstanding argument with Fisher, who was convinced that most populations in nature were too large for the effects of genetic drift to be important.
Another important scientist involved in reconceptualizing genotypic and phenotypic variation was anthropologist C. Loring Brace. Brace was responsible for the observation that these variations, insofar as they were affected by natural selection, migration or genetic drift, were distributed along geographic gradations called “clines.” This conclusion drew attention to the fact that
phenotypic-based descriptions of races ignore numerous other similarities and differences, such as blood type, which do not correlate highly with race. This led anthropologist Frank Livingstone’s to conclude that "there are no races, only clines."
Theodosius Dobzhansky, an American geneticist born in Russia, is known for his basic work in genetics and conducted much of his research with fruit flies. His writings include Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937), a summary of contemporary knowledge of genetics; Evolution, Genetics, and Man (1955); and Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species (1962), which explores cultural and biological evolution.
In 1939, race scientist Carleton Coon published The Races of Europe. By 1950, Coon had co-authored Races: A Study of the Problem of Race Formation in Man with colleagues Stanley Garn and Joseph Birdsell. In Race Formation, a place-based concept of race—a multi-regional theory—emerged that countered the neo-Darwinian interpretation of biological variability, which emphasized natural selection. With multi-regional theory, races were conceptualized as geographical races, whose defining characteristics were seen as the byproduct of adaptation through natural selection based on environmental factors. His hierarchal ranking resembled the scientific racism of the early twentieth century.
American immunochemist William C. Boyd co-authored a publication entitled Races and People
with Isaac Asimov in 1958. A worldwide survey of the distribution of
blood types made by Boyd and his wife Lyle in the 1930s showed that
blood groups are inherited and not influenced by environment. Genetic
analysis of blood groups led him to hypothesize that the population
differences between human races are found in alleles. This hypothesis
prompted him to divide the world population into 13 geographically
distinct races with different blood group gene profiles.Harvard
professor Richard Lewontin helped establish the field of molecular
evolution in a pair of papers that he co-authored with J.L. Hubby in the
journal Genetics in 1966. Lewontin , an evolutionary
biologist, geneticist and social commentator, helped establish the
mathematics of population genetics and evolutionary theory. He found
that the proportion of human variation that could be statistically
explained by race was insignificant in a 1972 article. If it could be
found that the relative degree of variation among races was significant
compared to the variation within a single race, then race could be a
statistically valid concept; however, if the relative degree of
variation among races was not significant compared to the variation
within a race, then race would have to be seen as a less statistically
valid measure of biological differences.A series of papers using larger data sets have replicated Lewontin’s results, demonstrating that statistically “race” does not explain a great deal about human variation. Neo-Darwinian theories which explain animal behavior and social structures in terms of evolutionary strategy—which has been controversially applied to humans, and seen as genetic determinism—as espoused by sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists such as Edward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins, has drawn criticism from Lewontin. His opinion is that a more careful understanding of the context of the whole organism as well as its environment is required for a more complete understanding of evolution.
Arthur Jensen, a protégé of British educational psychologist Cyril Burt and an educational psychologist at University of California-Berkeley, was well known for his work in psychometrics and differential psychology. In the “nature versus nurture” debate, Jensen took a hereditarian position, claiming that genetics played an important role in behavioral traits, such as intelligence. He published a controversial work in 1969 called "How Much Can We Boost I.Q. and Scholastic Achievement?" The opinion he put forward in the publication was that over 70% of the within-race IQ variability was due to genetics, and the rest due to environmental influences, and that as a result programs designed to boost black IQ had failed, simply because the IQ of African Americans could not be increased.
In 1981, Stephen Jay Gould, the noted Harvard paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, published The Mismeasure of Man, in which he debunked biological deterministic theories of intelligence based on craniometry and psychological testing.
American
biologist and geneticist Richard Lewontin, concerned by what he viewed
as the oversimplification of genetics, co-authored Not In Our Genes,
with Steven Rose and Leon Kamin in 1984. The book questioned the theory
of heritability of human behavioral traits such as intelligence as
measured by IQ tests.Within both the mainstream media and the scientific community, large numbers of people rallied to both support and criticize The Bell Curve,
published in 1994 by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. Some
denounced the book and its authors as supporting scientific racism. In
1996, Stephen Jay Gould updated The Mismeasure of Man, rebutting Bell Curve authors Herrnstein and Murray's theories on race and intelligence.According to current research, the African continent is the ancestral home of modern humans. Scientists studying patterns in human genetic variation have observed the greatest amount of human genetic diversity in African populations. Genetic variation outside of Africa—in Europe and Asia—includes some, but not all, of the genetic variation found in Africa, which suggests that between 140,000 and 290,000 years ago, Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa to colonize Europe, Asia and the Americas. This “Out of Africa” theory is supported by studies of mtDNA, the Y chromosome, portions of the X chromosome, and some but not all autosomal (non-sex determining) regions, as well as the archaeological record.
The role of genetics in human variation had to evolve before the "Out of Africa" theory of ancestry could be fully understood. Perhaps the most significant scientific development in helping to further understand human biological variation was the discovery of genes and the growth of genetic research. In 1905, British biologist William Bateson coined the term "genetics," building on Gregor Mendel's work, which was not initially understood. Alfred Sturtevant developed the first map of a human chromosome in 1913. Five years later, R.A. Fisher's work combined genetic research with evolutionary biology, but it wasn't until 1944 that scientists Oswald Theodore Avery, Colin McLeod and Maclyn McCarty were able to isolate DNA as human genetic material.
In 1953, James D. Watson and Frances Crick discovered the double helix structure of DNA.
In 1956, Jo Hin Tjio and Albert Levan determined that there are 46 human chromosomes.In
1966, Marshall Niremberg, Heinrich Mathaei and Severo Ochoa cracked the
human geneticcode, opening the door for the explosion of genetic engineering studies and achievements beginning in the late 1970s. The genetic code is the set of rules by which information encoded in genetic
material (DNA or RNA sequences) is translated into proteins (amino acid sequences) by living cells.
In
1972, scientists Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer developed recombinant
DNA (rDNA)technology, an artificial DNA sequencing process that “recombines” the DNA of two different organisms.
In 1977, molecular geneticists Walter Gilbert and Allan Maxam pioneered a new DNA sequencing method.In
1981, population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza established the
dual inheritance theory with Marcus Feldman which suggests that human
variation is the result of both biological and cultural evolution.In 1983, scientists successfully mapped the first human disease gene—the gene for Huntington's disease—with DNA markers.In
1989, Francis Collins and Lap-Chee Tsui sequenced the first human gene.
It encoded the CFTR protein, the defective gene that causes cystic
fibrosis.In 2001, the Human Genome Project and Celera Genomics released the first draft sequences of the human genome.The Human Genome Project was successfully completed with 99% of the human genome sequenced to within 99.99% accuracy.http://www.understandingrace.org/history/science/ancestry_dna.html
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