Occurrences of ‘Blumenbach’ in published writings.
After a peak in the early 19th century, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach faded into
the background. He had little influence on the thinking of later
anthropologists. (source)
Stephen Jay Gould believed that the Western world
view had been perverted by the racial theorizing of anthropologists in the 18th
and 19th centuries, one of them being the American anthropologist Samuel George
Morton (1799-1851). Another was his German contemporary Johann Friedrich
Blumenbach (1752-1840):
In the eighteenth century a
disastrous shift occurred in the way Westerners perceived races. The man
responsible was Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, one of the least racist thinkers
of his day.
[…] Blumenbach chose to regard
his own European variety as closest to the created ideal and then searched for
the subset of Europeans with greatest perfection--the highest of the high, so
to speak. As we have seen, he identified the people around Mount Caucasus as
the closest embodiments of the original ideal and proceeded to name the entire
European race for its finest representatives.
[…] however subjective (and even
risible) we view the criterion today, Blumenbach chose physical beauty as his
guide to ranking. He simply affirmed that Europeans were most beautiful, with
Caucasians as the most comely of all.
[…] Where would Hitler have been
without racism, Jefferson without liberty? Blumenbach lived as a cloistered
professor all his life, but his ideas have reverberated in ways that he never
could have anticipated, through our wars, our social upheavals, our sufferings,
and our hopes. (Gould, 1994)
As Gould himself noted, Blumenbach denied that human
populations differ in mental capacity. In this, he was less racist than many other
people of his day. But he did posit differences in sexual beauty, thus ultimately
leading humanity to … Hitler.
Is this true? Yes, Blumenbach considered Europeans the
most attractive of all humans, as we may see in his work De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa:
Caucasian
variety.
Colour white, cheeks rosy, hair brown or chestnut-coloured [...] In general,
that kind of appearance which, according to our opinion of symmetry, we
consider most handsome and becoming. (Blumenbach, 1795, p. 265)
Meiners refers all nations to two
stocks: (1) handsome, (2) ugly; the first white, the latter dark. He includes
in the handsome stock the Celts, Sarmatians, and oriental nations. The ugly
stock embraces all the rest of mankind. (Blumenbach, 1795, p. 268)
Caucasian
variety.
I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its
neighbourhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful
race of men, I mean the Georgian; and because all physiological reasons
converge to this, that in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the
greatest probability to place the autochthones of mankind. For in the first
place, that stock displays, as we have seen, the most beautiful form of the
skull, from which, as from a mean and primeval type, the others diverge by most
easy gradations on both sides to the two ultimate extremes (that is on the one
side, the Ethiopian, on the other, the Mongolian) […] (Blumenbach, 1795, p.
269)
These passages, however, covered less than a page
out of a tome that ran to 276 pages. Nor did they recount anything new in the
academic or popular literature. Blumenbach simply stated what most people
of his time believed, as is implied by the above quotes. One likeminded person
was the French naturalist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832):
The white race, with its oval
face, long hair, protruding nose, to which the civilized peoples of Europe
belong, and which appears to us to be the most beautiful of all races, is also
much superior to the others by strength of genius, courage and activity.
(Cuvier, 1798, p. 71)
Another was the American President Thomas
Jefferson (1743-1826):
And is this difference [of color]
of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty
in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions
of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable
to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable
veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race? Add to these,
flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of
the whites, declared by their preference of them […] (Jefferson, 1785, p. 265)
Blumenbach did not create a perception that
Europeans were more beautiful than other humans. That perception already
existed.
Influences on
later anthropologists?
But was Blumenbach instrumental in transmitting this
perception to later anthropologists? Did he play a pivotal role in creating the
racialized mind-set of later times? That, too, is doubtful. There is a chasm
between him and his successors. Unlike the latter, he saw human diversity
through the lens of the Bible, in particular the story of the Flood. Since
Noah’s Ark came to rest on Mount Ararat, he reasoned that the inhabitants of
that region must closely resemble the humans that God chose to repeople the
Earth. From this epicenter of physical perfection, Noah’s descendants spread to
other lands and gradually became less perfect in appearance.
This view is quite unlike later ones, which were
framed in secular and evolutionary terms. For Blumenbach, change was
degenerative, moving from the perfect to the less perfect. Later
anthropologists, while accepting the possibility of degenerative change, saw a
general trend towards advancement and increasing complexity.
Like others of his time, Blumenbach also believed in
the inheritance of acquired characteristics. If people of any origin share the
same climate, diet, and means of existence, they will converge to the same
physical type—not through natural selection, but through the direct action of
the environment. In this, he was poles apart from later writers, particularly
those influenced by Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel.
The chasm between him and later writers can be seen
in the occurrence of the term ‘Blumenbach’ in books over the years. After a
peak in the early 19th century, references to his name fell into steep decline,
long before the publication of Darwin’s Descent
of Man in 1871 (Hawks, 2013). That book had only four such references, all
of them minor.
Finally, European writers do not assign this German
naturalist a key role in the development of racial thinking. In a recent French
dictionary on the history of racism, there are entries for such individuals as
Bolk, Buffon, Darwin, Gobineau, Haeckel, Nietzsche, and Linnaeus, but none at
all for Blumenbach (Taguieff, 2013).
Famous but no
real legacy
Blumenbach, though widely respected in his time, made
few intellectual contributions that would be both lasting and original, other
than his coining of the term ‘Caucasian’ for white folks. What about the notion
that the Caucasus is the epicenter of human beauty? It was already in
circulation, as seen in this passage by the French traveler Jean Chardin
(1643-1713):
[…] the Persian blood is now
highly refined by frequent intermixtures with the Georgians and the
Circassians, two nations which surpass all the world in personal beauty. There
is hardly a man of rank in Persia who is not born of a Georgian or Circassian
mother; and even the king himself is commonly sprung, on the female side, from
one or other of these countries. As it is long since this mixture commenced,
the Persian women have become very handsome and beautiful, though they do not
rival the ladies of Georgia (Lawrence, 1848, p. 310)
The Caucasus was the last area where one could
freely buy fair-skinned women for marriage or concubinage, typically for
clients in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Previously, the zone
of recruitment had been larger, extending into what is now Ukraine and southern
Russia. Further back in time, it had covered almost all of Europe. But this earlier
page of European history was largely forgotten by Blumenbach’s time.
Blumenbach really had only one original idea. He saw
a causal link between the biblical account of the Flood and the beauty of
European women, particularly those from the Caucasus. But that single flash of
insight would leave no lasting impression on future generations.
More shenanigans
…
None of this was pointed out in 1994, when Stephen
Jay Gould published his essay on Blumenbach. Or perhaps it was. If a man shouts
in a forest and no one listens, did he ever really say anything?
Two years later, Gould incorporated this essay into
a new edition of The Mismeasure of Man.
Once again, he couldn’t resist the urge to “fudge”:
In 1996, when Gould updated The Mismeasure of Man, he added an
article about Blumenbach. It included a drawing of skulls which Gould claimed
to be an illustration from one of Blumenbach’s books. In this graphic, a
Caucasian skull is situated higher than those of other races. When a paper by
University of Tubingen historian Thomas Junker demonstrated that the original
drawing placed all the skulls at the same level, Gould blamed the mistake on
his editor saying, “I don’t think that I even knew about the figure when I
wrote the article, for I worked from a photocopy of Blumenbach’s text alone.”
Gould dismissed this error as “inconsequential” and faulted Junker for
misstating “the central thesis of my article—a misinterpretation that cannot, I
think, be attributed to any lack of clarity on my part.” (Michael, 2013)
One might wonder why Gould missed this error when he
got the galley proofs for the new edition. Furthermore, since his errors point
in the same direction, one might wonder whether there had been a systematic
tendency to distort the facts, either consciously or unconsciously. Wasn’t this
the same argument he had made when condemning Samuel George Morton?
References
Blumenbach, J.F. (1795). De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa, trans. On the Natural Variety of Mankind, 1865, London.
Cuvier, G. (1798). Tableau
elementaire de l'histoire naturelle des animaux, Paris.
Gould, S.J. (1994). The Geometer of Race, Discover Magazine, (November 1994),
online edition
http://discovermagazine.com/1994/nov/thegeometerofrac441#.UOGEqXcdOZQ
Jefferson, T. (1785). Notes on the State of Virginia,
http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=JefVirg.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=14&division=div1
Hawks, J. (2013). Blumenbach, Haeckel, Dobzhansky,
January 2, John Hawks Weblog,
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/history/biology/blumenbach-haeckel-dobzhansky-2013.html
Lawrence, W. (1848). Lectures on Comparative Anatomy, Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural
History of Man, London: Henry G. Bohn.
Michael, J.S. (2013). Stephen Jay Gould and Samuel
George Morton: A Personal Commentary, Part 4, June. 14, Michael1988.com
http://michael1988.com/?p=203
Taguieff, P.-A. (ed.) (2013). Dictionnaire historique et critique du racisme, Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France.
15 comments:
Yes, Gould posited unconscious manipulation as a scientific norm, but implicitly he was exempting himself and anyone who agreed with him; skewering physical anthropologists as supremacists, thereby demonstrating he was better than those who constructed hierarchies of humanity. The man had his cake and ate it. A true Living Legend.
Where would Hitler have been without racism? Well he would still have the heroes of Wagner as inspiration. Morover, he would still have had the concept of the Volk, which came from extreme egalitarian and cultural relativist Herder. Admittedly Romantic ideas originated as a reaction against the scientific outlook of the Enlightenment typified by Blumenbach. Without racism Hitler would still have have had the realist rationale for aggression:
"THE edgiest parts of Tragedy are when Mearsheimer presents full-bore rationales for the aggression of Wilhelmine Germany, Nazi Germany, and imperial Japan. The German decision to push for war in 1914 was not a case of wacky strategic ideas pushing a state to start a war it was sure to lose. It was … a calculated risk motivated in large part by Germany’s desire to break its encirclement by the Triple Entente, prevent the growth of Russian power, and become Europe’s hegemon."
One may wonder what Gould, would have done without a concept of racism that was widely accepted in the wider society. It's clear to me Gould was feted,not because he was original, but because he articulated the views of a very influential body of opinion among the higher, the most pacified, reaches of society.
Questioning the reliability of human cognition used to be an argument used against atheists. Gould used it to defend the new foundational belief of Western society.
Johann Friedich Blummenbach should be imagined who are a chosen.
Do not know anything about what really happened in World War II.
Blumenbach was not a racist, please stop using the word ugly, you guys invented by the German city of Frankfurt, mankind has lived 98% of his story without that thing, that denies, especially the Europeans, the right all natural and their biological prefer than the other, there is nothing wrong with that.
Insofar as it suited his purpose, Gould was quite the nominalist: "We abstract what we consider the “essence” of an entity, and then arrange our judgments by their degree of similarity to this assumed type"
He switched feet to claim species corresponded to an objective reality, but races did not.
"Species are unique in the Linnaean hierarchy as the only category with such objectivity. All higher units--genera, families, phyla, et cetera--are human conventions [...] subspecies are also partly objective but partly based on human decision. [...] Yet subspecies cannot be irrevocably unique natural populations (like full species) for two reasons: First, the decision to name them rests with human taxonomists, and isn’t solely dictated by nature. Second, they are, by definition, still capable of interbreeding with other subpopulations of the species and are, therefore, impermanent and subject to reamalgamation." See here.
Gould was a political activist first and a scientist second.
I doubt if it's only ducks:
http://www.ducks.org/conservation/waterfowl-biology/waterfowl-hybrids
(...)
Nearly every waterfowl season, a hunter brings a photo of a strange duck to a DU biologist and asks, "What kind of duck is this?" Typically, the bird has characteristics of two waterfowl species—the wings of a mallard and the bill of a pintail, for example, or the tail of a wigeon and the profile of a wood duck. Known as hybrids, these birds result from the mating of two different species.
Hybridization, or crossbreeding, occurs when an individual of one species enters the geographic or ecological space of another species, and two individuals mate and produce offspring. Hybridization sometimes results from a mixed-species pairing. A male mallard, for example, will pair with a female black duck and prevent other male black ducks from pairing with that female. But hybridization can also result from forced copulation, where a male of one species forcibly mates with a female of another species.
Waterfowl crossbreed more often than any other family of birds. Scientists have recorded more than 400 hybrid combinations among waterfowl species. Mallards crossbreed with nearly 50 other species, and wood ducks hybridize with a surprising 26 other species. Nearly 20 percent of waterfowl hybrid offspring are capable of reproducing.
In North America, one of the most common wild hybrids results from mallard/pintail breeding. Mallards also commonly crossbreed with black ducks, wigeon, shovelers, cinnamon teal, green-winged teal, and gadwalls.
(...)
http://www.ducks.org/conservation/waterfowl-biology/amazing-waterfowl-facts/page6
(...)
While hybridization is very rare in the wild, mallards have been known to crossbreed with some 40 waterfowl species...The wood duck, known to have crossbred with as many as 20 other duck species, takes second place in the annals of waterfowl promiscuity.
(...)
Mallards force themselves on female Black ducks and intimidate the Black males, but surely they don't have a theory about the superiority of Mallards genes or penes; do human groups need to have a theory to violate the natural rights of others?
Tooby said "To restrict interbreeding is to cut off ones population from the slow influx of spreading favourable mutations being harvested across the species range {...] In Goulds view, most evolutionary change takes place when closely related biological lineages compete, with one surviving and spreading through the others' ranges while the others go extinct...there is not much difference between a incipient species and a 'race' and in Goulds world of sudden genetic revolutions there is not necessarily any difference at all... Gould does intimate that competitive ability between sibling species is often the deciding force"
Gould said WW1 and 2 (and Nam) were the result of Blumenbach (and Haeckel). Yet according to Tooby, Gould was not really arguing against selection at the species level at all. Basically Gould was saying that it was statistical and logical fallacies that caused injustice and enormity. It is not obvious to me that any cultural, ethnic or political unit that ever existed was formed or motivated to commit aggression through an perception of superiority in some quality like beauty or intelligence.
I suppose during interactions individual ducks can be said to have beliefs about the relative formidableness of those they are competing with though.
Anon and others,
I'm starting to delete off-topic comments more ruthlessly now. There are other venues for some of the topics you wish to discuss. Please avail yourselves of them.
'''m starting to delete off-topic comments more ruthlessly now. There are other venues for some of the topics you wish to discuss. Please avail yourselves of them.''
My answers are completely related to Gould fraud. To understand why reason one public (or pubic) person lies about very important issues you need go more deep on the topics.
He's not lie because was naive, idealistic or something, but because make part of jewish agenda.
Unfortunatelly you need accept the bad reality or these bad reality some hour will be appear near in your house.
@Peter - I suppose you are using open-mindedness on SJG's ???dishonesty as a rhetorical device - but as a professional you must know people who had close dealings with SJG, and can confirm beyond doubt that he was thoroughly dishonest and had no interest in discovering or propagating the truth nor in correcting error?
The evidence on this is as solid and uncontradicted as anything gets, and if it isn't regarded as enough to convict him... well, then we might as well give up on scientific standards altogether.
It is a matter of standards of proof. Within the invisible college, scientists have to prove themselves honest and competent or else they are ignored.
It is not up to other scientists to come up conclusive evidence to legal standards of proof and with no alternative possible explanation that X is dishonest - they are assumed dishonest and incompetent until they show otherwise. And when they are shown to be sloppy or biased, then then *must* acknowledge the fact, publicly, or else that is that for them.
At least, that is how *real* science works. Of course, there is very little of that nowadays.
Among serious and competent scientists actively working in the field, Gould's has been ignored for many decades. Other people's opinions ought not to matter, since they are staking nothing upon them.
***scientists actively working in the field, Gould's has been ignored for many decades.***
Yes, Robert Wright wrote some scathing essays in the New Republic, Slate
and New Yorker about Gould's dishonesty & incompetence in discussing evolutionary biology
. In the Slate article he wrote:
" It all started in 1990, when I reviewed his book WonderfulLife for the NewRepublic. I argued, basically, that Gould is a fraud. He has convinced the public that he is not merely a great writer, but a great theorist of evolution. Yet, among top-flight evolutionary biologists, Gould is considered a pest--not just a lightweight, but an actively muddled man who has warped the public's understanding of Darwinism.:
Gould apparently ignored the comments but The New Yorker article prompted a response from Gould - not actually bothering to rebut Wright, but just noting his surprise they ran it:
IThis winter, after a brief silence, Wright has come back into Gould's life with a vengeance. To coincide with the publication of Nonzero, Wright has orchestrated a flurry of bylined pieces in The New Republic, Time, and the New York Times. But it was his New Yorker article that drew blood. "Other people have attacked me before," Gould says. "But this was different. I've read The New Yorker my whole life; I consider it a friend. And this did feel, emotionally, like a betrayal by a friend...
Gould, meanwhile, doesn't feel like the winner. "I still can't understand why The New Yorker ran that article," he says. And though he's been asked to review Wright's book, so far he has declined the invitation."
http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/columns/culturebusiness/1931/index1.html
Autor Desconhecido,
As the owner of this blog, I get to decide what is off-topic. Not you.
'Peter Frost' isn't a pseudonym. It corresponds to a real person who publishes under his own name. I thus assume the consequences of what I write, and some of those consequences can be quite negative. I can deal with that. But I don't see why I should suffer for stupid things that anonymous commenters write.
Lately, I've been getting a lot of extreme comments on my blog. You're not doing me a favor by writing such comments, although for you that might be a feature not a bug.
If this continues, I'll have to impose comment moderation. Will that be necessary?
Dear Mr. Frost,
I would like to know if you would be interested in being interviewed for a documentary about men, women, sexual attraction and sexual selection. I could not find any contact in your webpage, so I am writing here hoping that you may see it. You may write back to me privately at cronopiototal@yahoo.com, or let me know in which email address I can reach you, in case that you are interested. It would be very short, perhaps primarily by email and eventually filmed with a small video camera. Thank you!
The female sex drive
Of course, it is going to be modified by selection ...
Of course, females are in a difficult position. Any open displays of sexuality is likely to be mistaken by the wrong sort of males ... life is so hard.
I used to read a lot of Gould's books, but one day I woke up and realized that he was a charlatan.
A recent 2017 study has documented that the English translations of Blumenbach were faulty. Thus Gould's evaluation and that of many others were based on bad translations. See here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00048-017-0173-8
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