Still missing the point

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.

Not getting the point

Samuel George Morton, an early American anthropologist. He fudged his data to suit his preconceived ideas on race, according to Stephen Jay Gould. It later turned out that Gould was the fudger.

Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) is still seen as a great evolutionary biologist, if not one of the greatest. Yet the years since his death have steadily tarnished his memory. This is especially so for his best known book, The Mismeasure of Man, which focused on an early American anthropologist, Samuel George Morton (1799-1851). In this book and in an earlier Science article, Gould showed how Morton had fudged his measurements of a collection of skulls to make Europeans seem bigger-brained than Africans.

Gould didn’t re-measure any of the skulls. He reanalyzed Morton’s data … and in the process did far more fudging than Morton had ever done. When a team of physical anthropologists, headed by Jason E. Lewis, located and re-measured half of the skulls, they found only a few randomly distributed errors in the original measurements. Morton had in fact tended to overestimate African skull size (Lewis et al., 2011).

Interestingly, the same conclusion had been reached almost a quarter-century earlier by John S. Michael, a senior at Macalester College in Minnesota. This discovery has been recounted on John’s blog:

I re-measured the Morton skulls in 1986 as part of my undergraduate thesis, which was limited in scope and conducted without the rigor of graduate research. Nonetheless, I determined that my measurements more or less matched Morton’s, and so I described his overall results to be “reasonably accurate.” (Michael, 2013a)

Troubled by his finding, he got in touch with Gould:

In 1986, I mailed my results to Gould, who requested we meet after he gave a lecture in May at the University of Minnesota. Our meeting lasted perhaps five minutes. He told me that I “missed the point,” and abruptly ended the conversation, ignoring me and instead speaking to the man next to him. My recollection is that he did not say goodbye, so I simply walked away. […] After I published my paper in 1988, I sent Gould a copy but got no response. When I wrote him again, he replied that he had lost it and requested another copy, which I sent. I never heard back from him.

Sometime later, Gould gave a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania, after which he was asked a question about my paper. His response was simply that he would not discuss it, and he did not. Gould never mentioned my paper in any of his prolific writings. In 2011, Lewis wrote that, “were Gould still alive, we expect he would have mounted a defense of his analysis of Morton.” Soon after that, Prothero noted, “I’m sure if Steve were alive, he would be able to counter these accusations in his own inimitable way.” And yet these two statements conflict with the fact that Gould actually had two opportunities to counter such accusations, and instead chose to silently disengage. (Michael, 2013b)

Although John Michael’s paper appeared in Current Anthropology, a leading journal in its field, the response was largely silence (Michael, 1988). As recently as five years ago, a science historian had only this to say:

Gould’s interpretation of Samuel George Morton’s cranial data have been questioned by John S. Michael, who, as an undergraduate student at Macalester College, re-measured the skulls as part of an honors project (Michael, 1988). It is not entirely evident that one should prefer the measurements of an undergraduate to those of a professional paleontologist whose own specialist work included some very meticulous measurements of fossil snails. (Kitcher, 2004)

Some people were more supportive, but they were the wrong kind:

Because my findings refuted the writings of Gould, a left-leaning anti-racist Jew, I was celebrated in hate-filled white supremacist web pages, such as davidduke.com and stormfront.org. My work was grossly misquoted in a series of papers by J. Philippe Rushton, a proponent of eugenics from University of Western Ontario. In 2002, he served as the president of the Pioneer Fund, which the Southern Law Poverty Center designated as a “White Nationalist” group because it continues to fund the study of “breeding superior human beings that was discredited by various Nazi atrocities.” I have written this paper in part to document my strong displeasure that my work was used to promote eugenics or racist ideology, which I in no way support. (Michael, 2013a)

Yes, supporters can be as problematic as detractors. But a scientific finding is not invalidated because its supporters are the wrong kind of people. It stands or falls on its own merits. Also, the Southern Law Poverty Center is hardly an impartial source.

John Michael was ultimately vindicated when the Lewis et al. paper came out two years ago. Yet, even then, he never got the credit he deserved, as may be seen in a Nature editorial that raised the possibility of an improper relationship between Lewis’ research team and the University of Pennsylvania:

Of course, Lewis and his colleagues have their own motivations. Several in the group have an association with the University of Pennsylvania, and have an interest in seeing the valuable but understudied skull collection freed from the stigma of bias (Anon, 2011)

No evidence is provided for this curious accusation. In any case, Gould’s fudging had originally been revealed by someone from another university and from another state.  But who remembers?

Conclusion

John Michael found himself in an unequal battle. As a graduate student he was challenging not only an Ivy League professor but also a leading antiracist crusader. It didn’t really matter whether Gould was telling the truth or not. There was something bigger at stake—the war on racism. And that war had to be won.

John indeed “missed the point.” By insisting too much on truth, he was being at best naïve and at worst a willing accomplice of racism—by far a greater evil than falsehood. This was how many well-meaning people saw things in the late 20th century.

References

Anon. (2011). Mismeasure for mismeasure, Nature, 474, 419.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v474/n7352/full/474419a.html

Gould S.J. (1981). The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

Gould, S.J. (1978). Morton’s ranking of races by cranial capacity: unconscious manipulation of data may be a scientific norm, Science, 200, 503–509.

Kitcher, P. (2004). Evolutionary Theory and the Social Uses of Biology, Biology and Philosophy, 19, 13-14.

Lewis, J.E., D. DeGusta, M.R. Meyer, J.M. Monge, A.E. Mann, and R.L. Holloway. (2011). The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias, PLoS Biology, 9(6) e1001071

Michael, J.S. (2013a). Stephen Jay Gould and Samuel George Morton: A Personal Commentary, June 7, Michael1988.com

http://michael1988.com/?p=114

Michael, J.S. (2013b). Stephen Jay Gould and Samuel George Morton: A Personal Commentary, Part 4, June. 14, Michael1988.com

http://michael1988.com/?p=203

Michael, J.S. (1988). A new look at Morton’s craniological research, Current Anthropology, 29, 349–354.