Dr. D.R.Johnson

The fact that cultures evolve in different places and at different rates tends to segregate man into distinct groups. The presence of distinct groups tends to lead to genetic divergence.

These two facts are both plausible, but the second does not necessarily follow from the first. A group of animals that cannot, or normally does not breed with another group to produce fertile offspring is a species. Often we have to infer this with fossils, until better evidence comes along. Yet we have seen gradual transitions between say habilis and erectus, and who is to say that Neanderthals didn't breed with sapiens to produce those troublesome intermediate types? As far as we know all groups of modern man have always been able to interbreed, and have interbred where this is Geographically feasible. Overlap has produced hybridisation - there are no pure races of man.

But there are still major groupings of interrelated people possessing distinctive physical traits which are the result of inheritance. If I say to you Negro, or Chinaman, or Aborigine, or Amerindian a picture appears of distinct facial and body type. General anatomical relationships indicate common ancestry. In 1961 this table was published in Teach Yourself Anthropology

At present our view of these racial groupings is a snapshot: a snapshot taken a hundred years ago and one taken in a hundred years time would be very different. Races are changing, and always have. They are probably changing now faster than ever before.

We have seen that what would probably nowadays be called racial differences were present between different forms of habilis, of erectus and the early sapiens types: so it is not surprising that they are present today. But these differences within populations make it difficult to trace exactly where modern man came from and when.

Molecular data, such as blood grouping, DNA analysis and linguistic studies all point to an African origin for man, as indeed does the fossil record. However the timing and pattern of the subsequent spread are as controversial as ever. Also molecular and morphological traits are not necessarily coupled: a tool which gives a 99% likeness between man and chimp is obviously not a good discriminator, and the molecular data may well be recording the earlier spread of H erectus early sapiens out of Africa rather than the radiation of modern man. DNA data relies on the rate of mutation of its bases: if DNA evolution is constant then the differentiation of modern populations must have been >0.25 - 0.75 mya - i.e. in the erectus phase. If DNA evolution is not constant we can't use it as a tool.

There are also problems with the data. The original 'out of Africa' hypothesis was based upon phylogenetic trees which in turn reflected the DNA structure of population from all over the world. A shortest possible tree was constructed to relate all these samples to each other. Subsequent re-analysis has shown at least 10,000 other possible trees with 5 less steps than the original - some not based on Africa. So there are two more problems: the shortest tree isn't and there are another 10,000 choices, all as good as each other. Also the preferred trees do not reflect similarities in morphological traits.

So, we don't have a detailed pedigree of where we came from, and we know that races are changing. But how do we account for the sets of characteristics which define a Chinese or a Red Indian? As Biologists we can sort out some likely causes:

• Mutation. Changes occur in the structure of the genetic material
• Natural selection. Such changes may have survival value
• Genetic drift: if a breakaway group has some genetic characters unlike those of a main population, then after a time divergence may occur
• Population mixture will bring in different genes.

Skin Colour
Probably the most visible characteristic is skin colour. Historically long standing division into white, yellow and black. This is probably due originally to mutation: the classic story says that a darker pigment will give more protection against the sun. Probably more likely, if we believe an out of Africa scenario is that mutation giving a less pigmented skin allowed greater synthesis of vitamin D from the rather reduced sunshine of northern areas. Anyway, there was presumably a selective advantage. Skin colour is therefore a good racial classifier, highly visible, not terribly accurate (some Caucasoid races are darker than some Negroids and there is a huge range of variation).

Eye colour
All non-Caucasoid populations have a dark brown or a black iris: Caucasoids have a range from light blue to brown. Many Asiatics have an epicanthic fold over the inner cornea of the eye which gives there appearance of a slant

Hair colour and texture
Hair is dark and woolly in Negroids, straighter and lighter coloured in most Caucasoids, black and flat in cross section in Chinese.

Other indices
Cephalic index has also been used i.e. relative broadness of the head. This is not really useful because of inter-group variability. Stature, nose shape, lips, ears and body hair have also been used. Blood groups are useful - Caucasians and Asiatics have a very similar distribution, American Indians are largely O

Overlaps
Of course these are generalisations and there is much variation: Swedes are tall, fair haired and blue eyed aren't they? Well 11% of them are according to the Swedish army recruiting figures.

But even allowing for overlaps and generalisations and mixtures we can classify three broad racial types in the modern world.

Caucasoids. 1,000 million people with variable skin colour; white-dark brown. Hair variable, never woolly, body hair often thick. Lips tend to be thin. Three subdivisions exist, the Nordic, the Mediterranean and the Alpine.

The Nordic group are often tall, blonde and narrow headed - Scandinavia, Baltic, Germany, France, Britain The Mediterranean group (Southern France, Spain, Italy and oddly, Wales Egyptians, Semites, Persians, Afghans and some Indians. Lighter in body build, dark and narrow headed. The Alpine group extends from the Mediterranean to Asia. Broad headed, square jaws, olive skin, brown hair.

Mongoloids Most numerous of the present day populations, split into three groups

• The Eastern Siberians, Eskimos and the Northern American Indians
• The Japanese, Koreans, Chinese
• The Indonesians and Malays

Others. We also have to fit in somewhere the Central African pigmies, the Bushmen and the Australoids.

Racialism
Noting that there are differences between men from different areas is a very different thing from implying any judgement. Today there is a politically correct view that all men are equal. This is undoubtedly biologically correct too.

But lets go back to our Phoenician merchant travelling a world which varies culturally from his own comfortable and advanced society to the stone age. Let us get into the shoes of a Catholic missionary in South America in the fifteenth century, or a Methodist in nineteenth century Africa. These good people saw a stone age culture around them, believed implicitly in good faith that their version was better and drew the inevitable conclusion that the 'natives' who lived in 'savagery' were indeed savages and must be inferior because they had done nothing about it.

We thus see the beginnings of a feeling that members of other races, handily identified by visible characteristics, were inferior or even subhuman. Once implanted such a belief is difficult to eradicate.

Lets take up this belief at an arbitrary point, before Darwinism (so that we can see what impact the theory of evolution and the descent of man, and the introduction of quantitative science made) and in an arbitrary place, America (because there were two 'inferior' racial groups there, the Indians and the Blacks).

In America at this time the general view was Indians below whites and blacks below everyone else. This was part of a general view of white supremacy Perhaps the truth was unintentionally amended to make the point (the chimp skull has too large a braincase, the Negro a much extended jaw) but the picture was clear). Hard liners said that Blacks were inferior and their biological status justified enslavement: soft liners (such as Jefferson ) said that Blacks were inferior but that was not sufficient reason to enslave them. Soft liners differed in their views - some said that proper education would improve the Blacks, others that the ineptitude was inbuilt. The most liberal thinkers had an attitude which would today embarrass all of us .

' And while we are clearing America of woods and so making this side of our globe reflect a brighter light why should we.. darken its people? Why increase the sons of Africa by planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all blacks and tawneys, of increasing the lovely whites and red?' That was Benjamin Franklin: at least he was pro-Indian.

Thomas Jefferson, another American hero:
'I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race or made distinct by time and circumstance, are inferior to the whites in the endowment of both body and of mind'.

Abraham Lincoln:
'There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favour of having the superior position assigned to the white race'

All leading scientists followed these views. Linnaeus described Homo sapiens afer as 'ruled by caprice' Homo sapiens europaeus as 'ruled by customs'. Of African women he wrote Femnis sine pudoris: mammae lactanes prolixae - women without shame, breasts lactate profusely. The men, he added, are indolent and anoint themselves with grease. Cuvier, the founder of Geology Palaeontology and comparative Anatomy considered blacks:-
'the most degraded of human races, whose form approaches that of the beast and whose intelligence is nowhere great enough to arrive at regular government'

Charles Darwin, as liberal and abolitionist as any man alive at the time wrote about a future time when the gap between man and apes would be increased by the extinction of intermediates such as the chimpanzee and Hottentot. Man would be isolated by the gap between Caucasian and baboon, not by that between ' Negro or Australian and the gorilla'.

So how do we, as pre Darwinians, explain the inferiority of some races, or the superiority of others? Again there were two views. The first, very Christian suggested a single Adam and Eve who were, before the Fall, perfect. Modern races have degenerated since Eden, but to greater or lesser extents. Climate was seen as the most likely agent. Some argued that change was irreversible, some that remedial action was possible: Stanhope Smith, President of Princeton hoped that American Blacks, in a climate more suited to Caucasian temperaments, would soon turn white.

The harder argument held that human races were separate biological species, descendants of different Adams. Degeneration was the most popular view, not least because scripture was not to be discarded lightly. Moreover inter fertility of races made them more like a single species.

Some people managed to sit quite firmly on fences. Serres, a French medical anatomist wrote:
'Their conclusion is that the Negro is no more a white man than a donkey is a horse or a zebra - a theory put into practice in the United States of America, to the shame of Civilisation'

Yet he managed to hold the view that recapitulation was the answer, and that Blacks were like white children and Mongolians like white adolescents. He had some trouble getting his data to agree with this hypothesis but settled on the distance between navel and penis 'that inefficable sign of embryonic life in man'. This distance is small relative to body height in man, and the navel migrates upward in fetal life, but to a lesser extent in Blacks and more in whites than Asiatics.

David Hume (the Scottish philosopher) took the alternative view, that man was disparate:
'I am apt to suspect the Negroes and in general all the other species of man (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilised nation of any other complexion than white'.

Others were less rational in their criteria. Charles White, an English surgeon , wrote that only in the white man would one find:

'that nobly arched head, containing such a quantity of brain... where that variety of features and fullness of expression, those long, flowing graceful ringlets, that majestic beard those rosy cheeks and coral lips? Where, except on the bosom of the European woman, two such plump and snowy white hemispheres, tipt with vermilion '

Now the first important fact about the polygenic theory is that is was American: it was referred to as the American school of anthropology. It came from a nation practising slavery and at the same time expelling its aboriginal natives from their homelands. The second important fact is that is was, at first, a non-scientific theory. Scientific respectability was added by two great American anthropologists Agassiz and Morton

Agassiz was in fact a Swiss, converted to polygeny after his first encounters with American Blacks. He was also a creationist - but everyone was before 1859. He maintained his beliefs however and remained a leading anti-evolutionist.
In studying animals and plants Agassiz formed a view that there were centres of creation and that organisms didn't generally wander far away. He classified geographical races as separate species, each created at a different centre of origin and exploiting environmental differences. Man was a startling exception.
'Here is revealed anew the superiority of the human genre and its greater independence in nature. Whereas the animals are distinct species in the different zoological provinces to which they appertain, man, despite the diversity of his races, constitutes one and the same species all over the surface of the globe'

But Agassiz had probably never met a Black in Switzerland., or indeed in Europe. When he moved to Philadelphia he was seized by a visceral revulsion and changed his tune. He never produced any data but felt:

'it is impossible for me to repress the feeling that they are not of the same blood as us. ....their black faces with thick lips and grimacing teeth, the wool on their heads, their bent knees, their elongated hands, their large curved nails and especially the livid colour of the palms of their hands'

Strong stuff. Agassiz rationalised the separateness of the Blacks like this. The Christian doctrine of Adam refers, of course, only to Caucasians. The bible does not speak of things not known to the ancients. Negroes and Caucasians are as distinct in Egyptian mummified remains (3,000BC) as they are today. The chronology of the Bible puts creation at 4004BC. Surely if they diverged so much in the first 1,000 years they would have diverged much further since. So, the racial groups, occupying distinct geographical areas (albeit with some migration) are distinct species, created at separate centres of origin.

Allied to separateness, of course, was a pecking order and, of course, the Negroes were at the bottom. Because of this interbreeding must be discouraged., as unnatural and repugnant. The fact that interbreeding occurred was, of course, due to the sexual receptiveness of housemaids and the naiveté of young, white, Southern gentlemen. The servants says Agassiz are halfbeeds already (although how the parents overcame their natural repugnance is not stated) and the young men respond aesthetically to the white half while a degree of blackness loosens the natural inhibitions of the higher race.

All this, remember, and no data. Data was supplied by Moreton, who had a large collection of skulls, over 1,000 by the time he died. Why? because he had a hypothesis that the ranking of the races could be proved by the structure of the brain, as reflected in the skull. He measured the cranial capacity with mustard seed, and later, because that was not totally satisfactory, with lead shot. He produced clean, objective data reinforcing prejudice and putting the white man on top.

The odd thing is that these summary tables are derived from raw data, which he also published, and which said no such thing. There is no reason to suspect Morton as a faker - if so why publish the raw data, but unconsciously data was massaged to fit prejudice. With statistics in its infancy he did not understand the weighting of sub samples to make an average. He was choosy about who was in and who was out: Peruvians (who lowered the Indian mean) were in, Hindus (who lowered the Caucasian) were out. Changing from seed (where results are rather unpredictable) to shot (where results are repeatable) made a difference, but not a consistent one. Using shot instead of seed shifted the black average by 5.4cu in but the Caucasian by only 1.8: the Blacks fared the worst when results could be (unconsciously) biased by packing in more seed. Means were never computed by sex or stature: the Negroids from Egypt contained more (smaller) females, not more stupid blacks.

But craniology was not dead - it was the coming thing.

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