RaceSlide 2Slide 3Slide 4Slide 5Slide 6Slide 7Slide 8Slide 9Slide 10Slide 11Slide 12Slide 13Slide 14Slide 15Slide 16Slide 17Slide 18Slide 19Slide 20Slide 21Slide 22Slide 23Slide 24Slide 25Slide 26Slide 27Slide 28Slide 29Slide 30Slide 31Slide 32Slide 33Slide 34Slide 35Slide 36Slide 37RaceA social concept, but biologically unsupportable!Most of us can see differences in humans: skin color, eye color, hair are obvious. We, and most others in the world, tend to use these traits to categorize people. Morally, many of us understand the ramifications of our use of these categories and the harm they have brought and can bring. We need to understand the difference between what is essentially a sociological view of race rather than a biological view of race. Is race in our genes or just in our heads?Try some sorting by “race.”A sociological view of race: Race is used as a means of determining how a person should be related to or treated, either on a personal level or under some aspect of the law. Race is a modern idea; ancient societies did not divide people of physical features, but by language, wealth, status, religion, or class.A biological view of race: The anatomy of a given racial group is used in comparison with that of other racial groups to investigate how people adapt to environments. It is essentially "value free."Homer (fl. 1200 - 850 B.C.) •Iliad and Odyssey acknowledge variability •Aethiopians: People at the eastern and western edges of the known world •Cubit-men: African (?) pygmies Herodotus (484?-425? B.C.) •Historiae argues for an environmental cause of variability between human groups •Egyptians have strong skulls due to exposure •Persian skulls are brittle due to the use of felt hats Hippocrates (460 - 377 B.C.) •Environmental influences on human variability are noted in Volume I of Corpus Hippocraticum •Body build and temperament of different peoples are said to be related to their climate and life style Early Racial ClassificationsHomerHerodotusHippocratesAristotle (384-322 B.C.) Claims environmental causes of physical variation in humans Wooly hair of Aethiopians due to arid climate Straight hair of Scythians due to moist air St. Augustine (354-430)In De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos he says all men born everywhere, no matter how strange they appear to us, are descended from Adam, i.e., are descended from a single ancestral stock AristotleSt. AugustineEarly Racial ClassificationsLeonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) Questioned the environmental hypothesis in accounting for human variation, suggesting an early hereditarian argument based on the power of the mother's seed. Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) Noted a relationship between race and the shape of the skullDifferential Worth: The Beginnings Races are ranked on various criteria judged to assess intelligence or moral standards The rankings are used either to bolster the scala naturae or proto-evolutionary relationships Such rankings are highly subjective and loaded with potential for ethnocentric abuse, with the highest rank always being reserved for the race of the person doing the ranking18th Century Racial IdeologyMonogenism versus Polygenism Monogenism: All humans had a single origin from Adam and Eve. The races are seen as being due to environmentally determined degeneration from Europeans Polygenism: Different races are descendants of different Adams, separate creationsCarolus Linnaeus, 1707 – 1778Viewed the task of classification as one of attempting to understand the natural laws of the Scala Naturae (the ladder of nature) Races of LinnaeusAmericanus: Red, choleric, erect Europaeus: White, fickle, sanguine, blue-eyed, gentle, governed by laws Asiaticus: Sallow, grave, dignified, avaricious, ruled by opinion Afer: Black, choleric, obstinate, contented, regulated by customs Ferus: Wild man, walks on all fours, hairy Troglodytes: You wouldn't believe it Monstrous: Giants, mutantsJohann Friedrich Blumenbach, 1752 - 1840German Anatomy Professor Father of Physical Anthropology Father of Craniology Founder of Anthropology in Germany On the Natural Variety of Mankind (1775) •We owe much of our view of the races to him, but he was probably one of the least racist people of his time. Advocated Monogenism•Refuted the existence of "wild men" and "troglodytes" of earlier classifications •Proposed a system for classifying humans into five different races based on the shape of the skull •Using a skull from the Caucasus mountains as the perfect European form, he claimed his four other races degenerated from this group •Caucasoid (Europeans), Mongoloid (Asians), American (Native Americans), Ethiopian (Africans), and Malayan (Southeast Asians)Samuel George Morton, 1799 - 1851Physician from Philadelphia •Polygenist, convinced of inferiority of African populations•Measured cranial capacity (volume of braincase) to assess differential worth•Very careful technician, published extensive list of measurements of cranial capacitiesMorton's Racial RankingsRacial CategoryMorton's Averages (cubic inches)Gould's Averages (cubic inches)Caucasian 87 87Mongolian 83 87Malay 81 85American 82 86Ethopian 78 83Modified from Gould, S.J. (1981)Pierre Paul Broca, 1824 - 1880Founder of French Anthropology First Society of Anthropology (1859) First School of Anthropology (1876) •Instigated the study of Craniometry •Attempted to quantify differential worth •Ratio of radius to humerus: a high ratio is ape-like, hence lower worth. •Found Caucasians scored higher than Hottentots, Eskimos, and Australians •He discarded the ratio in favor of measures with whites furthest from the apes •Brain size: bigger is better •Men > Women •Eminent Men > Mediocre Men •Superior races (Caucasian) > Inferior (Other races)Definitions of RaceE.A. Hooton (1926): A race is a great division of mankind, the members of which, though individually varying, are characterized as a group by a certain combination of morphological and metrical features [which ones?], principally non-adaptive, which have been derived from their common descent.Brues (1990): A race is a division of a species which differs from other divisions by the frequency with which certain hereditary traits [which ones?] appear among its members.Mayr (1963): Biological races are noninterbreeding sympatric [in the same area] populations that differ in biological charteristics but not, or scarcely, in morphology.He points out that human races do not