The Mismeasure Of Man

In Chapter 2, Gould introduces the scientific justification for racial prejudice as biological determinism’s “primary line of attack” (63). He prefaces the chapter by asking whether inductive science led to 19th-century craniometry, or whether a desire to rank intelligence led to the “scientific” questions asked by 19th-century scientists (63).

Gould reports that both renowned scientists and American “culture heroes,” including Georges Cuvier, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, and Abraham Lincoln, ascribed to the social convention of ranking races; the only differences lay between “hard liners” who believed biology justified enslavement, and “soft-liners” who believed freedom was not dependent on intelligence (63).

Prior to Darwin’s theory of evolution, the two main rationales for racial ranking rested in monogenism and polygenism. Monogenists (a.k.a. degenerationists) believed that man originated out of Eden and, from there, declined with “whites least and blacks most” (71). Polygenists believed that races were a separate species, and, as such, blacks were a separate form of life.

Gould first introduces the work of Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), a leader in advancing American scientific theories of polygeny. After immigrating to America, Agassiz taught at Harvard and developed a theory whereby modern races of man living in distinct geographic areas met the “biological criteria for separate species” (78).