Table of Contents
Part 1- I. Biological Beginnings
- II. The Peril of Polygenism
- III. Pre-Darwinian Milestones, continued
- IV. Beginnings of Anthropology as an Organized Branch Science
- V. Darwinism vs "Social Darwinism"
- VI. Beginnings of Anthropology as an Organized Branch Science, continued
- VII. Nordicism
- VIII. A Brief Tangent into Other Fields of Biology
Part 2
- IX. The Taxonomic Era of Physical Anthropology Reaches Its Peak
- X. Paradigm Shift
- XI. Data from Physical Anthropology Remains Valid Today, Even if Typologies Have Fallen out of Fashion
- XII. Anthropometric Data Can Remain Useful Today, Even if the Old Typologies Have Outlived Their Usefulness
- XIII. Some Misconceptions of NS and German Anthropology of the 1930s-40s
- XIV. Were NS Anthropologists Obsessed with Twins?
- XV. Were NS Anthropologists Nordicists?
- XVI. What Did NS Anthropologists Mean by "Racial Purity"?
- XVII. Conclusion
IX. The Taxonomic Era of Physical Anthropology Reaches Its Peak
Just as genetics began to enter into a period of increased development near the beginning of the 20th century, a new generation of physical anthropologists began increasing the rigor of their field's taxonomies. Moving away from many of the overly-simplistic classifications before them, they laid the foundations for nearly all subsequent typological work.
"Marett takes the year 1900, when Mendel's earlier discoveries first became generally recognized, and a critical mood began to succeed the previous one of enthusiastic construction, as the beginning of a new stage in the history of Anthropology, and calls it the Critical Period. A more exact study of the causes of variation and examination of the laws of heredity have made both the biologists and social scientists proceed more slowly, and re-examine much that had been taken for granted. ...In addition, there are the studies of environment, the medium in which Man and his cultures develop. In the biological and psychological parts of the subject, there have been great advances and even greater hopes in the study of genetics and biometry, and as the functions of the endocrine glands come to be better understood, and the soil sciences develop, efforts to study more subtly than was before possible, the interplay of environment and of race and individual." - T. K. Penniman, (1935).[1]
With major publications in 1894 and 1901, Italian anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi formulated the concept of the "Mediterranean race".[2] One of the individuals to lead physical anthropology out of its simplistic early days, Sergi argued that the heavy reliance of previous anthropologists on cephalic index was too crude on its own to classify types--arguing instead that one must consider a detailed study of the overall cranial morphology.[3]
A fierce critic of Nordicism, Sergi's work was (perhaps understandably) sometimes colored by over-compensatory pro-'Mediterranean race' sentiments. Nevertheless, he correctly hypothesized that, from skeletal morphology, the "Nordic race" was merely a depigmented form of the "Mediterranean race," although it took until the next generation of physical anthropologists to convincingly demonstrate this.[4] Proving that not all physical anthropologists at the time were rabid White Supremacists, Sergi believed that the "Mediterranean race" (and therefore a large proportion of Europeans) were directly descended from ancient populations living in the Horn of Africa, due to skeletal similarities.[2]
Although modern data does not support this latter hypothesis, Sergi's observation of the skeletal similarity of the "Mediterranean race" throughout multiple geographic areas proved to be a major clue in unraveling the Neolithic migrations.[5]
In 1899, William Z. Ripley published The Races of Europe. Synthesizing work from many earlier anthropologists, he outlined three principal living "races" in Europe--Teutonic, Alpine, and Mediterranean--in addition to a brief mention of some other types such as Cro-Magnon. Some White Supremacists, most infamously Madison Grant, lifted much of their anthropological material from Ripley, twisting it to bolster their bigoted views of society. (In reality, Ripley's work contained a section on Scandinavia not at all flattering to Nordicists).[6]
Overall, Ripley's work was limited by his reliance on cephalic index. His classification lumped together the tall, robust, and wide-faced Cro-Magnon type with the short, gracile, and narrow-faced Neolithic type on the simple basis of similar cephalic index--ignoring the large morphological differences between them.[8] Carleton Coon (see below) stressed in his updated The Races of Europe just how morphologically distinct the gracile Neolithic type and the robust Paleolithic type ("Cro-Magnon") were.
"It is impossible, as some European anthropologists believe, to derive a Nordic directly from a dolichocephalic Upper Paleolithic ancestor of Bruenn or Cro-Magnon type. Reduction of these overgrown races produces a result which is quite un-Nordic morphologically as well as in constitutional type. It is the author's thesis that the Nordic race in Europe was caused by a blending of the early Danubian Mediterranean strain with the later Corded element." - Carleton Coon, (1939).[9]
Joseph Deniker published a competing taxonomy of European groups in his books Les Races de l'Europe (1899) and The Races of Man (1900).
In his work, Deniker was one of the first anthropologists to argue for a meaningful distinction between "races" and ethnic groups[10][11] (a term which he popularized).[11] Deniker contended that many anthropologists at the time were lazily assigning the status of "race" to living ethnic groups, and that a "race" could only be considered a meaningful concept if one separated it from ethnicity. In his view, every living ethnic group was comprised of multiple "races" which had mixed together in the distant past. Rather than merely classify the living ethnic variation, one had to unravel their mixtures in order to arrive at racial stocks which comprised them. Deniker was also of the opinion that cephalic index, or any other trait, on its own was insufficient to form a typology.
While Deniker's attempt to disentangle race and ethnicity was admirable, we argue that his "races" were, for the most part, still ethnic groups--albeit very ancient ones which may no longer have distinct cultural elements tied to them. In our opinion, it is important to point out that studying "races" by looking backwards in evolutionary time neglects to look at future trajectories which will result from recent and present-day selective pressure. Ripley seems to have attempted to take this into account, by more often looking for uniting factors (resulting in a smaller number of "races" in his typology), while Deniker looked for factors to further splinter apart existing mixes (resulting in a correspondingly higher number of "races").
In contrast to both Ripley and Deniker, we, 21st century Aryanists, argue that "race" is only meaningful when it takes into consideration specific selective pressures, and that ethnic relatedness (which is what the typologies of physical anthropologists were really describing, albeit on a very long timescale) has little value in the grand scheme of things, as convergent evolution of ethnically-unrelated groups will always result in higher qualitative (i.e. racial) similarity between them than with ethnically-related groups experiencing different selective pressure.
Deniker named some of his races after cardinal directions; these names were taken up into German-language anthropology, but not in English. Notably, Deniker introduced the phrase "la race nordique"[13][14][15] (which he translated as "Northern race" in his English-language works),[16] although he was by no means a "Nordicist" and not the first to write about this "race". Nordicist propagandist Madison Grant, rejecting Ripley's phrase "Teutonic race" as too narrowly connoting German ethnicity and Germanic-language-speakers, popularized the phrase "Nordic race" to English speakers.[17]
In addition to increasing the rigor of statistical methods used in anthropology, the statistical-minded Jan Czekanowski is remembered for rearranging Deniker's classification into a "tidy" mathematical representation. Demonstrating the importance of Deniker's typology for European groups, subsequent anthropologists largely stopped formulating their own typologies from scratch, and instead built upon his framework.
Earnest Hooton was an American professor who began teaching at Harvard in 1913 and turned the university into the nucleus for American physical anthropology. A prolific producer of PhD students, Hooton trained nearly an entire generation of US physical anthropologists.[20][21][22] His students went on to head many of the influential physical anthropology departments at other colleges in the US in the subsequent decades.
Hooton expanded beyond mere study of the skull and also looked at ways to integrate body shape into classifications.[23] Beyond this, Hooton was very interested in the application of anthropology to societal matters. He did much work in the field of criminology, and this led him to advocate (non-ethno-tribalist) eugenics in the hopes of eliminating the genetic causes of criminal or degenerate behavior. Rather unique amongst his peers in the Jim Crow USA, Hooton was resolute in his belief that eugenics programs should be carried out without any consideration of ethnic background--each ethnic group was capable of producing idiots, geniuses, criminals, and good citizens.[24] Additionally, Hooton was cognizant that socio-cultural differences often influence our perception of "race" and often cause us to be biased in our valuation of those who are different from us; indeed, he even went so far as to criticize the comparison of different "racial" groups via intelligence tests, suggesting some of the supposed IQ differences between Westerners and non-Westerners could be due to bias in the construction of tests.[25]
In contrast to the Nordicist fixation of Guenther, Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt was the leading figure of intellectually honest German-language physical anthropology in the 1930s.[26] In addition to his work on Europe, von Eickstedt is notable for making a typology for the entire world.[26] Although Deniker had previously made a serious attempt at such a feat, typologic work on non-European groups was relatively lacking--most anthropological descriptions of non-Europeans focused narrowly on specific ethnic groups, rather than examining the 'big picture'.
In 1939, American anthropologist Carleton Coon published his The Races of Europe. Originally intended as an updated edition of Ripley's work, it instead grew into an original work of its own.[27] In this work, Coon synthesized nearly every existing study and dataset he could get his hands on,[27] and as a result, his work is considered a high water mark of English-language physical anthropology. Although inspired by Ripley's work, Coon used the more detailed typology of Deniker as the basis for his typology.
The classifications of physical anthropologists continuing to pursue European typology post-WWII generally continued to build off this Deniker-inspired framework [e.g. Jan Czekanowski (Man in Time and Space, 1934, 1937, 1962), Renato Biasutti (Le Razze e i Popoli della Terra, first ed. 1941; fourth ed. 1967), and Bertil Lundman (The Races and Peoples of Europe, 1977)]. Post-WWII, interest in typology did not wane as significantly in Soviet-bloc countries. Polish, Russian, and Hungarian physical anthropologists, especially, have continued to develop detailed typological classifications.
***
Intellectually, Coon succeeded in de-politicizing the "Nordic race"[28] and properly contextualized it as a sub-variety of the "Mediterranean race" (although this knowledge never caught on amongst the public at large). Sufficient archaeological data had become available for Coon's work to show that (1) the so-called "Nordic race" shared remarkable skeletal similarity with the "Mediterranean race,"[29] (2) that the entrance of the "Mediterranean race" into Europe coincided with the Neolithic migrations which brought farming to Europe,[30] and (3) that the native Paleolithic (i.e. pre-Neolithic) inhabitants of Scandinavia were sharply distinct from the Neolithic Nordic-Mediterranean migrants[9]--precluding Scandinavia as the origin of the "Nordic race".[31] This is significant, as previous works (including Ripley's) lumped together robust, wide-faced Paleolithic descendants and gracile, narrow-faced Neolithic descendants in Scandinavia[8] on the basis of both being blond, as well as having insufficient data to pinpoint the "who" and "when" of the Neolithic migrations.
Beyond quietly providing a sword with which to deal Nordicism its death-blow, Coon endorsed the idea that anthropologists should endeavor to prevent their work from being misused by racists, being one of the anthropologists to sign the 1964 UNESCO statement on race:[32]
***
This is by no means an exhaustive list of anthropologists, but it should give the reader a decent picture of the development of physical anthropology and the names of major anthropologists who continue to be discussed on the internet. It is needless to say that, being Europeans or descendants of Europeans, these anthropologists had a very Euro-centric focus, which is reflected in their typologies. This has given White Supremacists more data to abuse compared to racists of other ethnic backgrounds, which is yet another reason why anti-racists must familiarize themselves with this era of physical anthropology.
To summarize, the typologists who continue to receive the most interest in 21st-century forums dedicated to physical anthropology are (in no particular order): Coon, Deniker, Czekanowski, von Eickstadt, etc. Earlier works by people such as Ripley and Sergi are sometimes brought up, but they are superseded by the more recent and detailed work of the others. Physical anthropologists whose career spanned mostly post-1950s (e.g. Bertil J. Lundman, Georg Glowatzki, Ilse Schwidetzky, etc.) are also important to note, although they fall outside of the scope of this article.
Of course, PC critics of physical anthropology are more likely to bring up polygenist charlatans from the early 1800s such as Samuel George Morton and Josiah C. Nott, unaware that they have hardly any relevance to academic physical anthropology and are of little interest to HBDers and others who continue to discuss "old school" physical anthropology.
***
X. Paradigm Shift
"Anthropology is the science of Man, a master-science, embracing first, such biological studies as to explain what Man is and was, and his place in the realm of animated nature. These shade into a second group, that of psychological studies, as is clearly shown by physiologists who have studied behaviour experimentally. And since beliefs underlie institutions, psychological studies shade into yet a third group, that which studies cultures, material and spiritual, past and present. All of these must be studied in connexion with the organic and inorganic environment, the medium in which man and his cultures develop." - T. K. Penniman, (1935).[33]
(Fifteen years later, this hierarchy within anthropology would become inverted.)
As a counter to the dominance of physical anthropology, interest in typology, and hard hereditarian notions, Franz Boas had outlined a competing paradigm by the 1910s.[34] Boas introduced the ideology of Cultural Relativism[35][36] (no absolute standards exist, therefore value comparisons between cultures, ethnic groups, etc. are meaningless). Although, in the strict sense, cultural relativism is not identical with moral relativism, the two ideas have been tightly linked since the end of WWII when the victorious nations sought a new political doctrine with respect to "race" and ethnicity.[37]
While many saw Boas's new paradigm as a welcome change from the Eurocentric hierarchy which had dominated Western thought since Aristotle, it is perhaps needless to say that a rejection of Eurocentrism does not require a complete abandonment of value standards. It merely requires a rejection of ignoble Western standards as the absolute by which judgments are made, and a replacement by fair and noble standards!
As a vehicle for his ideology, Boas outlined a system of anthropology where four, previously semi-independent, fields were brought very tightly together under the label of anthropology: cultural anthropology, linguistics, physical anthropology, and archaeology.[38] Through this system, the primacy of the "hard" sciences of physical and bio-anthropology (which had constituted one of the strongest focuses of anthropology since its early days) increasingly found itself displaced by the "soft" social and cultural aspects of anthropology.
Boas's system proved to be highly influential amongst US-based anthropologists (for example, archaeology continues to be considered a separate field of study in many European countries, but remains a sub-field of anthropology in the US today). Although the influence of Boas's socio-cultural focus was somewhat tempered by Hooton's prolific focus on physical anthropology, Boasian notions steadily gained traction amongst anthropologists.
In 1948, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) took a keen interest in establishing a new direction for the political and scientific discussion of "race," at the behest of the victorious powers of WWII who controlled the UN.[39] In 1950, Israel Ehrenberg Ashley Montagu (a student of prominent Boasian anthropologist Ruth Benedict) was appointed by UNESCO as the lead editor of the famous UN statement on race and racism called The Race Question. This statement upset many physical and bio-anthropologists, who considered it unduly dismissive of the biological side of anthropology.[39] A slightly revised statement, adding nuances from bio-anthropologists, was issued by UNESCO in 1951. UNESCO reaffirmed their stance by issuing essentially similar statements again in 1964 and 1967.[32]
Completing the paradigm shift which began with Boas, not only had socio-cultural anthropology taken the throne from the supposedly 'outdated' physical anthropology in academic circles, but now in official political doctrines.
"Some writers, particularly on the Continent [i.e. continental Europe], prefer to keep the word "Anthropology" for Physical Anthropology, and to call Cultural Anthropology "Ethnology", but in this book, we shall use the word "Anthropology" to mean the whole Science of Man, and consider it as having the threefold division which has been described..." - T. K. Penniman, (1935).[40]
(At one time considered the defining field of anthropology, physical anthropology would become seen as increasingly irrelevant, even within bio-anthropology.)
"A feature of the recent period to which attention is directed is the general advance in technique and the accession of new methods. ...
Some emphasis has been placed, at the outset, on the progress which can be claimed because in the period since 1935 there has nevertheless been some anxious and repeated examination of the aims and methods of the subject. This disquiet was aroused in part by the perverse use made of anthropology by Fascist countries and the association of a few professional workers with inhuman and unscientific Nazi race doctrines." [Apparently the preceding century of some professionals following the doctrine that "whites" were scientifically superior to "non-whites" wasn't perverse enough?] ...
"At the same time the feeling grew up that physical anthropologists were unduly restricted in their interests to the pursuit of a somewhat artificial taxonomy of race, and that much of their work was conducted on a narrow and even questionable basis both as to method and material (Fisher, 1936). There was an over-emphasis on skeleton material to the neglect of the genetics and ecology of living communities. Thus Haddon, the doyen of racial studies, pleaded in 1934, for "a wider study, that of Human Biology, which would also embracae the physiological study of Man as a living organism". And Fleure (1947) has spoken in a similar spirit. Critical (yet constructive) comments were offered by Fisher (1936) and Le Gros Clark (1939), amongst others, in the years before the war. Since then, as has already been indicated, a large measure of re-orientation and re-definition has undoubtedly occurred."[41] [My comment in brackets.]
Even with the triumph of socio-cultural anthropology, bio-anthropology continued to advance as a field. In 1951 Sherwood Washubrn published a paper called "The New Physical Anthropology,"[42] and successfully moved the field away from the broad concentration on typology and towards a more focused scope dealing with evolutionary processes.[43][44]
Previously, in the fields of heredity and genetics, authors such as Theodosius Dobzhansky (Genetics and the Origin of Species, 1937) had demonstrated that these subfields had become developed enough to merit integration into the larger framework of evolutionary biology--which had previously relied heavily on phenotypic and anatomical studies. In 1942, Julian Huxley coined the term "modern synthesis"[45] to refer to the integration of Darwin's theories on evolution and natural selection, Mendel and others' work on genetics and heredity, as well as other relevant aspects of biology (such as developmental biology, ecology, cell biology, and so forth) into a coherent and unified discipline.
By the 1950s, DNA was confirmed to be the molecule of heredity[46] and its structure was determined to be a double helix.[47] In the 1970s, DNA sequencing became possible,[48] firmly displacing physical anthropology from the leading spot within bio-anthropology.
***
XI. Data from Physical Anthropology Remains Valid Today, Even if Typologies Have Fallen out of Fashion
In the first half of the 19th century, White Supremacist and polygenist Samuel George Morton developed a hypothesis that intelligence was related to cranial capacity.[49] Morton collected a number of skulls from different "races," measured the interior of the cranium using seeds and lead pellets, and gathered data which concluded "whites" had bigger brains than "blacks," thereby "proving" they were more intelligent. During this time period, other racist charlatans promoted similar pseudo-scientific hypotheses.
In the book The Mismeasure of Man (1981) Stephen Jay Gould challenged the work of Morton and other race-and-intelligence theorists from the early 1800s.[50] Disastrously, Gould attempted to disprove their ethnocentric theories (which were already considered incorrect and obsolete by the late 1800s) by claiming that the data itself was biased and even falsified.[50][51]
"Plausible scenarios are easy to construct. Morton, measuring by seed, picks up a threateningly large black skull, fills it lightly and gives it a few desultory shakes. Next, he takes a distressingly small Caucasian skull, shakes hard, and pushes mightily at the foramen magnum with his thumb. It is easily done, without conscious motivation; expectation is a powerful guide to action." - Stephen Jay Gould[50]
Gould's work brought these outdated ideas from the earliest days of physical anthropology back into prominence, and wittingly or not, provided easy strawmen for opponents to knock down. His work mobilized many IQ-obsessed racists such as Arthur Jensen, J. Philippe Rushton, Charles Murray, and Hans Eysenck, and provided them a convenient opportunity to display their much more modern work on "race" and intelligence to the curious public.
In the wake of his book, some non-racist scientists decided to remeasure Morton's skulls.[51] The results of their re-measurements concluded that Morton's original measurements were indeed accurate--thereby giving the impression that the HBDers who challenged Gould had achieved a victory. (While replicating an experiment is considered an integral part of the scientific method, Gould apparently did not bother to remeasure any of Morton's skulls himself, and simply did new calculations on Morton's original data tables instead).[51][52]
This debacle could have easily been avoided by either (1) arguing against Morton's racist conjectures solely from an ethical point of view, (2) demonstrating the ways in which Morton's "theory" originated from his desire to make his personal prejudices appear more respectable (in other words, his methodology was systematically-flawed and his research questions were ideologically-motivated at best, and outright pseudo-scientific at worst), or (3) showing how the data itself (being valid data) did not provide evidence of the conclusions Morton was attempting to make (e.g. Morton merely measured skulls--automatically linking size with intelligence was a leap by Morton, and not something which could honestly be derived from the data).
Instead, Gould and PC egalitarians always attack the validity of the data itself, hinging their entire arguments upon the validity of the data rather than ethical arguments against bigotry!!! By framing the argument in such a manner, all racists have to do is to show that human variation exists or that Morton's skulls were measured correctly in order for their racist arguments to appear vindicated.
With regards to skull and brain size, we know that Neanderthals had larger cranial capacities than modern humans, yet no one seriously believes they had superior mental abilities compared to modern humans.[54] This is because brain shape, not size, is most important in determining mental abilities. Even so, if no significant difference in intelligence and cephalic index/skull or brain shape/cranial capacity has been found within Europeans--among whom exist individuals of extremely high cephalic index and extremely low index, and all sorts of other morphological variation--then there is no reason to assume other ethnic groups have significant differences in intelligence which can be correlated to measurements of cranial morphology either.
This is why I have so often stressed that focusing on the empirical accuracy of the data misses the point--it's really about the morality of the conclusions derived from the data. It doesn't matter whether Morton correctly or incorrectly measured lead pellets into skulls. It doesn't matter if there is a link between brain size and intelligence. It doesn't matter if different ethnic groups differ in average IQ. The conclusion that some ethnic groups should be stereotyped as inferior to others due to differences in intelligence is morally indefensible either way.
Whether by sheer ignorance of physical anthropology and incompetence in rhetorical ways to combat racism or by intentionally playing as an easy opponent for racists, Gould's work did much to allow HBDers to hammer the final nail in the coffin for the sanctity of PC egalitarian ideology which had unquestioningly dominated anthropology since 1950. Many PC supporters are still in denial that their narrative is crumbling, but the astonishing proliferation of HBD views since 1999 should be a major alarm bell as to this fact...
***
XII. Anthropometric Data Can Remain Useful Today, Even if the Old Typologies Have Outlived Their Usefulness
I hope that I do not need to further explain to the reader that a skull measured 100 years ago will not change its shape if measured today. Therefore, the anthropometric data gathered by anthropologists over the past 100+ years remains factual and usable, even if the conclusions originally drawn from the data 100+ years ago are unsupportable. Of course, I do not advocate that the field of anthropology moves backwards and becomes dominated once again by 75+ year-old ideas from physical anthropology... Indeed, the ascendancy of socio-cultural anthropology was not some evil plot, but happened in no small part because physical anthropology had become intellectually stagnant. By continuing the taxonomic tradition from the 1800s, anthropometrists of the mid-20th century neglected to integrate aspects from the social sciences and genetics, preferring to remain focused on the study of bones.
"Though more clearly defined aims and a wider scope may be claimed for physical anthropology today, the distribution of effort, judged from the period under review, appears ill-balanced. The field work has almost invariably been concerned with "racial" characters, and these mainly non-genetic and usually limited to adult males. It has dealt only in minor degree with the underlying physiological or adaptive significance of the traits observed, and hardly at all with such biological characteristics of the community as the state of fitness or nutritional well-being of its members. When the overall activities in physical anthropology are considered, the relative dearth of field work and its restricted nature (in contrast to the exhaustive and long-term studies of the "functionalist" social anthropologist) become apparent..."[55]
"In the anthropological description of living peoples there is discernible in this period under review the important difference of approach as between the "traditional" characterized by the time-honoured criteria of anthropometry and anthroscopy (as set forth, for example, in Martin's Lehrbuch), and that which aims at a strictly genetic analysis. The first relies essentially on morphological differences to establish the existence of "racial" differences. ...
The alternative method, the genetic, is now superseding the other method since, by specifying the frequencies of certain genes in a given group, comparisons of racial affinity become entirely objective. Boyd (1950) has fully discussed the limitations and weaknesses of the older approach. These are ultimately traceable to the use of phenotypic criteria whose genic constitution is unknown, for with such criteria it is left an open question whether apparently similar characters necessarily denote similar genotypes (and this may well be a difficulty with criteria such as indicies of shape); furthermore, the extent to which phenotypic expression may suffer modification through use and disuse and other environmental agencies remains uncertain."[56]
So, while it was necessary for physical anthropology to move beyond traditional typology if it was to remain useful, it is still possible for data gathered long ago to be useful when it is synthesized with genetic data and applied to matters other than typology. If physical anthropologists relied too heavily on studying phenotype while neglecting genotype, it seems many bio-anthropologists today too often neglect a full, rigorous treatment of phenotype in their analyses. Understanding genotype, phenotype, and environmental influences (including both the natural environment and the cultural environment) are all critical for a holistic study of humanity.
Indeed, some major anthropological institutions are finally beginning to consider re-assessing the data of pre-1950s physical anthropology:
"The situation today is that comparative observations on living populations will prove of limited value unless blood-grouping and other genetic examination is undertaken; but, as already remarked, it would be entirely a retrograde step to curtail morphological and metrical observations." - J. S. Weiner, (1952).[58]
"The account given below is sufficient, it is hoped, to reveal the great potentialities which exist for valid anthropological work, whether evolutionary, morphological, genetic, functional, or ecological..." - J. S. Weiner, (1952).[59]
***
It is our thesis on this website that face shapes are one of the best ways to aesthetically demonstrate how poorly ethnic-based classifications of "race" capture human variation. Individuals from vastly different ethnic groups who share similar face shapes and body types will look more similar to each other than someone of a related ethnic group who has a vastly different face shape or body type--regardless of superficial traits such as skin color or hair texture. This seems so obvious when spelled out, but racists and anti-racists alike remain fixated on skin color, causing it to be one of the only supposed "racial" traits which receives any attention.
If we want a discussion of human variation which is sane and fully and accurately takes into consideration the vast amount of variation and nuances existing in the human population, we desperately need to move the conversation beyond skin color.
Beyond mere aesthetics, we can use the metric data collected by physical anthropologists to demonstrate just how similar a gracile, narrow skull from one ethnicity is to a gracile, narrow skull from a different ethnicity, and just how different a gracile, narrow skull is from a robust, wide skull of similar ethnic groups (see photo above). Beyond skulls, we can see this in body shape and genetically, as a result of convergent evolution.
The popularity of "classify this face" posts in HBD forums should be a testament as to how intuitive and interesting people find facial aesthetics. Shockingly, HBDers who embrace the old typologies of physical anthropologists have a better understanding of how much variation there is within "the races" than PC egalitarians who reject physical anthropology! Genetic clustering graphs demonstrating human variation may have their use, but nothing will ever be more intuitive than looking at individuals with our own eyes. As social beings, we have evolved a keen sense of recognizing facial shapes, expressions, and have many archetypes psychologically associated with these different "looks". Nothing is so easy to demonstrate human variation with than the face shape.
"...let us bear in mind that in no other part of the world save modern America is such an amalgamation of various peoples to be found as in Europe. History, and archaeology long before history, show us a continual picture of tribes appearing and disappearing, crossing and recrossing in their migrations, assimilating, dividing, colonizing, conquering, or being absorbed. It follows from this, that, even if the environment were uniform, our pure types must be exceedingly rare. Experience proves that the vast majority of the population of this continent shows evidence of crossing, so that in general we can not expect that more than one third of the people will be marked by the simplest combination of traits." - William Ripley, (1899)[62]
"It may smack of heresy to assert, in the face of the teaching of all our text-books on geography and history, that there is no single European or white race of men; and yet that is the plain truth of the matter. Science has advanced since Linnaeus' single type of Homo Europaeus albus was made one of the four great races of mankind. No continental group of human beings with greater diversities or extremes of physical type exists. That fact accounts in itself for much of advance in culture. We have already shown in the preceding chapters that entire communities of the tallest and shortest of men as well as the longest and broadest headed ones, are here to be found within the confines of Europe. Even in respect of the colour of the skin, hair, and eyes, responsible more than all else for the misnomer "white race," the greatest variations occur. To be sure, the several types are to-day all more or less blended together by the unifying influences of civilization; there are few sharp contrasts in Europe such as those between the Eskimo and the American Indian, or the Malay and the Papuan in other parts of the world. We have been deceived by this in the past. It is high time for us to correct our ideas on the subject, especially in our school and college teaching." - William Ripley, (1899)[63]
"Thus we reject at once that old classification in our geographies of all the peoples of Europe under a single title of the White, the Indo-Germanic, Caucasian, or Aryan race. Europe, instead of being a monotonous entity, is a most variegated patchwork of physical types." - William "look at all the variation within this so-called 'race'" Ripley, (1899)[64]
***
Although the trend for enterprising anthropologists to construct different typologies of human types has long passed, their unfortunate reference frame of viewing "race" as something more-or-less tied to ethnic groupings has not vanished. This continues on in sociology (albeit not without some criticism), and less controversially in forensics, genetic studies (where the less charged word "population" has often been substituted), censuses, and even medicine.
Today, new genetic data shows us just how complicated the picture of human variation is (supplementing the anthropometric data which already showed this), yet both the general public's and academics' views on "race" seem to be more black-and-white than at any point in the past 150 years.
Perhaps there is an alternative, which reinterprets "race" as something other than a mere synonym for ethnicity or a cultural fantasy. A reinterpretation which can even overcome the centuries of inter-ethinc conflict caused by the interpretation of race which linked it to ethnicity? In fact, this alternative was proposed nearly 100 years ago in National Socialist theory.
***
XIII. Some Misconceptions of NS and German Anthropology of the 1930s-40s
To end this history of pre-1950s anthropology, let us look at examples from National Socialist Germany. From examination of the facts, it seems that not only were German anthropologists of the 1930s and 1940s in accordance with accepted academic facts of the time (and not raving pseudo-scientific fanatics, as they are sometimes portrayed), but they also recognized the stagnancy of typology, and were developing new outlooks fostered by the National Socialist political environment. This association of biology and political philosophy may sound scary, but note the analogous developments of Lysenkoism (a rejection of Mendelian inheritance in favor of a neo-Lamarckist view that acquired traits were heritable) in the USSR from 1948-1960s, and the primacy placed on socio-environmental factors by "blank slate" egalitarians in the West (starting with the UN declaration in the 1950s, and Political Correctness which has ideologically rejected early physical anthropology as "scientific racism" in more recent decades).
This is perhaps not too different from how Penniman observed Lamarckism and Darwinism 100 years prior had been influenced by different political and philosophical milieus (see section V). Afterall, anthropology is the study of mankind. Due to the fact that humans are a social animal and the organism whose bodies and societies are being studied by anthropology, the conclusions of anthropologists, or at least the significance of these conclusions with respect to society, will always carry some degree of subjectivity. A human, living in human society, and sharing the results of their research on humans with other humans who are also studying humans while living in human society, cannot study humans in a vacuum completely isolated and disinterested from the subject and system being studied.
Socio-cultural anthropologists seem to have realized this, and have correctly criticized the traditional (ethnic-based) "races" as being an unworthy framework/working hypothesis due to its negative impact on society. A poor understanding of this argument has led many to reject not only the traditional hypotheses/conclusions on "race", but also, in their haste, to dogmatically reject the data these conclusions were built upon--instead of simply formulating new, ethically and logically superior, hypotheses and theories!
As the rise of HBD has shown us, irrationally rejecting the data based on ideological concerns does not stop individuals from other ideologies from using the data to make their own hypotheses! Even though HBD hypotheses are morally unsupportable, they are one of the only camps to at least pretend to draw conclusions from the data.
Instead of providing an alternative hypothesis which would once and for all demonstrate the obsolescence of ethnic-based "race", anti-racists throw around the slogan "race is a social construct", as if that is enough on its own to destroy the conception of race which has gripped the West for centuries... We suggest a better formulation of this phrase is "the races are a social construct". This rejects the traditional ethno-centric notion of "race" without at the same time dogmatically precluding discussions of human variation and alternative hypotheses for a "race" construct.
All of empirical science is a "social construct", with some constructs being more discrete, intuitive, or less disputable than others, but ultimately all non-mathematical attempts to gain knowledge result in "constructed" models to help us understand the many facets of this infinite glob of something that is our universe. Atoms, elements, and states of matter are not unfalsifiable concepts ordained by the Creator and implanted perfectly-understood into our brains. They are models which were constructed in order to aid us in expressing and understanding what we observe.
When it comes to evolutionary biology, consider how arbitrary the line between where one species ends and the other begins is. This is the chicken and the egg problem. What separates Homo sapiens from our ancestors? Did a Homo heidelbergensis or Homo rhodesiensis one day give birth to a Homo sapiens that looked just like you or me and was unable to reproduce with the "species" of its parents? No. The transition was gradual, and if you could construct a family photo album going back 1,000,000 years, the gradation would be imperceptible. Indeed, some scientists debate whether Neanderthals are truly another species, or merely a very divergent group of Homo sapiens (afterall, Neanderthals were able to reproduce with humans to some extent). Any classifications of "race" within Homo sapiens must therefore be even more a matter of social construction.
But that does not mean there are no biological foundations upon which we can make a working construct of "race". Indeed, to displace the ethno-centric HBD construct of "race", anti-ethno-tribalists need a competing construct. Such a construct was being developed by National Socialists, who believed "race" was not merely a measurement of skin color or skull shape, but could only be a meaningful concept if moral quality was taken into consideration and placed above physical appearance.
“I know perfectly well,” he said, “just as well as all these tremendously clever intellectuals, that in the scientific sense there is no such thing as race. But you, as a farmer and cattle-breeder, cannot get your breeding successfully achieved without the conception of race. And I as a politician need a conception which enables the order which has hitherto existed on historic bases to be abolished and an entirely new and anti-historic order enforced and given an intellectual basis. Understand what I mean,” he said, breaking off. “I have to liberate the world from dependence on its historic past. Nations are the outward and visible forms of our history. So I have to fuse these nations into a higher order if I want to get rid of the chaos of an historic past that has become an absurdity. And for this purpose the conception of race serves me well. It disposes of the old order and makes possible new associations. France carried her great Revolution beyond her borders with the conception of the nation. With the conception of race, National Socialism will carry its revolution abroad and recast the world.”
Hitler concluded, with growing fervour:
“Just as the conception of the nation was a revolutionary change from the purely dynastic feudal states, and just as it introduced a biological conception, that of the people, so our own revolution is a further step, or, rather, the final step, in the rejection of the historic order and the recognition of purely biological values. And I shall bring into operation throughout all Europe and the whole world this process of selection which we have carried out through National Socialism in Germany. The process of dissolution and reordering will run its course in every nation, no matter how old and firmly knit its social system may be.”[65]
"Enough time has elapsed since the cessation of hostilities against Germany to permit the inspection of one of the theoretical components of the National Socialist Movement; the element which, of all the heterogeneous elements, made National Socialism what it was: the theory of race.
An inquiry of this nature can either, like almost all previous criticisms, muster external objections from anthropological, sociological and historical sources against what are conceived (often incorrectly) to be critical facets of the National Socialist theory on race; (1) or it can venture upon an immanent criticism; that is, it can pursue the inquiries of National Socialist theoreticians themselves, trying to understand the theory of race as it was, as it came to be, rather than as one conceives it to have been.
The latter course, the course chosen for this exposition, has much to recommend it. One does not dissipate one's energies harassing a straw man. The National Socialist theory of race was dynamic, ever-changing. This, indeed, must be the case with any theory which even pretends to be scientific. Furthermore, it is necessary to distinguish between the bona fide subject of inquiry and existing misconceptions. One need not resort to external sources to refute aspects of the theory which were rejected in the course of its development by National Socialist theoreticians themselves.
No theory, whether scientific, ethical or metaphysical, develops in a vacuum. It would be incredibly naïve to believe that any of these disciplines develops independently of the social milieu in which it arose. In order, therefore, to understand the nature and evolution of National Socialist speculations on race one would have to be conversant with the prevailing psychological, economic, scientific and social (cultural and political) forces prevalent throughout the period. Even were I fully informed as to these conditions, which I am not, space would not permit the introduction of such data into an essay of its length. What I shall attempt to do, however, is to indicate, in passing, the most compelling forces, tactical and theoretical, which, it seems, in general directed the rapid growth and transformation of the National Socialist theory of race."[66]
(An optimistic Gregor thought 13 years was "enough" time to allow for level-headed examinations of National Socialist race theory. Writing this blog over 70 years--nearly an entire lifetime--after the war, perhaps it is now finally enough time for a re-examination?)
Gregor was far from the only one who advocated for a radical re-examination of the concept of "race". The importance of "re-romonaticizing" the notion of "race" with a new and positive meaning in order to overcome the ignoble traditional ethnic-based conception of "race" was independently expressed by David Elliston Allen in a 1971 introduction to a reprint of John Beddoe's 1885 book. Further, Allen reminds us that, although physical anthropology had fallen out of fashion, the information gained from it remains insightful to this day.
"Ignorance and misconceptions about race, as about heredity in general, are as prevalent and as stubbornly persistent today as ever they were in the past. Yet the salient facts are scarcely taught, the very few who are sufficiently informed rarely address themselves to a non-specialist audience, the word itself has become so distastefully emotive that it is fast becoming taboo. Only a few years out of a period during which the predominant intellectual reflex, entirely understandably, was to call in question the very validity of "race" as a scientific concept, in an effort to outflank the spurious and harmful doctrines then being erected upon it, we now find ourselves instead in a world confronted and riven by human physical differences of an altogether starker kind, too extensive and too prominent to be convincingly denied. ...The task now, therefore—in so far as the biological facts contribute to what is first and foremost a social and cultural problem—is not, perhaps, to attempt to underplay the physical reality of race, but, rather, to come to terms with it: to grapple with it in all its complex details, to paint the unavoidable portraits with the greatest possible subtlety, in the hope that rational interest and curiosity will eventually crowd out irrational fear and resentment. Confuse the crude perception and we may hope to defuse the crude emotion. If we cannot conjure race out of existence, if we cannot eliminate altogether its worrying classificatory possibilities through wholesale miscegenation, then conceivably the next best thing we can do is try to counter one kind of positive reaction with another equally positive: by giving it a deliberate boost, by restoring it to a position of pride—in a word, by re-romanticizing it.
This, at any rate, was essentially the attitude to race of Beddoe and his contemporaries. For them, the study of human physical differences was merely a part of natural history or archaeology. Just as it seemed to them useful and commendable to try to learn as much as one could about one’s environment and its origins, so it seemed no less useful and commendable—if anything, even more so—to try to determine one’s own physical ancestry. The past-in-the-present has always constituted an extraordinarily powerful ingredient in romanticism. Men did not only want to know who they were or why they behaved as they did: they wanted to feel as well the stirring of the root-tug, to catch a glimpse of the Old Adam. The notion that people walked around with a natural endowment hundreds or even thousands of years old indelibly stamped upon their faces was both immensely romantic and—in those days—immensely mysterious.
[...]
It goes back to a time, too, when even savants as eminent and sensible as Beddoe still entertained the naive assumption that the precise delineation of the external physical characteristics of human populations entitled them to generalize with almost equal blitheness and aplomb about the mental traits supposedly associated with them. ...The many statements that they contain on racial disposition and moral character can in no way be regarded as substantiated. We may, if we feel so inclined, relish these as interesting suppositions; we must not, however, take them for anything more than this. It is, to be sure, by no means impossible that correlations between at least certain physical and psychological traits in some degree exist and that these occur in patterns that may be broadly described as racial. But this is far from proven..."[67]
Allen was likely unaware, and probably wouldn't even believe it if you informed him, that Hitler had already expressed this exact same sentiment 50 years prior:
“In the scientific sense there is no such thing as race. But you...cannot get your breeding successfully achieved without the conception of race. And I as a politician need a conception which enables the order which has hitherto existed on historic bases to be abolished and an entirely new anti-historic order enforced and given an intellectual basis ... For this purpose the conception of race serves me well ... With the conception of race, National Socialism will carry the revolution abroad and re-cast the world.” – Adolf Hitler[65]
"We do not conclude from a man's physical type his ability, but rather from his achievements his race." – Adolf Hitler[66]
***
Being an American insulated from both the tumult of National Socialist racial ideas in addition to traditional Nordicist ideas placing the 'best' "race" in Scandinavia/Germany/Northern Europe, Carleton Coon's (1939) easily-accessible English-language work provides a good source to compare to contemporary German anthropologists. From this, we can see German anthropologists at the time did not differ too profoundly from Coon, suggesting they were in line with accepted academic facts. By taking isolated quotes and examining them with 21st-century knowledge, it is easy for disingenuous authors to make any work from the 1930s seem crude. Now knowing the history of bio-anthropology and the rather rudimentary, and almost entirely pre-genetic, state of this field by the 1930s, we can properly contextualize German anthropology and see that (besides speculative Nordicists such as Guenther) it was by no means crude for the time, and in many ways, more insightful than views predominating today.
First, we see that anthropologists understood "race" as a highly dynamic and elastic entity, and not at all like the set-in-stone categories we are used to thinking of it as today.
"All of this leads us back eventually to where we started, when we began to consider the meaning of the word race. A race is, in view of this discussion, a group of people who possess the majority of their physical characteristics in common. A pure race, if the term need be used, is one in which the several contributing elements have become so completely blended that correlations fail to reveal their original combinations. At the same time the processes of selection and of response to environmental influences have given the resultant blend a distinctive character.
The longer such a human entity remains isolated, the more distinctive it may become in the racial sense. It may expand numerically, divide, and become a major human stock, while others once much more numerous may become almost extinct, or fully so through absorption. But the most important fact about a race is that it is an entity, however ill defined, which is never static, but always in process of change." - Carleton Coon, (1939).[68]
"Race stasis (Rassenstatik), has become in the course of the last ten years even more life-less. What now announces itself is a race dynamic." - Friedrich Merkenschlager, Rassensonderung, Rassenmischung, Rassenwandlung (1933).[66]
"In view of the complexity of the human species, as a result of its cultural peculiarities which have separated it from the rest of the animal world, it is not easy to define the word "race." Since man is the oldest domestic animal, his variation and selection have operated over an immensely longer span of time than those of the other species for whose present forms he is responsible. Any attempt to classify him by a rigid scheme is immensely difficult, and the scheme must be elastic if it is to work at all. Hence the term "race" must also be elastic." - Carleton Coon, (1939).[69]
Hitler's background was an artist, not a biologist; however, he understood the divisive nature of ethnic-based race and had little desire for it to carry on.
“We have this folk of ours that is not to be defined as a race, and this is now clear to millions. However, when I began my career twenty-five years ago, this was not the case; then I was always told by bourgeois circles: “Yes, folk and race are one and the same.” No, folk and race are not the same! Race is a component of blood – a blood kernel, but a folk is very often composed not of one but of two, three, four or five different blood kernels.” – Adolf Hitler[70]
In old-school anthropology terms, a "blood kernel" means a "race" (in the ethnic sense)--anthropologists at the time considered Germany to be composed of "Alpines", "Nordics", "Mediterraneans", "Dinarics", "Faelids", and a number of other "races". In social terms, a folk is the dynamic result of a blending of peoples united by a common goal. In evolutionary terms, this corresponds to a heterogeneous group experiencing similar selective pressure--the first steps towards the qualitative race formation, i.e. a genetic folk. This is race is the true sense, not the ethnic sense.
"The only definite facts before us are these groups of mankind, dispersed over the whole habitable surface of the globe, to which are commonly given the names of peoples, nations, clans, tribes, etc. We have presented to us Arabs, Swiss, Australians, Bushmen, English, Siouan Indians, Negroes, etc., without knowing if each of these groups is on an equal footing from the point of view of classification.
Do these real and palpable groupings represent unions of individuals which, in spite of some slight dissimilarities, are capable of forming what zoologists call "species," "sub-species," "varieties," in the case of wild animals, or "races" in the case of domestic animals? One need not be a professional anthropologist to reply negatively to this question. They are ethnic groups formed by virture of community of language, religion, social institutions, etc., which have the power of uniting human beings of one or several species, races, or varieties, and are by no means zoologial species; they may include human beings of one or of many species, races, or varieties.
Here, then, is the first distinction to make: the social groups that we are to describe in this work under the names of clans, tribes, nations, populations, and peoples, according to their numerical importance and the degree of complication of their social life, are formed for us by the union of individuals belonging usually to two, three, or a greater number of "somatological units." These units are "theoretic types" formed of an aggregation of physical characters combined in a certain way." - Joseph Deniker, (1900).[71]
"We can sum up what has just been said in a few propositions. On examining attentively the different "ethnic groups" commonly called "peoples," "nations," "tribes," etc., we ascertain that they are distinguished from each other especially by their language, their mode of life, and their manners; and we ascertain besides that the same traits of physical type are met with in two, three, or several groups, sometimes considerably removed the one from the other in point of habitat. On the other hand, we almost always see in these groups some variations of type so striking that we are led to admit the hypothesis of the formation of such groups by the blending of several distinct somatological units.
It is to these units that we give the name "races," using the word in a very broad sense different from that given to it in zoology and zootechnics. It is a sum-total of somatological characteristics once met with in a real union of individuals, now scattered in fragments of varying proportions among several "ethnic groups," from which it can no longer be differentiated except by a process of delicate analysis." - Joseph Deniker, (1900).[72]
"Besides, if we go to the root of the matter we perceive that the diversity in the classifications of the genus Homo is often only apparent, for most classifications confuse ethnic groups and races. If my readers refer back to what I said in the introduction on "races" and "ethnic groups," they will understand all the difficulties this causes.
In order to class peoples, nations, tribes, in a word, "ethnic groups," we ought to take into consideration linguistic differences, ethnic characters, and especially, in my opinion, geographical distribution. It is thus that I shall describe the different peoples in the subsequent chapters, while classing them geographically. But for a classification of "races" (using the word in the sense given to it in the introduction), it is only necessary to take into account physical characters. We must try to determine by the anthropological analysis of each of the ethnic groups the races which constitute it; then compare these races one with another, unite those which possess most similarities in common, and separate those which exhibit most dissimilarities.
On making these methodic groupings we arrive at a small number of races, combinations of which, in various proportions, are met with in the multitude of ethnic groups." - Joseph Deniker, (1900).[73]
From the quotes above, we can see Deniker recognized by 1900 that ethnic groups were composed of multiple "blood kernels". Earlier in this article I pointed out that Deniker's "races" are merely ancient ethnic groups, and not races in the true evolutionary sense. Just the same, Hitler realized the ethnic-based conception of "the races" (no matter how detailed or anthropometrically-accurate) had little value in his worldview, giving much more importance to the concept of the folk.
Von Eickstedt's elucidation of racial dynamics can be easily be interpreted from the perspective of qualitative race rather than ethnic race:
"…races provide the original fundamentals of our essence and our expressions; it determines the physical and psychical collective expression of our people; but our Folk is a new biological unity whose members are joined together in the portentous bands of a community of blood in a common homeland. Within a Folk the profound biological laws of human evolution, heredity and selection, adaption and genetic drift, realize themselves. Race is therefore a result, Folk is a commencement in the biological evolution of human groups…" - Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt, Die rassischen Grundlagen des deutschen Volkes, (1934).[66]
Perhaps the present-day conception of "race" as something which connotes sharp, discrete boundaries is a cultural carry-over from the days of the "one drop rule" in US and British colonialist societies? Certainly it is difficult to understand how we went from anthropologists in both English and German-speaking countries explaining racial flux in the 1930s to the 21st century where professional academics have reverted back to Blumenbach's crude terminology of "the Caucasian race" from the 1700s...
***
XIV. Were NS Anthropologists Obsessed with Twins?
What of the infamous "Nazi twin studies"? It seems this may be yet another cliche blown out of proportion--by conflating early anthropological studies on twins with the the alleged atrocities of Josef Mengele, and pretending as if the crude "experiments" he is said to have done on prisoners were standard practice among serious anthropologists. For reference, the US conducted an experiment on Guatemalans where prisoners, prostitutes, and mental patients were infected with syphilis from 1946-1948,[74] and continued the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment on impoverished "blacks" into the 1970s.[75] I bring this up not to downplay any cruel or scientifically useless things Mengele may have done, but to demonstrate that dangerous and cruel experimentation on prisoners (and even random citizens) is by no means restricted to one man, nation, or ideology. Much research has been done into experimentation of this sort conducted by individuals from the US, so I recommend the reader start there if they are curious of the history of human experimentation.[76]
Getting back on topic, twin studies are still used today in order to help scientists separate environmental factors from hereditary factors.
Twin studies were a relatively new area of research at the time (although Galton had showed interest in twin studies in the 1800s,[77] it was not until the era of genetics that they became more useful to science), so perhaps this is why it was so easy for the public imagination to become captured by those 'wacky Nazzis' and their "weird" science. Indeed, a brief glance at internet websites written about twin studies reveals that the majority have significant sections dedicated to Mengele.
Here is a US-based author writing about the emerging use of twins to study heredity in the 1930s and 1940s:
"These developments in our understanding of human differentiation have served to draw greater attention in recent years to what may be termed the ecological and adaptive aspects. More emphasis is being placed on studies of the interrelation between Man and his environment and on the nature and limits of human adaptability. Of the various possible approaches, a particularly fruitful technique for distinguishing between heredity endowment and environmental modification is that based on the comparison of twins. The work of Newman and his colleagues is noteworthy here (1937, 1940)." - J. S. Weiner, (1952).[78]
Below is an excerpt from the 1937 study referenced above. Newman was a US-based researcher, and we may imagine German-based anthropologists at the time had similar interest in using twins to study the emerging field of genetics and heredity.
"It is now ten years since the three authors agreed to pool their intellectual resources in an attack upon the much-debated nature-nurture problem, using twins as the most favorable weapons for such an attack. It was thought that the three of us together--a psychologist, a statistician, and a specialist in the biology of twins--might be able to go more deeply into this problem than could one person with one particular type of training.
Originally the plan was to compare, in as many ways as we could, a group of identical twins reared together with an equivalent group of fraternal twins reared together. Subsequently, when we began to secure for a study a number of pairs of identical twins reared apart, it seemed advisable to postpone an attempt to arrive at final conclusions until the number of twins reared apart became sufficiently large to have statistical value. These cases came in slowly, and it was only a little over a year ago that we decided that the time had come for publishing a general report on the whole project."[79]
***
XV. Were NS Anthropologists Nordicists?
A. James Gregor, in what seems to be one of the exceedingly few studies on NS racial ideas which wasn't written under the dogma that everything the Nazis touched dripped with pure evil, notes that Guenther was the leading driver of Nordicism in Germany at the time. According to Gregor, the work of Guenther, which was immensely popular in Germany before the National Socialists came to power, was only 'embraced' by the National Socialists in an intermediate phase of the development of their racial ideas. While National Socialists avoided Nordicism early on, once they started gaining popularity in Germany they seem to have decided to tolerate absorbing Guenther's fans for the additional electoral popularity this would give them. Then, once in power, they distanced themselves from Guenther and Nordicism in order to pursue a more dynamic, nuanced, and unifying concept of race. Unfortuantely, they still had to contend with the unfortunate baggage that Guenther's terminology had left on the public imagination.
"The development of the National Socialist theory of race can be divided into three periods, and each period had a characteristic cast and temper.
The earliest period of National Socialist racism was characterized by the writings and speeches of Hitler himself."[66]
"Nowhere in the early literature of the Movement does the designation "Nordic" figure with any prominence, least of all in Hitler's public statements."[66]
"Even at the close of this first period, in 1930, when Rosenberg's Mythos appeared, his use of the word "Nordic" was strictly qualified by this pronouncement: "…nothing would be more superficial than to measure a man's worth by his physical appearance (with a centimeter rule and cephalic indices). A far more accurate measure of worth is conduct."
But with the advent of the thirties we enter a new and highly critical phase of theoretical development. By this time, quite independently of the National Socialist Movement, the works of Hans F.K. Guenther had achieved wide circulation and popularity in Germany.
The works of Guenther evinced a certain attractiveness for National Socialist theoreticians.
[...]
Why this should have been so can be explained largely by recalling once more to mind the psychological climate of revolutionary Germany. A people disillusioned in war, betrayed in peace, sought, in a hostile world, status and place. Overcompensation, generated by the tensions of the time, demanded not only equality but superiority."[66]
"This having been the case it is necessary to note two important facts:
1. Guenther categorically rejected the designation "Aryan" which Hitler favoured (10) and substituted a carefully defined "Nordic" in its stead. The change, as we shall see, was of critical importance."[66]
"The impossibility of accepting such a conclusion was obvious, to the least informed National Socialist, on its very face. The immediate leadership of the National Socialist Party with about 95 per cent. of the German population did not meet the requirements for first class citizenship under this scheme.
A Movement which had arisen in Germany with the promise of unifying a people, and had promised the elimination of class distinctions as divisive, found itself advocating distinctions more penetrating and permanent than class lines had ever been. (92) Men have sometimes risen above their class - no man can escape his degree of pigmentation or his cranial index. Such a situation was intolerable, and it was the realization of this fact that galvanized the theoreticians into action.
Guenther was to be specifically rejected. While recognizing the fact that his books had served to stimulate inquiry into the intricate problems of race, the pernicious aspects of the "Nordic hypothesis" were decried. The enthusiasm with which Guenther's ideas had been accepted, Weinert wrote, precipitated conclusions for which "there was no biological foundation… The consequence was often that an unfounded race-pride threatened to sunder the German people." (93)
The first clear statement on official reorientation had come from Hitler himself only seven months after he came to power, at the 1933 Nuremberg Parteitag. Hitler said: "We do not conclude from a man's physical type his ability, but rather from his achievements his race." (94) Thus achievements, not physical type, were to be the measure of worth.
This principle advanced by Hitler entered the basic texts on anthropology and heredity, and by 1935 the last phase in the development of National Socialist race theory was well under way. Thieme repeats Hitler's principle and adds "the men who bear the qualities of heroism, strength of will, a readiness to sacrifice and faith have played a decisive role in deciding Germany's destiny, and they shall continue to do so even if they are not all tall, blond or blue-eyed." (95)
Eichenauer goes so far as to inform his readers that the amount of Nordic blood an individual possesses means nothing (spielt keine Rolle) in the Nordic scheme of things because "it has often enough been the case that men of extremely mixed race (stark gemischter Rasse) have conceived and more powerfully grasped these notions than the predominantly Nordic." (96)
Goebbels is identified quite candidly as a Nordic - Mediterranean (97) restored to first class citizenship. In mid-1936 the National socialistische Korrespondenz stated with clarity and authority: "From his deeds one can recognize the Nordic man - not from the length of his nose and the colour of his eyes." (98)
In effect this last phase of National Socialist race theory was a complete rejection of Guenther's Nordicism.
[...]
Dr. Walter Gross, head of the Rassenpolitische Amt of the National Socialist Party, said: "We appreciate the fact that those of another race are different from us… Whether that other race is 'better' or 'worse' is not possible for us to judge. For this would demand that we transcend our own racial limitations for the duration of the verdict and take on a superhuman, even divine, attitude from which alone an 'impersonal' verdict could be formed on the value or lack of such of the many living forms of inexhaustible Nature." (105)
Less than a year later, in 1939, he defined the official position of mature National Socialist race theory:
"A serious situation arose through the fact that other people and States, because of German race laws… felt themselves attacked and defamed … For example the whole world of the Far East remained for a long time under the impression that the Germans… had designated them as non-Aryan, and as non-Aryans inferior rabble - (that the) Germans had designated (them) unworthy, second class humanity and that the Germans imagined themselves as the sole bearers of culture… What could we say to those who saw in German racism a fundamental defamation of men of other races? We could do nothing other than, with patience and conviction, repeat that German racism does not evaluate or deprecate other racial groups… It only recognizes, scientifically, that differences exist… We have often been disturbed by the indiscretion or even stupidity in our own land when, just after we had carefully made clear to some people or other that we respected and honoured… their racial qualities, some wild fool manufactured his own ideas about race and declared that these same people were racially inferior and stood somewhere below the cow or the ass, and that their characteristics were degrading or impure and lord knows what else! By such idiotic assertions were repelled and offended not only alien peoples in distant parts of the world but even our own neighbours in Europe, many times even friends of National Socialist Germany bound to us historically and in destiny." (106)"[66]
(Note that when Gross says "race" he means it in the ethnic sense--German is an ethnicity, not a "race". Indeed, his statement that one can not judge whether a "race" is better or worse only makes sense using the "blood kernel" definition. It was futile to sweepingly judge whether an individual of the so-called "Faelid race" or "Nordic race" or "Mediterranean race" was categorically inferior. Yet, Hitler and National Socialism in general were never shy about their dislike of the racial character of Jews, and that Jewishness was indeed a racial trait, not merely a cultural or religious one. Jews had become qualitatively different from Aryans by a different selective process, rather than merely being quantitatively different due to differences in ethnic ancestry.)
"It was in this last phase that National Socialist race theory was cut off. Of this last phase all to little is known outside the immediate intellectual circle which fostered it.
Upon the cessation of hostilities the work of half a decade was scattered or destroyed - to leave only the tragic-comic image of the Nordicism of Guenther and his followers, to appear and reappear as the popular misconception of the National Socialist theory of history.
Actually the elements of a far more profound theory are to be discerned in the few surviving books that mark the last dynamic phase of development of a concept of race free of the encumbrances of a hysterical Nordicism. (108)
As early as 1933 the first elements are to be found in Merkenschlager (109) - later some appear in von Eickstedt, (110) and still later in Gross. (111)
In Italy the same tendencies revealed themselves in the Fascist Race Manifesto of 1938, and in the work of Maggiore (112) and Franzi. (113) Everywhere the talk was no longer of fixed and immutable races, (114) but of races in formation, the components for which arise out of the crucible of the past - races in formation cast over by the ideal of a living heritage - for Germany a Nordic Mythos, for Italy an animating devotion of Romanita. The talk is of races yet to be fashioned by living an ideal, united by a common destiny, nurtured in a common environment, the political expression of which is Nationhood. (115)"[66]
***
XVI. What Did NS Anthropologists Mean by "Racial Purity"?
And, most infamously, what of the supposed obsession with "racial purity"?
Contrary to popular belief, National Socialists consistently rejected that ethnic purity or anthropometric measurements were criteria which in themselves determined an individual's worth:
"We do not conclude from a man's physical type his ability, but rather from his achievements his race." - Adolf Hitler[66]
"Nothing would be more superficial than to measure a man's worth by his physical appearance (with a centimeter rule and cephalic indices). A far more accurate measure of worth is conduct." - Alfred Rosenberg[66]
"Eichenauer goes so far as to inform his readers that the amount of Nordic blood an individual possesses means nothing (spielt keine Rolle) in the Nordic scheme of things because "it has often enough been the case that men of extremely mixed race (stark gemischter Rasse) have conceived and more powerfully grasped these notions than the predominantly Nordic."" - A. James Gregor (1958), quoting Richard Eichenauer, Die Rasse als Lebensgesetz in Geschichte und Gesittung (1934).[66]
Could the narrative of "Nazi obsession" with "racial purity" have come from a misunderstanding of biological concepts by sociologists, historians, and political authors? Reading the following passage from the 1930s may help contextualize much of the hubbub about "purity" in biological circles at the time:
"We have already recognized the concept species in regard to man. There is one other concept, wholly theoretical for practical reasons, which may be recognized with equal definition. That is the pure strain, the result of generations of inbreeding and selection of recessive characters. In man, the pure strain is impossible to create unless our social system radically changes. In rats, guinea pigs, and fruit flies, it has been created." - Carleton Coon, (1939).[80]
Gregor Mendel in the 1860s realized reliable studies on breeding could only take place if he had a "pure line" which "bred true". In his experiments, he mated plants with themselves for many generations in order to produce plants whose alleles were homozygous (i.e. "pure").[82]
Before advanced genetic sequencing techniques, it was impossible to know whether a yellow pea was Yy or YY. If your goal was to only produce yellow peas, mating a Yy with a Yy would sometimes produce offspring with undesired phenotypes. If mating a YY and Yy, all offspring would be of the desired phenotype, but half would have the undesirable "y" allele, allowing it to continue into the next generation and be re-expressed. When you run into complex traits with multiple genes influencing them (such as countless important traits in humans) or want to take multiple traits into account when considering offspring, things get much more complicated. And, of course, experimentally breeding humans to produce a "pure strain" is not practical, and therefore one must instead find mostly "pure" individuals (i.e. possessing the desired traits) who are already around.
"The decisive problem which alone remained was thus: What was the method by which one was to find these men who as successors of the former creators of the body of our people and therefore as their heirs could today maintain their work? Here there was but one possibility: one could not from the race infer the capacity but one had to infer from the capacity the racial fitness for the task." - Adolf Hitler[66]
The way "pure strains" of plants and mice were created was by inbreeding. Inbreeding increases the frequency of homozygous genotypes. Again, recognizing the uselessness of trying to experimentally "breed" "pure" humans as if they were lab mice, and the dangers of inbreeding depression on biological quality, Hitler was highly critical of inbreeding. No doubt he would have been aware of historic inbreeding amongst the "aristocratic" classes, which eugenicists (e.g. Lapouge, Ammon) seemed to favor in order to increase "purity". Darwin had observed inbreeding depression in the health of plants as early as 1876 in The Effects of Cross and Self-fertilization in the Vegetable Kingdom.
"Our duty is methodically to pursue a racial policy. We’re compelled to do so, if only to combat the degeneration which is beginning to threaten us by reason of unions that in a way are consanguineous [i.e inbred]." – Adolf Hitler [83]
***
Ah, so there we have it. "Purity" is a theoretical concept which, if it existed in humans, would make demographically promoting certain traits much easier.
Living in the pre-DNA era of biology, perhaps we can forgive National Socialists for not elucidating which specific alleles they desired in an theoretical "pure strain". For 21st-century Aryanists, we can begin to more precisely define which alleles to demographically enhance, and which to minimize. All other genetic material, whether it be "junk DNA" or genes for traits such as skin color or hair texture (which have zero influence on the quality of an individual's moral character), are irrelevant. This is why ethnicity is irrelevant to us--heritable traits for nobility can exist in any ethnic group's gene pool.
It is not "pure" ethnicity or ancestry which National Socialists truly desired, but alleles for certain, noble, traits. Any emphasis on "purity" of ancestry was merely a crude, yet the best available, proxy for the hypothesized genetic basis for noble traits. Their particular emphasis on Jewish ancestry was because Jews, who had maintained their group identity for millennia (despite being very small minorities in the nations they inhabited) through rarely mating outside of tight-knit circles, had come closer than any other group to reaching this theoretical "pure strain".
This was achieved through strong selective pressure for traits favorable to tribalism and maintaining a strong sense of in-group-out-group identity, amongst other things viewed as negative by National Socialists, and therefore of critical importance to minimize in the 'gene pool'. While it is no doubt that historical National Socialists frequently pointed out a variety of negative traits they associated with Jewishness, 21st-centry Aryanists believe "Jewishness" can best be encapsulated as dishonest tribalism, archetypically arising from a herding lifestyle.
“We see how enormous the differences are between the ethics, the philosophy of life, the attitude toward others between the Jews and the settled peoples … They really are two completely different races. In the same way, the concept of ‘keeping the race pure’ can never be transferred from the Jewish example to, for example, the Aryan.” – Adolf Hitler[84]
"Through thousands of years of the closest kind of inbreeding, Jews in general have maintained their race and their peculiarities far more distinctly than many of the peoples among whom they have lived." – Adolf Hitler[85]
Again, it is not ethnic or ancestral purity in and of itself that matters, but specific traits for noble moral character (which can theoretically be found in any ethnic group), and the mathematical frequency of these traits within a given gene pool/population. An ancestrally-isolated and hence "pure" ethnic group without these traits is useless, while a highly-mixed population with such traits can be demographically enhanced, provided the trait is heritable.
Eichenauer goes so far as to inform his readers that the amount of Nordic blood an individual possesses means nothing (spielt keine Rolle) in the Nordic scheme of things because "it has often enough been the case that men of extremely mixed race (stark gemischter Rasse) have conceived and more powerfully grasped these notions than the predominantly Nordic."[66]
All heritable traits have a genetic basis, but as the field of genetics was only making its first steps in the 1930s (recall that DNA's role as the hereditary molecule[46] and its structure as a double helix[47] would not be demonstrated until the 1950s, and it was not until the 1970s that sequencing of DNA bases (letters) started to become practical[48]), 1930s National Socialists were often forced to rely heavily on better-studied physical traits, ethnological studies, and archaeological data as the scientific basis of their ideas, and were stuck with the baggage of pre-existing terminology and opinions in order to explain and rhetorically promote their visionary ideas to the public.
Radically, they offered the anti-traditional social construct of "race" as something indicative of moral quality rather than mere quantitative anthropometric similarity or genetic relatedness.
***
XVII. Conclusion
The longer anti-racists refuse to re-examine the state of bio-anthropology, the more time racists have to appropriate material and hone their arguments. If PC's stifling directive as to which perspectives were acceptable for scientists to hold was bad (and it is), just imagine how bad things will be once PC finally withers away and HBDers inherit this monopoly (which they certainly will, if they remain unopposed).
As I keep stressing, the real ideological battleground in science is not the data itself, but the subjective conclusions observers reach from the data. HBDers have long realized this, while PC supporters continue to reject an entire sub-field and century's worth of anthropological work, allowing HBDers to pick and choose data to support their narrative (and ignore any that contradicts it) at their leisure.
Putting our hands over our eyes and ears and pretending anthropology didn't exist before 1950 has not made racism disappear, nor has it made society any less interested in discussing "race" and human variation. It is time for leftists and anti-racists to revisit the data, and embrace the fact that it is at odds with the crude picture which HBDers try to paint.
Ethically, racism will always be repulsive, independently of any "scientific data." Even so, the nuances revealed to us by the scientific data rarely, if ever, align with the crude narrative of the world which racists attempt to spin. Contrary to what White Supremacists and HBDers constantly say, we do not live in a world with a clearcut division between the "white race" and "black race", where the only purpose of these "races" is to engage in a nature (or God) ordained battle of survival to overpower the other. The true picture of human variation is one of nuances and complexity, of fluctuations, changes, mixing, and gradients spanning over an immense time period.
Many anti-racists parrot the phrase "there is more variation within 'the races' than between them" in an attempt to discredit the ethnicity-based classification of "races", but they time after time fail to convincingly articulate this argument to undecided bystanders. Yet anyone with even the most simple acquaintance with physical anthropology intuitively knows how sound this argument against the ethno-centric concept of "race" is, and certainly this sentiment was shared by the physical anthropologists who devoted their lives to studying and classifying this variation in an attempt to communicate it to society.
It is time for anti-racists to prove they actually believe their own talking points, and re-examine the data which they so unjustifiably fear. One of the keys to proving the logical absurdity of HBD views lies in front of us; woe to them who refuse to grasp it.
***
For comments and discussion, refer to this blog post:
https://aryan-anthropology.blogspot.com/2017/04/reclaming-race-from-racists.html
References
[1] T. K. Penniman. (1935, 2nd edition 1952). A Hundred Years of Anthropology. Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd. Page 21.
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.103292/page/n5/mode/2up
[2] Wikipedia. Giuseppe Sergi. Page last edited November 4, 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Sergi
[3] T. K. Penniman, op. cit. (1952). Page 114-115.
[4] Carleton Coon. (1939). The Races of Europe. New York: The MacMillan Company. Page 83 and 283.
https://archive.org/details/racesofeurope031695mbp
[5] Ibid., Chapter IV: The Neolithic Invasions.
[6] William Z. Ripley. (1899). The Races of Europe, A Sociological Study. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, and Co., Ltd. Page 507-510.
https://archive.org/details/racesofeuropeso00ripl/page/n5/mode/2up
[7] Ibid., figure 137, page 330. Previously-unpublished photo from the collection of John Beddoe.
[8] Ibid., page 129.
[9] Carleton Coon, op. cit. (1939). Plate 27.
[10] Joseph Deniker. (1900). The Races of Man: An Outline of Anthropology and Ethnography. London: Walter Scott, Limited. See Introduction.
https://archive.org/details/racesofmanoutlin00deniuoft/page/n7/mode/2up
[11] Michael Billinger. (2007). Another Look at Ethnicity as a Biological Concept. Critique of Anthropology, 27(1): 5-35.
https://www.academia.edu/1435069/Another_Look_at_Ethnicity_as_a_Biological_Concept
[12] A Peep at the World. (c. 1800s). Children's Original Toy Books series. London: Thomas Dean and Co. Page 4.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:National-stereotypes.jpg
https://web.archive.org/web/20070216112256/http://www.inf.aber.ac.uk/academicliaison/horton/details/peepattheworld.asp
[13] Wikipedia. Nordic race. Page last edited November 4, 2021. (See the first sentence of the subsection "Background".)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_race
[14] Madison Grant. (1916, 4th edition 1936). The Passing of the Great Race. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Page 282.
https://archive.org/details/passingofgreatra00granuoft/page/n5/mode/2up
[15] Carleton Coon, op. cit. (1939). Page 280.
[16] Joseph Deniker, op. cit. (1900). Page 326.
[17] Madison Grant, op. cit. (1936). Page 20 and 61-62.
[18] Wikimedia Commons. File:Czekanowski.jpg. Figure from: Jan Czekanowski. (1934). Człowiek w czasie i przestrzeni.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Czekanowski.jpg
[19] Carleton Coon, op. cit. (1939). Page 288.
[20] Michael A. Little. (2018). Physical anthropology in 1918 and the founding of the U.S. journal. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 165(4): 626-637.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.23394
[21] Elizabeth A. Kelly and Robert W. Sussman. (2006). An academic genealogy on the history of American field primatologists. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 132(3): 406-425.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.20532
[22] W. Andrew Barr, Brett Nachman, and Liza Shapiro. Academic Phylogeny of Biological Anthropology.
https://www.bioanthtree.org/
[23] J. E. Lindsay Carter, William D. Ross, William Duquet, and Stephen P. Aubry. (1983). Advances in somatotype methodology and analysis. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 26(S1): 193-213.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ajpa.1330260509
[24] Wikipedia. Earnest Hooton. Page last edited November 11, 2021. (In particular, see footenotes 9 and 14.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earnest_Hooton
[25] Ibid., see second paragraph of subsection "Hooton on African Americans (1930-1940)".
[26] Carleton Coon, op. cit. (1939). Page 286.
[27] William W. Howells. (1989). Carleton Stevens Coon. Printed in: Biological Memoirs, Volume 58. Chapter 6, page 108-131. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press. (See page 112.)
https://www.nap.edu/read/1645/chapter/6
[28] Carleton Coon, op. cit. (1939). "Nordicism", Glossary, page 677.
[29] Ibid., page 83.
[30] Ibid., page 82.
[31] Ibid., page 121.
[32] UNESCO. (1969). Four statements on the race question. (Reprint containing the 1950, 1951, 1964, and 1967 UNESCO statements on "the race question".)
http://www.refugeestudies.org/UNHCR/UNHCR.%20Four%20Statements%20on%20the%20Race%20Question.pdf
[33] T. K. Penniman, op. cit. (1952). Preface.
[34] Charles Fergus. (May 1, 2003). Boas, Bones, and Race. Research | Penn State University.
https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/boas-bones-and-race/
[35] Wikipedia. Boasian anthropology. Page last edited April 10, 2020.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boasian_anthropology
[36] Wikipedia. Cultural relativism. Page last edited October 6, 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_relativism
[37] Ibid., see subsection "Comparison to moral relativism."
[38] Wikipedia. History of anthropology. Page last edited November 15, 2021. (See subsection "Franz Boas".)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_anthropology#Franz_Boas
[39] Wikipedia. The Race Question. Page last edited October 27, 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Race_Question
[40] T. K. Penniman, op. cit. (1952). Page 15.
[41] J. S. Weiner. Physical Anthropology Since 1935; A Survey of Developments. Published in: T. K. Penniman. (1935, 2nd edition 1952). A Hundred Years of Anthropology. Page 378-379.
[42] Sherwood L. Washubrn. (1951). The New Physical Anthropology. Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences, 13(7:II): 298-304.
https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2164-0947.1951.tb01033.x
[43] Peter T. Ellison. (2018). The evolution of physical anthropology. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 165: 615-625.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajpa.23408
[44] Alan H. Goodman and Evelynn Hammonds. (2000). Reconciling Race and Human Adaptability: Carleton Coon and The Persistence of Race in Scientific Discourse. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, 84(4): 28-44.
https://digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu/record/84025
[45] Wikipedia. Modern synthesis (20th century). Page last edited October 8, 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_synthesis_(20th_century)
[46] Wikipedia. Hershey–Chase experiment. Page last edited September 20, 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hershey%E2%80%93Chase_experiment
[47] NIH, U.S. National Library of Medicine. The Discovery of the Double Helix, 1951-1953. Francis Crick - Profiles in Science.
https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/spotlight/sc/feature/doublehelix
[48] Wikipedia. DNA sequencing. Page last edited October 23, 2021. (See subsection "History".)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_sequencing#History
[49] Wikipedia. Samuel George Morton. Page last updated November 19, 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_George_Morton
[50] Wikipedia. The Mismeasure of Man. Page last edited November 19, 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man
[51] Jason E. Lewis, David DeGusta, Marc R. Meyer, Janet M. Monge, Alan E. Mann, and Ralph L. Holloway. (2011). The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias. PLOS Biology, 9(7): e1001071.
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001071
[52] Wikipedia. The Mismeasure of Man. Page last edited November 19, 2021. (See reference 24 and subsection "Reassessing Morton's skull measurements".)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man
[53] RationalRevolution. (January 16, 2014). Yes, There is a Gene for That.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160317091910/http://www.rationalrevolution.net/blog/index.blog?entry_id=2328845
[54] Bridget Alex. (September 21, 2018). Neanderthal Brains: Bigger, Not Necessarily Better. The Crux, Discover Magazine.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/neanderthal-brains-bigger-not-necessarily-better
[55] J. S. Weiner. Physical Anthropology Since 1935; A Survey of Developments. Published in: T. K. Penniman. (1935, 2nd edition 1952). A Hundred Years of Anthropology. Page 380.
[56] Ibid., page 397-398.
[57] Veronika Lipphardt. (August 31, 2009). Historicizing Knowledge about Human Biodiversity. Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Twentieth Century Histories of Knowledge about Human Variation, No. 9.
https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/news/features/features-feature9
https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/PDF/MPIWG-Feature_2009-09_Historizing-Knowledge-about-Human-Biodiversity.pdf
[58] J. S. Weiner. Physical Anthropology Since 1935; A Survey of Developments. Published in: T. K. Penniman. (1935, 2nd edition 1952). A Hundred Years of Anthropology. Page 403.
[59] Ibid., page 381.
[60] Lothrop Stoddard. (1920). The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stoddard_race_map_1920.jpg
[61] Joseph Deniker. (1899). Races de l'Europe.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deniker%27s_Races_de_l%27Europe_(1899).jpg
[62] William Z. Ripley, op. cit. (1899). Page 107.
[63] Ibid., page 102-104.
[64] Ibid., page 55-56.
[65] Hermann Rauschning. (1939). Hitler Speaks. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Page 113 and 229-30.
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.505385/page/n229/mode/2up
[66] A. James Gregor. (1958). National Socialism and Race. The European, 11 (July 1958): 273-91.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090202205701/http://dienekes.110mb.com/texts/natsoc/
[67] David Elliston Allen. (1971). Introduction, page ix-xi. Published in a reprint of the original edition of: John Beddoe. (1885). The Races of Britain.
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.533971/page/n9/mode/2up
[68] Carleton Coon, op. cit. (1939). Page 11.
[69] Ibid., page 5.
[70] Adolf Hitler. (May 26, 1944). Platterhof speech. See: Veronica Clark. (2010). Black Nazis II!", footnote 37, for an alternate translation.
https://archive.org/details/blacknazisiiethnicminoritiesandforeignersinhitlersarmedforcesanunbiasedhistory/page/n85/mode/2up
[71] Joseph Deniker, op. cit. (1900). Page 2-3.
[72] Ibid., page 8.
[73] Ibid., page 279-281.
[74] Wikipedia. Guatemala syphilis experiments. Page last edited November 13, 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiments
[75] Wikipedia. Tuskegee Syphilis Study. November 19, 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study
[76] Wikipedia. Unethical human experimentation in the United States. Page last updated November 21, 2021. (See subsection "Surgical experiments".)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States
[77] David Burbridge. (2001). Francis Galton on twins, heredity and social class. The British Journal for the History of Science, 34(3): 323-340.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-for-the-history-of-science/article/abs/francis-galton-on-twins-heredity-and-social-class/9508CBDCC07F44186B62E065AAF23E69
[78] J. S. Weiner. Physical Anthropology Since 1935; A Survey of Developments. Published in: T. K. Penniman. (1935, 2nd edition 1952). A Hundred Years of Anthropology. Page 377.
[79] Horatio Newman, Frank Freeman, and Karl Holzinger. (1937). Twins: A Study of Heredity and Environment. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Page v.
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.202894/page/n7/mode/2up
[80] Carleton Coon, op. cit. (1939). Page 4.
[81] Wikipedia. Laboratory mouse. Page last edited November 7, 2021. (See subsection "History as a biological model".)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratory_mouse
[82] Wikipedia. True-breeding organism. Page last edited September 8, 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True-breeding_organism
[83] Hitler's Table Talk: 1941-1944. (1953, 3rd edition 2000). Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens (translators). Preface by Hugh Trevor-Roper. New York City: Enigma Books. Page 25.
https://archive.org/details/HitlersTableTalk_1941_1944/mode/2up
[84] Otto Wagener, Hitler—Memoirs of a Confidant, ed. Henry Ashby Turner, Jr, trans. Ruth Hein (London: Yale University Press, 1985), 207, 208. Cited in: Veronica Clark. (2010). Black Nazis II!, footnote 41.
https://archive.org/details/blacknazisiiethnicminoritiesandforeignersinhitlersarmedforcesanunbiasedhistory/page/n87/mode/2up
[85] Adolf Hitler. (September 16, 1919). Letter to Adolf Gemlich. (Translator not specified.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20160705164237/http://multimedia.jp.dk/archive/00285/Gemlich_brevet_285325a.pdf
The specific translation found in the excerpt can be found here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210413020500/https://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/classes/133b/07files/133b07NaziTimeline.htm
.jpg){kind=link}