Polygenism
Encyclopedia
Polygenism is a theory of human origins positing that the human races are of different lineages (polygenesis). This is opposite to the idea of monogenism
, which posits a single origin of humanity.
s feature polygenesis in their creation stories, for example Bambuti mythology
and other creation stories from the pygmies of Congo state that the supreme God of the pygmies, Khonvoum
, created three different races of man separately out of three kinds of clay: one black, one white, and one red. In some cultures, polygenism in the creation narrative served an etiological function. These narratives provided an explanation as to why other people groups exist who are not affiliated with their tribe. Moreover, distinctions made between the creation of foreign people groups and the tribe or ethnic group to which the creation myth pertains served to reinforce tribal or ethnic unity, the need to exercise wariness and caution when dealing with outsiders, or the unique nature of the relationship between that tribe and the deities of their religious system. An example may be found in the creation myth of the Asmat people
, a hunter-gatherer
tribe situated along the south-western coast of New Guinea
. This creation myth asserts that the Asmat themselves came into being when a deity placed carved wooden statues in a ceremonial house and began to beat a drum. The statues became living humans and began to dance. Some time later, a great crocodile attempted to attack this ceremonial house, but was defeated by the power of the deity. The crocodile was cut into several pieces and these were tossed in different directions. Each piece became one of the foreign tribes known to the Asmat.
The idea is also found in some ancient Greek and Roman literature. For example the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate
in his Letter to a Priest wrote that he believed Zeus made multiple creations of man and women. In his Against the Galilaens Julian presented his reasoning for this belief. Julian had noticed that the Germanics and Scythians (northern nations) were different in their bodies (i.e complexion) to the Ethiopians. He therefore could not imagine such difference in physical attributes as having originated from common ancestry, so maintained separate creations for different races.
In early classical and medieval geography the idea of polygenism surfaced because of the suggested possibility of there being inhabitants of the antipodes
(Antichthones
). These inhabitants were considered by some to have separate origins because of their geographical extremity.
Robert Argod a navy
sailor
wrote a book in which he claimed Polynesian mythology
supported polygenesis, that the Polynesian peoples and later Asiatic people had originated from the Antarctica, separate from the other races.
The religion
of the Ainu people
claims that the ancestors of the Ainu people arrived on earth from the skys separate from the other races. See (Ainu creation myth
).
. In this context, polygenism described all alternative explanations for the origin of humankind that involved more than two individual "first people". This definition of polygenism is still employed among some Creationists and within the Roman Catholic Church (see Humani Generis
).
With the development of the evolutionary paradigm of human origins, it has become widely recognized within the scientific community that at no point did there exist a single "first man" and a single "first woman" who constituted the first true humans and to whom all lineages of modern humans ultimately converge. If Adam and Eve ever existed as distinct historical persons, they were members of a much larger population of the same species.. However, a common scientific explanation of human origins asserts that the population directly ancestral to all modern humans remained united as a single population by constant gene flow
. Therefore, on the level of the entire human population, this explanation of human origin is classified as monogenism. All modern humans share the same origin from this single ancestral population.
Modern polygenists are unable to accept either theological or scientific monogenism. They believe it does not explain why there is such a big variation among human races. Polygenists do not believe that Adam and Eve, being one race, could give birth to all of the races on earth; polygenists believe this to be biologically impossible. They also are unable to accept that evolutionary processes occurring since the recent African origin of modern humans
are able to account for all current racial differences. Polygenists view the racial differences between each race to be too great to accept that all people derive from the same mating pair or the same ancestral human population. Those who support polygenism cite the existence of interspecies hybrids such as mules in rebuttal to the argument that human races must belong to a single species because they can interbreed. Polygenists cite scientific evidence from racial variations in skin colour, stature, head shape and size to prove that the only logical scientific explanation for different races is separate origins. There have been a number of polygenist hypotheses, the two most popular are biblical creationist polygenism and polygenist evolution, both of which are attempts to solve the race origin problems of monogenism.
Biblical polygenists believe that the races are, like other species, fixed in form. They believe that each human race was created to survive in its own ecosystem: that each race was placed by God in a specific zoological province, together with fauna specific to those regions. Biblical polygenists believe there is no way that racial variations in skin colour, stature, head shape and size could have developed over six thousand or even (if one did not literally interpret the Bible) thirty or forty thousand years.
Biblical polygenists such as John William Colenso
, Louis Agassiz
, Josiah Clark Nott, George Gliddon
, maintained that many of the races on earth, such as Negros and Asians, were not featured in the Bible or the Table of Nations outlined in Genesis 10 because when the Hebrews
wrote the Bible they had no knowledge of any other races' existence except their own. Biblical polygenists claim the Bible was written in just a single region of the world and that the Hebrews who wrote the Bible could not have known about anything or anyone outside their own region. An example of this is Josiah Clark Nott, who in his books claimed that the writers of the Bible had no knowledge of any races except themselves and their immediate neighbors, and that the Bible does not concern the whole of the earth's population. According to Nott there are no verses in the Bible which support monogenism and that the only passage the monogenists use is Acts 17:26, but according to Nott the monogenists are wrong in their interpretation of this verse because the "one blood" of Paul's sermon only includes the nations he knew existed, which were local.
There are two forms of Biblical polygenism: PreAdamism and CoAdamism.
PreAdamism claims there were already races of man living prior to the creation of Adam. By contrast, CoAdamism claims that there was more than one Adam or small group of men created at the same time in different places across the earth, and therefore that the different races were separately created. The idea of CoAdamism has been traced back as far as Paracelsus
in 1520. Other 16th century advocates of CoAdamism included Thomas Harriot
and Walter Raleigh
, who theorised a different origin for the Native Americans.
Lucilio Vanini
was a polygenist, who argued that Africans are descended from apes because of their skin colour, while other races did not. In his book De Admirandis Naturae Reginae Deaeque Mortalium Arcanis (1616) he wrote that that only the Negro descends from the monkey and that there are lower and higher levels within humanity (a race hierarchy), he also reported in the book that other atheists supported this position as opposed to the theory of monogenism.
Giordano Bruno
(1548 – 1600), a CoAdamist, believed that there was an infinite number of Gardens of Eden:
In 1591 Giordano Bruno argued that because no one could imagine that the Jews and the Ethiopians had the same ancestry, then God must have either created separate Adams or Africans were the descendants of pre-Adamite
races.
PreAdamism traces back to Isaac La Peyrère
in the 17th century (see Preadamites).
An anonymous Biblical paper supporting CoAdamism was published in 1732 entitled Co-adamitae or an Essay to Prove the Two Following. Paradoxes, viz. I. That There Were Other Men Created at the Same time with Adam, and II. That the Angels did not fall.
Henry Home, Lord Kames
was a believer in CoAdamism. Home believed God had created different races on earth in separate regions. In his book Sketches on the History of Man in 1734 Home claimed that the environment, climate, or state of society could not account for racial differences, so that the races must have come from distinct, separate stocks.
Charles White (physician)
was another key advocate of CoAdamism, although he used less theology to support his views. Charles White's Account of the Regular Gradation in Man in 1799, provided the empirical science for polygenism. White defended the theory of polygeny by refuting French naturalist George Louis de Buffon's interfertility argument—the theory that only the same species can interbreed—pointing to species hybrids such as foxes, wolves and jackals, which were separate groups that were still able to interbreed.
In Christianity, polygenesis remained an uncommon Biblical interpretation
. Until the mid-19th century, polygenism was largely considered heretical
; however, it has been pointed out by some modern scholars that while PreAdamism was strongly rejected by most and deemed heretical, CoAdamism was not received with the same degree of hostility.
A major reason for the emergence of Biblical polygenism from around the 18th century was because it became noted that the number of races could not have developed within the commonly-accepted Biblical timeframe. Voltaire
brought the subject up in his Essay on the Manner and Spirit of Nations and on the Principal Occurrences in History in 1756 (which was an early work of comparative history). Voltaire was a French
Enlightenment
writer, historian
and philosopher, he was also a polygenist. He believed each race had separate origins because they were so racially diverse. Voltaire found biblical monogenism laughable, as he expressed:
When comparing Caucasians
to Negro
s, Voltaire claimed they are both different species:
Charles Hamilton Smith
a naturalist from England was a polygenist, he believed races had been created separately. He published the book The Natural History of the Human Species in 1848. In the book he maintained that there had always been three fundamentally distinct human types: The Caucasian, the Mongolian and the Negro. He also referred to the polygenist Samuel George Morton's work in America. Smith’s book was re-printed in America, Samuel Kneeland (naturalist)
wrote an 84-page introduction to the American edition of the book where he laid out evidence which supports polygenist creationism and that the Bible is entirely compatible with multiple Adams.
Francis Dobbs (1750–1811), an eccentric member of the Irish Parliament, believed in a very different kind of biblical polygenism. In his Concise View from History written in 1800 he maintained that there was a race resulting from a clandestine affair between Eve and the Devil (see Serpent Seed
).
John William Colenso
a theologian and biblical scholar was a polygenist who believed in CoAdamism. Colenso pointed to monuments and artifacts in Egypt to debunk monogenist beliefs that all races came from the same stock. For example, Ancient Egyptian representations of races showed exactly how the races looked in his time. Egyptological evidence indicated the existence of remarkable permanent differences in the shape of the skull, bodily form, colour and physiognomy between different races which are difficult to reconcile with biblical monogenesis. Colenso believed that racial variation between races was so great, that there was no way in which all the races could have come from the same stock just a few thousand years ago. He was unconvinced that climate could change racial variation and also believed, in common with other biblical polygenists, that monogenists had interpreted the Bible wrongly.
Colenso said “It seems most probable that the human race, as it now exists, had really sprung from more than one pair”. Colenso denied that polygenism caused any kind of racist attitudes or practices, like many other polygenists he claimed monogenesis was the cause of slavery and racism. Colenso claimed that each race had sprung from a different pair of parents, and that all races been created equal by God.
Polygenism was heavily criticized in the 20th century Roman Catholic Church
, and especially by Pope Pius XII in the encyclical Humani Generis
, who felt that polygenism was incompatible with the doctrine of Original Sin
.
routes. Because of the encounters with different races, many people could not believe that they had the same ancestry of other races because of the extreme racial differences. Many explorers and scientists visited other countries to observe and study different races and write down their findings, later they went back to their own countries to publish books and journals on their findings and claim that the evidence supported polygenism.
Some polygenists of the 18th century were Voltaire
and David Hume
.
Voltaire in his book 1734 book Traité de métaphysique said “Whites...Negroes...the yellow races are not descended from the same man”.
John Atkins
an English naval surgeon
was one of the earliest scientists to be a proponent of the polygenist theory. In his book A Voyage to Guinea (1723) he said “I am persuaded that the black and white race have sprung from different coloured parents.”
In the last two decades of the 18th century polygenism was advocated in England by historian Edward Long
and anatomist Charles White, in Germany by ethnographers Christoph Meiners
and Georg Forster
, and in France by Julien Virey. Polygenism was very popular and most widespread in the 19th century.
Georges Cuvier
the French naturalist
and zoologist racial studies influenced scientific polygenism and scientific racialism. Cuvier believed there were three distinct races the Caucasian
(white), Mongolian
(yellow) and the Ethiopian
(black), Cuvier claimed Adam and Eve
were Caucasian and that was the original race of mankind, and the other two races originated by survivors escaping in different directions after a major catastrophe hit the earth 5,000 years ago, with those survivors then living in complete isolation from each other.
Cuvier insisted that the Caucasian skull was most beautiful. He divided humanity into three races, white, yellow and black all which receive marks for their beauty or ugliness of their skull and quality of their civilizations. According to Cuvier the White race was at the top and the black race was at the bottom.
Cuvier wrote regarding Caucasians:
Regarding Negros, Cuvier wrote:
Cuvier's racial studies held the main features of polygenism
which are as follows:
Scientific Polygenism became popular in France in the 1820s in response to James Cowles Prichard
's Researches into the Physical History of Man (1813) which was considered a pioneering work of monogenism. In response an entire anthropological school advocating polygenism was set up to counter Prichard's monogenism in France. Key French polygenists of this period included the naturalist Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent
and Louis-Antoine Desmoulins (1796–1828) a student of Georges Cuvier
.
Anders Retzius
a Swedish professor of anatomy was a polygenist. Retzius studied many different skull types from different races, because the skulls were so different from each race he believed that the races had a separate origin.
Polygenist schools were later set up in the 1830s and 1840s across Europe. The Scottish anatomist and zoologist Robert Knox
was considered to be the 'founding father' of scientific polygenism in Britain and he argued in his Races of Man (1850) that racial natures never changed and therefore must have been created separately. A colleague of Knox, James Hunt
, was also an early author who promoted polygenism in Britain, though he was more concerned with establishing white superiority. Hunt dedicated his On the negro's place in nature (1863) to Knox who had died a year before its publication.
John Crawfurd
a Scottish physician, and colonial administrator was a polygenist, he studied the geography of where different races were located, he believed that that different races had been created separately by God in specific regional zones for climatic circumstance.
Charles Caldwell was one of the earliest supporters of polygenism in America. Caldwell attacked the position that environment was the cause of racial differences and argued instead that four races, Caucasian, Mongolian, American Indian, and African, were four different species, created separately by God.
Charles Pickering (naturalist)
was the librarian and a curator of the Academy of Natural Sciences. In 1843, he traveled to Africa and India to research human races. In 1848, Pickering published Races of Man and Their Geographical Distribution, which enumerated eleven races.
Polygenism came into mainstream scientific thought in America in the mid 19th century due to the work of several corresponding natural scientists such as Samuel George Morton
and Charles Pickering
as well as Egyptologist George Gliddon
, the surgeon Josiah Clark Nott and more prominently the paleontologist and geologist Louis Agassiz
in the United States
. All had contributed to a major ethnological work of 738 pages entitled Types of Mankind which was published in 1854 and was a great success, this was followed by a sequel Indigenous Races of the Earth (1857). Both these works sparked the first formal Polygenist vs. Monogenist debates across America, and advocates of the polygenism school became known as pluralists. As Louis Agassiz backed the pluralists, polygenism received mainstream public approval and wide exposure during the 1840s-1860's. Numerous articles promoting polygenist views were published in the American Journal of Science and Arts during this time period.
The archeologist Ephraim George Squier helped Morton’s polygenism by excavating an ancient cranium from the midwestern mounds and sending a drawing of it to Morton. Morton found its similarities striking to Central and South American crania, confirming his belief that the American Indian nations had a common and indigenous origin. Morton’s polygenism explicitly stated the Mound Builders were an American Indian race of great antiquity, they did not migrate from Asia, and their physical form has remained essentially unchanged in their descendants. Both Squier and Gliddon demonstrated for Morton the permanence of racial characteristics, and the suitability of each race to the region for which it had been created.
American Indians supported Morton's conclusions, whilst some white archaeologists supported Morton others such as William Pidgeon
did not accept Morton's conclusions because at the time some white archaeologists such as Pidgeon could not believe that Native Americans had created the archaeological remains they saw around them, instead William Pidgeon wrote a book called Traditions of Dee-Coo-Dah and Antiquarian Researches in 1858. In the book Pidgeon attempts to prove that a vanished race, culturally superior to and existing earlier than the American Indians, occupied America first and that The Mound Builders were not Native Americans. Pidgeon's book was revealed mostly to be a hoax. The famed archaeologist Theodore H. Lewis later revealed that Pidgeon had fabricated most of his research, and distorted much of the rest of it, mapping mounds where none existed, and changing the arrangement of existing mound groups to suit his needs. Morton's work gained more support because his work was considered to be evidence of true objective science unlike others such as Pidgeon. Morton won his reputation as the great data-gatherer and objectivist of American Science. Oliver Wendell Holmes praised Morton for "The severe and cautious character" of his works, which "from their very nature are permanent data for all future students of ethnology".
By 1850 Agassiz had developed a unique form of CoAdamism. God he believed had created several different zoological provinces with different races in them, but also fauna and animals specific to those regions. An essay of Agassiz promoting this theory with maps of the zoological zones was attached as a preface to Types of Mankind in collaboration with Morton, Gliddon, Nott and others. Agassiz's theory developed some support amongst Christians, and he often wrote articles in Christian magazines claiming his views on polygenism were compatible with the bible. Christian fundamentalists however who held to Young Earth Creationism
and strict monogenism (i.e everyone on earth from Adam and Eve) attacked his views, as well as those of Gliddon and Nott.
Unlike Josiah Nott, the slave-owner from Alabama, Agassiz was never a supporter of slavery. He claimed his views had nothing to do with politics.
The notion that races were separate and came together by hybridism, rather than being variations from a common stock, received its death knell with the publication of Darwin
's Origin of Species in 1859, which Agassiz opposed till his death. But as Darwin did not address man's origin directly at this stage, the argument continued for a number of years, with the creation of the Anthropological Society of London
in 1863 in the shadow of the American civil war
, in opposition to the abolitionist Ethnological Society
. The Anthropologicals had the Confederate
agent Henry Hotze
permanently on their council. The two societies did not heal their differences until they merged in 1871 to form the Anthropological Institute
.
Georges Pouchet
the French naturalist and anatomist was a polygenist. Pouchet made contributions in several scientific fields, and specialised in comparative anatomy of fishes and whales. He was a prime advocate of polygeny, and was the author of an anthropological work titled De la Pluralité des Races Humaines (1858), which was translated into English as The Plurality of the Human Race in 1864 by the Anthropological Society.
John Thurnam
an English psychiatrist, archaeologist, and ethnologist with Dr. Joseph Barnard Davis published a work in two volumes under the title of Crania Britannica in 1865 it was a very important work for Craniometry. Both Thurnam and Davis were polygenists. Dr. Joseph Barnard Davis was a collector of racial crania he had a collection of over 1700 specimens. Because of the differences of the crania of each race, Davis and Thurnam believed that the proofs of polygenism were to be found in studying the skull types of different races. Because each race had a different size and type of skull then the only logical explanation is separate origins. Davis also wrote Thesaurus craniorum: catalogue of the skulls of the various races of man in 1875.
in 1864. Polygenist evolution allowed polygenists to link each race to an altogether different ape, this was shown in the work of Hermann Klaatsch
and F. G. Crookshank.
Karl Vogt
believed that the Negro was related to the ape. He believed the White race was a separate species to Negros. In Chapter VII of his lectures of man (1864) he compared the Negro to the White race whom he described as “two extreme human types”. The difference between them, he claimed are greater than those between two species of ape; and this proves that Negros are a separate species from the Whites.
In an unusual blend of contemporary evolutionary thinking and pre-Adamism the theistic evolutionist and geologist Alexander Winchell argued in his 1878 book Adamites and Preadamites for the pre-Adamic origins of the human race on the basis that the Negroes were too racially inferior to have developed from the Biblical Adam. Winchell also believed that the laws of evolution operated according to the will of God.
Before Darwin published his theory of evolution and common descent
in his Origin of Species (1859) scientific theories or models of Polygenism (such as Agassiz's) were strictly creationist. Even after Darwin's book was published, Agassiz still stuck to his scientific form of polygenist creationism and denounced the idea of evolution. However by the late 19th century most scientific polygenists had abandoned Agassiz's creationism and began to embrace polygenist forms of evolution. This even included many students of Agassiz, including Nathaniel Shaler
who had studied under Agassiz at Harvard. Shaler continued to believe in polygenism, but believed the different races evolved from different primates. The prominent French anthropologist Paul Broca
by 1878 had also converted from creationist polygenism to accepting a form of polygenist evolution.
In his work The Descent of Man (1871) Charles Darwin
and some of his supporters argued for the monogenesis
of the human species, seeing the common origin of all humans as essential for evolutionary theory. This is known as the single-origin hypothesis
. Darwin even dedicated a chapter of his The Descent of Man in attempt to refute the polygenists and support common ancestry for all races. Polygenist evolution views however continued into the early 20th century, and still found support amongst prominent scientists. Henry Fairfield Osborn
for example in his The Origin and Evolution of Life (1916) claimed blacks and whites both evolved off different primates.
Alfred Russell Wallace influenced polygenist evolution he claimed that the physical differences in races must have occurred at such a remote time in the past before humans had any intelligence, when natural selection was still operative on human bodies. The differentiation into separate races with distinct physical traits must have happened so soon after humans had just appeared on earth that for all practical purposes all races had always been distinct.
In contrast to most of Darwin's supporters, Ernst Haeckel
put forward a doctrine of evolutionary polygenism based on the ideas of the linguist and polygenist August Schleicher
, in which several different language groups had arisen separately from speechless prehuman Urmenschen, which themselves had evolved from simian ancestors. These separate languages had completed the transition from animals to man, and, under the influence of each main branch of languages, humans had evolved as separate species, which could be subdivided into races. Haeckel divided human beings into ten races, of which the Caucasian was the highest and the primitives were doomed to extinction.
Ernst Haeckel
claimed that Negros have stronger and more freely movable toes than any other race which is evidence that Negros are connected to apes because when apes stop climbing in trees they hold on to the trees with their toes, Haeckel compared Negros to “four-handed” apes. Haeckel also believed Negros were savages and that Whites were the most civilised.
Franz Weidenreich
originated the "Weidenreich Theory of Human Evolution" which is a form of polygenist evolution. The Weidenreich Theory states that human races have evolved independently in the Old World from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens sapiens, while at the same time there was gene flow between the various populations. According to the Weidenreich Theory, genes that were generally adaptive (such as those for intelligence and communication) would flow relatively rapidly from one part of the world to the other, while those that were locally adaptive, would not. This is contrary to popular theories of human evolution that have one superior race displacing other races. A vocal proponent of the Weidenreich theory was Carleton Coon.
In the late 20th century, the work of the paleoanthropologist
Carleton Coon
was the closest to what can be perhaps considered a "modern" polygenism by positing that the individual races of the earth separately evolved into modern Homo sapiens. This hypothesis, called the candelabra theory, was not very popular when it was presented in the mid-1960s. It is often confused with the multiregional hypothesis, but these two theories differ significantly in that Coon's candelabra model involves no gene flow between populations (so truly independent evolutions for races of humans) while the multiregional hypothesis is based on the idea of massive amounts of gene flow between human populations.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
the French philosopher believed in polygenist evolution. Teilhard did not believe in the creation of the Biblical first man, Adam and the first woman, Eve, he taught that there were many 'First Parents' who evolved from primates at one time.
In 1971 The Beginning Was the End
was published by Oscar Kiss Maerth
which argued different races sprung from different types of ape. The book is considered to be pseudoscience
.
Neo-evangelical theistic evolutionist John Stott
wrote in his 1984 book Understanding the Bible: ‘My acceptance of Adam and Eve as historical is not incompatible with my belief that several forms of pre-Adamic ‘hominid’ seem to have existed for thousands of years previously. It is conceivable that God created Adam out of one of them. I think you may even call some of them Homo sapiens".
Monogenesis
Monogenism is the theory of human origins which posits a single origin for all human races. For the belief that all humans are descended from Adam, see Polygenism.Monogenesis may refer to:* Recent African origin of modern humans...
, which posits a single origin of humanity.
Origins
Many oral traditionOral tradition
Oral tradition and oral lore is cultural material and traditions transmitted orally from one generation to another. The messages or testimony are verbally transmitted in speech or song and may take the form, for example, of folktales, sayings, ballads, songs, or chants...
s feature polygenesis in their creation stories, for example Bambuti mythology
Bambuti mythology
Mbuti mythology is the mythology of the African Mbuti Pygmies of Congo.The most important god of the Bambuti pantheon is Khonvoum , a god of the hunt who wields a bow made from two snakes that together appear to humans as a rainbow...
and other creation stories from the pygmies of Congo state that the supreme God of the pygmies, Khonvoum
Khonvoum
Khonvoum is the supreme god and creator of the Bambuti Pygmy people in central Africa. He is the 'great hunter', god of the hunt, and carries a bow made of two snake which appears to mortals as a rainbow. He rules the heavens and when the sun sets, he gathers pieces of the stars and throws it at...
, created three different races of man separately out of three kinds of clay: one black, one white, and one red. In some cultures, polygenism in the creation narrative served an etiological function. These narratives provided an explanation as to why other people groups exist who are not affiliated with their tribe. Moreover, distinctions made between the creation of foreign people groups and the tribe or ethnic group to which the creation myth pertains served to reinforce tribal or ethnic unity, the need to exercise wariness and caution when dealing with outsiders, or the unique nature of the relationship between that tribe and the deities of their religious system. An example may be found in the creation myth of the Asmat people
Asmat people
The Asmat are an ethnic group of New Guinea, residing in the Papua province of Indonesia. Possessing one of the most well-known and vibrant woodcarving traditions in the Pacific, their art is sought by collectors worldwide...
, a hunter-gatherer
Hunter-gatherer
A hunter-gatherer or forage society is one in which most or all food is obtained from wild plants and animals, in contrast to agricultural societies which rely mainly on domesticated species. Hunting and gathering was the ancestral subsistence mode of Homo, and all modern humans were...
tribe situated along the south-western coast of New Guinea
New Guinea
New Guinea is the world's second largest island, after Greenland, covering a land area of 786,000 km2. Located in the southwest Pacific Ocean, it lies geographically to the east of the Malay Archipelago, with which it is sometimes included as part of a greater Indo-Australian Archipelago...
. This creation myth asserts that the Asmat themselves came into being when a deity placed carved wooden statues in a ceremonial house and began to beat a drum. The statues became living humans and began to dance. Some time later, a great crocodile attempted to attack this ceremonial house, but was defeated by the power of the deity. The crocodile was cut into several pieces and these were tossed in different directions. Each piece became one of the foreign tribes known to the Asmat.
The idea is also found in some ancient Greek and Roman literature. For example the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate
Julian the Apostate
Julian "the Apostate" , commonly known as Julian, or also Julian the Philosopher, was Roman Emperor from 361 to 363 and a noted philosopher and Greek writer....
in his Letter to a Priest wrote that he believed Zeus made multiple creations of man and women. In his Against the Galilaens Julian presented his reasoning for this belief. Julian had noticed that the Germanics and Scythians (northern nations) were different in their bodies (i.e complexion) to the Ethiopians. He therefore could not imagine such difference in physical attributes as having originated from common ancestry, so maintained separate creations for different races.
In early classical and medieval geography the idea of polygenism surfaced because of the suggested possibility of there being inhabitants of the antipodes
Antipodes
In geography, the antipodes of any place on Earth is the point on the Earth's surface which is diametrically opposite to it. Two points that are antipodal to one another are connected by a straight line running through the centre of the Earth....
(Antichthones
Antichthones
Antichthones, in geography, are those peoples who inhabit the antipodes, countries on opposite sides of the Earth. The word is compounded of the Greek ὰντὶ, contra, and χθών, terra....
). These inhabitants were considered by some to have separate origins because of their geographical extremity.
Robert Argod a navy
Navy
A navy is the branch of a nation's armed forces principally designated for naval and amphibious warfare; namely, lake- or ocean-borne combat operations and related functions...
sailor
Sailor
A sailor, mariner, or seaman is a person who navigates water-borne vessels or assists in their operation, maintenance, or service. The term can apply to professional mariners, military personnel, and recreational sailors as well as a plethora of other uses...
wrote a book in which he claimed Polynesian mythology
Polynesian mythology
Polynesian mythology is the oral traditions of the people of Polynesia, a grouping of Central and South Pacific Ocean island archipelagos in the Polynesian triangle together with the scattered cultures known as the Polynesian outliers...
supported polygenesis, that the Polynesian peoples and later Asiatic people had originated from the Antarctica, separate from the other races.
The religion
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
of the Ainu people
Ainu people
The , also called Aynu, Aino , and in historical texts Ezo , are indigenous people or groups in Japan and Russia. Historically they spoke the Ainu language and related varieties and lived in Hokkaidō, the Kuril Islands, and much of Sakhalin...
claims that the ancestors of the Ainu people arrived on earth from the skys separate from the other races. See (Ainu creation myth
Ainu creation myth
The Ainu creation myths are the traditional creation accounts of the Ainu peoples of Hokkaidō, Japan. Their stories share common characteristics with Japanese creation myths and earth diver creation stories commonly found in Central Asian and Native American cultures. In one version the creator...
).
Main beliefs
Traditionally, most Jews, Christians and Muslims have embraced monogenism in the form that all modern humans ultimately are descended from a single mating pair, named Adam and EveAdam and Eve
Adam and Eve were, according to the Genesis creation narratives, the first human couple to inhabit Earth, created by YHWH, the God of the ancient Hebrews...
. In this context, polygenism described all alternative explanations for the origin of humankind that involved more than two individual "first people". This definition of polygenism is still employed among some Creationists and within the Roman Catholic Church (see Humani Generis
Humani Generis
Humani generis is a papal encyclical that Pope Pius XII promulgated on 12 August 1950 "concerning some false opinions threatening to undermine the foundations of Catholic Doctrine"...
).
With the development of the evolutionary paradigm of human origins, it has become widely recognized within the scientific community that at no point did there exist a single "first man" and a single "first woman" who constituted the first true humans and to whom all lineages of modern humans ultimately converge. If Adam and Eve ever existed as distinct historical persons, they were members of a much larger population of the same species.. However, a common scientific explanation of human origins asserts that the population directly ancestral to all modern humans remained united as a single population by constant gene flow
Gene flow
In population genetics, gene flow is the transfer of alleles of genes from one population to another.Migration into or out of a population may be responsible for a marked change in allele frequencies...
. Therefore, on the level of the entire human population, this explanation of human origin is classified as monogenism. All modern humans share the same origin from this single ancestral population.
Modern polygenists are unable to accept either theological or scientific monogenism. They believe it does not explain why there is such a big variation among human races. Polygenists do not believe that Adam and Eve, being one race, could give birth to all of the races on earth; polygenists believe this to be biologically impossible. They also are unable to accept that evolutionary processes occurring since the recent African origin of modern humans
Recent African origin of modern humans
In paleoanthropology, the recent African origin of modern humans is the most widely accepted model describing the origin and early dispersal of anatomically modern humans...
are able to account for all current racial differences. Polygenists view the racial differences between each race to be too great to accept that all people derive from the same mating pair or the same ancestral human population. Those who support polygenism cite the existence of interspecies hybrids such as mules in rebuttal to the argument that human races must belong to a single species because they can interbreed. Polygenists cite scientific evidence from racial variations in skin colour, stature, head shape and size to prove that the only logical scientific explanation for different races is separate origins. There have been a number of polygenist hypotheses, the two most popular are biblical creationist polygenism and polygenist evolution, both of which are attempts to solve the race origin problems of monogenism.
Polygenism and the Bible
Biblical polygenists believe that human races have been created separately in different zones by God. They utilize such theories as PreAdamite creation or CoAdamism to explain the existence of different races.Biblical polygenists believe that the races are, like other species, fixed in form. They believe that each human race was created to survive in its own ecosystem: that each race was placed by God in a specific zoological province, together with fauna specific to those regions. Biblical polygenists believe there is no way that racial variations in skin colour, stature, head shape and size could have developed over six thousand or even (if one did not literally interpret the Bible) thirty or forty thousand years.
Biblical polygenists such as John William Colenso
John William Colenso
John William Colenso , first Anglican bishop of Natal, mathematician, theologian, Biblical scholar and social activist.-Biography:Colenso was born at St Austell, Cornwall, on 24 January 1814...
, Louis Agassiz
Louis Agassiz
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz was a Swiss paleontologist, glaciologist, geologist and a prominent innovator in the study of the Earth's natural history. He grew up in Switzerland and became a professor of natural history at University of Neuchâtel...
, Josiah Clark Nott, George Gliddon
George Gliddon
George Robins Gliddon was an English-born American Egyptologist. He was born in Devonshire, England. His father, a merchant, was United States consul at Alexandria where Gliddon was taken at an early age....
, maintained that many of the races on earth, such as Negros and Asians, were not featured in the Bible or the Table of Nations outlined in Genesis 10 because when the Hebrews
Hebrews
Hebrews is an ethnonym used in the Hebrew Bible...
wrote the Bible they had no knowledge of any other races' existence except their own. Biblical polygenists claim the Bible was written in just a single region of the world and that the Hebrews who wrote the Bible could not have known about anything or anyone outside their own region. An example of this is Josiah Clark Nott, who in his books claimed that the writers of the Bible had no knowledge of any races except themselves and their immediate neighbors, and that the Bible does not concern the whole of the earth's population. According to Nott there are no verses in the Bible which support monogenism and that the only passage the monogenists use is Acts 17:26, but according to Nott the monogenists are wrong in their interpretation of this verse because the "one blood" of Paul's sermon only includes the nations he knew existed, which were local.
There are two forms of Biblical polygenism: PreAdamism and CoAdamism.
PreAdamism claims there were already races of man living prior to the creation of Adam. By contrast, CoAdamism claims that there was more than one Adam or small group of men created at the same time in different places across the earth, and therefore that the different races were separately created. The idea of CoAdamism has been traced back as far as Paracelsus
Paracelsus
Paracelsus was a German-Swiss Renaissance physician, botanist, alchemist, astrologer, and general occultist....
in 1520. Other 16th century advocates of CoAdamism included Thomas Harriot
Thomas Harriot
Thomas Harriot was an English astronomer, mathematician, ethnographer, and translator. Some sources give his surname as Harriott or Hariot or Heriot. He is sometimes credited with the introduction of the potato to Great Britain and Ireland...
and Walter Raleigh
Walter Raleigh
Sir Walter Raleigh was an English aristocrat, writer, poet, soldier, courtier, spy, and explorer. He is also well known for popularising tobacco in England....
, who theorised a different origin for the Native Americans.
Lucilio Vanini
Lucilio Vanini
Lucilio Vanini was an Italian free-thinker, who in his works styled himself Giulio Cesare Vanini.He was born at Taurisano, near Lecce, and studied philosophy and theology at Rome. After his return to Lecce he applied himself to the physical studies which had come into vogue with the Renaissance....
was a polygenist, who argued that Africans are descended from apes because of their skin colour, while other races did not. In his book De Admirandis Naturae Reginae Deaeque Mortalium Arcanis (1616) he wrote that that only the Negro descends from the monkey and that there are lower and higher levels within humanity (a race hierarchy), he also reported in the book that other atheists supported this position as opposed to the theory of monogenism.
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno
Giordano Bruno , born Filippo Bruno, was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. His cosmological theories went beyond the Copernican model in proposing that the Sun was essentially a star, and moreover, that the universe contained an infinite number of inhabited...
(1548 – 1600), a CoAdamist, believed that there was an infinite number of Gardens of Eden:
I can imagine an infinite number of worlds like the Earth, with a Garden of Eden on each one. In all these Gardens of Eden, half the Adams and Eves will not eat the fruit of knowledge, and half will. But half of infinity is infinity, so an infinite number of worlds will fall from grace and there will be an infinite number of crucifixions
In 1591 Giordano Bruno argued that because no one could imagine that the Jews and the Ethiopians had the same ancestry, then God must have either created separate Adams or Africans were the descendants of pre-Adamite
Pre-Adamite
Pre-Adamite hypothesis or Preadamism is the religious belief that humans existed before Adam, the first human being named in the Bible. This belief has a long history, probably having its origins in early pagan responses to Abrahamic claims regarding the origins of the human race.Advocates of this...
races.
PreAdamism traces back to Isaac La Peyrère
Isaac La Peyrère
Isaac La Peyrère, or Pererius, was a French Millenarian theologian and formulator of Pre-Adamite hypothesis.- Life :Born into a Huguenot family in Bordeaux, and possibly of Jewish descent, La Peyrère was a lawyer by training and a Calvinist by upbringing, though he later converted to...
in the 17th century (see Preadamites).
An anonymous Biblical paper supporting CoAdamism was published in 1732 entitled Co-adamitae or an Essay to Prove the Two Following. Paradoxes, viz. I. That There Were Other Men Created at the Same time with Adam, and II. That the Angels did not fall.
Henry Home, Lord Kames
Henry Home, Lord Kames
Henry Home, Lord Kames was a Scottish advocate, judge, philosopher, writer and agricultural improver. A central figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, a founder member of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, and active in the Select Society, his protégés included James Boswell, David Hume and...
was a believer in CoAdamism. Home believed God had created different races on earth in separate regions. In his book Sketches on the History of Man in 1734 Home claimed that the environment, climate, or state of society could not account for racial differences, so that the races must have come from distinct, separate stocks.
Charles White (physician)
Charles White (physician)
Charles White FRS was an English physician and a co-founder of the Manchester Royal Infirmary, along with local industrialist Joseph Bancroft...
was another key advocate of CoAdamism, although he used less theology to support his views. Charles White's Account of the Regular Gradation in Man in 1799, provided the empirical science for polygenism. White defended the theory of polygeny by refuting French naturalist George Louis de Buffon's interfertility argument—the theory that only the same species can interbreed—pointing to species hybrids such as foxes, wolves and jackals, which were separate groups that were still able to interbreed.
In Christianity, polygenesis remained an uncommon Biblical interpretation
Exegesis
Exegesis is a critical explanation or interpretation of a text, especially a religious text. Traditionally the term was used primarily for exegesis of the Bible; however, in contemporary usage it has broadened to mean a critical explanation of any text, and the term "Biblical exegesis" is used...
. Until the mid-19th century, polygenism was largely considered heretical
Heresy
Heresy is a controversial or novel change to a system of beliefs, especially a religion, that conflicts with established dogma. It is distinct from apostasy, which is the formal denunciation of one's religion, principles or cause, and blasphemy, which is irreverence toward religion...
; however, it has been pointed out by some modern scholars that while PreAdamism was strongly rejected by most and deemed heretical, CoAdamism was not received with the same degree of hostility.
A major reason for the emergence of Biblical polygenism from around the 18th century was because it became noted that the number of races could not have developed within the commonly-accepted Biblical timeframe. Voltaire
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...
brought the subject up in his Essay on the Manner and Spirit of Nations and on the Principal Occurrences in History in 1756 (which was an early work of comparative history). Voltaire was a French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
writer, historian
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
and philosopher, he was also a polygenist. He believed each race had separate origins because they were so racially diverse. Voltaire found biblical monogenism laughable, as he expressed:
It is a serious question among them whether the Africans are descended from monkeys or whether the monkeys come from them. Our wise men have said that man was created in the image of God. Now here is a lovely image of the Divine Maker: a flat and black nose with little or hardly any intelligence. A time will doubtless come when these animals will know how to cultivate the land well, beautify their houses and gardens, and know the paths of the stars: one needs time for everything.
When comparing Caucasians
Caucasian race
The term Caucasian race has been used to denote the general physical type of some or all of the populations of Europe, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Western Asia , Central Asia and South Asia...
to Negro
Negro
The word Negro is used in the English-speaking world to refer to a person of black ancestry or appearance, whether of African descent or not...
s, Voltaire claimed they are both different species:
The negro race is a species of men different from ours as the breed of spaniels is from that of greyhounds. The mucous membrane, or network, which nature has spread between the muscles and the skin, is white in us and black or copper-colored in them.
Charles Hamilton Smith
Charles Hamilton Smith
Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Hamilton Smith was an English artist, naturalist, antiquary, illustrator, soldier and spy.-Military service:...
a naturalist from England was a polygenist, he believed races had been created separately. He published the book The Natural History of the Human Species in 1848. In the book he maintained that there had always been three fundamentally distinct human types: The Caucasian, the Mongolian and the Negro. He also referred to the polygenist Samuel George Morton's work in America. Smith’s book was re-printed in America, Samuel Kneeland (naturalist)
Samuel Kneeland (naturalist)
Samuel Kneeland was a naturalist of the United States.-Biography:He graduated from Harvard in 1840, and got a medical degree there in 1843...
wrote an 84-page introduction to the American edition of the book where he laid out evidence which supports polygenist creationism and that the Bible is entirely compatible with multiple Adams.
Francis Dobbs (1750–1811), an eccentric member of the Irish Parliament, believed in a very different kind of biblical polygenism. In his Concise View from History written in 1800 he maintained that there was a race resulting from a clandestine affair between Eve and the Devil (see Serpent Seed
Serpent seed
The doctrine of Serpent seed, dual seed or two-seedline is a controversial doctrine according to which the serpent in the Garden of Eden mated with Eve, and the offspring of their union was Cain. This belief is still held by some adherents of the Christian Identity theology, who claim that the...
).
John William Colenso
John William Colenso
John William Colenso , first Anglican bishop of Natal, mathematician, theologian, Biblical scholar and social activist.-Biography:Colenso was born at St Austell, Cornwall, on 24 January 1814...
a theologian and biblical scholar was a polygenist who believed in CoAdamism. Colenso pointed to monuments and artifacts in Egypt to debunk monogenist beliefs that all races came from the same stock. For example, Ancient Egyptian representations of races showed exactly how the races looked in his time. Egyptological evidence indicated the existence of remarkable permanent differences in the shape of the skull, bodily form, colour and physiognomy between different races which are difficult to reconcile with biblical monogenesis. Colenso believed that racial variation between races was so great, that there was no way in which all the races could have come from the same stock just a few thousand years ago. He was unconvinced that climate could change racial variation and also believed, in common with other biblical polygenists, that monogenists had interpreted the Bible wrongly.
Colenso said “It seems most probable that the human race, as it now exists, had really sprung from more than one pair”. Colenso denied that polygenism caused any kind of racist attitudes or practices, like many other polygenists he claimed monogenesis was the cause of slavery and racism. Colenso claimed that each race had sprung from a different pair of parents, and that all races been created equal by God.
Polygenism was heavily criticized in the 20th century Roman Catholic Church
Roman Catholic Church
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...
, and especially by Pope Pius XII in the encyclical Humani Generis
Humani Generis
Humani generis is a papal encyclical that Pope Pius XII promulgated on 12 August 1950 "concerning some false opinions threatening to undermine the foundations of Catholic Doctrine"...
, who felt that polygenism was incompatible with the doctrine of Original Sin
Original sin
Original sin is, according to a Christian theological doctrine, humanity's state of sin resulting from the Fall of Man. This condition has been characterized in many ways, ranging from something as insignificant as a slight deficiency, or a tendency toward sin yet without collective guilt, referred...
.
Scientific polygenism
During the late 1600's and early 1700's many countries first began to encounter different races from other countries due to colonial expansion, discovery, overseas exploration (due to the advancement of ships) and increases in tradeTrade
Trade is the transfer of ownership of goods and services from one person or entity to another. Trade is sometimes loosely called commerce or financial transaction or barter. A network that allows trade is called a market. The original form of trade was barter, the direct exchange of goods and...
routes. Because of the encounters with different races, many people could not believe that they had the same ancestry of other races because of the extreme racial differences. Many explorers and scientists visited other countries to observe and study different races and write down their findings, later they went back to their own countries to publish books and journals on their findings and claim that the evidence supported polygenism.
Some polygenists of the 18th century were Voltaire
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...
and David Hume
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
.
Voltaire in his book 1734 book Traité de métaphysique said “Whites...Negroes...the yellow races are not descended from the same man”.
John Atkins
John Atkins (naval surgeon)
John Atkins , was a naval surgeon.Atkins received his professional education as a surgeon's apprentice, and immediately entered the navy. He records wounds which he treated in Sir George Rooke's victory off Malaga . In 1707 he was in some small actions with the French in the Channel, and in 1710 he...
an English naval surgeon
Surgeon
In medicine, a surgeon is a specialist in surgery. Surgery is a broad category of invasive medical treatment that involves the cutting of a body, whether human or animal, for a specific reason such as the removal of diseased tissue or to repair a tear or breakage...
was one of the earliest scientists to be a proponent of the polygenist theory. In his book A Voyage to Guinea (1723) he said “I am persuaded that the black and white race have sprung from different coloured parents.”
In the last two decades of the 18th century polygenism was advocated in England by historian Edward Long
Edward Long
Edward Long was a British colonial administrator and historian, and author of an influential work, The History of Jamaica .-Life:...
and anatomist Charles White, in Germany by ethnographers Christoph Meiners
Christoph Meiners
Christoph Meiners was a German philosopher and historian, born in Hemmoor. He supported a polygenist theory of human origins....
and Georg Forster
Georg Forster
Johann Georg Adam Forster was a German naturalist, ethnologist, travel writer, journalist, and revolutionary. At an early age, he accompanied his father on several scientific expeditions, including James Cook's second voyage to the Pacific...
, and in France by Julien Virey. Polygenism was very popular and most widespread in the 19th century.
Georges Cuvier
Georges Cuvier
Georges Chrétien Léopold Dagobert Cuvier or Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric Cuvier , known as Georges Cuvier, was a French naturalist and zoologist...
the French naturalist
Naturalist
Naturalist may refer to:* Practitioner of natural history* Conservationist* Advocate of naturalism * Naturalist , autobiography-See also:* The American Naturalist, periodical* Naturalism...
and zoologist racial studies influenced scientific polygenism and scientific racialism. Cuvier believed there were three distinct races the Caucasian
Caucasian race
The term Caucasian race has been used to denote the general physical type of some or all of the populations of Europe, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Western Asia , Central Asia and South Asia...
(white), Mongolian
Mongols
Mongols ) are a Central-East Asian ethnic group that lives mainly in the countries of Mongolia, China, and Russia. In China, ethnic Mongols can be found mainly in the central north region of China such as Inner Mongolia...
(yellow) and the Ethiopian
Ethiopia
Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...
(black), Cuvier claimed Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve
Adam and Eve were, according to the Genesis creation narratives, the first human couple to inhabit Earth, created by YHWH, the God of the ancient Hebrews...
were Caucasian and that was the original race of mankind, and the other two races originated by survivors escaping in different directions after a major catastrophe hit the earth 5,000 years ago, with those survivors then living in complete isolation from each other.
Cuvier insisted that the Caucasian skull was most beautiful. He divided humanity into three races, white, yellow and black all which receive marks for their beauty or ugliness of their skull and quality of their civilizations. According to Cuvier the White race was at the top and the black race was at the bottom.
Cuvier wrote regarding Caucasians:
The white race, with oval face, straight hair and nose, to which the civilised people of Europe belong and which appear to us the most beautiful of all, is also superior to others by its genius, courage and activity.
Regarding Negros, Cuvier wrote:
The Negro race... is marked by black complexion, crisped of woolly hair, compressed cranium and a flat nose, The projection of the lower parts of the face, and the thick lips, evidently approximate it to the monkey tribe: the hordes of which it consists have always remained in the most complete state of barbarism.
Cuvier's racial studies held the main features of polygenism
Polygenism
Polygenism is a theory of human origins positing that the human races are of different lineages . This is opposite to the idea of monogenism, which posits a single origin of humanity.- Origins :...
which are as follows:
- Fixity of species
- Strict limits on environmental influence
- Unchanging underlying type
- Anatomical and cranial measurement differences in races
- Physical and mental differences between racial worth
- Human races are all distinct
Scientific Polygenism became popular in France in the 1820s in response to James Cowles Prichard
James Cowles Prichard
James Cowles Prichard MD FRS was an English physician and ethnologist. His influential Researches into the physical history of mankind touched upon the subject of evolution...
's Researches into the Physical History of Man (1813) which was considered a pioneering work of monogenism. In response an entire anthropological school advocating polygenism was set up to counter Prichard's monogenism in France. Key French polygenists of this period included the naturalist Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent
Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent
Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent was a French naturalist. He was born at Agen...
and Louis-Antoine Desmoulins (1796–1828) a student of Georges Cuvier
Georges Cuvier
Georges Chrétien Léopold Dagobert Cuvier or Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric Cuvier , known as Georges Cuvier, was a French naturalist and zoologist...
.
Anders Retzius
Anders Retzius
Anders Retzius , was a Swedish professor of anatomy and a supervisor at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm....
a Swedish professor of anatomy was a polygenist. Retzius studied many different skull types from different races, because the skulls were so different from each race he believed that the races had a separate origin.
Polygenist schools were later set up in the 1830s and 1840s across Europe. The Scottish anatomist and zoologist Robert Knox
Robert Knox
Robert Knox was a Scottish surgeon, anatomist and zoologist. He was the most popular lecturer in anatomy in Edinburgh before his involvement in the Burke and Hare body-snatching case. This ruined his career, and a later move to London did not improve matters...
was considered to be the 'founding father' of scientific polygenism in Britain and he argued in his Races of Man (1850) that racial natures never changed and therefore must have been created separately. A colleague of Knox, James Hunt
James Hunt (speech therapist)
James Hunt was a speech therapist in London, England who had among his clients Charles Kingsley and Charles Dodgson. His other main interest was in anthropology and in 1863 he established the Anthropological Society of London, which after his death merged with the more established Ethnological...
, was also an early author who promoted polygenism in Britain, though he was more concerned with establishing white superiority. Hunt dedicated his On the negro's place in nature (1863) to Knox who had died a year before its publication.
John Crawfurd
John Crawfurd
John Crawfurd , Scottish physician, and colonial administrator and author, was born in the island of Islay, Scotland...
a Scottish physician, and colonial administrator was a polygenist, he studied the geography of where different races were located, he believed that that different races had been created separately by God in specific regional zones for climatic circumstance.
Charles Caldwell was one of the earliest supporters of polygenism in America. Caldwell attacked the position that environment was the cause of racial differences and argued instead that four races, Caucasian, Mongolian, American Indian, and African, were four different species, created separately by God.
Charles Pickering (naturalist)
Charles Pickering (naturalist)
Charles Pickering was an American naturalist.Born in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, the grandson of Colonel Timothy Pickering, he grew up in Wenham, Massachusetts and received a medical degree from Harvard University in 1823...
was the librarian and a curator of the Academy of Natural Sciences. In 1843, he traveled to Africa and India to research human races. In 1848, Pickering published Races of Man and Their Geographical Distribution, which enumerated eleven races.
Samuel George Morton
Samuel George Morton was an American physician and natural scientist. Morton, reared a Quaker but became Episcopalian in midlife, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1820. After earning an advanced degree from Edinburgh University in...
and Charles Pickering
Charles Pickering (naturalist)
Charles Pickering was an American naturalist.Born in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, the grandson of Colonel Timothy Pickering, he grew up in Wenham, Massachusetts and received a medical degree from Harvard University in 1823...
as well as Egyptologist George Gliddon
George Gliddon
George Robins Gliddon was an English-born American Egyptologist. He was born in Devonshire, England. His father, a merchant, was United States consul at Alexandria where Gliddon was taken at an early age....
, the surgeon Josiah Clark Nott and more prominently the paleontologist and geologist Louis Agassiz
Louis Agassiz
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz was a Swiss paleontologist, glaciologist, geologist and a prominent innovator in the study of the Earth's natural history. He grew up in Switzerland and became a professor of natural history at University of Neuchâtel...
in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. All had contributed to a major ethnological work of 738 pages entitled Types of Mankind which was published in 1854 and was a great success, this was followed by a sequel Indigenous Races of the Earth (1857). Both these works sparked the first formal Polygenist vs. Monogenist debates across America, and advocates of the polygenism school became known as pluralists. As Louis Agassiz backed the pluralists, polygenism received mainstream public approval and wide exposure during the 1840s-1860's. Numerous articles promoting polygenist views were published in the American Journal of Science and Arts during this time period.
The archeologist Ephraim George Squier helped Morton’s polygenism by excavating an ancient cranium from the midwestern mounds and sending a drawing of it to Morton. Morton found its similarities striking to Central and South American crania, confirming his belief that the American Indian nations had a common and indigenous origin. Morton’s polygenism explicitly stated the Mound Builders were an American Indian race of great antiquity, they did not migrate from Asia, and their physical form has remained essentially unchanged in their descendants. Both Squier and Gliddon demonstrated for Morton the permanence of racial characteristics, and the suitability of each race to the region for which it had been created.
American Indians supported Morton's conclusions, whilst some white archaeologists supported Morton others such as William Pidgeon
William Pidgeon (archaeologist)
William Pidgeon was an antiquarian and archaeologist most famous for his 1858 work, Traditions of Dee-Coo-Dah and Antiquarian Researches, a putative history about lost tribes of the Upper Mississippi and the mounds they left behind. This book was eventually revealed to be partly a hoax, and partly...
did not accept Morton's conclusions because at the time some white archaeologists such as Pidgeon could not believe that Native Americans had created the archaeological remains they saw around them, instead William Pidgeon wrote a book called Traditions of Dee-Coo-Dah and Antiquarian Researches in 1858. In the book Pidgeon attempts to prove that a vanished race, culturally superior to and existing earlier than the American Indians, occupied America first and that The Mound Builders were not Native Americans. Pidgeon's book was revealed mostly to be a hoax. The famed archaeologist Theodore H. Lewis later revealed that Pidgeon had fabricated most of his research, and distorted much of the rest of it, mapping mounds where none existed, and changing the arrangement of existing mound groups to suit his needs. Morton's work gained more support because his work was considered to be evidence of true objective science unlike others such as Pidgeon. Morton won his reputation as the great data-gatherer and objectivist of American Science. Oliver Wendell Holmes praised Morton for "The severe and cautious character" of his works, which "from their very nature are permanent data for all future students of ethnology".
By 1850 Agassiz had developed a unique form of CoAdamism. God he believed had created several different zoological provinces with different races in them, but also fauna and animals specific to those regions. An essay of Agassiz promoting this theory with maps of the zoological zones was attached as a preface to Types of Mankind in collaboration with Morton, Gliddon, Nott and others. Agassiz's theory developed some support amongst Christians, and he often wrote articles in Christian magazines claiming his views on polygenism were compatible with the bible. Christian fundamentalists however who held to Young Earth Creationism
Young Earth creationism
Young Earth creationism is the religious belief that Heavens, Earth, and all life on Earth were created by direct acts of the Abrahamic God during a relatively short period, sometime between 5,700 and 10,000 years ago...
and strict monogenism (i.e everyone on earth from Adam and Eve) attacked his views, as well as those of Gliddon and Nott.
Unlike Josiah Nott, the slave-owner from Alabama, Agassiz was never a supporter of slavery. He claimed his views had nothing to do with politics.
The notion that races were separate and came together by hybridism, rather than being variations from a common stock, received its death knell with the publication of Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
's Origin of Species in 1859, which Agassiz opposed till his death. But as Darwin did not address man's origin directly at this stage, the argument continued for a number of years, with the creation of the Anthropological Society of London
Anthropological Society of London
The Anthropological Society of London was founded in 1863 by Richard Francis Burton and Dr. James Hunt. It broke away from the existing Ethnological Society of London, founded in 1843, and defined itself in opposition to the older society...
in 1863 in the shadow of the American civil war
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
, in opposition to the abolitionist Ethnological Society
Ethnological Society of London
The Ethnological Society of London was founded in 1843 by a breakaway faction of the Aborigines' Protection Society . It quickly became one of England's leading scientific societies, and a meeting-place not only for students of ethnology but also for archaeologists interested in prehistoric...
. The Anthropologicals had the Confederate
Confederate States of America
The Confederate States of America was a government set up from 1861 to 1865 by 11 Southern slave states of the United States of America that had declared their secession from the U.S...
agent Henry Hotze
Henry Hotze
Henry Hotze was a Swiss-born propagandist for the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War.-Early life and career:...
permanently on their council. The two societies did not heal their differences until they merged in 1871 to form the Anthropological Institute
Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
The Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland is the world's longest established anthropological organization, with a global membership. Since 1843, it has been at the forefront of new developments in anthropology and new means of communicating them to a broad audience...
.
Georges Pouchet
Georges Pouchet
Charles Henri Georges Pouchet was a French naturalist and anatomist who was born in Rouen. He was the son of naturalist Félix Archimède Pouchet....
the French naturalist and anatomist was a polygenist. Pouchet made contributions in several scientific fields, and specialised in comparative anatomy of fishes and whales. He was a prime advocate of polygeny, and was the author of an anthropological work titled De la Pluralité des Races Humaines (1858), which was translated into English as The Plurality of the Human Race in 1864 by the Anthropological Society.
John Thurnam
John Thurnam
John Thurnam was an English psychiatrist, archaeologist, and ethnologist. He was Medical Superintendent of The Retreat, the Quaker psychiatric hospital near York...
an English psychiatrist, archaeologist, and ethnologist with Dr. Joseph Barnard Davis published a work in two volumes under the title of Crania Britannica in 1865 it was a very important work for Craniometry. Both Thurnam and Davis were polygenists. Dr. Joseph Barnard Davis was a collector of racial crania he had a collection of over 1700 specimens. Because of the differences of the crania of each race, Davis and Thurnam believed that the proofs of polygenism were to be found in studying the skull types of different races. Because each race had a different size and type of skull then the only logical explanation is separate origins. Davis also wrote Thesaurus craniorum: catalogue of the skulls of the various races of man in 1875.
Polygenist evolution
Polygenist evolution is the belief that humans evolved independently from separate species of apes. This can be traced back to Karl VogtKarl Vogt
Carl Christoph Vogt was a German scientist who emigrated to Switzerland. Vogt published a number of notable works on zoology, geology and physiology...
in 1864. Polygenist evolution allowed polygenists to link each race to an altogether different ape, this was shown in the work of Hermann Klaatsch
Hermann Klaatsch
Dr. Hermann Klaatsch was a German physician, anatomist, physical anthropologist, evolutionist, and professor at the University of Heidelberg and at the University of Breslau until 1916....
and F. G. Crookshank.
Karl Vogt
Karl Vogt
Carl Christoph Vogt was a German scientist who emigrated to Switzerland. Vogt published a number of notable works on zoology, geology and physiology...
believed that the Negro was related to the ape. He believed the White race was a separate species to Negros. In Chapter VII of his lectures of man (1864) he compared the Negro to the White race whom he described as “two extreme human types”. The difference between them, he claimed are greater than those between two species of ape; and this proves that Negros are a separate species from the Whites.
In an unusual blend of contemporary evolutionary thinking and pre-Adamism the theistic evolutionist and geologist Alexander Winchell argued in his 1878 book Adamites and Preadamites for the pre-Adamic origins of the human race on the basis that the Negroes were too racially inferior to have developed from the Biblical Adam. Winchell also believed that the laws of evolution operated according to the will of God.
Before Darwin published his theory of evolution and common descent
Common descent
In evolutionary biology, a group of organisms share common descent if they have a common ancestor. There is strong quantitative support for the theory that all living organisms on Earth are descended from a common ancestor....
in his Origin of Species (1859) scientific theories or models of Polygenism (such as Agassiz's) were strictly creationist. Even after Darwin's book was published, Agassiz still stuck to his scientific form of polygenist creationism and denounced the idea of evolution. However by the late 19th century most scientific polygenists had abandoned Agassiz's creationism and began to embrace polygenist forms of evolution. This even included many students of Agassiz, including Nathaniel Shaler
Nathaniel Shaler
Nathaniel Southgate Shaler was an American paleontologist and geologist who wrote extensively on the theological and scientific implications of the theory of evolution.-Biography:...
who had studied under Agassiz at Harvard. Shaler continued to believe in polygenism, but believed the different races evolved from different primates. The prominent French anthropologist Paul Broca
Paul Broca
Pierre Paul Broca was a French physician, surgeon, anatomist, and anthropologist. He was born in Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, Gironde. He is best known for his research on Broca's area, a region of the frontal lobe that has been named after him. Broca’s Area is responsible for articulated language...
by 1878 had also converted from creationist polygenism to accepting a form of polygenist evolution.
In his work The Descent of Man (1871) Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.He published his theory...
and some of his supporters argued for the monogenesis
Monogenesis
Monogenism is the theory of human origins which posits a single origin for all human races. For the belief that all humans are descended from Adam, see Polygenism.Monogenesis may refer to:* Recent African origin of modern humans...
of the human species, seeing the common origin of all humans as essential for evolutionary theory. This is known as the single-origin hypothesis
Recent African origin of modern humans
In paleoanthropology, the recent African origin of modern humans is the most widely accepted model describing the origin and early dispersal of anatomically modern humans...
. Darwin even dedicated a chapter of his The Descent of Man in attempt to refute the polygenists and support common ancestry for all races. Polygenist evolution views however continued into the early 20th century, and still found support amongst prominent scientists. Henry Fairfield Osborn
Henry Fairfield Osborn
Henry Fairfield Osborn, Sr. ForMemRS was an American geologist, paleontologist, and eugenicist.-Early life and career:...
for example in his The Origin and Evolution of Life (1916) claimed blacks and whites both evolved off different primates.
Alfred Russell Wallace influenced polygenist evolution he claimed that the physical differences in races must have occurred at such a remote time in the past before humans had any intelligence, when natural selection was still operative on human bodies. The differentiation into separate races with distinct physical traits must have happened so soon after humans had just appeared on earth that for all practical purposes all races had always been distinct.
In contrast to most of Darwin's supporters, Ernst Haeckel
Ernst Haeckel
The "European War" became known as "The Great War", and it was not until 1920, in the book "The First World War 1914-1918" by Charles à Court Repington, that the term "First World War" was used as the official name for the conflict.-Research:...
put forward a doctrine of evolutionary polygenism based on the ideas of the linguist and polygenist August Schleicher
August Schleicher
August Schleicher was a German linguist. His great work was A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages, in which he attempted to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language...
, in which several different language groups had arisen separately from speechless prehuman Urmenschen, which themselves had evolved from simian ancestors. These separate languages had completed the transition from animals to man, and, under the influence of each main branch of languages, humans had evolved as separate species, which could be subdivided into races. Haeckel divided human beings into ten races, of which the Caucasian was the highest and the primitives were doomed to extinction.
Ernst Haeckel
Ernst Haeckel
The "European War" became known as "The Great War", and it was not until 1920, in the book "The First World War 1914-1918" by Charles à Court Repington, that the term "First World War" was used as the official name for the conflict.-Research:...
claimed that Negros have stronger and more freely movable toes than any other race which is evidence that Negros are connected to apes because when apes stop climbing in trees they hold on to the trees with their toes, Haeckel compared Negros to “four-handed” apes. Haeckel also believed Negros were savages and that Whites were the most civilised.
Franz Weidenreich
-External references:*...
originated the "Weidenreich Theory of Human Evolution" which is a form of polygenist evolution. The Weidenreich Theory states that human races have evolved independently in the Old World from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens sapiens, while at the same time there was gene flow between the various populations. According to the Weidenreich Theory, genes that were generally adaptive (such as those for intelligence and communication) would flow relatively rapidly from one part of the world to the other, while those that were locally adaptive, would not. This is contrary to popular theories of human evolution that have one superior race displacing other races. A vocal proponent of the Weidenreich theory was Carleton Coon.
In the late 20th century, the work of the paleoanthropologist
Paleoanthropology
Paleoanthropology, which combines the disciplines of paleontology and physical anthropology, is the study of ancient humans as found in fossil hominid evidence such as petrifacted bones and footprints.-19th century:...
Carleton Coon
Carleton S. Coon
Carleton Stevens Coon, was an American physical anthropologist, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, lecturer and professor at Harvard, and president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.-Biography:Carleton Coon was born in Wakefield, Massachusetts to a...
was the closest to what can be perhaps considered a "modern" polygenism by positing that the individual races of the earth separately evolved into modern Homo sapiens. This hypothesis, called the candelabra theory, was not very popular when it was presented in the mid-1960s. It is often confused with the multiregional hypothesis, but these two theories differ significantly in that Coon's candelabra model involves no gene flow between populations (so truly independent evolutions for races of humans) while the multiregional hypothesis is based on the idea of massive amounts of gene flow between human populations.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin SJ was a French philosopher and Jesuit priest who trained as a paleontologist and geologist and took part in the discovery of both Piltdown Man and Peking Man. Teilhard conceived the idea of the Omega Point and developed Vladimir Vernadsky's concept of Noosphere...
the French philosopher believed in polygenist evolution. Teilhard did not believe in the creation of the Biblical first man, Adam and the first woman, Eve, he taught that there were many 'First Parents' who evolved from primates at one time.
In 1971 The Beginning Was the End
The Beginning Was the End
The Beginning Was the End is a 1971 pseudo-scientific book written by Oscar Kiss Maerth that claims that humankind evolved from cannibalistic apes...
was published by Oscar Kiss Maerth
Oscar Kiss Maerth
Oscar Kiss Maerth was born in what was then Hungary but what was, in 1974, Yugoslavia.He was the author of The Beginning Was the End , a pseudo-scientific book written in a Chinese monastery that claimed modern man devolved from a species of brain-eating apes...
which argued different races sprung from different types of ape. The book is considered to be pseudoscience
Pseudoscience
Pseudoscience is a claim, belief, or practice which is presented as scientific, but which does not adhere to a valid scientific method, lacks supporting evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status...
.
Neo-evangelical theistic evolutionist John Stott
John Stott
John Robert Walmsley Stott CBE was an English Christian leader and Anglican cleric who was noted as a leader of the worldwide Evangelical movement. He was one of the principal authors of the Lausanne Covenant in 1974...
wrote in his 1984 book Understanding the Bible: ‘My acceptance of Adam and Eve as historical is not incompatible with my belief that several forms of pre-Adamic ‘hominid’ seem to have existed for thousands of years previously. It is conceivable that God created Adam out of one of them. I think you may even call some of them Homo sapiens".
Modern adherents
- A tenet of RaëlismRaëlismRaëlism is a UFO religion that was founded in 1974 by Claude Vorilhon, now known as Raël.The Raëlian Movement teaches that life on Earth was scientifically created by a species of extraterrestrials, which they call the Elohim...
holds that the different races of humans were created by separate teams of extraterrestrial scientists. - Several minor Christian groups still embrace Biblical polygenism (Preadamism or Coadamism).
See also
- Historical definitions of race
- MonogenesisMonogenesisMonogenism is the theory of human origins which posits a single origin for all human races. For the belief that all humans are descended from Adam, see Polygenism.Monogenesis may refer to:* Recent African origin of modern humans...
- Multiregional hypothesisMultiregional origin of modern humansThe multiregional hypothesis is a scientific model that provides an explanation for the pattern of human evolution. The hypothesis holds that humans first arose near the beginning of the Pleistocene two million years ago and subsequent human evolution has been within a single, continuous human...
- Polygenesis (linguistics)Polygenesis (linguistics)In the field of linguistics, polygenesis is the view that human languages evolved as several lineages independent of one another. It is contrasted with monogenesis, which is the view that human languages all go back to a single common ancestor....
External links
- "Darwin the liberator: How evolutionary thought undermined the rationale for slavery" Washington Post (February 15, 2009). (Review of book exploring Charles Darwin's opposition to polygenism.)