Darwinism, Democracy, and Race: American Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology in the Twentieth Century

253 Pages·2017·3.58 MB·English

by  John P Jackson

Darwinism, Democracy, and Race
Darwinism, Democracy, and Race examines the development and defense of an
argument that arose at the boundary between anthropology and evolutionary
biology in twentieth century America. In its fully articulated form, this argument
simultaneously discredited scientific racism and defended free human agency in
Darwinian terms.
The volume is timely because it gives readers a key to assessing con-
temporary debates about the biology of race. By working across disciplinary
lines, the book’s focal figures – the anthropologist Franz Boas, the cultural
anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, and the
physical anthropologist Sherwood Washburn – found increasingly persuasive
ways of cutting between genetic determinist and social constructionist views of
race by grounding Boas’s racially egalitarian, culturally relativistic, and demo-
cratically pluralistic ethic in a distinctive version of the genetic theory of natural
selection. Collaborators in making and defending this argument included Ashley
Montagu, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Lewontin.
Darwinism, Democracy, and Race will appeal to advanced undergraduates,
graduate students, and academics interested in subjects including Philosophy,
Critical Race Theory, Sociology of Race, History of Biology and Anthropology,
and Rhetoric of Science.
John P. Jackson Jr. is a Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Studies, Charles Center
for Academic Excellence, College of William and Mary, USA.
David J. Depew is Emeritus Professor of Communication Studies and POROI
(Project on the Rhetoric of Inquiry) at the University of Iowa, USA.
History and Philosophy of Biology
Series editor: Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther
This series explores significant developments in the life sciences from historical and
philosophical perspectives. Historical episodes include Aristotelian biology, Greek
and Islamic biology and medicine, Renaissance biology, natural history, Darwinian
evolution, Nineteenth-c entury physiology and cell theory, Twentieth-c entury genet-
ics, ecology, and systematics, and the biological theories and practices of non-
Western perspectives. Philosophical topics include individuality, reductionism and
holism, fitness, levels of selection, mechanism and teleology, and the nature- nurture
debates, as well as explanation, confirmation, inference, experiment, scientific prac-
tice, and models and theories vis-à -vis the biological sciences.
Authors are also invited to inquire into the “and” of this series. How has,
does, and will the history of biology impact philosophical understandings of life?
How can philosophy help us analyze the historical contingency of, and structural
constraints on, scientific knowledge about biological processes and systems? In
probing the interweaving of history and philosophy of biology, scholarly investi-
gation could usefully turn to values, power, and potential future uses and abuses
of biological knowledge.
The scientific scope of the series includes evolutionary theory, environmental
sciences, genomics, molecular biology, systems biology, biotechnology, bio-
medicine, race and ethnicity, and sex and gender. These areas of the biological
sciences are not silos, and tracking their impact on other sciences such as psy-
chology, economics, and sociology, and the behavioral and human sciences more
generally, is also within the purview of this series.
Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Univer-
sity of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), and Visiting Scholar of Philosophy at
Stanford University (2015–2016). He works in the philosophy of science and
philosophy of biology and has strong interests in metaphysics, epistemology,
and political philosophy, in addition to cartography and GIS, cosmology and
particle physics, psychological and cognitive science, and science in general.
Recent publications include “The Structure of Scientific Theories,” The Stanford
Encyclopaedia of Philosophy and “Race and Biology,” The Routledge Compan-
ion to the Philosophy of Race. His book with University of Chicago Press, When
Maps Become the World, is forthcoming.
Published:
Romantic Biology, 1890–1945
Maurizio Esposito
Natural Kinds and Classification in Scientific Practice
Edited by Catherine Kendig
Organisms and Personal Identity
Individuation and the Work of David Wiggins
A.M. Ferner
The Biological Foundations of Action
Derek M. Jones
Darwinism and Pragmatism
William James on Evolution and Self-T ransformation
Lucas McGranahan
Darwinism, Democracy, and Race
American Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology in the Twentieth Century
John P. Jackson Jr. and David J. Depew
Around the mid of the last century, evolutionary biology changed to become
compatible with and even enable liberal-democratic and antiracist values. In their
important book, Jackson and Depew recount the story of this crucial alliance. At
a time of profound changes in both the political arena and the biological under-
standing of gene functioning and heredity, this alliance may look, in retrospect,
more fragile and unstable than what we used to believe. Knowing deeply its
contingent making and deep entanglement with wider anthropological and socio-
political debates remains an essential tool to understand our present.
Maurizio Meloni, author of Political Biology: Science and Social Values in
Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics, Palgrave
Science historians have long tended to stop at Darwin, and are only now begin-
ning to open up the last century of the science of human evolution to critical
historical analysis. In this literate and accessible new book, Jackson and Depew
lead us through a marvelously intricate and intertwined intellectual history
involving cultural anthropology, biological anthropology, population genetics,
evolutionary biology, and racial studies. They scrupulously analyze the work of
scholars like Alfred Kroeber, Ashley Montagu, Sherwood Washburn, and Theod-
osius Dobzhansky, and challenge the facile alt-histories that circulate in con-
temporary evolutionary psychology. This is an important addition to the library
of anyone seriously interested in how we think about human origins and
diversity.
Jonathan Marks, Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina
at Charlotte, USA
Jackson and Depew have produced an important work: a muscular refutation of
scientific racism, grounded in science and deploying the tools of the historian.
Through rich new readings of the work of five central geneticists and anthropolo-
gists, they show that inoculation with the Modern Synthesis of evolutionary
biology immunized biological anthropology against racist genetic determinism,
leading this group of scientists toward a more egalitarian human biology. Anyone
sympathetic to the idea that racial superiority is “in the genes” needs to confront
this book. And those of us who find ourselves repeatedly whacking the mole of
racist science now have a solid new mallet.
Nathaniel Comfort, Professor of the History of Medicine, Johns Hopkins
University, USA
Darwinism, Democracy,
and Race
American Anthropology and Evolutionary
Biology in the Twentieth Century
John P. Jackson Jr.
and David J. Depew
First published 2017
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 John P. Jackson Jr. and David J. Depew
The right of John P. Jackson Jr. and David J. Depew to be identified as
authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-62817-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-21080-3 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
To Michele Jackson and Mary Depew, who lived with this
evolving manuscript far too long, but never wavered in their
support and encouragement.

Contents
Acknowledgments x
1 Introduction: in the footsteps of Franz Boas 1
2 Franz Boas and the argument from presumption 32
3 Demarcating anthropology: the boundary work of Alfred
Kroeber 59
4 Theodosius Dobzhansky and the argument from definition 97
5 Unifying science by creating community: the epideictic
rhetoric of Sherwood Washburn 137
6 A kairos moment unmet and met: the controversy over
Carleton Coon’s The Origin of Races 172
7 Epilogue: the roots of the Sociobiology controversy, the
infirmities of Evolutionary Psychology, and the unity of
anthropology 207
Index 231