Concept
Scientific racism
Overview
Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscientific belief that the human species is divided into biologically distinct taxa called "races", and that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racial discrimination, racial inferiority, or racial superiority. Before the mid-20th century, scientific racism was accepted throughout the scientific community, but it is no longer considered scientific. The division of humankind into biologically separate groups, along with the assignment of particular physical and mental characteristics to these groups through constructing and applying corresponding explanatory models, is referred to as racialism, racial realism, race realism, or race science by those who support these ideas. Modern scientific consensus rejects this view as being irreconcilable with modern genetic research.
Scientific racism misapplies, misconstrues, or distorts anthropology (notably physical anthropology), craniometry, evolutionary biology, and other disciplines or pseudo-disciplines through proposing anthropological typologies to classify human populations into physically discrete human races, some of which are then typically asserted to be superior or inferior to others.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Thus, then, there originates the notion of _equality_. The things which among ourselves are called _equal_--whether lines, angles, weights, temperatures, sounds or colours--are things which produce in us sensations that cannot be distinguished from each other. It is true we now apply the word _equal_ chiefly to the separate phenomena which objects exhibit, and not to groups of phenomena; but this limitation of the…
Herbert Spencer, Essays on education and kindred subjects
States what Scientific racism is; the author is tied to Scientific racism in the knowledge graph.
If, however, species and genera and orders have resulted from the process of “natural selection,” then, as Mr. Darwin shows, there must have been a tendency to divergence, causing the contrasts between groups to become more and more pronounced. By the disappearance of intermediate forms, less fitted for special spheres of existence than the extreme forms they connected, the differences between the extreme forms must…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
The author is tied to Scientific racism in the knowledge graph.
The alliance between the nearest species in _distinct_ groups being general and not especial; the close similarity in the rules and objects in classifying domestic races and true species. All these facts were shown to follow on the natural system being a genealogical system.
Charles Darwin, The Foundations of the Origin of Species Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844
Close in meaning to Scientific racism; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Scientific racism
- Roger Scruton
- Immanuel Kant
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
- Herbert Spencer
- Houston Stewart Chamberlain
- Nick Land
- Petre P. Negulescu
Related ideas
- Ethnicity
- Antisemitism
- Adam and Eve
- Franz Boas
- Genetics
- Harvard University Press
- Princeton University Press
- Hindus
- Transaction Publishers
- Arthur de Gobineau
- History of science
- Julian Huxley
- Isaac Newton
- Ethnography
- Correlation
- Nordic race
- Karl Pearson
- Language
- Decadence
- Eurocentrism
- Indo-Iranians
- Harvard University
- Archaeology
- Munich
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Essentialism.