Evelynn Hammonds
"I am asking scientists to think about the histories of the racial categories they use and not just accept them as self evident,'' said Hammonds, who is also Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity at the University, following her talk entitled "Race and Science: New Challenges to an Old Problem.''
Racial categories, "have histories, and all of them have meanings that have changed over time,'' she added. "We have a tendency to think that the terms we use reflect natural differences between human groups, but they don't. They are historical constructs.''
The term "Caucasian," for example, was first used by the German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1795. He divided the human race into five categories based on physical criteria-Caucasian or 'white,' Mongolian or 'yellow,' Malayan or 'brown,' Negro or 'black,' and American or 'red,' she explained. Blumenbach believed that the Caucasus Mountain range in Eurasia was the cradle of civilization and its people were the ancestors of modern humans. He based his categories on his analysis of different skull formations-these being the longest-lasting and most unchangeable parts of the human body. He had an impressive collection of human skulls. The skulls which he deemed to be a prototype of the Caucasian variety belonged to a Georgian woman: Georgia is in the Caucasus-hence the term Caucasian. Blumenbach thought this was the most beautiful skull in his collection, said Hammonds, and so he chose it to represent the most "civilized" nations: Europeans, Indians and Semites. "He reinforced a hierarchical ranking of races by establishing a Caucasian ideal from which all other human groups were derived,'' explained Hammonds.
His ideas migrated to the United States in the 19th century where they "provided a scientific justification for numerous acts of racial segregation,'' she said. Increasingly, Blumenbach's view of a single human race with a single origin on Mount Caucasus became less popular, and a polygenist view that humankind was composed of races that came from different origins was more accepted. Over time in Europe, the Caucasian theory lost out to the Aryan thesis that fueled anti-Semitism and became the philosophy that fed Nazism.
At least since the 1940s, biologists and anthropologists began to reject the view that racial categories should be based on physical characteristics, arguing that race definitions are imprecise and arbitrary, noted Hammonds.
"Biologists shifted from the old classification of race with roots in anatomy to a new evolutionary biology of man with roots in genetics, ecology, and evolution,'' she said.
But the terminology remains popular, particularly among the public and even in scientific papers, she said. Hammonds said that she typed the term "Caucasian'' into the Medline database the day of her talk and came up with 3,000 scientific articles that used the term.
"What keeps this going?'' she asked. "There is something holding this concept in our culture and in our science.''
Hammonds said that efforts must be made to find new ways to compare populations. "Scientists need categories to define human populations, but they need to be specific and precise about what categories they need, why they use them, and why they tell them what they want to know,'' she said.
"I would say that if the public knew that scientists still used categories such as Negroid, Mongoloid, and Caucasoid, they would be surprised,'' she said. "There are other ways to get at differences between human populations. One way is to precisely characterize the variables you are trying to understand and not use racial categories as proxies.''
—ML
Copyright, 2009, President and Fellows of Harvard College
