I Have Landed

by Stephen Jay Gould

  Obviously, we cannot make a coherent claim for “blacks” being innately anything by heredity if the people so categorized do not form a distinctive genealogical grouping. But the category mistake goes far, far deeper than dilution by extensive intermixture with other populations. The most exciting and still emerging discovery in modern paleoanthroplogy and human genetics will force us to rethink the entire question of human categories in a radical way. We shall be compelled to recognize that “African black” cannot rank as a racial group with such conventional populations as “Native American,” “European Caucasian,” or “East Asian,” but must be viewed as something more inclusive than all the others combined, not really definable as a discrete group, and therefore not available for such canards as “Africans are less intelligent” or “Africans sure can play basketball.”

  The past decade of anthropology has featured a lively debate about the origin of the only living human species, Homo sapiens. Did our species emerge separately on three continents (Africa, Europe, and Asia) from precursor populations of Homo erectus inhabiting all these areas—the so-called multiregionalist view? Or did Homo sapiens arise in one place, probably Africa, from just one of these Homo erectus populations, and then spread out later to cover the globe—the so-called out-of-Africa view?

  The tides of argument have swung back and forth, but recent evidence seems to be cascading rapidly toward Out of Africa. As more and more genes are sequenced and analyzed for their variation among human racial groups, and as we reconstruct genealogical trees based upon these genetic differences, the same strong signal and pattern seem to be emerging: Homo sapiens arose in Africa; the migration into the rest of the world did not begin until about 100,000 years ago.

  In other words, all non-African racial diversity—whites, yellows, reds, everyone from the Hopi to the Norwegians to the Fijians—may not be much older than one hundred thousand years. By contrast, Homo sapiens has lived in Africa for a far longer time. Consequently, since genetic diversity roughly correlates with time available for evolutionary change, genetic variety among Africans alone exceeds the sum total of genetic diversity for everyone else in the rest of the world combined! How, therefore, can we lump “African blacks” together as a single group, and imbue them with traits either favorable or unfavorable, when they represent more evolutionary space and more genetic variety than we find in all non-African people in all the rest of the world? Africa includes most of humanity by any proper genealogical definition; all the rest of us occupy a branch within the African tree. This non-African branch has surely flourished, but can never be topologically more than a subsection within an African structure.

  We will need many years, and much pondering, to assimilate the theoretical, conceptual, and iconographic implications of this startling reorientation in our views about the nature and meaning of human diversity. For starters, though, I suggest that we finally abandon such senseless statements as “African blacks have more rhythm, less intelligence, greater athleticism.” Such claims, apart from their social perniciousness, have no meaning if Africans cannot be construed as a coherent group because they represent more diversity than all the rest of the world put together.

  Our greatest intellectual adventures often occur within ourselves—not in the restless search for new facts and new objects on the earth or in the stars, but from a need to expunge old prejudices and build new conceptual structures. No hunt can promise a sweeter reward, a more admirable goal, than the excitement of thoroughly revised understanding—the inward journey that thrills real scholars and scares the bejesus out of the rest of us. We need to make such an internal expedition in reconceptualizing our views of human genealogy and the meaning of evolutionary diversity. Thomas Browne—for we must award him the last word—praised such inward adventures above all other intellectual excitement. Interestingly, in the same passage, he also invoked Africa as a metaphor for unknown wonder. He could not have known the uncanny literal accuracy of his words (from Religio Medici, book 1, section 15):

  I could never content my contemplation with those general pieces of wonder, the flux and reflux of the sea, the increase of the Nile, the conversion of the [compass] needle to the north; and have studied to match and parallel those in the more obvious and neglected pieces of nature, which without further travel I can do in the cosmography of myself; we carry with us the wonders we seek without us: there is all Africa and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature.

  26

  The Geometer of Race

  INTERESTING STORIES OFTEN LIE ENCODED IN NAMES THAT seem either capricious or misconstrued. Why, for example, are political radicals called “left” and their conservative counterparts “right”? In most European legislatures, maximally distinguished members sat at the chairman’s right, following a custom of courtesy as old as our prejudices for favoring the dominant hand of most people. (These biases run deep, extending well beyond can openers and writing desks to language itself, where dextrous comes from the Latin for “right,” and sinister for “left.”) Since these distinguished nobles and moguls tended to espouse conservative views, the right and left wings of the legislature came to define a geometry of political views.

  Among such apparently capricious names in my own field of biology and evolution, none seems more curious, and none elicits more inquiry from correspondents and questioners after lectures, than the official designation of light-skinned people from Europe, western Asia, and North Africa as Caucasian. Why should this most common racial group of the Western world be named for a range of mountains in Russia? J. F. Blumenbach (1752–1840), the German naturalist who established the most influential of all racial classifications, invented this name in 1795, in the third edition of his seminal work, De generis humani varietate nativa (On the Natural Variety of Mankind). Blumenbach’s original definition cites two reasons for his choice—the maximal beauty of people from this small region, and the probability that humans had first been created in this area. Blumenbach wrote:

  Caucasian variety. I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighborhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, and because . . . in that region, if anywhere, we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones [original forms] of mankind.

  Blumenbach, one of the greatest and most honored naturalists of the Enlightenment, spent his entire career as a professor at the University of Göttingen in Germany. He first presented his work De generis humani varietate nativa as a doctoral dissertation to the medical faculty of Göttingen in 1775, as the minutemen of Lexington and Concord began the American Revolution. He then republished the text for general distribution in 1776, as a fateful meeting in Philadelphia proclaimed our independence. The coincidence of three great documents in 1776—Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (on the politics of liberty), Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (on the economics of individualism), and Blumenbach’s treatise on racial classification (on the science of human diversity)—records the social ferment of these decades, and sets the wider context that makes Blumenbach’s taxonomy, and his decision to call the European race Caucasian, so important for our history and current concerns.

  The solution to big puzzles often hinges upon tiny curiosities, easy to miss or to pass over. I suggest that the key to understanding Blumenbach’s classification, the foundation of so much that continues to influence and disturb us today, lies in a peculiar criterion that he invoked to name the European race Caucasian—the supposed maximal beauty of people from this region. Why, first of all, should anyone attach such importance to an evidently subjective assessment; and why, secondly, should an aesthetic criterion become the basis for a scientific judgment about place of origin? To answer these questions, we must turn to Blumenbach’s original formulation of 1775, and then move to the changes he introduced in 1795, when Caucasians received their name.

  Blumenbach’s final taxonomy of 1795 divided all humans into five groups de
fined by both geography and appearance—in his order, the “Caucasian variety” for light-skinned people of Europe and adjacent areas; the “Mongolian variety” for inhabitants of eastern Asia, including China and Japan; the “Ethiopian variety” for dark-skinned people of Africa; the “American variety” for native populations of the New World; and the “Malay variety” for Polynesians and Melanesians of Pacific islands, and for the aborigines of Australia. But Blumenbach’s original classification of 1775 recognized only the first four of these five, and united members of the “Malay variety” with the other people of Asia, later named “Mongolian” by Blumenbach.

  We now encounter the paradox of Blumenbach’s reputation as the inventor of modern racial classification. The original four-race system, as I shall illustrate in a moment, did not arise from Blumenbach’s observations or theorizing, but only represents, as Blumenbach readily admits, the classification adopted and promoted by his guru Carolus Linnaeus in the founding document of taxonomy, the Systema Naturae of 1758. Therefore, the later addition of a “Malay variety” for some Pacific peoples originally included in a broader Asian group represents Blumenbach’s only original contribution to racial classification. This change seems so minor. Why, then, do we credit Blumenbach, rather than Linnaeus, as the founder of racial classification? (One might prefer to say “discredit,” as the enterprise does not, for good reason, enjoy high repute these days.) I wish to argue that Blumenbach’s apparently small change actually records a theoretical shift that could not have been broader, or more portentous, in scope. This change has been missed or misconstrued in most commentaries because later scientists have not grasped the vital historical and philosophical principle that theories should be construed as models subject to visual representation, usually in clearly definable geometric terms.

  By moving from the Linnaean four-race system to his own five-race scheme, Blumenbach radically changed the geometry of human order from a geographically based model without explicit ranking to a double hierarchy of worth, oddly based upon perceived beauty, and fanning out in two directions from a Caucasian ideal. The addition of a Malay category, as we shall see, provided the focus for this geometric reformulation—and Blumenbach’s “minor” change between 1775 and 1795 therefore becomes the key to a conceptual transformation rather than a simple refinement of factual information within an old scheme.

  Blumenbach idolized his teacher Linnaeus. On the first page of the 1795 edition of his racial classification, Blumenbach hailed “the immortal Linnaeus, a man quite created for investigating the characteristics of the works of nature, and arranging them in systematic order.” Blumenbach also acknowledged Linnaeus as the source of his original fourfold classification: “I have followed Linnaeus in the number, but have defined my varieties by other boundaries” (1775 edition). Later, in adding his “Malay variety,” Blumenbach identified his change as a departure from his old guru Linnaeus: “It became very clear that the Linnaean division of mankind could no longer be adhered to; for which reason I, in this little work, ceased like others to follow that illustrious man.”

  Linnaeus divided his species Homo sapiens into four varieties, defined primarily by geography and secondarily by appearance and supposed behavior (Linnaeus also included two other false or fanciful varieties within Homo sapiens—ferus for “wild boys” occasionally discovered in the woods and possibly raised by animals [most turned out to be retarded or mentally ill youngsters abandoned by their parents]; and monstrosus for travelers’ tales of hairy people with tails, and other assorted fables.)

  Linnaeus then presented the four major varieties arranged by geography and, interestingly, not in the ranked order favored by most Europeans in the racist tradition. He discussed, in sequence, Americanus, Europeus, Asiaticus, and Afer (or African). In so doing, Linnaeus presented nothing at all original, but merely mapped humans onto the four geographic regions of conventional cartography.

  In the first line of his descriptions, Linnaeus characterized each group by three words for color, temperament, and posture in that order. Again, none of these three categories implies any ranking by worth. Moreover, Linnaeus again bowed to classical taxonomic theories rather than his own observations in making these decisions. For example, his separations by temperament (or “humor”) record the ancient medical theory that a person’s mood arises from a balance of four fluids (humor, in Latin, means “moisture”)—blood, phlegm, choler (or yellow bile), and melancholy (or black bile). One of the four substances may dominate, and a person therefore becomes sanguine (the cheerful realm of blood), phlegmatic (sluggish), choleric (prone to anger), or melancholic (sad). Four geographic regions, four humors, four races.

  For the American variety, Linnaeus wrote “rufus, cholericus, rectus” (red, choleric, upright); for the European, “albus, sanguineus, torosus” (white, sanguine, muscular); for the Asian, “luridus, melancholicus, rigidus” (pale yellow, melancholy, stiff); and for the African, “niger, phlegmaticus, laxus” (black, phlegmatic, relaxed).

  I don’t mean to deny that Linnaeus held conventional beliefs about the superiority of his own European variety over all others. He surely maintained the almost universal racism of his time—and being sanguine and muscular as a European surely sounds better than being melancholy and stiff as an Asian. Moreover, Linnaeus included a more overtly racist label in his last line of description for each variety. Here he tries to epitomize supposed behavior in a single word following the statement regitur (ruled)—for the American, consuetudine (by habit); for the European, ritibus (by custom); for the Asian, opinionibus (by belief); and for the African, arbitrio (by caprice). Surely, regulation by established and considered custom beats the unthinking rule of habit or belief, and caprice can only represent the least desirable among the four criteria, thus leading to the implied and conventional racist ranking of Europeans first, Asians and Americans in the middle, and Africans at the bottom.

  Nonetheless, and despite these implications, the overt geometry of Linnaeus’s model is neither linear nor hierarchical. When we epitomize his scheme as an essential picture in our mind, we see a map of the world divided into four regions, with the people in each region characterized by a list of different traits. In short, Linnaeus uses cartography as a primary principle for human ordering; if he had wished to advocate linear ranking as the essential picture of human variety, he would surely have listed Europeans first and Africans last, but he started with Native Americans instead.

  The shift from a geographic to a hierarchical ordering of human diversity marks a fateful transition in the history of Western science—for what, short of railroads and nuclear bombs, has generated more practical impact, in this case almost entirely negative, upon our collective lives and nationalities? Ironically, J. F. Blumenbach became the primary author of this shift—for his five-race scheme became canonical, as he changed the geometry of human order from Linnaean cartography to linear ranking by putative worth.

  I say ironic because Blumenbach surely deserves plaudits as the least racist, most egalitarian, and most genial of all Enlightenment writers on the subject of human diversity. How peculiar that the man most committed to human unity, and to inconsequential moral and intellectual differences among groups, should have changed the mental geometry of human order to a scheme that has promoted conventional racism ever since. Yet, on second thought, this situation should not be deemed so peculiar or unusual—for most scientists have always been unaware of the mental machinery, and particularly of the visual or geometric implications, behind their particular theorizing (and underlying all human thought in general).

  An old tradition in science proclaims that changes in theory must be driven by observation. Since most scientists believe this simplistic formula, they assume that their own shifts in interpretation only record their better understanding of novel facts. Scientists therefore tend to be unaware of their own mental impositions upon the world’s messy and ambiguous factuality. Such mental manipulations arise from a variety of sources, including
psychological predisposition and social context. Blumenbach lived in an age when ideas of progress, and of the cultural superiority of European life, dominated the political and social world of his contemporaries. Implicit and loosely formulated (or even unconscious) notions of racial ranking fit well with such a worldview. In changing the geometry of human order to a system of ranking by worth, I doubt that Blumenbach operated consciously in the overt service of racism. I think that he only, and largely passively, recorded the pervasive social view of his time. But ideas have consequences, whatever the motives or intentions of their promoters.

  Blumenbach certainly thought that his switch from the Linnaean four-race system to his own five-race scheme—the basis for his fateful geometric shift, as we shall see, from cartography to hierarchy—arose only from his improved understanding of nature’s factuality. He so stated in the second (1781) edition of his treatise, when he announced his change: “Formerly in the first edition of this work, I divided all mankind into four varieties; but after I had more actively investigated the different nations of Eastern Asia and America, and, so to speak, looked at them more closely, I was compelled to give up that division, and to place in its stead the following five varieties, as more consonant to nature.” And, in the preface to the third edition of 1795, Blumenbach states that he gave up the Linnaean scheme in order to arrange “the varieties of man according to the truth of nature.” When scientists adopt the myth that theories arise solely from observation, and do not scrutinize the personal and social influences emerging from their own psyches, they not only misunderstand the causes of their changed opinions, but may also fail to comprehend the deep and pervasive mental shift encoded by their own new theory.