The Mismeasure of Man

by Stephen Jay Gould

  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, was crucial to 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. (For the insight that scientific revolutions embody such geometric shifts, I am grateful to my wife, Rhonda Roland Shearer, who portrays these themes in her sculptures and in her forthcoming book, The Flatland Hypothesis, named for Abbott’s great science fiction work of 1884 on the limitations imposed by geometry upon our general thoughts and social theories.)

  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 three words indicating color, temperament, and stance. (Linnaeus also included two other false or fanciful varieties within Homo sapiens—ferns 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 and medieval theory that a persons’ mood arises from a balance of four fluids (humor is Latin for “moisture”)—blood, phlegm, choler (or yellow bile), and melancholy (or black bile). One of the four substances would dominate, and a person would therefore be 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 all these are superior to caprice—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 not linear or 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 push 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, had more practical impact, in this case almost entirely negative, upon our collective lives and nationalities. Ironically, J. F. Blumenbach is the focus of this shift—for his five-race scheme became canonical, and he changed the geometry of human order from Linnaean cartography to linear ranking by putative worth.

  I say ironic because Blumenbach was 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 is really not so peculiar or unusual—for most scientists have always been unaware of the mental machinery, and particularly of the visual or geometric implications, behind all theorizing.

  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 newly discovered facts. Scientists therefore tend to be unaware of their own mental impositions upon the world’s messy and ambiguous factuality. Such mental impositions 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 world view; almost any other taxonomic scheme would have been anomalous. In changing the geometry of human order to a system of ranking by worth, I doubt that Blumenbach did anything consciously in the overt service of racism. I think that he was only, and largely passively, recording 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 his 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 miss the causes of their changed opinions, but may also fail to comprehend the deep and pervasive mental shift encoded by their own new theory.

  Blumenbach strongly upheld the unity of the human species against an alternative view, then growing in popularity (and surely more conducive to conventional forms of racism), that each major race had been separately created. He ended the third edition of his treatise by writing: “No doubt can any longer remain but that we are with great probability right in referring all varieties of man … to one and the same species.”

  As his major argument for unity, Blumenbach notes that all supposed racial characters grade continuously from one people to another, and cannot define any separate and bounded group.

  For although there seems to be so great a difference between widely separate nations, that you might easily take the inhabitants of the Cape of Good Hope, the Greenlanders, and the Circassians for so many different species of man, yet when the matter is thoroughly considered, you see that all do so run into one another, and that one variety of mankind does so sensibly pass into the other, that you cannot mark out the limits between them.

  He particularly refutes the common claim that black Africans, as lowest on the conventional racist ladder, bear unique features of their inferiority: “There is no single character so peculiar and so universal among the Ethiopians, but what it may be observed on the one hand everywhere in other varieties of men.”

  Blumenbach believed that Homo sapiens had been created in a single region and had then spread out over the globe. Our racial diversity, he then argued, arose as a result of our movement to other climates and topographies, and our consequent adoption of different habits and modes of life in these various regions. Following the terminology of his time, Blumenbach referred to these changes as “degenerations”—not intending, by this word, the modern sense of deterioration, but the literal meaning of departure from an initial form of humanity at the creation (de means “from” and genus refers to our original stock).

  Most of these degenerations, Blumenbach argues, arise directly from differences in climate—ranging from such broad patterns as the correlation of dark skin with tropical environments, to more particular (and fanciful) attributions, including a speculation that the narrow eye slits of some Australian people may have arisen as their response to “constant clouds of gnats … contracting the natural face of the inhabitants.” Other changes then originate as a consequence of varying modes of life adopted in these different regions. For example, nations that compress the heads of babies by swaddling boards or papoose carriers end up with relatively long skulls. Blumenbach holds that “almost all the diversity of the form of the head in different nations is to be attributed to the mode of life and to art.”

  Blumenbach does not deny that such changes, promoted over many generations, may eventually become hereditary (by a process generally called “Lamarckism,” or “inheritance of acquired characters” today, but serving as the folk wisdom of the late eighteenth century, and as nothing peculiar to Lamarck, as Blumenbach’s support illustrates). “With the progress of time,” Blumenbach writes, “art may degenerate into a second nature.”

  But Blumenbach strongly held that most racial variation, as superficial impositions of climate and mode of life, could be easily altered or reversed by moving to a new region or by adopting new styles of behavior. White Europeans living for generations in the tropics may become dark-skinned, while Africans transported as slaves to high latitudes may eventually become white: “Color, whatever be its cause, be it bile, or the influence of the sun, the air, or the climate, is, at all events, an adventitious and easily changeable thing, and can never constitute a diversity of species.”

  Backed by these views on the superficiality of racial variation, Blumenbach stoutly defended the mental and moral unity of all peoples. He held particularly strong opinions on the equal status of black Africans and white Europeans—perhaps because Africans had been most stigmatized by conventional racist beliefs.

  Blumenbach established a special library in his house devoted exclusively to writings by black authors. He may have been patronizing in praising “the good disposition and faculties of these our black brethren,” but paternalism is better than contempt. He campaigned for the abolition of slavery when such views did not enjoy widespread assent, and he asserted the moral superiority of slaves to their captors, speaking of a “natural tenderness of heart, which has never been benumbed or extirpated on board the transport vessels or on the West India sugar plantations by the brutality of their white executioners.”

  Blumenbach affirmed “the perfectibility of the mental faculties and the talents of the Negro,” and he listed the fine works of his library, offering special praise for the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, a Boston slave whose writings have only recently been rediscovered and reprinted in America: “I possess English, Dutch, and Latin poems by several [black authors], amongst which however above all, those of Phillis Wheatley of Boston, who is justly famous for them, deserves mention here.” Finally, Blumenbach noted that many Caucasian nations could not boast so fine a set of authors and scholars as black Africa has produced under the most depressing circumstances of prejudice and slavery: “It would not be difficult to mention entire well-known provinces of Europe, from out of which you would not easily expect to obtain off-hand such good authors, poets, philosophers, and correspondents of the Paris Academy.”

  Blumenbach’s racial geometry with two lines of “degeneration” extending out through intermediary stages from a central Caucasian “ideal.” Figure modified from Anthropological Treatises, J. F. Blumenbach, 1865.

  Nonetheless, when Blumenbach presented his implied mental picture of human diversity—his transposition from Linnaean geography to hierarchical ranking—he chose to identify a central group as closest to the created ideal, and then to characterize other groups by relative degrees of departure from this archetypal standard. He ended up with a system (see the accompanying illustration from his treatise) that placed a single race at the pinnacle of closest approach to the original creation, and then envisioned two symmetrical lines of departure from this ideal toward greater and greater degeneration.

  We may now return to the riddle of the name Caucasian, and to the significance of Blumenbach’s addition of a fifth race, the Malay variety. Blumenbach chose to regard his own European variety as closest to the created ideal, and he then searched within the variety of Europeans for a smaller group of greatest perfection—the highest of the highest, so to speak. As we have seen, he identified the people around Mount Caucasus as the closest embodiments of an original ideal, and he then named the entire European race for their finest representatives.

  But Blumenbach now faced a dilemma. He had already affirmed the mental and moral equality of all peoples. He therefore could not use these conventional standards of racist ranking to establish degrees of relative departure from the Caucasian ideal. Instead, and however subjective (and even risible) we view the criterion today, Blumenbach chose physical beauty as his guide to ranking. He simply affirmed that Europeans were most beautiful, with people of the Caucasus on the highest pinnacle of comeliness (hence his linking, in the quotation presented at the beginning of this article, of maximal beauty with place of human origin—for Blumenbach viewed all subsequent variation as departure from a created ideal, and the most beautiful people must therefore live closest to our primal home).

  Blumenbach’s descriptions are pervaded by his personal sense of relative beauty, presented as though he were discussing an objective and quantifiable property, not subject to doubt or disagreement. He describes a Georgian female skull (from closest to Mount Caucasus) in his collection as “really the most beautiful form of skull which … always of itself attracts every eye, however little observant.” He then defends his European standard on aesthetic grounds:

  In the first place, that stock displays… the most beautiful form of the skull, from which, as from a mean and primeval
type, the others diverge by most easy gradations.… Besides, it is white in color, which we may fairly assume to have been the primitive color of mankind, since … it is very easy for that to degenerate into brown, but very much more difficult for dark to become white.

  Blumenbach then presented all human variety on two lines of successive departure from this Caucasian ideal, ending in the two most degenerate (least attractive, not morally unworthy or mentally obtuse) forms of humanity—Asians on one side, and Africans on the other. But Blumenbach also wanted to designate intermediary forms between ideal and most degenerate—especially since even gradation formed his primary argument for human unity. In his original four-race system, he could identify Native Americans as intermediary between Europeans and Asians, but who would serve as the transnational form between Europeans and Africans?

  The four-race system contained no appropriate group, and could therefore not be transformed into the new geometry of a pinnacle with two symmetrical limbs leading to maximal departure from ideal form. But invention of a fifth racial category for forms intermediate between Europeans and Africans would complete the new geometry—and Blumenbach therefore added the Malay race, not as a minor factual refinement, but as the enabler of a thorough geometric transformation in theories (mental pictures) about human diversity. As an intermediary between Europeans and Africans, the Malay variety provided crucial symmetry for Blumenbach’s hierarchical taxonomy. This Malay addition therefore completed the geometric transformation from an unranked geographic model to the conventional hierarchy of implied worth that has fostered so much social grief ever since. Blumenbach epitomized his system in this geometric manner, and explicitly defended the necessary role of his Malay addition: