Opinion: Zoology’s Racism Problem

Harmless as they may seem, the scalae implied a hierarchy of inherent value among natural things. These classifications of nature became progressively more complex, and with that complexity came a veneer of scientific authority, as in Charles Bonnet’s 1745 Notion of a Scale of Living Beings.

As the 19th century started, these value-laden worldviews collided with new ways of thinking in biology—especially the idea that humans could be analyzed and classified in the same way as other animals. To be sure, there have been several species of humans in Earth’s history, and science does classify these hominins based in part on physical characteristics, but early researchers took this idea too far by applying it to modern humans within the species Homo sapiens. For example, Charles White, in his disturbing 1799 book An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man and in Different Animals and Vegetables, ranks animals and people according to the verticality of their facial profile, from snipe and crocodiles to dogs and orangutans, and from “negroes,” “American savages,” and “Asiatics” to Europeans.

During the first half of the 19th century, many zoologists’ minds turned toward the idea that animal types—and by extension, human types—could change and diverge over long periods of time. Yet this often meant the old hierarchy of nature simply transformed into a concept of evolutionary “progress” toward ever more perfect beings. And this carried the implication that some of those beings, human and animal, had been left behind in a primitive state.

One of the strangest examples of this distortion of evolutionary theory was polygenism, an idea espoused by the pro-slavery scion of the American School of Ethnology, Josiah Nott. Although he disliked the concept of evolution, Nott, in his 1854 Types of Mankind, cherry-picked the ideas he needed to claim that the “human races” are distinct species with origins in different animal groups. Nott claimed the evidence showed that white men were justified in dominating Black men, whose attributes render them the perfect slaves.

The respected German über-Darwinist Ernst Haeckel perpetuated the myth of evolutionary progress when he claimed influentially that Judaism is an evolutionary intermediate between primitive paganism and advanced Christianity, and when he asserted that non-Europeans are “physiologically nearer to the mammals—apes and dogs—than to the civilized European. We must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives.” 

Zoology must fight hard to decontaminate itself from the value judgments and skewed arguments of the past. Already, we no longer speak of animals as primitive or advanced, and those concepts have become meaningless in the context of humans too. Additionally, the human species is no longer considered to be gouped into a number of discrete races, but rather an array of populations, each adapted to its ancestral geographical environment, yet blurring genetically and culturally into its neighbors.

Humans have been the most widespread mammalian species for some time, so it is no surprise that we have ended up diverse. Yet it has taken a depressingly long time for scientists to state explicitly that this variation is messy and overlapping, and did not evolve to suit our prejudices.

David Bainbridge is a reproductive biologist and veterinary anatomist at the University of Cambridge. Read an excerpt of  How Zoologists Organize Things.