title: Why be against Darwin? Creationism, racism, and the roots of anthropology.
abstract: In this work, I review recent works in science studies and the history of science of relevance to biological anthropology. I will look at two rhetorical practices in human evolution--overstating our relationship with the apes and privileging ancestry over emergence--and their effects upon how human evolution and human diversity have been understood scientifically. I examine specifically the intellectual conflicts between Rudolf Virchow and Ernst Haeckel in the 19th century and G. G. Simpson and Morris Goodman a century later. This will expose some previously concealed elements of the tangled histories of anthropology, genetics, and evolution-particularly in relation to the general roles of race and heredity in conceptualizing human origins. I argue that scientific racism and unscientific creationism are both threats to the scholarly enterprise, but that scientific racism is worse.
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC 28223, USA. jmarks@uncc.edu
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Marks
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D000885:Anthropology, Physical / Q000266:history*; D005075:Biological Evolution; D005053:Eugenics / Q000266:history; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D015186:Hominidae; D006801:Humans; D063505:Racism / Q000266:history*; D012067:Religion