Polygenism

Not to be confused with Polygyny.

Polygenism is a theory of human origins positing that the human races are of different lineages (polygenesis). This is opposite to the idea of monogenism, which posits a single origin of humanity.

Origins

Many oral traditions feature polygenesis in their creation stories, for example Bambuti mythology and other creation stories from the pygmies of Congo state that the supreme God of the pygmies, Khonvoum, created three different races of man separately out of clay: one black, one white, and one red.

The idea is also found in some ancient Greek and Roman literature. For example the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate in his Letter to a Priest wrote that he believed Zeus made multiple creations of man and women. In his Against the Galilaens Julian presented his reasoning for this belief. Julian had noticed that the Germanics and Scythians (northern nations) were different in their bodies (i.e skin complexion) to the Ethiopians. He therefore could not imagine such difference in shade of skin as having originated from common ancestry, so maintained separate creations for different races.

In early classical and medieval geography the idea of polygenism surfaced because of the suggested possibility of there being inhabitants of the antipodes (Antichthones). These inhabitants were considered by some to have separate origins because of their geographical extremity.

Robert Argod a navy sailor wrote a book in which he claimed Polynesian mythology supported polygenesis, that the Polynesian peoples and later Asiatic people had originated from the Antarctica, separate from the other races.

The religion of the Ainu people claims that the ancestors of the Ainu people arrived on earth from the skys separate from the other races. See (Ainu creation myth).

Main beliefs

Most Christians have taught monogenism that a single mating pair named Adam and Eve gave birth to all of humanity, polygenists do not accept this position because they believe it does not explain why there is such a big variation of human races, polygenists do not believe that Adam and Eve being one race could give birth to all of the races on earth, polygenists believe this to be biological impossible. Polygenists view the racial differences between each race to be too great to accept that all men derive from the same stock. Those who support polygenism cite the existence of interspecies hybrids such as mules in rebuttal to the argument that human races must belong to a single species because they can interbreed. Polygenists cite scientific evidence from racial variations in skin colour, stature, head shape and size to prove that the only logical scientific explanation for different races is separate origins. There have been a number of polygenist theories, the two most popular are biblical creationist polygenism and polygenist evolution, both are attempts to solve the race origin problems of monogenism.

Polygenism and the Bible

Biblical polygenists (creationists) believe that human races have been created separately in different zones by God. They utilize such theories as PreAdamite creation or CoAdamism to explain the existence of different races.

Biblical polygenists believe that the races are, like other species, fixed in form. They believe that each human race was created to survive in its own ecosystem: that each race was placed by God in a specific zoological province, together with fauna specific to those regions. Biblical polygenists believe there is no way that racial variations in skin colour, stature, head shape and size could have developed over six thousand or even (if one did not literally interpret the Bible) thirty or forty thousand years.

Biblical polygenists such as John William Colenso, Louis Agassiz, Josiah Clark Nott, George Gliddon, maintained that many of the races on earth, such as Negros and Asians, were not featured in the Bible or the Table of Nations outlined in Genesis 10 because when the Hebrews wrote the Bible they had no knowledge of any other races' existence except their own. Biblical polygenists claim the Bible was written in just a single region of the world and that the Hebrews who wrote the Bible could not have known about anything or anyone outside their own region. An example of this is Josiah Clark Nott, who in his books claimed that the writers of the Bible had no knowledge of any races except themselves and their immediate neighbors, and that the Bible does not concern the whole of the earth's population. According to Nott there are no verses in the Bible which support monogenism and that the only passage the monogenists use is Acts 17:26, but according to Nott the monogenists are wrong in their interpretation of this verse because the "one blood" of Paul's sermon only includes the nations he knew existed, which were local.

There are two forms of Biblical polygenism: PreAdamism and CoAdamism.

PreAdamism claims there were already races of man living prior to the creation of Adam. By contrast, CoAdamism claims that there was more than one Adam or small group of men created at the same time in different places across the earth, and therefore that the different races were separately created. The idea of CoAdamism has been traced back as far as Paracelsus in 1520. Other 16th century advocates of CoAdamism included Thomas Harriot and Walter Raleigh, who theorised a different origin for the Native Americans.

Lucilio Vanini was a polygenist, who argued that Africans are descended from apes because of their skin colour, while other races did not. In his book De Admirandis Naturae Reginae Deaeque Mortalium Arcanis (1616) he wrote that that only the Negro descends from the monkey and that there are lower and higher levels within humanity (a race hierarchy), he also reported in the book that other atheists supported this position as opposed to the theory of monogenism.

Giordano Bruno (1548 – 1600), a CoAdamist, believed that there was an infinite number of Gardens of Eden:

I can imagine an infinite number of worlds like the Earth, with a Garden of Eden on each one. In all these Gardens of Eden, half the Adams and Eves will not eat the fruit of knowledge, and half will. But half of infinity is infinity, so an infinite number of worlds will fall from grace and there will be an infinite number of crucifixions

In 1591 Giordano Bruno argued that because no one could imagine that the Jews and the Ethiopians had the same ancestry, then God must have either created separate Adams or Africans were the descendants of pre-Adamite races.

PreAdamism traces back to Isaac La Peyrère in the 17th century (see Preadamites).

An anonymous Biblical paper supporting CoAdamism was published in 1732 entitled Co-adamitae or an Essay to Prove the Two Following. Paradoxes, viz. I. That There Were Other Men Created at the Same time with Adam, and II. That the Angels did not fall.

Henry Home, Lord Kames was a believer in CoAdamism. Home believed God had created different races on earth in separate regions. In his book Sketches on the History of Man in 1734 Home claimed that the environment, climate, or state of society could not account for racial differences, so that the races must have come from distinct, separate stocks.

Charles White (physician) was another key advocate of CoAdamism, although he used less theology to support his views. Charles White's Account of the Regular Gradation in Man in 1799, provided the empirical science for polygenism. White defended the theory of polygeny by refuting French naturalist George Louis de Buffon's interfertility argument—the theory that only the same species can interbreed—pointing to species hybrids such as foxes, wolves and jackals, which were separate groups that were still able to interbreed.

In Christianity, polygenesis remained an uncommon Biblical interpretation. Until the mid-19th century, polygenism was largely considered heretical; however, it has been pointed out by some modern scholars that while PreAdamism was strongly rejected by most and deemed heretical, CoAdamism was not received with the same degree of hostility.

A major reason for the emergence of Biblical polygenism from around the 18th century was because it became noted that the number of races could not have developed within the commonly-accepted Biblical timeframe. Voltaire brought the subject up in his Essay on the Manner and Spirit of Nations and on the Principal Occurrences in History in 1756 (which was an early work of comparative history). Voltaire was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher, he was also a polygenist. He believed each race had separate origins because they were so racially diverse. Voltaire found biblical monogenism laughable, as he expressed:

It is a serious question among them whether the Africans are descended from monkeys or whether the monkeys come from them. Our wise men have said that man was created in the image of God. Now here is a lovely image of the Divine Maker: a flat and black nose with little or hardly any intelligence. A time will doubtless come when these animals will know how to cultivate the land well, beautify their houses and gardens, and know the paths of the stars: one needs time for everything.

When comparing Caucasians to Negros, Voltaire claimed they are both different species:

The negro race is a species of men different from ours as the breed of spaniels is from that of greyhounds. The mucous membrane, or network, which nature has spread between the muscles and the skin, is white in us and black or copper-colored in them.

Charles Hamilton Smith a naturalist from England was a polygenist, he believed races had been created separately. He published the book The Natural History of the Human Species in 1848. In the book he maintained that there had always been three fundamentally distinct human types: The Caucasian, the Mongolian and the Negro. He also referred to the polygenist Samuel George Morton's work in America. Smith’s book was re-printed in America, Samuel Kneeland (naturalist) wrote an 84-page introduction to the American edition of the book where he laid out evidence which supports polygenist creationism and that the Bible is entirely compatible with multiple Adams.

Francis Dobbs (1750–1811), an eccentric member of the Irish Parliament, believed in a very different kind of biblical polygenism. In his Concise View from History written in 1800 he maintained that there was a race resulting from a clandestine affair between Eve and the Devil (see Serpent Seed).

John William Colenso a theologian and biblical scholar was a polygenist who believed in CoAdamism. Colenso pointed to monuments and artifacts in Egypt to debunk monogenist beliefs that all races came from the same stock. For example, Ancient Egyptian representations of races showed exactly how the races looked in his time. Egyptological evidence indicated the existence of remarkable permanent differences in the shape of the skull, bodily form, colour and physiognomy between different races which are difficult to reconcile with biblical monogenesis. Colenso believed that racial variation between races was so great, that there was no way in which all the races could have come from the same stock just a few thousand years ago. He was unconvinced that climate could change racial variation and also believed, in common with other biblical polygenists, that monogenists had interpreted the Bible wrongly.

Colenso said “It seems most probable that the human race, as it now exists, had really sprung from more than one pair”. Colenso denied that polygenism caused any kind of racist attitudes or practices, like many other polygenists he claimed monogenesis was the cause of slavery and racism. Colenso claimed that each race had sprung from a different pair of parents, and that all races been created equal by God.

John Ambrose Fleming in his Origin of Mankind (1935) also supported Biblical polgenism, writing: "Hence, the conclusion that the fundamental species of Man—Caucasian, Mongolian, and Negroid, must be regarded as originally separate Divine Creations, not simultaneous. In an excellent book by Mr. Dominick M’Causland, now out of print, called Adam and the Adamite, the above view is strongly held, namely, that of the three apparently distinct fundamental races of mankind inhabiting different parts of the earth’s surface now and in long time past, the Caucasian was the last to make its appearance and the other two were previous to it, whilst the Caucasian cam not by evolution from the others, but by separate creation and endowed with higher faculties than the other two."

Polygenism was heavily criticized in the 20th century Roman Catholic Church, and especially by Pope Pius XII in the encyclical Humani Generis, who felt that polygenism was incompatible with the doctrine of Original Sin.

Scientific polygenism

During the late 1600's and early 1700's many countries first began to encounter different races from other countries due to colonial expansion, discovery, overseas exploration (due to the advancement of ships) and increases in trade routes. Because of the encounters with different races, many people could not believe that they had the same ancestry of other races because of the extreme racial differences. Many explorers and scientists visited other countries to observe and study different races and write down their findings, later they went back to their own countries to publish books and journals on their findings and claim that the evidence supported polygenism.

Some polygenists of the 18th century were Voltaire and David Hume.

Voltaire in his book 1734 book Traité de métaphysique said “Whites...Negroes...the yellow races are not descended from the same man”.

John Atkins an English naval surgeon was one of the earliest scientists to be a proponent of the polygenist theory. In his book A Voyage to Guinea (1723) he said “I am persuaded that the black and white race have sprung from different coloured parents.”

In the last two decades of the 18th century polygenism was advocated in England by historian Edward Long and anatomist Charles White, in Germany by ethnographers Christoph Meiners and Georg Forster, and in France by Julien Virey. Polygenism was very popular and most widespread in the 19th century.

Georges Cuvier the French naturalist and zoologist racial studies influenced scientific polygenism and scientific racialism. Cuvier believed there were three distinct races the Caucasian (white), Mongolian (yellow) and the Ethiopian (black), Cuvier claimed Adam and Eve were Caucasian and that was the original race of mankind, and the other two races originated by survivors escaping in different directions after a major catastrophe hit the earth 5,000 years ago, with those survivors then living in complete isolation from each other.

Cuvier insisted that the Caucasian skull was most beautiful. He divided humanity into three races, white, yellow and black all which receive marks for their beauty or ugliness of their skull and quality of their civilizations. According to Cuvier the White race was at the top and the black race was at the bottom.

Cuvier wrote regarding Caucasians:

The white race, with oval face, straight hair and nose, to which the civilised people of Europe belong and which appear to us the most beautiful of all, is also superior to others by its genius, courage and activity.

Regarding Negros, Cuvier wrote:

The Negro race... is marked by black complexion, crisped of woolly hair, compressed cranium and a flat nose, The projection of the lower parts of the face, and the thick lips, evidently approximate it to the monkey tribe: the hordes of which it consists have always remained in the most complete state of barbarism.

Cuvier's racial studies held the main features of polygenism which are as follows:

• Fixity of species
• Strict limits on environmental influence
• Unchanging underlying type
• Anatomical and cranial measurement differences in races
• Physical and mental differences between racial worth
• Human races are all distinct

Scientific Polygenism became popular in France in the 1820s in response to James Cowles Prichard's Researches into the Physical History of Man (1813) which was considered a pioneering work of monogenism. In response an entire anthropological school advocating polygenism was set up to counter Prichard's monogenism in France. Key French polygenists of this period included the naturalist Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent and Louis-Antoine Desmoulins (1796–1828) a student of Georges Cuvier.

Anders Retzius a Swedish professor of anatomy was a polygenist. Retzius studied many different skull types from different races, because the skulls were so different from each race he believed that the races had a separate origin.

Polygenist schools were later set up in the 1830s and 1840s across Europe. The Scottish anatomist and zoologist Robert Knox was considered to be the 'founding father' of scientific polygenism in Britain and he argued in his Races of Man (1850) that racial natures never changed and therefore must have been created separately. A colleague of Knox, James Hunt, was also an early author who promoted polygenism in Britain, though he was more concerned with establishing white superiority. Hunt dedicated his On the negro's place in nature (1863) to Knox who had died a year before its publication.

John Crawfurd a Scottish physician, and colonial administrator was a polygenist, he studied the geography of where different races were located, he believed that that different races had been created separately by God in specific regional zones for climatic circumstance.

Charles Caldwell was one of the earliest supporters of polygenism in America. Caldwell attacked the position that environment was the cause of racial differences and argued instead that four races, Caucasian, Mongolian, American Indian, and African, were four different species, created separately by God.

Charles Pickering (naturalist) was the librarian and a curator of the Academy of Natural Sciences. In 1843, he traveled to Africa and India to research human races. In 1848, Pickering published Races of Man and Their Geographical Distribution, which enumerated eleven races.

Indigenous Races of the Earth (1857), Josiah Clark Nott and George Robins Gliddon implied that "Negroes" were a creational rank between "Greeks" and chimpanzees.

Polygenism came into mainstream scientific thought in America in the mid 19th century due to the work of several corresponding natural scientists such as Samuel George Morton and Charles Pickering as well as Egyptologist George Gliddon, the surgeon Josiah Clark Nott and more prominently the paleontologist and geologist Louis Agassiz in the United States. All had contributed to a major ethnological work of 738 pages entitled Types of Mankind which was published in 1854 and was a great success, this was followed by a sequel Indigenous Races of the Earth (1857). Both these works sparked the first formal Polygenist vs. Monogenist debates across America, and advocates of the polygenism school became known as pluralists. As Louis Agassiz backed the pluralists, polygenism received mainstream public approval and wide exposure during the 1840s-1860's. Numerous articles promoting polygenist views were published in the American Journal of Science and Arts during this time period.

The archeologist Ephraim George Squier helped Morton’s polygenism by excavating an ancient cranium from the midwestern mounds and sending a drawing of it to Morton. Morton found it’s similarities striking to Central and South American crania, confirming his belief that the American Indian nations had a common and indigenous origin. Morton’s polygenism explicitly stated the Mound Builders were an American Indian race of great antiquity, they did not migrate from Asia, and their physical form has remained essentially unchanged in their descendants. Both Squier and Gliddon demonstrated for Morton the permanence of racial characteristics, and the suitability of each race to the region for which it had been created.

American Indians supported Morton's conclusions, whilst some white archaeologist's supported Morton others such as William Pidgeon did not accept Morton's conclusions because at the time some white archaeologist's such as Pidgeon could not believe that Native Americans had created the archaeological remains they saw around them, instead William Pidgeon wrote a book called Traditions of Dee-Coo-Dah and Antiquarian Researches in 1858. In the book Pidgeon attempts to prove that a vanished race, culturally superior to and existing earlier than the American Indians, occupied America first and that The Mound Builders were not Native Americans. Pidgeon's book was revealed mostly to be a hoax. The famed archaeologist Theodore H. Lewis later revealed that Pidgeon had fabricated most of his research, and distorted much of the rest of it, mapping mounds where none existed, and changing the arrangement of existing mound groups to suit his needs. Morton's work gained more support because his work was considered to be evidence of true objective science unlike others such as Pidgeon. Morton won his reputation as the great data-gatherer and objectivist of American Science. Oliver Wendell Holmes praised Morton for "The severe and cautious character" of his works, which "from their very nature are permanent data for all future students of ethnology".

By 1850 Agassiz had developed a unique form of CoAdamism. God he believed had created several different zoological provinces with different races in them, but also fauna and animals specific to those regions. An essay of Agassiz promoting this theory with maps of the zoological zones was attached as a preface to Types of Mankind in collaboration with Morton, Gliddon, Nott and others. Agassiz's theory developed some support amongst Christians, and he often wrote articles in Christian magazines claiming his views on polygenism were compatible with the bible. Christian fundamentalists however who held to Young Earth Creationism and strict monogenism (i.e everyone on earth from Adam and Eve) attacked his views, as well as those of Gliddon and Nott.

Unlike Josiah Nott, the slave-owner from Alabama, Agassiz was never a supporter of slavery. He claimed his views had nothing to do with politics.

The notion that races were separate and came together by hybridism, rather than being variations from a common stock, received its death knell with the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859, which Agassiz opposed till his death. But as Darwin did not address man's origin directly at this stage, the argument continued for a number of years, with the creation of the Anthropological Society of London in 1863 in the shadow of the American civil war, in opposition to the abolitionist Ethnological Society. The Anthropologicals had the Confederate agent Henry Hotze permanently on their council. The two societies did not heal their differences until they merged in 1871 to form the Anthropological Institute.

Georges Pouchet the French naturalist and anatomist was a polygenist. Pouchet made contributions in several scientific fields, and specialised in comparative anatomy of fishes and whales. He was a prime advocate of polygeny, and was the author of an anthropological work titled De la Pluralité des Races Humaines (1858), which was translated into English as The Plurality of the Human Race in 1864 by the Anthropological Society.

John Thurnam an English psychiatrist, archaeologist, and ethnologist with Dr. Joseph Barnard Davis published a work in two volumes under the title of Crania Britannica in 1865 it was a very important work for Craniometry. Both Thurnam and Davis were polygenists. Dr. Joseph Barnard Davis was a collector of racial crania he had a collection of over 1700 specimens. Because of the differences of the crania of each race, Davis and Thurnam believed that the proofs of polygenism were to be found in studying the skull types of different races. Because each race had a different size and type of skull then the only logical explanation is separate origins. Davis also wrote Thesaurus craniorum: catalogue of the skulls of the various races of man in 1875.

Polygenist evolution

Polygenist evolution is the belief that humans evolved independently from separate species of apes. This can be traced back to Karl Vogt in 1864. Polygenist evolution allowed polygenists to link each race to an altogether different ape, this was shown in the work Hermann Klaatsch and F. G. Crookshank.

Karl Vogt believed that the Negro was related to the ape. He believed the White race was a separate species to Negros. In Chapter VII of his lectures of man (1864) he compared the Negro to the White race whom he described as “two extreme human types”. The difference between them, he claimed are greater than those between two species of ape; and this proves that Negros are a separate species from the Whites.

In an unusual blend of contemporary evolutionary thinking and pre-Adamism the theistic evolutionist and geologist Alexander Winchell argued in his 1878 book Adamites and Preadamites for the pre-Adamic origins of the human race on the basis that the Negroes were too racially inferior to have developed from the Biblical Adam. Winchell also believed that the laws of evolution operated according to the will of God.

Before Darwin published his theory of evolution and common descent in his Origin of Species (1859) scientific theories or models of Polygenism (such as Agassiz's) were strictly creationist. Even after Darwin's book was published, Agassiz still stuck to his scientific form of polygenist creationism and denounced the idea of evolution. However by the late 19th century most scientific polygenists had abandoned Agassiz's creationism and began to embrace polygenist forms of evolution. This even included many students of Agassiz, including Nathaniel Shaler who had studied under Agassiz at Harvard. Shaler continued to believe in polygenism, but believed the different races evolved from different primates. The prominent French anthropologist Paul Broca by 1878 had also converted from creationist polygenism to accepting a form of polygenist evolution.

In his work The Descent of Man (1871) Charles Darwin and some of his supporters argued for the monogenesis of the human species, seeing the common origin of all humans as essential for evolutionary theory. This is known as the single-origin hypothesis. Darwin even dedicated a chapter of his The Descent of Man in attempt to refute the polygenists and support common ancestry for all races. Polygenist evolution views however continued into the early 20th century, and still found support amongst prominent scientists. Henry Fairfield Osborn for example in his The Origin and Evolution of Life (1916) claimed blacks and whites both evolved off different primates.

Alfred Russell Wallace influenced polygenist evolution he claimed that the physical differences in races must have occurred at such a remote time in the past before humans had any intelligence, when natural selection was still operative on human bodies. The differentiation into separate races with distinct physical traits must have happened so soon after humans had just appeared on earth that for all practical purposes all races had always been distinct.

In contrast to most of Darwin's supporters, Ernst Haeckel put forward a doctrine of evolutionary polygenism based on the ideas of the linguist and polygenist August Schleicher, in which several different language groups had arisen separately from speechless prehuman Urmenschen, which themselves had evolved from simian ancestors. These separate languages had completed the transition from animals to man, and, under the influence of each main branch of languages, humans had evolved as separate species, which could be subdivided into races. Haeckel divided human beings into ten races, of which the Caucasian was the highest and the primitives were doomed to extinction.

Ernst Haeckel claimed that Negros have stronger and more freely movable toes than any other race which is evidence that Negros are connected to apes because when apes stop climbing in trees they hold on to the trees with their toes, Haeckel compared Negros to “four-handed” apes. Haeckel also believed Negros were savages and that Whites were the most civilised.

File:Racetheories.jpg

"The different human races developed from different breeds of ape...the following eight pages show starling resemblances between types of ape and different human races" - The Beginning Was the End, 1971.

Franz Weidenreich originated the "Weidenreich Theory of Human Evolution" which is a form of polygenist evolution. The Weidenreich Theory states that human races have evolved independently in the Old World from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens sapiens, while at the same time there was gene flow between the various populations. According to the Weidenreich Theory, genes that were generally adaptive (such as those for intelligence and communication) would flow relatively rapidly from one part of the world to the other, while those that were locally adaptive, would not. This is contrary to popular theories of human evolution that have one superior race displacing other races. A vocal proponent of the Weidenreich theory was Carleton Coon.

In the late 20th century, the work of the paleoanthropologist Carleton Coon was the closest to what can be perhaps considered a "modern" polygenism by positing that the individual races of the earth separately evolved into modern Homo sapiens. This hypothesis, called the candelabra theory, was not very popular when it was presented in the mid-1960s. It is often confused with the multiregional hypothesis, but these two theories differ significantly in that Coon's candelabra model involves no gene flow between populations (so truly independent evolutions for races of humans) while the multiregional hypothesis is based on the idea of massive amounts of gene flow between human populations.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin the french philosopher believed in polygenist evolution. Teilhard did not believe in the creation of the Biblical first man, Adam and the first woman, Eve, he taught that there were many 'First Parents' who evolved from primates at one time.

In 1971 The Beginning Was the End was published by Oscar Kiss Maerth which argued different races sprung from different types of ape. The book is considered to be pseudoscience.

Neo-evangelical theistic evolutionist John Stott wrote in his 1984 book Understanding the Bible: ‘My acceptance of Adam and Eve as historical is not incompatible with my belief that several forms of pre-Adamic ‘hominid’ seem to have existed for thousands of years previously. It is conceivable that God created Adam out of one of them. I think you may even call some of them Homo sapiens".

Modern adherents

• A tenet of Raëlism holds that the different races of humans were created by separate teams of extraterrestrial scientists.
• Several minor Christian groups still embrace Biblical polygenism (Preadamism or Coadamism).

See also

• Multiregional hypothesis
• Polygenesis (linguistics)
• Historical definitions of race
• Monogenesis

External links

• "Darwin the liberator: How evolutionary thought undermined the rationale for slavery" Washington Post (February 15, 2009). (Review of book exploring Charles Darwin's opposition to polygenism.)