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 seperate creations for different races.

Polygenism and the Bible

There are two forms of Biblical polygenism: Preadamism (preadamites) and Coadamism.

Preadamism claims that prior to the creation of Adam, there were already races of man living which were created before. In contrast Coadamism claims that there was more than one Adam or 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. Preadamism traces back to Isaac La Peyrère in the 17th century.

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. In 1734 Henry Home, Lord Kames also took up Coadamism in his Sketches of the History of Man.. Another key adherent of Coadamism included the 18th century English physician Charles White though he used less theology to support views.

In Christianity, polygenesis remains 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 as much recieved with great hostility.

Isaac La Peyrère, first proposed polygenesis to reconcile the limited number of generations between Adam and Eve and modern day by positing "pre-Adamites" .

It was not believed that the number of races could 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), although he made no attempt to solve the problem.

The races of the world according to many Biblical Polygenists

Science

Polygenism came into mainstream scientific and religious thought due to the work of Samuel George Morton and more prominently Louis Agassiz in the United States. The issue of race was polemical, and slave owners attempted to justify their treatment of slaves using claimed empirical science such as Morton's work.

They argued that each race was a different species, and that black Africans were mentally inferior to Caucasians. Agassiz believed that each race was unique, but could still be classified as the same species. Contemporary geological discoveries described the earth as far older than strict interpretation of Genesis allows, and among some thinkers, polygenism was a way to reconcile the new discoveries with their faith.

In the race debates of the 1860s and 1870s, 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. Ernst Haeckel, the major publicizer of Darwin's ideas (or his interpretation of them) to the German-speaking world, attacked this view, arguing that human beings do not form a single species but a genus divided into nine separate species that have been evolving separately since before the development of speech.[1] Haeckel's view remained influential until well into the 20th century.

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, although evolution was compatible with Catholicism, polygenism was seemingly incompatible with the doctrine of Original Sin.

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. The multiregional hypothesis is not a true example of polygenism, though it is the closest thing to polygenism surviving as a currently somewhat respectable scentific theory.

See also

• Quantitative trait locus
• Single gene disorders
• Multiregional hypothesis
• Polygenesis (linguistics)
• Monogenesis

References

• George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987).

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.)