In 1908, George Shull at the Station for Experimental Evolution, Cold Spring Harbor, showed that crossing different corn strains produced a more vigorous hybrid. Applying this model to human biology stirred a debate among eugenicists. Shulls advisor, Charles Davenport, could not ignore completely his work, and he even found some evidence for increased vigor among the mixed race people of Jamaica. However, he ultimately concluded that race crossing led to behavioral disharmony. However, Shulls work was lost on the vast majority of lay eugenicists who subscribed to the Biblical notion of like with like and who believed that miscegenation (race mixing) produced undesirable mongrels. In his influential book, The Passing of the Great Race, Madison Grant warned that racial mixing was a social and racial crime that would lead to the demise of white civilization. Eugenicists emphasized the supposed hereditary differences among races and ignored the social-economic variables that might account for differences in behavior and customs. Thus, the eugenic concept of degenerate heredity provided a pseudo-scientific gloss to age-old prejudices. We are all members of one species, Homo sapiens.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 07:31:04 +0000
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