Scientific Racism and Monogenesis

"To suppose that all men originated from Adam and Eve is to assume that the order of creation has been changed in the course of historical times, and to give to the Mosaic record a meaning that it never was intended to have." — Louis Agassiz, 1850¹

"Southerners discerned in the doctrine of multiple origins an assault upon orthodox religion (a shrewd enough interpretation) and chose to hold fast to the latter." — William Stanton, 1960²

"Possessed of a genetic character concerned mainly with mundane, practical matters, they have often eventually been displaced by the intellectual and philosophical acumen of the Japhethites and the religious zeal of the Semites." — Henry Morris, 1976, of the Hamites, "especially the Negroes"³

Summary

Two questions run together in this subject, and they have different answers.

The first is a question of fact.  Do all human beings share one origin, as Genesis says, or did the races arise separately, as the leading American scientists of the 1840s and 1850s taught?  On that question the answer is settled.  The polygenists were wrong, and the monogenists, most of whom held their view because of Genesis, were right.

The second is a question of conduct.  Who used science, or Scripture, to rank races and to defend slavery, segregation and forced sterilization?  On that question nobody comes out clean.  The record below is quoted from both sides in their own words.

1. Polygenism rejected Genesis on purpose. Samuel George Morton granted in 1839 that the Bible, read in its "literal and obvious interpretation", teaches "that all men have originated from a single pair", and then argued that each race "was adapted from the beginning to its peculiar local destination". Louis Agassiz of Harvard wrote in 1850 that descent from Adam and Eve would give "the Mosaic record a meaning that it never was intended to have", and that Genesis is "chiefly relating to the history of the white race". Josiah Nott and George Gliddon's Types of Mankind (1854) mocked descent from Adam and Eve as the limit of "human credulity".
2. The most eminent polygenist was a creationist, though not a biblical one. Agassiz opposed every theory of transmutation and believed each species was created where it lives, "in nations". His polygenism came from that doctrine of many creations. So "creation" in general was no protection against scientific racism. What protected people against polygenism was the Genesis account of one origin. The historian William Stanton found that the slave South mostly refused polygenism because it was "an assault upon orthodox religion". But the same South used the curse on Canaan instead.
3. Morton's skull numbers were measured honestly and read badly. His 1839 table gave a mean of 87 cubic inches for 52 "Caucasian" skulls and 78 for 29 "Ethiopian" skulls, with ranges that overlapped by 19 cubic inches. Stephen Jay Gould charged in 1981 that Morton's summaries were "a patchwork of fudging and finagling". A team that remeasured 308 of the skulls in 2011 found Morton's measurements sound and Gould's reanalysis flawed, and Morton's lost seed measurements, found in 2018, do not support Gould either. Neither fact rescues Morton's inference. Small samples of mixed sex and body size cannot show that races were created apart, and they cannot rank minds.
4. Darwin ended polygenism and kept the ranking. The Descent of Man (1871) treated the races as sub-species of one species and predicted that the monogenist and polygenist dispute "will die a silent and unobserved death". The same book predicted that "the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races". Darwin also loathed slavery, and wrote "I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country". Ernst Haeckel went further, dividing mankind into twelve species and writing that "we must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives". Francis Galton put "the negro race" "some two grades below our own" and coined the word "eugenics". Stephen Jay Gould himself wrote that biological arguments for racism "increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory".
5. Christians stood on both sides of every line. The Lutheran pastor and naturalist John Bachman defended the unity of mankind against Morton and Agassiz, and also defended slavery. Frederick Douglass answered the polygenists from Scripture and science in 1854. Pro-slavery clergy read Noah's curse on Canaan as a decree of slavery for Africans, though the text curses Canaan, whose descendants lived in the Levant, and says nothing about skin. Some writers even built a "biblical" polygenism of their own. Liberal Protestant clergy preached eugenics in the 1920s, while most Catholics, joined in New Orleans by fundamentalists, fought sterilization laws.
6. Early creationists carried the racial ideas of their day. The Scofield Reference Bible told millions of fundamentalists that "from Ham will descend an inferior and servile posterity". George McCready Price, the founder of modern flood geology, wrote in 1924 that God set "barriers of race and colour" at Babel and that "the negroid or the Mongolian types" were, like the apes, "a product of modern conditions" since the Flood. Bob Jones Sr. preached in 1960 that "God is the author of segregation". Henry Morris rejected the curse as a warrant for slavery and called race an evolutionary idea, yet in 1976 he wrote of Hamites, "especially the Negroes", as having "a genetic character concerned mainly with mundane, practical matters".
7. The movement corrected itself from the text. Morris's own Institute for Creation Research had already printed in 1973 that "the Bible says nothing whatever about race". Ken Ham, Carl Wieland and Don Batten's One Blood (1999) says that "the curse of Canaan has nothing whatsoever to do with skin color" and that there is "in essence no such thing as 'interracial marriage.'" The Southern Baptist Convention repented of slavery and racism in 1995, and Bob Jones University apologized for its policies in 2008.
8. Genetics shows one population, not separately made types. Richard Lewontin found in 1972 that 85.4% of human genetic variation lies within populations and 6.3% between races. Later studies with DNA agree: 93 to 95% within populations in Noah Rosenberg's 1,056 people. A. W. F. Edwards was right that many loci together can sort people by continent, and Rosenberg's clusters do match continents. But the clusters come from "small discontinuous jumps" at geographic barriers, with mixed people between, and 79 great apes carry more than twice the variable sites of over a thousand humans. That is the signature of one young, recently spread population. It refutes the polygenists. It does not by itself show that the population began with one couple, which is a separate question.

Verdict.  On the question of origins, Genesis was right and the polygenist science of Agassiz, Morton, Nott and Gliddon was wrong.  On the question of conduct, Darwin, Haeckel, Galton and the eugenicists used evolution to rank races, and many Christians, including founders of the young-earth movement, used a misreading of Genesis 9 to do the same.  The Bible's text gave Christians the means to see their error, and abolitionists and later creationists used it.  The record does not support the claim that evolution invented racism, nor the claim that Christianity did.

Part 1: Polygenism in its own words

Polygenism is the claim that the human races did not descend from one ancestral stock but arose separately, each in its own region.  Monogenism is the claim that all human beings share one origin.  In the United States between about 1839 and 1859, polygenism was the position of the country's most respected scientists.  It came to be known as the "American School" of ethnology.

Samuel George Morton: the measurer

Morton was a Philadelphia physician who collected over a thousand human skulls and published the internal volume of 670 of them, measured by filling each skull with seed and later with lead shot.^{4 5}  His Crania Americana (1839) opened by stating the biblical position fairly.  The "sacred writings", he wrote, "in their literal and obvious interpretation, teach us that all men have originated from a single pair".⁶  He then laid the races over Noah's sons:  "assigning, therefore, the Mongolian race to Japheth, and the Ethiopian to Ham, the Caucasian, the noblest race, will belong to Shem".⁶  His own conclusion was that "each Race was adapted from the beginning to its peculiar local destination".⁶  By 1849 he said plainly that whenever he had ventured an opinion, "it has been in favor of the doctrine of primeval diversities among men".⁷

The usual test of a species was whether two forms could produce fertile offspring.  All human groups can, and every polygenist knew it.  Morton answered in 1847 that fertile crosses between animals called separate species show that "hybridity ceases to be a test of specific affiliation".  So, he concluded, the fertility of human crosses "constitutes, in itself, no proof of the unity of the human species".⁸  But Morton defined a species by "separate origin and distinctness of race, evinced by the constant transmission of some characteristic peculiarity of organization".⁸  The argument was circular:  a race became a species by having a separate origin, and the separate origin was what had to be proved.

Morton did not think every difference was innate.  In the same paper he gave "the moral degradation consequent to the state of slavery" as one cause of the barriers between races.⁸  But in a private letter printed after his death he wrote that "it makes little difference whether the mental inferiority of the Negro, the Samoiyede, or the Indian, is natural or acquired; for, if they ever possessed equal intelligence with the Caucasian, they have lost it; and if they never had it, they had nothing to lose."⁹

Louis Agassiz: the creationist polygenist

Louis Agassiz was the most famous naturalist in America, a Harvard professor and the man who had persuaded geologists that ice ages happened (see the Ice Age article).  He was also the leading American opponent of every theory that species change into one another.  In his view each species was created by God in its own region, in the numbers suited to it.  He applied the same rule to humanity in two essays in the Unitarian Christian Examiner in 1850.

Agassiz drew a distinction that carried the whole argument.  He affirmed "the Unity of Mankind" as a moral and spiritual fact, and denied that it implied common descent:

We maintain, therefore, that the unity of mankind does not imply a community of origin for men; we believe, on the contrary, that a higher view of this unity of mankind can be taken than that which is derived from a mere sensual connection ...¹

He then applied his zoology to people.  "Mankind cannot have originated in single individuals," he wrote, "but must have been created in that numeric harmony which is characteristic of each species; men must have originated in nations, as the bees have originated in swarms".¹  In 1854 he argued that the differences among human races "are of the same kind and even greater than those upon which the anthropoid monkeys are considered as distinct species".⁹  The only alternative to separate creation, he said, would "run inevitably into the Lamarkian development theory", that is, into evolution, which he rejected.⁹

Agassiz did not pretend that this agreed with the usual reading of Genesis.  He changed the reading:

To suppose that all men originated from Adam and Eve is to assume that the order of creation has been changed in the course of historical times, and to give to the Mosaic record a meaning that it never was intended to have. On that ground, we would particularly insist upon the propriety of considering Genesis as chiefly relating to the history of the white race, with special reference to the history of the Jews.¹

In the March essay he had gone further:  the view "of mankind as originating from a single pair, Adam and Eve" was "neither a Biblical view nor a correct view, nor one agreeing with the results of science".¹⁰  He even read Paul's "made of one blood" (Acts 17:26) as "this figurative expression", which "applies to the higher unity of mankind, and not to their supposed genital connection by natural descent".¹

Agassiz insisted that his science had no politics.  "We disclaim, however, all connection with any question involving political matters," he wrote, and on slavery:  "let the politicians, let those who feel themselves called upon to regulate human society, see what they can do with the results."¹  Thirty pages later he described "the submissive, obsequious, imitative negro" and called it "mock-philanthropy and mock-philosophy" to treat all races as equal.¹  And he gave a policy after all:  "human affairs with reference to the colored races would be far more judiciously conducted, if, in our intercourse with them, we were guided by a full consciousness of the real difference existing between us and them ... rather than by treating them on terms of equality."¹

Nott and Gliddon: the polemicists

Josiah Nott was a physician in Mobile, Alabama.  George Gliddon was an Egyptologist.  Their Types of Mankind (1854), dedicated to Morton's memory and carrying a preface essay by Agassiz, was the American School's manifesto.⁹

Nott and Gliddon did not reread Genesis as Agassiz had.  They attacked it.  Nott had written in 1844 that "the Mosaic account ... sheds no satisfactory light on this question".¹¹  In Types of Mankind he reprinted his own 1849 lectures, which listed the human varieties of China, India, Australia and the Pacific, and ended:  "and all are descended from Adam and Eve!  Can human credulity go farther, or human ingenuity invent any argument more absurd?"⁹  The same pages asked:  "Can any one call the name of a full-blooded Negro who has ever written a page worthy of being remembered?"⁹  The authors sided openly with Agassiz:  "we incline to the opinion of M. Agassiz, that men were created in nations, and not in a single pair."⁹

They knew who their opponents were.  Of an earlier set of his lectures, which attacked "the authenticity of the Pentateuch directly", Nott had predicted that the little book would "stir up hell in the christians".²  The book's memoir of Morton complained of the "clerical gentlemen at the south" who opposed the doctrine of diversity, and asked:  "Do they consider all doctrine necessarily desolante, because an argument in favor of slavery, true or false, may be based upon it?"⁹

One detail cuts against a common Christian telling of this story.  Nott, a Southern polygenist writing in a slave state, rejected the curse-of-Ham argument for slavery.  "Many have supposed Ham to be the progenitor of the negro race.  There was no curse upon him, and there is nothing in the Bible which induces such a belief".  The curse fell on Canaan, he added, "and his descendants were Caucasians."¹¹  The polygenists did not need Genesis 9.  They had their own theory.

What the polygenists did for slavery, and why the South mostly declined it

Types of Mankind tells a story that shows how the doctrine was meant to be used.  In 1844 John C. Calhoun, Secretary of State and the South's chief defender of slavery, faced British pressure over "our inherited Institution of Negro Slavery".  According to Gliddon, Calhoun consulted him and Morton's work, and concluded "that it behoved the statesman to lay aside all current speculations about the origin and perfectibility of races, and to deal, in political argument, with the simple facts as they stand."⁹  This is Gliddon's own account, and Calhoun's dispatch itself has not been checked for this article.

Yet the slave South as a whole did not adopt the American School.  The historian William Stanton, whose The Leopard's Spots (1960) remains the standard study, stated why:

While the North defected, the South had the opportunity to keep faith with the Jeffersonian ideal by grounding the defense of slavery upon a scientific basis. It did nothing of the kind. Southerners discerned in the doctrine of multiple origins an assault upon orthodox religion (a shrewd enough interpretation) and chose to hold fast to the latter. Their devotion to Scripture was not entirely disinterested. They were busily reading about Paul's request for the return of Onesimus, an obvious foreshadowing of the Fugitive Slave Law, and pointing importantly to the curse on Ham in the Book of Genesis.²

Stanton quotes the secessionist Richmond Enquirer in 1854:  the system of slavery could afford no such defenders as Nott and Gliddon if the Bible was to be "the price it must pay for them".²

That paragraph contains both halves of this article's verdict.  The Genesis account of one origin was strong enough to make slaveholders refuse a scientific racism that would have served them.  And the same slaveholders found in a misreading of Genesis 9 a racism of their own.

Part 2: Morton's skulls, Gould, and the remeasurement

Morton's numbers became the most famous case study in the history of scientific bias, and the case has turned twice.

What Morton reported

Morton's 1839 table gave mean internal capacities in cubic inches.  The two ends of his scale were "Caucasian" skulls, 52 of them, averaging 87 cubic inches with a range of 75 to 109, and "Ethiopian" skulls, 29 of them, averaging 78 with a range of 65 to 94.⁶  His own note says that the Caucasians "were, with a single exception, derived from the lowest and least educated class of society."⁶  A difference of 9 cubic inches is about 147 cubic centimetres, a tenth of the average.¹²

Gould's charge

In The Mismeasure of Man (1981), Stephen Jay Gould reanalyzed Morton's published data.  He did not remeasure any skull.  His verdict:

In short, and to put it bluntly, Morton's summaries are a patchwork of fudging and finagling in the clear interest of controlling a priori convictions. Yet — and this is the most intriguing aspect of the case — I find no evidence of conscious fraud; indeed, had Morton been a conscious fudger, he would not have published his data so openly.¹³

After his own corrections Gould found "no significant differences among races for Morton's own data ... All groups rank between 83 and 87 cubic inches, and Caucasians share the pinnacle."¹³  Gould's moral was that unconscious bias shapes even the measurement of bones.

The remeasurement

In 2011 a team led by the anthropologist Jason Lewis, with Ralph Holloway among the authors, went back to the Morton collection in Philadelphia.  "We remeasured 308 of the 670 skulls (46%) whose capacity was published by Morton".  Only seven, about 2%, differed from Morton's figures by more than 5.5%, and the errors ran in no racial direction.⁵  Their conclusion was blunt:  "Our results resolve this historical controversy, demonstrating that Morton did not manipulate data to support his preconceptions, contra Gould."  They found "most of Gould's criticisms are poorly supported or falsified", and added:  "Ironically, Gould's own analysis of Morton is likely the stronger example of a bias influencing results."⁵

The case did not end there.  Morton first measured with white pepper seed and later with lead shot.⁴  Gould's strongest point had been that the African means rose more than others when Morton switched from seed to shot, which suggested that the earlier seed measurements had been pressed down or left loose according to expectation.  Michael Weisberg and Diane Paul replied in 2016 that remeasuring the skulls cannot test that charge, because Gould had accepted the shot values as accurate:  "We take no issue with Lewis et al.'s remeasurements, but argue that these measurements are not and cannot be evidence for their conclusion."⁴  Then in 2018 Paul Wolff Mitchell found Morton's lost handwritten seed measurements.  They did not support Gould:  "Analysis of Morton's lost data and the records of his studies does not support Gould's arguments about Morton's biased data collection."¹⁴

What the measurements could and could not show

Mitchell drew the lesson that matters most here.  Morton's data "may have been unbiased", but "his cranial race science was not".  The German anatomist Friedrich Tiedemann had measured skulls independently and got "nearly equivalent results", but interpreted them "in dramatically different ways:  Tiedemann using them to argue for equality and the abolition of slavery, and Morton using them to entrench racial divisions and hierarchy."¹⁴  Jonathan Kaplan, Massimo Pigliucci and Joshua Banta argued in 2015 that "Gould was right to reject Morton's analysis as inappropriate and misleading, but wrong to believe that a more appropriate analysis was available."  The samples were too small, too mixed in sex and body size, and too unrepresentative to answer the question either man asked.¹⁵

So the measurements were honest, and the conclusions drawn from them were not justified.  A 9-cubic-inch gap between two small, unmatched samples whose ranges overlapped by 19 cubic inches says nothing about whether races were created apart.  It also says nothing about intelligence.  The polygenist case did not fail because Morton cheated.  It failed because its inference ran far past its data, and because the deeper data, which arrived a century later, contradicted it.

Part 3: Darwin, Haeckel, Galton and eugenics

Darwin settled the origins question and kept the ranking

Charles Darwin's Descent of Man (1871) took up polygenism directly.  He weighed the evidence for the races being separate species and concluded that "sub-species" was "the most appropriate" term.  Then he predicted the end of the whole debate:

Finally, we may conclude that when the principles of evolution are generally accepted, as they surely will be before long, the dispute between the monogenists and the polygenists will die a silent and unobserved death.¹⁶

His reasons included the likeness of human minds across races.  "The American aborigines, Negroes and Europeans differ as much from each other in mind as any three races that can be named; yet I was incessantly struck, whilst living with the Fuegians on board the 'Beagle,' with the many little traits of character, shewing how similar their minds were to ours; and so it was with a full-blooded negro with whom I happened once to be intimate."¹⁶  On this point Darwin was right and Agassiz was wrong, and Darwin's prediction came true.

The same book ranked the races and expected the lower to disappear:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.¹⁶

This is a prediction, not a recommendation, and it should not be quoted as a call to kill anyone.  But it places "the negro or Australian" next to the gorilla on a scale, and it treats the extinction of whole peoples as part of the expected course of evolution.  Darwin wrote the same thing privately ten years later:  "Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world."¹⁷  In volume 2 he wrote that some of the faculties more marked in women "are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilisation".¹⁸

Darwin's best-known passage on the weak is usually quoted in half.  The first half reads:  "Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind.  No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man."  The second half, on the next page, rejects the policy the first half seems to invite:  "Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature ... Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind".¹⁶  Both halves are Darwin.  A fair account quotes both.

Darwin was also a sincere opponent of slavery.  Leaving Brazil for the last time on the Beagle voyage, he wrote:  "I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country."¹⁹  He went on:  "Those who look tenderly at the slave-owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter ... It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty".¹⁹  Darwin hated slavery and also ranked races.  Many men of his century did both, Christian and otherwise.

Haeckel and Galton went further

Ernst Haeckel, Darwin's chief popularizer in Germany, divided mankind into twelve species and thirty-six races.²⁰  He wrote that the woolly-haired peoples "are incapable of a true inner culture and of a higher mental development", and that "No woolly-haired nation has ever had an important 'history.'"²⁰  The Mediterranean species, he wrote, had "by means of the higher development of their brain surpassed all the other races and species in the struggle for life".²⁰  Like Agassiz, he dismissed descent from one pair:  the dispute over "whether the human race is descended from a single pair or not, rests upon a completely false way of putting the question."²⁰

In 1904 Haeckel drew the moral conclusion:

These lower races (such as the Veddahs or Australian negroes) are psychologically nearer to the mammals (apes or dogs) than to civilised Europeans; we must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives.²¹

Of the "lower savages" he wrote that "The value of the life of these lower savages is like that of the anthropoid apes, or very little higher."²¹

Francis Galton compared races by the rate at which they produced men of high ability.  He concluded "that the average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own."²²  In 1883 he coined a word for improving the human stock, defined as giving "to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had.  The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea".²³

Did evolution increase scientific racism?

Stephen Jay Gould, an evolutionary biologist and no friend of creationism, answered yes:

Biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance of evolutionary theory.²⁴

Gould's sentence states both halves of the truth.  Racism did not begin with Darwin.  Agassiz, Morton and Nott were all pre-Darwinian, and Agassiz was Darwin's leading American opponent.  But evolution gave racism a new scale to hang on, from ape to "savage" to "civilised", and a new mechanism, the struggle for existence, to explain why some races would win.

Eugenics, and the Christians on both sides

The American high-school textbook at the center of the 1925 Scopes trial, George William Hunter's A Civic Biology (1914), taught that there were five races of man, "and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America."²⁵  Its eugenics section said of families judged to be degenerate:  "If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading.  Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage".²⁵  In 1927 the United States Supreme Court upheld forced sterilization in Buck v. Bell.  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote:  "The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.  ...  Three generations of imbeciles are enough."²⁶

Christians did not stand on one side of this.  The historian Christine Rosen found that in 1926 "hundreds of Osgood's fellow clerics, representing nearly every major Protestant denomination, as well as several Reform rabbis, preached eugenics across the country" in a sermon contest run by the American Eugenics Society.  "During the first few decades of the twentieth century, eugenics flourished in the liberal Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish mainstream".²⁷  But she also found that "most Catholic clergy and laymen opposed eugenics", and that "In New Orleans, Catholics formed a coalition with fundamentalist Protestants to thwart legislators' attempts to pass a compulsory sterilization law."²⁷  Pope Pius XI ruled in 1930 that public magistrates "can never directly harm, or tamper with the integrity of the body, either for the reasons of eugenics or for any other reason."²⁸  William Jennings Bryan, the fundamentalist prosecutor at Scopes, had attacked Darwin's "weak members" passage in 1922.²⁹

The pattern is the same as in the 1850s.  The clergy who adopted the newest science adopted its racism and its eugenics with it.  The clergy who held to the old doctrine of one human family made in God's image resisted both, though many of them, as the next part shows, had a racism of their own.

Part 4: Christians on both sides, 1787 to 1900

Christians in the nineteenth century did not hold one position.  Some defended the unity of mankind against the polygenists and opposed slavery.  Some defended the unity of mankind and slavery together.  Some defended slavery from Genesis 9.  And a few built a polygenism of their own out of the Bible.

The monogenists

The Presbyterian Samuel Stanhope Smith, president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton, argued in 1787 and again in 1810 that "all the varieties of men may have sprung from the same original stock".³⁰  He held that "A just philosophy, therefore, grounded on fact and experience, will lead us to the conclusion which the sacred scriptures propose as an elementary principle of our belief", that from one original man "have descended the various tribes of men upon the earth".³⁰

Frederick Douglass, who had escaped slavery and become its most famous opponent, answered the American School directly in a commencement address at Western Reserve College in July 1854, the year Types of Mankind appeared.  He saw what was at stake for the Bible:  "The unity of the human race—the brotherhood of man—the reciprocal duties of all to each, and of each to all, are too plainly taught in the Bible to admit of cavil.  The credit of the Bible is at stake".  His reason, "not less than my feeling, and my faith", welcomed "the declaration of the Inspired Apostle, 'that God has made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell upon all the face of the earth.'"³¹  And he saw what was at stake for the slave:

For, let it be once granted that the human race are of multitudinous origin, naturally different in their moral, physical, and intellectual capacities, and at once you make plausible a demand for classes, grades and conditions, for different methods of culture, different moral, political, and religious institutions, and a chance is left for slavery, as a necessary institution.³¹

Nott had asked in print whether "any one" could "call the name of a full-blooded Negro who has ever written a page worthy of being remembered".⁹  Douglass's address was one answer.

Monogenism and slavery in one book

John Bachman shows that monogenism alone was not enough.  He was a Lutheran pastor in Charleston, South Carolina, and a serious naturalist who wrote on the quadrupeds of North America with John James Audubon.³²  His The Doctrine of the Unity of the Human Race (1850) was the best scientific reply to Morton and Agassiz written in America.  It argued that "if man is of one species, he must have been derived from one common centre of creation, and is, therefore, of one blood."³²  "When the assertion is made that the whole human race has originally descended from one pair, the mind is startled at the vast idea", he admitted, and then he argued that the arithmetic of reproduction makes it reasonable.³²

But Bachman defended slavery in the same book.  He warned polygenists not to give "the enemies of our domestic institutions" an excuse to accuse slaveholders of wanting "to degrade their servants below the level of those creatures of God to whom a revelation has been given".  For, he wrote, "The fact that nature has stamped on the African race the permanent marks of inferiority ... and that the Scriptures point out the duties both of masters and servants, should be sufficient".³²  Later he wrote that "in intellectual powers the African is an inferior variety of our species", adding at once that "His inferiority, however, in intellect, does not prove that he is not a man", and that "We might select thousands of the Caucasian race that are inferior to thousands of the more intelligent Africans."³²

Bachman's monogenism made the slave a brother, "of our own blood".  It did not make him free.

The curse of Ham

The verse at the center of the proslavery Bible argument is Genesis 9:25:  "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren."³³  The Baptist pastor Thornton Stringfellow of Virginia called it "the inspired language of Noah", and wrote:  "The first recorded language which was ever uttered in relation to slavery, is the inspired language of Noah."³⁴  Josiah Priest's Bible Defence of Slavery (1851) went further and wrote "Ham" into the verse beside "Canaan".³⁵

The historian David Goldenberg, who traced the curse through Jewish, Christian and Muslim sources, states the textual problem plainly:  "the biblical text does not describe anyone as Black."  The story's "most obvious" difficulty is "that Ham sinned but Canaan was punished.  Despite the inherent problems, this text has for centuries provided divine justification for the enslavement of black Africans".³⁶  Some Greek and Latin manuscripts and Church Fathers even changed the verse to read "Cursed be Ham".³⁶  Goldenberg found no evidence of a black Ham in the Hellenistic period.  The first texts that darken Ham are rabbinic etiologies of late antiquity.³⁶  By the nineteenth century the belief was nearly universal in America, held "including both abolitionists and a large number of Black clergy".³⁶

Stephen Haynes, in Noah's Curse (2002), traces the American use.  By the 1670s "the 'curse of Ham' was being employed as a sanction for black enslavement", and by the 1830s "Noah's curse had become a stock weapon in the arsenal of slavery's apologists, and references to Genesis 9 appeared prominently in their publications."³⁷

A biblical polygenism

After the Civil War some writers turned the polygenist argument into a Bible argument.  In 1867 a Cincinnati pamphlet signed "Ariel", attributed to Buckner Payne, asked on its title page:  "Is he a descendant of Adam and Eve?  Has he a soul?  Or is he a beast in God's nomenclature?"³⁸  Its answer was that two common assumptions were false:  "That the negro is a descendant of Ham, the youngest son of Noah.  This is false and untrue.  ...  That the negro is a descendant of, or the progeny of, Adam and Eve.  This is also false and untrue."³⁸  Payne reasoned that since no one "suspicioned either Shem or Japheth of being the father of the negro", the negro must have entered the Ark as an animal:  "he could not come out, unless he had previously entered it".³⁸  Charles Carroll's "The Negro a Beast"; or, "In the Image of God" (1900) carried the same idea into the twentieth century.³⁹

These books show that the polygenist idea did not depend on Agassiz's science.  It could be read into the Bible as easily as Noah's curse could.  What it could not do was survive the plain sense of Genesis 3:20, which calls Eve "the mother of all living", and of Acts 17:26.³³  Douglass and Bachman, who disagreed about slavery, agreed on that.

Part 5: Fundamentalists and creationists, 1909 to today

The modern young-earth movement says that evolution fed racism and that Genesis answers it.  The first half of that claim is partly true, as Part 3 shows.  The movement's own early record has to be read before the second half can be accepted.

The Scofield note

The Scofield Reference Bible (1909, revised 1917) was the standard study Bible of many American fundamentalists.  Its note on the covenant with Noah listed, as element (5):  "A prophetic declaration is made that from Ham will descend an inferior and servile posterity (Gen. 9. 24, 25)."  Element (7) added that "Government, science, and art, speaking broadly, are and have been Japhetic, so that history is the indisputable record of the exact fulfilment of these declarations."⁴⁰  The note does not mention skin colour.  It did not need to.  Its readers knew which peoples were called Hamitic.  And the verses it cites curse Canaan, not Ham.

George McCready Price

Price, a Seventh-day Adventist teacher, was the founder of modern flood geology, and his books shaped Henry Morris and John Whitcomb's The Genesis Flood (1961).⁴¹  In The Phantom of Organic Evolution (1924) he wrote that "The races of mankind greatly resemble true species.  Indeed, in the days of Agassiz the human race was thought to be made up of several distinct species."⁴²  He explained the races by Babel:

... the barriers of race and colour were also interposed at this same time, these racial barriers assisting in segregating the people of the world off into self-contained groups ... And there is no doubt that if human beings had always been as true to natural instincts as are the species among the higher animals, there never would have been amalgamation among these races which had thus been set apart from one another by a special intervention of Providence.⁴²

He also treated certain races as products of decline after the Flood:  the apes "may be just as much a product of modern conditions as are the negroid or the Mongolian types of mankind."⁴²  The historian Ronald Numbers, citing both this book and an unpublished manuscript of Price's titled "The White and the Brown", summarized him this way:  "racial mixing in violation of God's intentions had led to rapid degeneration after Babel, producing not only Negroes and Mongolians but perhaps apes as well".⁴¹  The printed book says less than Numbers's summary.  It does not say that any race is inferior in ability, and it never mentions Ham or Canaan.  But it calls races near-species, sets them apart by "a special intervention of Providence", and treats "amalgamation" as a betrayal of that separation.  That is the theology of segregation in a geology book.

"God is the author of segregation"

Bob Jones Sr., the evangelist who founded Bob Jones University, preached on the radio on Easter Sunday 1960.  He took his text from the same verse the abolitionists had used, Acts 17:26.  The King James Version reads "And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation".³³  Jones read the second half against the first:  "That says that God Almighty fixed the bounds of their habitation."  He concluded:  "If you are against segregation and against racial separation, then you are against God Almighty ...  God is the author of segregation. ...  God made of one blood all nations, but He also drew the boundary lines between races."⁴³

The same sermon says things a reader should not leave out.  Jones called the African slave trade wrong:  "away back yonder our forefathers went over to Africa and brought the colored people back and sold them into slavery.  That was wrong."  And he denied that any race was inferior:  "No race is inferior in the will of God."⁴³  His was a segregation without a theory of inferiority, which did not make it less a segregation.  His university admitted no black students until the 1970s and then barred interracial dating until 2000.⁴⁴  In 2008 it said:  "We conformed to the culture rather than provide a clear Christian counterpoint to it. ... For these failures we are profoundly sorry."⁴⁴

Henry Morris, in both directions

Henry Morris founded the Institute for Creation Research and co-wrote The Genesis Flood.  In 1973 his institute printed his essay "Evolution and Modern Racism", which said:  "As a matter of fact, the Bible says nothing whatever about race."  He granted that "If certain Christian writers have interpreted the Bible in a racist framework, the error is in the interpretation, not in the Bible itself."⁴⁵

His commentary The Genesis Record (1976) took the same line on slavery.  "Unfortunately, there have been some interpreters who have applied the Hamitic curse specifically to the Negro peoples, using it to justify keeping the black man in economic servitude or even slavery."  The prophecy, he argued, applied to all of Ham's descendants, "most of whom are not blacks".³  And:  "Neither Negroes nor any other Hamitic people is intended to be forcibly subjugated on the basis of this Noahic declaration."³

But Morris read Noah's words as a prophecy about the character of whole peoples.  Following Arthur Custance's Noah's Three Sons, he assigned religion to Shem, philosophy and science to Japheth, and "material pursuits" to Ham.  Then he wrote:

Sometimes the Hamites, especially the Negroes, have even become actual slaves to the others. Possessed of a genetic character concerned mainly with mundane, practical matters, they have often eventually been displaced by the intellectual and philosophical acumen of the Japhethites and the religious zeal of the Semites.³

Custance, his source, had gone further, speculating that Canaan "could have been a black child, the homozygous offspring of his mulatto parents, Ham and his wife", and adding that "The black people have a quite remarkable series of high cultures to their credit, and are almost born metallurgists."⁴⁶  Custance meant it as praise.  It is still the assignment of a mental character to a skin colour, and it rests on no genetic study.

Morris was not a segregationist, and on the question of slavery he was right.  But "a genetic character concerned mainly with mundane, practical matters", applied to black people, is a claim about inherited mental capacity by race.  It is exactly what the polygenists said, minus the separate creation.  It has no support in genetics and none in the text of Genesis, which says nothing of anyone's "genetic character".

The modern position

The young-earth organizations later corrected this, and they did it from the text.  Ken Ham, Carl Wieland and Don Batten's One Blood (1999) states that "The belief that the skin color of black people is a result of a curse on Ham and his descendants is taught nowhere in the Bible.  Furthermore, it was not Ham who was cursed; it was his son, Canaan".⁴⁷  "The curse of Canaan has nothing whatsoever to do with skin color".⁴⁷  On marriage, the book says there is "in essence no such thing as 'interracial marriage.'"⁴⁷  The Southern Baptist Convention, which in its own words was shaped by "the role that slavery played in the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention", resolved in 1995 that "Many of our Southern Baptist forbears defended the right to own slaves", and that "we apologize to all African-Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime".⁴⁸

Two cautions remain.  First, One Blood still guesses at skin colours from the Table of Nations:  "Canaan's descendants were probably brown-skinned (Gen. 10:15—19)."⁴⁷  Genesis gives no colours.  Second, the movement's claim that evolution caused racism needs the qualification Gould gave it.  Racism, slavery and polygenism were all older than Darwin, and the most celebrated polygenist was a creationist.  The honest claim is narrower:  Genesis gave Christians a single human family to appeal to, and the ones who appealed to it were right.

Part 6: What genetics says about one origin

The polygenists made a prediction, though they did not put it that way.  If the races were created separately, "in nations", in their own provinces, then they should differ deeply and consistently, the way separate species do.  A person's race should be the main fact about his biology.  Genetics has tested that prediction for fifty years.  It failed.

Lewontin's 85 percent

In 1972 the evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin took data for 17 genetic loci and grouped the world's populations into seven conventional races.⁴⁹  He found that "the average proportion of diversity within populations was 85.4% of the total, between populations within races was 8.3% of the total, and a final 6.3% was accounted for by diversity between the race groups."⁵⁰  His conclusion was that "Human racial classification ... is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance".⁵⁰

DNA confirmed the numbers.  Guido Barbujani and colleagues measured 109 DNA markers in 16 populations in 1997 and found that "differences between members of the same population account for 84.4% of the total".  Only one of the 109 loci had less than half its variation within populations.⁴⁹  In 2002 Noah Rosenberg's team genotyped 377 markers in 1,056 people from 52 populations:  "Within-population differences among individuals account for 93 to 95% of genetic variation; differences among major groups constitute only 3 to 5%."⁵¹

Morton's own numbers show the same thing.  His Caucasian skulls ran from 75 to 109 cubic inches and his Ethiopian skulls from 65 to 94.⁶  The 9-cubic-inch gap between the two means is about a quarter of the 34-cubic-inch spread inside his Caucasian sample alone.⁵²

Edwards's correction, and why it does not rescue polygenism

In 2003 the Cambridge statistician and geneticist A. W. F. Edwards called Lewontin's inference a fallacy.  The 85% figure is real, he said, but the conclusion drawn from it "is unwarranted because the argument ignores the fact that most of the information that distinguishes populations is hidden in the correlation structure of the data and not simply in the variation of the individual factors."⁵³  Many small differences, each nearly useless alone, can together sort individuals reliably.

Edwards was right, and the data bear him out.  Rosenberg's 2002 study, using no information about where people came from, "identified six main genetic clusters, five of which correspond to major geographic regions".⁵¹  D. J. Witherspoon and colleagues showed in 2007 that both findings hold at once.  With ten loci, two people from different continents are often more alike than two from the same population.  But "if genetic similarity is measured over many thousands of loci, the answer becomes 'never' when individuals are sampled from geographically separated populations."⁵⁴

This does not revive the polygenists.  It shows that geographic ancestry leaves a statistical signature, as any separation of a few thousand years would.  It does not show deep, separate origins.  Rosenberg's team tested whether the clusters were artifacts of sampling and found that they arise "from small discontinuous jumps in genetic distance for most population pairs on opposite sides of geographic barriers", with "some individuals from intermediate geographic locations having mixed membership in the clusters that correspond to neighboring regions."⁵⁵  Witherspoon's team drew the practical lesson:  "Phenotypes controlled by a dozen or fewer loci can therefore be expected to show substantial overlap between human populations."⁵⁴  And none of this ranks anyone.  Edwards argued only that groups can be told apart, not that one is better.

A shallow, nested species

Two more facts point the same way.  First, humans have little genetic variation for a great ape.  The 2013 great-ape survey reported that "sequencing of 79 great ape genomes identifies more than double the number of SNPs obtained from the recent sequencing of more than a thousand diverse humans".⁵⁶  Second, human variation is nested.  "Although most common variants are shared across the world, rarer variants are typically restricted to closely related populations", and "Individuals from African ancestry populations harbour the greatest numbers of variant sites".⁵⁷  Common, old variation is shared by everyone.  Rare, young variation is local.

That is the pattern of one population that spread recently and is still mixing at its edges.  It is not the pattern of separately created "types" that have "existed, in their present forms, for at least 4000 years", as Gliddon said of Morton's results.⁹  Darwin's prediction has held.  The polygenist position is dead in genetics, and nobody in the field defends it.

What this does and does not show

The genetics refutes polygenism and supports a single human origin as a population.  Three further questions belong to other articles.

1. Whether that population could have begun with one couple is tested in Adam, Eve, and Human Genetic Diversity. Mainstream population genetics estimates a long-term effective size of about ten thousand, and the creationist answer to that is not settled here.
2. Where the spread began is tested in Out of Africa or Out of Babel?. The greater diversity of African populations points to Africa as the source of the expansion, which a Babel model must explain.
3. How skin colour varies, the one trait most people mean by "race", is the subject of The Genetics of Skin Color. It is controlled by many genes and has changed fast in some populations.

Objections and responses

"Evolution caused racism."

This is the claim of Morris's 1973 essay and of Ken Ham's books, and it is half true.  Darwin ranked "savage" and "civilised" races and expected the first to be exterminated.  Haeckel set different values on human lives by race.  Galton founded eugenics.  Gould, an evolutionist, said biological racism "increased by orders of magnitude" after 1859.²⁴  But racism, the Atlantic slave trade and the polygenist science of Morton, Agassiz and Nott were all older than The Origin of Species.  Agassiz, the most eminent polygenist, was Darwin's chief American opponent.  Evolution amplified racism.  It did not invent it.

"Christianity caused slavery and racism, and the Bible endorses the curse of Ham."

The text does not say what the proslavery readers said.  Genesis 9:25 reads "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren."³³  It curses Canaan, not Ham.  It says nothing about skin.  The Canaanites of Genesis 10:15-19 lived "from Sidon, as thou comest to Gerar, unto Gaza", in the land later called Israel, not in Africa.³³  Where the Bible later shows Canaanite peoples made servants, they are the Hivites of Gibeon, told "there shall none of you be freed from being bondmen" (Joshua 9:23), and the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites on whom "did Solomon levy a tribute of bondservice" (1 Kings 9:20-21).³³  None of them were Africans.  Even Nott, the proslavery polygenist, said "There was no curse upon him".¹¹  The racial reading was imposed on the text.  But Christians did impose it, for centuries, and they used it to defend slavery and segregation.  Whether the Bible's own laws on servitude are defensible is a separate question, treated in Slavery and Servitude and Christianity, Slavery, and Human Rights.

"Darwin was a racist, so his theory is false."

The truth of a theory does not depend on the morals of the man who proposed it.  Darwin's views on race are a fact about Darwin.  They are not evidence about common descent, which has to be tested on its own data, as other articles on this site do.  The same rule protects Christianity:  Bob Jones's sermon is not evidence against the resurrection.  And Darwin opposed slavery in plain words.¹⁹

"Lewontin proved that race does not exist."

Lewontin proved that most human variation lies within groups.  He did not prove that ancestry cannot be read from DNA.  Edwards was right that many loci together can sort people by continent, and Rosenberg's clusters do so.^{53 51}  The honest summary is that human groups differ a little, mostly by small gradual steps, and that no measurement ranks them.  Whether to call the clusters "races" is a choice of words, not a discovery.

"Edwards proved the races are real, so the polygenists were partly right."

The polygenists did not claim that ancestry could be detected statistically.  They claimed separate creation and deep, fixed differences, with races "of the same kind and even greater" in difference than separate ape species.⁹  Clusters built from many tiny frequency differences, with mixed individuals between them, are the opposite of that claim.⁵⁵  Every human group can and does interbreed, and the variation is nested inside African diversity.⁵⁷

"Monogenism does not prove Adam and Eve."

Correct.  The genetics shows one population, not one couple.  Mainstream population genetics puts the long-term effective population at about ten thousand, and whether a single couple can be reconciled with the data is argued in Adam, Eve, and Human Genetic Diversity.  This article claims only that Genesis was right against the polygenists on the question they disputed:  whether the races share an origin.

"Agassiz was a creationist, so creationism was racist."

Agassiz's creationism was a doctrine of many creations, region by region, and it rejected the Genesis account of one human origin in so many words.¹⁰  The Christians who held to Genesis rejected him.  The fair lesson is that belief in a Creator does not by itself protect against racism.  Belief that all people descend from Adam, taken seriously, does.

"Creationists still sort the nations by Shem, Ham and Japheth."

They do, and it is a risk.  The Table of Nations in Genesis 10 is a genealogy of peoples, and testing its claims against archaeology and genetics is fair (see The Table of Nations).  The error of Scofield, Custance and the 1976 Morris was to attach inherited mental characters to those lines, "servile", "material", "almost born metallurgists".  Genesis does none of that.  A genealogy of nations can be tested.  A character assigned to a race cannot be read out of the text, and no genetic study has found one.

"The 'favoured races' subtitle of the Origin shows that Darwin's theory was racist from the start."

Morris used this in 1973 and Ham in 2007.  But in 1859 "races" meant varieties of any living thing.  The Origin speaks of "the several races, for instance, of the cabbage".⁵⁸  Morris himself conceded that "It is clear from the context that he had races of animals primarily in mind".⁴⁵  The subtitle is not evidence of racism.  The Descent of Man is, and it is the better source to quote.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. Lewontin 1972 and Edwards 2003 were not read in full. Lewontin's figures and his concluding sentence are quoted here as John Novembre quotes them in a 2022 retrospective, with Lewontin's page. Edwards's argument is quoted from his own abstract. Neither summary is in dispute, but the full texts would allow a closer statement.
2. Calhoun's 1844 dispatch was not checked. The story that Calhoun drew on Morton and Gliddon in his diplomacy is Gliddon's own account in Types of Mankind. Douglass believed it ("There is no doubt that Messrs. Nott, Glidden, Morton, Smith and Agassiz were duly consulted by our slavery propagating statesmen"),³¹ but neither man is a neutral witness.
3. Price's unpublished papers were not read. Numbers's summary of Price on "racial mixing" cites a manuscript, "The White and the Brown", alongside the printed book, and Numbers also lists a Price manuscript titled "The 'Amalgamation' Question Again".⁴¹ The printed book says the races were set apart at Babel and were "just as distinctly marked as at present" at the dawn of history, which is not the same claim.⁴² How far Price's private views went is open.
4. How representative are the creationist examples? Scofield, Price, Jones, Morris and Custance were chosen because they were influential, not by a survey. No one has counted how many twentieth-century creationist writers held racial views, or how many opposed them. The 1973 ICR essay shows that the movement's leader rejected race as a biblical category three years before his own commentary assigned a "genetic character" to Hamites. How he held both is not explained in either text.
5. Morton's 1839 mean for the American race is uncertain in the scans read. Three OCR copies give three readings. It does not affect any argument here.
6. Single couple or single population? The genetic evidence in Part 6 supports one population. Whether it supports one couple is the harder question, and the young-earth answers to it are assessed in Adam, Eve, and Human Genetic Diversity, not here.
7. The Table of Nations as a research program. Creationists still map peoples onto the sons of Noah, now using Y-chromosome lineages. That is a legitimate test of Genesis 10 if it stays a genealogy and claims no inherited character for any line. Whether the genealogical mapping succeeds is treated in The Table of Nations.

Verdict

On origins, the monogenists were right.  The American polygenists said the races were created separately "in nations" and differ like separate species.  Measured human DNA shows instead one shallow, interbreeding population, with most variation inside every group, small clinal steps between neighbors, and less diversity in all of humanity than in a sample of great apes.  Darwin predicted that the polygenist dispute would die, and it did.  Genesis and Acts had said all along that the nations are "of one blood".

On conduct, both sides failed, and the record should be stated plainly.  Darwin ranked "savage" and "civilised" races and expected the first to be exterminated, though he hated slavery.  Haeckel set a "totally different value" on the lives of the "lower races".  Galton coined eugenics to help "the more suitable races" prevail, and American courts and textbooks put it into practice.  On the Christian side, Bachman held to one human origin and defended slavery in the same book.  Pro-slavery clergy turned a curse on Canaan into a curse on Africa.  The Scofield Reference Bible taught that Ham's descendants were "inferior and servile".  Price wrote of "barriers of race and colour" set by Providence, Jones called God "the author of segregation", and Morris assigned black people a "genetic character concerned mainly with mundane, practical matters".

What distinguishes the two records is the source of the correction.  Nothing in Darwin's theory forbade ranking races, and the correction came from later data, much of it gathered by evolutionary biologists such as Lewontin.  The Christian correction came from the text.  Genesis 9 never mentions skin and curses Canaan, not Africa.  Genesis 3:20 and Acts 17:26 make all people one family.  The Southern clergy who refused polygenism, Douglass, the 1973 ICR essay, One Blood and the Southern Baptists' 1995 repentance all appealed to the Bible against the racism of Christians.  The claim that evolution created racism is false, and so is the claim that the Bible did.  The claim that the Bible's teaching of one human family was true, and that Christians who departed from it were wrong by its own standard, is supported by the evidence.

Sources