(Skulls from the collection of Samuel Morton, the father of scientific racism, illustrate his classification of people into five races—which arose, he claimed, from separate acts of creation. From left to right: a black woman and a white man, both American; an indigenous man from Mexico; a Chinese woman; and a Malaysian man.)
In the first half of the 19th century, one of America’s most prominent scientists was a doctor named Samuel Morton. Morton lived in Philadelphia, and he collected skulls. He wasn’t choosy about his suppliers, He accepted skulls scavenged from battlefields and snatched from catacombs. One of his most famous craniums belonged to an Irishman who’d been sent as a convict to Tasmania (and ultimately hanged for killing and eating other convicts). With each skull Morton performed the same procedure: I le stuffed it with pepper seeds—later he switched to lead shot—which he then decanted to ascertain the volume of the braincase.
In the first half of the 19th century, one of America’s most prominent scientists was a doctor named Samuel Morton. Morton lived in Philadelphia, and he collected skulls. He wasn’t choosy about his suppliers, He accepted skulls scavenged from battlefields and snatched from catacombs. One of his most famous craniums belonged to an Irishman who’d been sent as a convict to Tasmania (and ultimately hanged for killing and eating other convicts). With each skull Morton performed the same procedure: I le stuffed it with pepper seeds—later he switched to lead shot—which he then decanted to ascertain the volume of the braincase.
Morton believed that people could be divided into five races
and that these represented separate acts of creation. The races had distinct
characters, which corresponded to their place in a divinely determined
hierarchy. Morton’s “craniometry" showed, he claimed, that whites, or
"Caucasians." were the most intelligent of the races, East
Asians—Morton used the term “Mongolian"— though "ingenious” and
"susceptible of cultivation," were one step down. Next came Southeast
Asians, followed by Native Americans. Blacks, or "Ethiopians," were
at the bottom. In the decades before the Civil War. Morton’s ideas were quickly
taken up by the defenders of slavery.
“He had a lot of influence, particularly in the South,” says
Paul Wolff Mitchell, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania who is
showing me the skull collection, now housed at the Penn Museum. We’re standing
over the braincase of a particularly large-headed Dutchman who helped inflate
Morton’s estimate of Caucasian capacities. When Morton died, in 1851, the
Charleston Medical Journal in South Carolina praised him for “giving to the
negro his true position as an inferior race.”
Today Morton is known as the father of scientific racism. So
many of the horrors of the past few centuries can be traced to the idea that
one race is inferior to another that a tour of his collection is a haunting
experience. To an uncomfortable degree we still live with Morton’s legacy:
Racial distinctions continue to shape our politics, our neighborhoods, and our
sense of self.
This is the case even though what science actually has to
tell us about race is just the opposite of what Morton contended.
Morton thought he’d identified immutable and inherited
differences among people, but at the time he was working—shortly before Charles
Darwin put forth his theory of evolution and long before the discovery of
DNA—scientists had no idea how traits were passed on. Researchers who have
since looked at people at the genetic level now say that the whole category of
race is misconceived. Indeed, when scientists set out to assemble the first
complete human genome, which was a composite of several individuals, they
deliberately gathered samples from people who self-identified as members of
different races. In June 2000, when the results were announced at a White House
ceremony, Craig Venter, a pioneer of DNA sequencing, observed, “The concept of
race has no genetic or scientific basis.”
(Elizabeth Kolbert, National Geographic, April 2018)