Race biology
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Race biology Anssi Saura
Abstract Background: The founders of Hereditas envisioned that race biology would be a major subject that had social applications with utmost importance in the near future. Anthropometrics was in this context understood to be the pure and eugenics the applied science. Sweden had a long tradition in physical anthropometry. Herman Lundborg, member of the advisory board of Hereditas, united the anthropometric and eugenic approaches in a synthesis. He was the first head of the Institute for Race Biology in Sweden. The contents of Hereditas reflect the development of race biology in the Nordic countries. Conclusions: The initial enthusiasm for applied race biology did not last long. In the 1920’s Hereditas carried papers on both physical anthropology and eugenics. Most paper dealt, however, with human genetics without eugenic content. Two papers, published in 1921 and 1939 show how the intellectual climate had changed from positive to negative. Finally only human genetics prevailed as the legitimate study of the human race or humankind. A belated defense of eugenics published in 1951 did not help; geneticists had abandoned anthropometrics for good around the year 1940 and eugenics about a decade later. In spite of that, eugenic legislation was amended astonishingly late, in the 1970’s. The development was essentially similar in all Nordic countries. Keywords: anthropometrics, eugenics, sterilization, Hereditas
Background A race is a population distinguishable from other populations by hereditary phenotypic characters. Members of a human race may freely produce offspring with representatives of other races. Even if race has been socially constructed [1], it has been an immensely powerful construction that has shaped the lives of millions. Restrictions based on geography, skin color, language, culture and religion have been imposed to maintain groups of people as endogamous units. The Indian caste system may have been the most extreme effort of social control of human reproduction [2]. Segregation in the American south, apartheid in South Africa, aristocratic societies and prejudices represent less brazen attempts of social control. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted to abolish the above practices.
Correspondence: [email protected] Department of Molecular Biology, Umeå University, SE-901 87 Umeå, Sweden
Race biology stands for biological anthropology with eugenics as an applied approach. In the Nordic countries the two make up a temporal sequence so that anthropological measurements came first, followed with the social aspect. Linnaeus had in Systema naturae divided humanity into four differentiated groups using geographic but otherwise arbitrary criteria. A systematic research on race was begun in Sweden in the 1840’s. The father of anthropometrics is Anders Rezius (1796–1869), who took measures on Sámi (Lapps) [3, 4] . He introduced craniometry, the study of skull dimensions, and coined terms such as dolichocephalic and brachycephalic, longand shor
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