The research question at the center of this project concerns how the idea of permanent racial traits, a notion consistent with the static and openly religious view of nature assumed during the 17th and 18th centuries, continued to have explanatory power within scientific discussions of human difference even after the wide acceptance of Darwinian evolution and the 19th century discoveries made in geology and archaeology.
Intellectual Merits. The researcher will argue that contrary to conventional wisdom, theistic forms of reasoning concerning racial groups continued to play an important role within modern scientific formulations of race, even though explicitly religious claims about human origins were no longer thought to be empirically viable. Using archival materials, the researcher will show how American scientists and physicians drew upon 18th century naturalist ideas that racial traits were fixed, innate and the outcome of a "transcendent" force, in their effort to explain human heredity, racial admixture, and disease between the 1870s and the early 1950s. The researcher will support the view that enduring theistic notions about the "intentions of nature" justified ideas of racial fixity. Finally, the researcher will consider mid 20th century efforts to contest the notion of fixed racial traits by looking at the understudied work of the African American physician Charles V. Roman, and the famous UNESCO Statements on Race written in the 1950s.
Potential Broader Impacts. With the rising interest in racially specific medicine, the increased use of genetics in the behavioral sciences, and persistent tensions between scientists and religious communities in regard to theories of human origin and evolution, it is crucial that scholars, policy makers and the lay public in the United States have a comprehensive understanding of the early history that shaped modern scientific studies of race. The aim of this dissertation is to advance current knowledge about how modern racial categories within medicine and genetics were forged through the use of both scientific and religious conceptions of the human in order to provide crucial information to scholars, policy makers, and the lay public.
The Religious Pursuit of Race: Christianity, Modern Science, and the Perception of Human Difference This dissertation is a work in intellectual history that chronicles racial theories within Western science and medicine. Therein, I address two interrelated questions. Firstly, has Christianity shaped modern scientific perceptions of race? Secondly, is the search for the origin of human life, vis-à-vis theories of race, a purely scientific matter or, a more basic human existential concern? To answer these questions I undertook archival research within the history of European and American racial science, analyzing contemporary scientific work, archival data of primary scientific material, biblical commentaries, literary monthlies, and early maps of the major continents. I argue that Christian ideas about nature, humanity, and history have facilitated modern scientific perceptions of race since the time of the Enlightenment. This is true despite what is believed to be the "Death of Adam" within Western science following the emergence of Darwinian evolution.In defense of my thesis I trace the currency of three ideas derived from Christianity that have shaped the assumptions and reasoning styles of early modern and contemporary scientific theorists of race. These ideas are: common human descent (derived from the Biblical creation narrative), the ontological uniqueness of human life (drawn from Biblical claims about the "image of God" mirrored in "mankind"), and the longevity of racial traits (an idea that has its roots in theological claims about the stability and inherent order of nature). I chart the development of these three Christian concepts across four different historical moments that reveal how religious and scientific perceptions of race share a common foundation in the West. These moment are: Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s attempt to develop anthropology as a secular science during the end of the eighteenth-century; mid-nineteenth-century debates in the U.S. over common human descent; early twentieth-century theories of race and disease that relied on polygenist assumptions about distinct human ancestry; and finally the recent discovery of Neanderthal DNA exclusively in the descendents of Eurasia. Ultimately, this thesis concludes that religious and scientific ways of viewing race have been interconnected and are animated by irresolvable questions about what it means to be human.
