181CHAPTER 8: sTudYIng CulTuRE

However, looking at Linnaeus’s “varieties” of humans, it’s clear that they were based on biased observations and skewed positively toward Europeans. Besides the bizarre Homo sapiens ferus (four-footed, mute, hairy wild people) and Homo sapiens monstruosus (apparent giants, dwarves, and misshapen individuals), the other four varieties that can be identified more clearly are described in Table 8.1.

For the next several hundred years, these categories—based on reports from explorers and those involved in the slave trade—came to represent a pseudoscien-tific basis for different biological races of humans. It laid the foundation for centuries of slavery and oppression of non-White peoples based on “God-given” traits that were unalterable. Racial classification played a role in the horrific extermination of people during the ethnic cleansing of World War II under the guise of eugenics, a pseudoscientific plan to “purify” the human race. More recently, it has led to forced abortion and sterilization, laws against marriage, and anti-immigration policies.

Fortunately, Darwin’s theories of natural selection and, later, an understanding of genetics shed light on the process of evolution by natural selection. Scientists began to apply those principles to the study of human variation. Later in the twen-tieth and, now, twenty-first centuries, most of the pseudoscientific conversations have dropped out of public discourse. Now that we are able to compare the entire genomes of people around the world, we know that people’s DNA differs by no more than 0.14 per cent anywhere in the world. It is abundantly clear that all of this racial typecasting was done to maintain the social superiority of certain groups of people to the detriment of others.

Of course humans have differences! But although we may refer to differences among groups of people as “racial,” clearly those differences are not biologically

TABLE 8.1

linnaeus’s four “Varieties” of Humans The four types of humans that Linnaeus added to the 1758 version of Systema Naturae were based on tales from explorers but created the racial “color” classifications that are still in use today.

Homo sapiens americanus

Red, choleric [angry], upright. Hair black … obstinate, content free … ruled by habit.

Homo sapiens europaeus

White, sanguine [cheerful], muscular. Hair yellow, brown, flowing … gentle, acute, inventive … ruled by custom or law.

Homo sapiens asiaticus

Pale-yellow, melancholy, stiff. Hair black … severe, haughty … ruled by belief [opinions].

Homo sapiens afer Black, phlegmatic [sluggish], relaxed. Hair black, fizzled … crafty, indolent, negligent … ruled by caprice [impulse].

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