Terence Keel’s Divine Variations: A Symposium
with Terence D. Keel, “The Religious Preconditions for the Race Concept in Modern
Science”; Yiftach Fehige, “In What Sense Exactly Did Christianity Give Us Racial
Science?”; Ernie Hamm, “Christian Thought, Race, Blumenbach, and Historicizing”;
Jonathan Marks, “The Coevolution of Human Origins, Human Variation, and Their
Meaning in the Nineteenth Century”; Elizabeth Neswald, “Racial Science and ‘Absolute
Questions’: Reoccupations and Repositions”; and Terence D. Keel, “Response to My Critics:
The Life of Christian Racial Forms in Modern Science.”
THE COEVOLUTION OF HUMAN ORIGINS, HUMAN
VARIATION, AND THEIR MEANING IN THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY
by Jonathan Marks
Abstract.
Ideas about biology, race, and theology were bound up
together in nineteenth-century scholarship, although they are rarely,
if ever, considered together today. Nevertheless, the new genealogical way of thinking about the history of life arose alongside a new
way of thinking about the Bible, and a new way of thinking about
people. They connected with one another in subtle ways, and modern scholarly boundaries do not map well on to nineteenth-century
scholarship.
Keywords:
biblical studies; evolution; Ernst Haeckel; scientific
racism; Alfred Russel Wallace
The U.S. Civil War was not fought over evolution.1 Nevertheless, as any
biology textbook will tell you, the publication of The Origin of Species in
1859 was a fantastically important event.
One of the principal effects that Terence Keel’s Divine Variations has had
on me as a modern biological (physical) anthropologist involves seeing the
intertwined histories of biology, race, and theology over the course of the
nineteenth century. Historians of science have tended to be so transfixed
by Darwin that they lose sight of the crucially relevant scholarly fields of
biblical studies and human differences (itself coalescing into anthropology
from ethnology, craniology, and prehistoric archaeology) that were maturing at the same time as evolutionary biology. Moreover, we have tended
Jonathan Marks is Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina
at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA; e-mail jmarks@uncc.edu.
[Zygon, vol. 54, no. 1 (March 2019)]
C
2019 by the Joint Publication Board of Zygon ISSN 0591-2385
www.zygonjournal.org
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Jonathan Marks
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to bracket these intellectual histories of science apart from the political
and the religious—in short, apart from the actual cultural history of the
nineteenth century. Terence Keel, along with other contemporary historians, such as Marianne Sommer (2016) and David Livingstone (2008)—is
working to challenge that traditional approach.
To bracket the intellectual history of biology and Darwinism apart
from other aspects of nineteenth century Euro-American culture has always seemed strange to me—as if scholars of the age cared more about
giraffe necks than about slavery. The interlacing of biology (origins) and
human variation (race) and its meaning (theology) comes out clearly in the
biopolitics of, say, 1850.
In 1850, the opponents of Josiah Nott, the anatomist from Alabama,
were the monogenists, who held that all people had a common origin,
which was a position well rooted in biblical scripture. In denying that
people shared a common origin, Nott challenged scriptural authority—
although not too sharply, for he did not challenge the foundations of
Christianity, but merely the number of creative acts on Day 6. Nott’s
infamous conclusion was that we are not all brothers and sisters under the
skin, and as Keel notes, there did not seem to be any known way that white
people could become black people, or vice versa, especially given the six
thousand-year biblical chronology.
Consequently, the intellectual community of 1850 is retrospectively
something of a paradox. For the abolitionist, scriptural authority counted
as evidence for the common origin of all people, yet necessitated a theory of biological change to account for the facts of human diversity. Even
the sons of Noah—Ham, Shem, and Japheth, the putative continental
progenitors—were all brothers. Thus the earliest microevolutionary speculations were necessitated by biblical literalism, and the intellectual poles
of 1850 reflected an alignment of ideas that are unfamiliar to modern sensibilities. On one side were the social progressives, biblical literalists, and
evolutionists. (This is a broad-brush portrait; actual biopolitical views were
often more nuanced; see Haller 1970.) And on the other hand, embodied
by Nott, there was (1) a defense of slavery; (2) an interpretationist approach to the Bible; and (3) the basic creationist tenet of the immutability
of type. These cross-cut modern ideologies in ways that show students how
politically unfamiliar even the fairly recent past can actually be.
There are in fact several intellectual historical strands here, brocaded in
complex ways, although only partially independent of one another. The
famous Darwin story is the one we take for granted in biology, and in
considerable detail: the Beagle in the 1830s; the delay in publishing his
ideas on transmutation; the manuscript from Alfred Russel Wallace; The
Origin of Species in 1859 and its aftermath. But actually the 1830s also saw
the publication of David Strauss’s radical Das Leben Jesu, then its translation
into English in 1846 by Mary Anne Evans (George Eliot). This was not
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about natural history, but about the meaning of the Bible as a repository
of meaningful stories, rather than as histories, the relevant story here being
the demiraclized life of Christ.
Strauss directly challenged the veracity of scripture in ways that Darwin
only hinted at. Thus, reviewing the genealogies of Jesus given in Matthew
1 and Luke 3, he explains:
A consideration of the insurmountable difficulties, which unavoidably embarrass every attempt to bring these two genealogies into harmony with
one another, will lead us to despair of reconciling them, and will incline us
to acknowledge, with the more free-thinking class of critics, that they are
mutually contradictory. Consequently they cannot both be true. . . (Strauss
1846, 137–38)
This is certainly far more threatening to a pious mid-nineteenth century
Christian’s sensibilities than anything anyone could say about bird beaks or
glyptodont fossils. Indeed, to bracket off natural history from the overall
intellectual experience within just the single year 1863 would be very myopic. Certainly fundamental scientific works appeared in that year: Thomas
Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature (documenting the close relationship between human and ape) and Charles Lyell’s Antiquity of Man (documenting
the coexistence of ancient people and extinct species). But at least as significant was the popularity of Ernest Renan’s La Vie de Jésus, which famously
presented Jesus as an Aryan sage, rather than as a Mediterranean demigod.
And 1863 was also bracketed by Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (January 1) and Gettysburg Address (November 19)—signaling
ideas that were also on educated people’s minds.
One important lesson that can be seen in taking these strands together
is the imperviousness of scientific racism to Darwinism. Although Darwin
settled the origins question in favor of monogenism, there was still considerable latitude in reconstructing the histories of the races. These histories
could never be value-neutral, and here the entwined intellectual strands are
indeed evident as alternative scientific explanations to a single biopolitical
question: Why are there savages?
Savagery—that is to say, preagricultural life—has no scriptural basis at
all. Adam tends a garden from the very outset; a life without domestic
plants and animals was literally inconceivable to the authors of Genesis.
And yet, such peoples were becoming increasingly familiar both archaeologically (in Europe) and ethnographically (in the rest of the world).
The most obvious reconciliation between these facts and the Bible would
be that savages represent post-Adamic degeneration, from a primordially
agricultural status. This, however, did not harmonize well with either the
metaphysical doctrine of progress, nor with the empirical evidence for it.
The primordial human state was premetallic, nonagricultural, primitive,
and savage (Lubbock 1865).
Jonathan Marks
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Even so, what differentiated the contemporary backward savages from
the civilized peoples? Three different scientific answers were ventured,
in rapid succession. The German Darwinian Ernst Haeckel explained it
naturalistically in his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (1868). The civilized
and savage peoples were zoologically distinct species, and the savage species
were closer to the apes.
They are on the whole at a much lower stage of development, and more
like apes, than most of the . . . straight-haired men. [They] are incapable
of a true inner culture and of a higher mental development, even under
the favourable conditions of adaptation now offered to them in the United
States of North America. No woolly-haired nation has ever had an important
“history.” (Haeckel 1876, 307–10)2
While the Darwinians perceived Haeckel as an ally, they nevertheless had
reservations about the zoological explanation, and Charles Lyell ([1868]
1881) privately politely criticized Haeckel’s appalling racial caricatures
(which did not appear in the subsequent English translation of the work).
But if not a naturalistic, zoological explanation for the difference between
the savage and citizen, then where else might the answer lie? Alfred Russel
Wallace denied the savage’s biological inferiority, and offered an alternative
explanation the following year.
In the brain of the lowest savages, and, as far as we yet know, of the prehistoric
races, we have an organ so little inferior in size and complexity to that of
the highest types (such as the average European), that we must believe it
capable . . . of producing equal average results. But the mental requirements
of the lowest savages, such as the Australians or the Andaman islanders, are
very little above those of many animals. The higher moral faculties and
those of pure intellect and refined emotion are useless to them, are rarely if
ever manifested, and have no relation to their wants, desires, or well-being.
How, then, was an organ developed so far beyond the needs of its possessor?
Natural selection could only have endowed the savage with a brain a little
superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one but very little
inferior to that of the average members of our learned societies . . . .
[W]e must therefore admit the possibility, that in the development of the
human race, a Higher Intelligence has guided the same laws for nobler ends.
(Wallace 1869, 391–94)
Rejecting Haeckel’s explanation for the savage in terms of the natural,
Wallace sought it in the realm of the supernatural. Of all the creatures on
Earth, only savages had received a bit of heavenly help, in the form of large
modern brains that they did not really need (Gould 1980). On hearing of
Wallace’s essay, Darwin wrote him, “I hope you have not murdered too
completely your own & my child.”3
And finally, if not in the domain of Haeckel’s (1868) zoology or Wallace’s
(1869) theology, then how might we satisfactorily and scientifically explain
the savage? According to E. B. Tylor (1871), in the realm of neither nature
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nor supernature, but of culture. As Wallace defended the savage’s essential
humanity from the racist biological evolution of Haeckel, so too Tylor
defends the savage’s moral, intellectual, and social life from the divinely
assisted evolution of Wallace. The true scientific explanation lies in a
new ontological domain, cultural evolution. To be sure, this is not the
relativistic “culture” of a generation later—the savage’s culture is inferior,
indeed, but it is culture nonetheless: “that complex whole which includes
knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and
habits acquired by man as a member of society” (Tylor 1871,1).
In universalizing culture, Tylor not only humanized the savage, but
exoticized his readers’ behaviors, for their own knowledge, beliefs, art,
morals law, and customs could now be examined and contrasted alongside
the savage’s (Stocking 1987). Indeed, Wallace (1872) took personal offense
at Tylor’s representation of contemporary spiritualism as a survival, or
an intellectual relic from a more primitive mode of thought. Today of
course we spurn Haeckel’s racist naturalism and Wallace’s divine interventionism, leaving us with Tylor’s anthropology as the normative scientific
explanation for human mental and behavioral diversity. Nevertheless,
for a brief period, circa 1870, they all coincided and vied with one
another as the study of nature, religion, and culture all developed in rough
synchrony.
By century’s end, Josiah Nott and his polygenism had been rendered
irrelevant, as had Bible-based history. James Frazer’s (1890) The Golden
Bough could take for granted that a proper understanding of the gospel
narrative would involve situating it among the myths and practices of the
ancient world, and would proceed to do so. Scientific racism will be equally
at home in evolutionary biology as in creationist biology, and accommodate
itself in more varied forms than Haeckel’s. Notably, Arthur de Gobineau’s
(pre-Darwinian) Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races Humaines was quickly translated into English with an appendix by Josiah Nott (1856) himself, but
had little impact until it was retranslated for a post-Darwinian audience
(1915), and its ideas repackaged by the evolutionary racist Madison Grant
(1916).
The mid-nineteenth century was formative and foundational for modern
science, but not simply for the emergence of a theory of the transformation
of species. Darwinism emerged entangled with revolutionary scholarly
approaches to human diversity and to the Bible itself, as nineteenth-century
biology, anthropology, and theology all wrestled with their newly emerging
paradigms.
NOTES
1. Although trivia buffs know that Lincoln and Darwin were born on the same day.
2. This particular passage actually first appears in Haeckel’s second German edition of
1870. “Im Allgemeinen stehen sie auf einer viel tieferen Entwickelungsstufe und den Affen viel
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näher, als die meisten Lissotrichen oder Schlichthaarigen. Einer wahren inneren Cultur und
einer höheren geistigen Durchbildung sind die Ulotrichen unfähig, auch unter so günstigen
Anpassungs-Bedingungen, wie sie ihnen jetzt in den vereinigten Staaten Nordamerikas geboten
werden. Kein kraushaariges Volk hat jemals eine bedeutende ‘Geschichte’ gehabt.” The English
translation is from Ray Lankester (1876), based on Haeckel’s slightly variant fourth edition.
3. Darwin Correspondence Project, “Letter no. 6684,” accessed on 2 June 2018, http://
www.darwinproject.ac.uk/DCP-LETT-6684
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