Polygenism is a theory of human origins which posits the view that the human races are of different origins (polygenesis). This view is opposite to the idea of monogenism, which posits a single origin of humanity. Modern scientific views no longer favor the polygenic model, with the monogenic "Out of Africa" theory and its variants being the most widely accepted models for human origins.
Origins
Many oral traditions feature polygenesis in their creation stories. For example, Bambuti mythology and other creation stories from the pygmies of Congo state that the supreme God of the pygmies, Khonvoum, created three different races of man separately out of three kinds of clay: one black, one white, and one red. In some cultures, polygenism in the creation narrative served as an etiological
function. These narratives provided an explanation as to why other
people groups exist who are not affiliated with their tribe. Moreover,
distinctions made between the creation of foreign people groups and the
tribe or ethnic group to which the creation myth pertains served to
reinforce tribal or ethnic unity, the need to exercise wariness and
caution when dealing with outsiders, or the unique nature of the
relationship between that tribe and the deities of their religious
system.
An example may be found in the creation myth of the Asmat people, a hunter-gatherer tribe situated along the south-western coast of New Guinea.
This creation myth asserts that the Asmat themselves came into being
when a deity placed carved wooden statues in a ceremonial house and
began to beat a drum. The statues became living humans and began to
dance. Some time later, a great crocodile attempted to attack this
ceremonial house, but was defeated by the power of the deity. The
crocodile was cut into several pieces and these were tossed in different
directions. Each piece became one of the foreign tribes known to the
Asmat.
The idea is also found in some ancient Greek and Roman literature. For example, the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate in his Letter to a Priest wrote that he believed Zeus made multiple creations of man and women. In his Against the Galilaens Julian presented his reasoning for this belief. Julian had noticed that the Germanics and Scythians (northern nations) were different in their bodies (i.e. complexion) to the Ethiopians.
He therefore could not imagine such difference in physical attributes
as having originated from common ancestry, so maintained separate
creations for different races.
In early classical and medieval geography the idea of polygenism
surfaced because of the suggested possibility of there being inhabitants
of the antipodes (Antichthones). These inhabitants were considered by some to have separate origins because of their geographical extremity.
The religion of the Ainu people claims that the ancestors of the Ainu people arrived on Earth from the skies separate from the other races.
Main beliefs
Traditionally, most Jews, Christians and Muslims have embraced monogenism in the form that all modern humans ultimately are descended from a single mating pair, named Adam and Eve.
In this context, polygenism described all alternative explanations for
the origin of humankind that involved more than two individual "first
people". This definition of polygenism is still employed among some Creationists and within the Roman Catholic Church.
With the development of the evolutionary paradigm of human
origins, it has become widely recognized within the scientific community
that at no point did there exist a single "first man" and a single
"first woman" who constituted the first true humans and to whom all
lineages of modern humans ultimately converge. If Adam and Eve ever
existed as distinct historical persons, they were members of a much
larger population of the same species.
However, a common scientific explanation of human origins asserts that
the population directly ancestral to all modern humans remained united
as a single population by constant gene flow.
Therefore, on the level of the entire human population, this
explanation of human origin is classified as monogenism. All modern
humans share the same origin from this single ancestral population.
Modern polygenists do not accept either theological or scientific
monogenism. They believe that the variation among human racial types
cannot be accounted for by monogenism or by evolutionary processes
occurring since the proposed recent African origin of modern humans.
Polygenists reject the argument that human races must belong to a
single species because they can interbreed. There are several polygenist
hypotheses, including biblical creationist polygenism and polygenist
evolution.
The Bible
To make polygenism compatible with the Biblical account in the early chapters of the Book of Genesis, some argument is needed to the effect that what is in the Bible is incomplete. Three standard positions are:
- Pre-Adamism;
- Co-Adamism;
- incompleteness of the Table of Nations in Genesis 10.
In Christian terms, polygenesis remained an uncommon Biblical interpretation until the mid-19th century, and was largely considered heretical;
however, it has been pointed out by some modern scholars that, while
Pre-Adamism was strongly rejected by most and deemed heretical,
Co-Adamism was not received with the same degree of hostility.
A major reason for the emergence of Biblical polygenism from
around the 18th century was because it became noted that the number of
races could not have developed within the commonly-accepted Biblical
timeframe. Francis Dobbs (1750–1811), an eccentric member of the Irish Parliament, believed in a different kind of biblical polygenism. In his Concise View from History written in 1800 he maintained that there was a race resulting from a clandestine affair between Eve and the Devil (see Serpent Seed).
Polygenism was heavily criticized in the 20th century Roman Catholic Church, and especially by Pope Pius XII in the encyclical Humani generis, on the grounds that polygenism is incompatible with the doctrine of Original Sin.
Pre-Adamism
Pre-Adamism claims there were already races of man living before the creation of Adam. It traces back to Isaac La Peyrère in the 17th century.
Co-Adamism
Co-Adamism
claims that there was more than one Adam or small groups of men,
created at the same time in different places across the Earth, and
therefore that the different races were separately created. The idea of
co-Adamism has been traced back as far as Paracelsus in 1520. Other 16th century advocates of co-Adamism included Thomas Harriot and Walter Raleigh, who theorised a different origin for the Native Americans.
In 1591 Giordano Bruno argued that because no one could imagine
that the Jews and the Ethiopians had the same ancestry, then God must
have either created separate Adams or Africans were the descendants of pre-Adamite races.
An anonymous Biblical paper supporting co-Adamism was published in 1732 entitled Co-adamitae
or an Essay to Prove the Two Following. Paradoxes, viz. I. That There
Were Other Men Created at the Same time with Adam, and II. That the
Angels did not fall.
Henry Home, Lord Kames was a believer in co-Adamism. Home believed God had created different races on Earth in separate regions. In his book Sketches on the History of Man
in 1734 Home claimed that the environment, climate, or state of society
could not account for racial differences, so that the races must have
come from distinct, separate stocks.
Charles White was another advocate of co-Adamism, although he used less theology to support his views. White's Account of the Regular Gradation in Man in 1799, provided the empirical science for polygenism. White defended the theory of polygeny by refuting French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon's interfertility
argument—the theory that only the same species can interbreed—pointing
to species hybrids such as foxes, wolves and jackals, which were
separate groups that were still able to interbreed.
Charles Hamilton Smith, a naturalist from England, was a polygenist: he believed races had been created separately. He published the book The Natural History of the Human Species
in 1848. In the book he maintained that there had always been three
fundamentally distinct human types: the Caucasian, the Mongolian and the
Negro. He also referred to the polygenist Samuel George Morton's work in America. Samuel Kneeland
wrote an 84-page introduction to the American edition of the book where
he laid out evidence which supports polygenist creationism and that the
Bible is entirely compatible with multiple Adams.
John William Colenso,
a theologian and biblical scholar, was a polygenist who believed in
co-Adamism. Colenso pointed to monuments and artifacts in Egypt to
debunk monogenist beliefs that all races came from the same stock. For
example, Ancient Egyptian representations of races showed exactly how
the races looked in his time. Egyptological evidence indicated the
existence of remarkable permanent differences in the shape of the skull,
bodily form, colour and physiognomy between different races which are
difficult to reconcile with biblical monogenesis. Colenso believed that
racial variation between races was so great, that there was no way in
which all the races could have come from the same stock just a few
thousand years ago. He was unconvinced that climate could change racial
variation and also believed, in common with other biblical polygenists,
that monogenists had interpreted the Bible wrongly.
Colenso said "It seems most probable that the human race, as it
now exists, had really sprung from more than one pair". Colenso denied
that polygenism caused any kind of racist attitudes or practices-like
many other polygenists he claimed monogenesis was the cause of slavery
and racism. Colenso claimed that each race had sprung from a different
pair of parents, and that all races were created equal by God.
Criticism of the Table of Nations
Biblical polygenists such as Colenso, Louis Agassiz, Josiah Clark Nott and George Gliddon maintained that many of the races on Earth, such as Africans and Asians, were not featured in the Table of Nations
in Genesis 10. They argued that its authors' knowledge was limited to
their own region. Nott in his books claimed this, and that the Bible
does not concern the whole of the Earth's population. According to Nott,
there are no verses in the Bible which support monogenism; and that the
only passage the monogenists use is Acts 17:26, where (he wrote) the
monogenists are wrong in their interpretation of this verse because the
"one blood" of Paul's sermon only includes the nations he knew existed,
which were local.
Atheist polygenism
According
to Lansdown (2006) "Polygenism, the concept of different human species,
was heretical and 'atheistic'; it was embraced only by the most
isolated and heterodox thinkers". Atheist polygenism was most notably supported by Ephraim Squier (1821–1888). In Europe
in the 19th century the general public had favored polygenism, as many
believed it contradicted the Genesis account and thus was more
scientific than religious monogenism.
The British atheist leader Charles Bradlaugh
was also interested in the theory of polygenesis. He found it useful to
undermine Genesis accounts of creation, but this did not mean he
advocated racist policies.
Scientific polygenism
During
the late 17th century and early 18th century many countries first began
to encounter different races from other countries due to colonial expansion, discovery, overseas exploration (due to the advancement of ships) and increases in trade
routes. Because of the encounters with different races, many people
could not believe that they had the same ancestry of other races because
of the extreme racial differences. Many explorers and scientists
visited other countries to observe and study different races and write
down their findings. Later they went back to their own countries to
publish books and journals on their findings and claim that the evidence
supported polygenism.
18th century
Polygenists of the 18th century included Voltaire and David Hume. Voltaire in his 1734 book Traité de métaphysique wrote that "Whites ... Negroes ... the z races are not descended from the same man". Voltaire brought the subject up in his Essay on the Manner and Spirit of Nations and on the Principal Occurrences in History
in 1756 (which was an early work of comparative history). He believed
each race had separate origins because they were so racially diverse.
Voltaire found biblical monogenism laughable, as he expressed:
It is a serious question among them whether the Africans are descended from monkeys or whether the monkeys come from them. Our wise men have said that man was created in the image of God. Now here is a lovely image of the Divine Maker: a flat and black nose with little or hardly any intelligence. A time will doubtless come when these animals will know how to cultivate the land well, beautify their houses and gardens, and know the paths of the stars: one needs time for everything.
When comparing Caucasians to those with dark skin, Voltaire claimed they were different species:
The negro race is a species of men different from ours as the breed of spaniels is from that of greyhounds. The mucous membrane, or network, which nature has spread between the muscles and the skin, is white in us and black or copper-colored in them.
John Atkins, an English naval surgeon, was one of the earliest scientists to be a proponent of the polygenist theory. In his book A Voyage to Guinea (1723) he said "I am persuaded that the black and white race have sprung from different coloured parents."
In the last two decades of the 18th century polygenism was advocated in England by historian Edward Long and anatomist Charles White, in Germany by ethnographers Christoph Meiners and Georg Forster, and in France by Julien-Joseph Virey.
19th-century views
Polygenism was most widespread during the 19th century. The racial studies of Georges Cuvier, the French naturalist and zoologist, influenced scientific polygenism and scientific racism.
These theories proposed a graduation from ‘civilisation’ to
‘barbarism’, at once justifying the European acquisition of foreign
territories and highlighting the belief in the singular role of the
Europeans as a civilizing force.
Georges Cuvier
Georges Cuvier, a French naturalist and zoologist, believed there were three distinct races: the Caucasian ("white"), the Mongolian ("yellow") and the Ethiopian ("black"), Cuvier claimed Adam and Eve
were Caucasian, forming the original race of mankind, while the other
two races originated by survivors escaping in different directions after
a major catastrophe hit the Earth 5,000 years ago, with those survivors
then living in complete isolation from each other.
Cuvier insisted that the Caucasian skull was most beautiful. He divided
humanity into three races: white, yellow and black. Each race received
marks for the beauty or ugliness of their skull and quality of their
civilizations. According to Cuvier the white race was at the top and the
black race was at the bottom.
Cuvier wrote regarding Caucasians:
The white race, with oval face, straight hair and nose, to which the civilised people of Europe belong and which appear to us the most beautiful of all, is also superior to others by its genius, courage and activity.
Regarding those he termed "Ethiopian," Cuvier wrote:
The Negro race... is marked by black complexion, crisped of woolly hair, compressed cranium and a flat nose, The projection of the lower parts of the face, and the thick lips, evidently approximate it to the monkey tribe: the hordes of which it consists have always remained in the most complete state of barbarism.
Cuvier's racial studies held the main features of polygenism, which are as follows:
- Fixity of species
- Strict limits on environmental influence
- Unchanging underlying type
- Anatomical and cranial measurement differences in races
- Physical and mental differences between racial worth
- Human races are all distinct
Prichard
Scientific polygenism became popular in France in the 1820s in response to James Cowles Prichard's Researches into the Physical History of Man (1813) which was considered a pioneering work of monogenism. An anthropological school advocating polygenism arose to counter Prichard's monogenism in France. Key French polygenists of this period included the naturalist Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent and Louis-Antoine Desmoulins (1796–1828), a student of Georges Cuvier.
Retzius
Anders Retzius,
a Swedish professor of anatomy, was a polygenist. Retzius studied many
different skull types, and because the skulls were so different he
believed that the races had a separate origin.
Later European trends
Polygenist schools arose in the 1830s and 1840s across Europe. The Scottish anatomist and zoologist Robert Knox was considered to have influenced polygenism in Britain; he argued in his The Races of Men
(1850) that "[r]acial natures ... were unchanging over thousands of
years, and were so different that they should be called different
species". A colleague of Knox, James Hunt,
was also an early author who promoted polygenism in Britain, though he
was more concerned with establishing white superiority. Hunt dedicated
his On the Negro's Place in Nature (1863) to Knox who had died a year before its publication.
John Crawfurd,
a Scottish physician, and colonial administrator, was a polygenist. He
studied the geography of where different races were located, and
believed that different races had been created separately by God in
specific regional zones for climatic circumstance.
American views
Charles Caldwell
was one of the earliest supporters of polygenism in America. Caldwell
attacked the position that environment was the cause of racial
differences and argued instead that four races, Caucasian, Mongolian,
American Indian, and African, were four different species, created
separately by God.
Charles Pickering (naturalist)
was the librarian and a curator of the Academy of Natural Sciences. In
1843, he traveled to Africa and India to research human races. In 1848,
Pickering published Races of Man and Their Geographical Distribution, which enumerated eleven races.
Indigenous Races of the Earth (1857), Josiah Clark Nott and George Robins Gliddon implied that "Negroes" were a creational rank between "Greeks" and chimpanzees.
Polygenism came into mainstream scientific thought in America in the
mid 19th century with the work of several corresponding natural
scientists such as Samuel George Morton and Charles Pickering as well as Egyptologist George Gliddon, the surgeon Josiah Clark Nott and more prominently the paleontologist and geologist Louis Agassiz in the United States. All had contributed to a major ethnological work of 738 pages entitled Types of Mankind which was published in 1854 and was a great success; it was followed by a sequel Indigenous Races of the Earth
(1857). These works sparked the first formal Polygenist vs. Monogenist
debates across America, and advocates of the polygenism school became
known as pluralists. Since Louis Agassiz backed the pluralists,
polygenism received mainstream public approval and wide exposure during
the 1840s-1860s. Numerous articles promoting polygenist views were
published in the American Journal of Science and Arts during this time period.
The archeologist Ephraim George Squier
helped Morton's polygenism by excavating an ancient cranium from the
midwestern mounds and sending a drawing of it to Morton. Morton found
its similarities striking to Central and South American crania,
confirming his belief that the American Indian nations had a common and
indigenous origin. Morton's polygenism explicitly stated the Mound Builders
were an American Indian race of great antiquity, they did not migrate
from Asia, and their physical form has remained essentially unchanged in
their descendants.
Both Squier and Gliddon demonstrated for Morton the permanence of
racial characteristics, and the suitability of each race to the region
for which it had been created.
American Indians supported Morton's conclusions, whilst some white archaeologists supported Morton. Others such as William Pidgeon
did not accept Morton's conclusions because at the time some white
archaeologists such as Pidgeon could not believe that Native Americans
had created the archaeological remains they saw around them, instead
William Pidgeon wrote a book called Traditions of Dee-Coo-Dah and Antiquarian Researches in 1858.
In the book Pidgeon attempts to prove that a vanished race, culturally
superior to and existing earlier than the American Indians, occupied
America first and that The Mound Builders were not Native Americans.
Pidgeon's book was revealed mostly to be a hoax. The famed archaeologist
Theodore H. Lewis later revealed that Pidgeon had fabricated most of
his research, and distorted much of the rest of it, mapping mounds where
none existed, and changing the arrangement of existing mound groups to
suit his needs.
Morton's work gained more support because his work was considered to be
evidence of true objective science unlike others such as Pidgeon.
Morton won his reputation as the great data-gatherer and objectivist of
American Science. Oliver Wendell Holmes
praised Morton for "The severe and cautious character" of his works,
which "from their very nature are permanent data for all future students
of ethnology".
By 1850 Agassiz had developed a unique form of co-Adamism. God he
believed had created several different zoological provinces with
different races in them, but also fauna and animals specific to those
regions. An essay of Agassiz promoting this theory with maps of the
zoological zones was attached as a preface to Types of Mankind in collaboration with Morton, Gliddon, Nott and others.
Agassiz's theory developed some support amongst Christians, and he
often wrote articles in Christian magazines claiming his views on
polygenism were compatible with the bible. Christian fundamentalists however who held to Young Earth Creationism and strict monogenism (i.e. everyone on Earth from Adam and Eve) attacked his views, as well as those of Gliddon and Nott.
Unlike Josiah Nott, the slave-owner from Alabama, Agassiz was never a supporter of slavery. He claimed his views had nothing to do with politics.
Effect of evolutionary ideas and debates from the 1860s
The
notion that races were separate and came together by hybridism, rather
than being variations from a common stock, was cast into doubt with the
publication of Darwin's Origin of Species
in 1859, which Agassiz opposed till his death. Yet the influence of
polygenism persisted for many years. For example, the Hamitic
Hypothesis, which argued that certain African populations were the
descendants of a proto-white invasion in the ancient past, was
influenced by polygenism and continued to hold sway in linguistics and
anthropology until the 1950s.
Darwin did not address man's origin directly at this stage, and the
argument continued for a number of years, with the creation of the Anthropological Society of London in 1863 in the shadow of the American civil war, in opposition to the abolitionist Ethnological Society. The Anthropologicals had the Confederate agent Henry Hotze permanently on their council. The two societies did not heal their differences until they merged in 1871 to form the Anthropological Institute.
Georges Pouchet,
the French naturalist and anatomist, was a polygenist. Pouchet made
contributions in several scientific fields, and specialised in
comparative anatomy of fishes and whales. He was a prime advocate of
polygeny, and was the author of an anthropological work titled De la Pluralité des Races Humaines (1858), which was translated into English as The Plurality of the Human Race in 1864 by the Anthropological Society.
John Thurnam with Joseph Barnard Davis published a work in two volumes under the title of Crania Britannica in 1865, important for craniometry.
Thurnam and Davis were both believers in polygenism, in the form that
different races had been created separately. Davis was a collector of
crania, and had over 1700 specimens.
Because of the racial differences of the crania, Davis and Thurnam
believed that proofs of polygenism were to be found in studying the
skull types of different races. Davis also wrote Thesaurus craniorum: catalogue of the skulls of the various races of man (1875).
Although it took many years, polygenism, which required species
to be created in specific geographic locations and to remain immutable,
has been almost entirely replaced among scientists by Darwin's theory of
evolution from a common ancestor. Persistent antagonism to Darwinian
theory is today primarily a matter of religious or political viewpoint.
Polygenist evolution
Polygenist evolution is the belief that humans evolved independently from separate species of apes. This can be traced back to Karl Vogt
in 1864. Polygenist evolution allowed polygenists to link each race to
an altogether different ape. This was shown in the work of Hermann Klaatsch and F. G. Crookshank.
Karl Vogt
believed that the inhabitants of Africa were related to the ape, and
was separate from those of European descent. In Chapter VII of his Lectures of man
(1864) he compared both ethnicities, describing them as "two extreme
human types". The difference between them, he claimed, are greater than
those between two species of ape; and this proves the two are a separate
species altogether.
In an unusual blend of contemporary evolutionary thinking and pre-Adamism, the theistic evolutionist and geologist Alexander Winchell argued in his 1878 book Adamites and Preadamites
for the pre-Adamic origins of the human race on the basis that Africans
were too racially inferior to have developed from the Biblical Adam.
Winchell also believed that the laws of evolution operated according to
the will of God.
Before Darwin published his theory of evolution and common descent in his Origin of Species (1859), scientific theories or models of Polygenism (such as Agassiz's) were strictly creationist.
Even after Darwin's book was published, Agassiz still stuck to his
scientific form of polygenist creationism and denounced the idea of
evolution. However, by the late 19th century most scientific polygenists
had abandoned Agassiz's creationism and began to embrace polygenist
forms of evolution. This even included many students of Agassiz,
including Nathaniel Shaler, who had studied under Agassiz at Harvard.
Shaler continued to believe in polygenism, but believed the different
races evolved from different primates. The prominent French
anthropologist Paul Broca by 1878 had also converted from creationist polygenism to accepting a form of polygenist evolution.
In his work The Descent of Man (1871), Charles Darwin and some of his supporters argued for the monogenesis of the human species, seeing the common origin of all humans as essential for evolutionary theory. This is known as the single-origin hypothesis. Darwin even dedicated a chapter of his The Descent of Man
to an attempt to refute the polygenists and support common ancestry of
all races. Polygenist evolution views however continued into the early
20th century, and still found support amongst prominent scientists. Henry Fairfield Osborn for example in his The Origin and Evolution of Life (1916) claimed blacks and whites both evolved from different primates.
Alfred Russel Wallace
was also an advocate of polygenist evolution, claiming that the
physical differences in races must have occurred at such a remote time
in the past before humans had any intelligence, when natural selection
was still operative on human bodies. The differentiation into separate
races with distinct physical traits must have happened so soon after
humans had just appeared on Earth that for all practical purposes all
races had always been distinct.
In contrast to most of Darwin's supporters, Ernst Haeckel put forward a doctrine of evolutionary polygenism based on the ideas of the linguist and polygenist August Schleicher,
in which several different language groups had arisen separately from
speechless prehuman Urmenschen, which themselves had evolved from simian
ancestors. These separate languages had completed the transition from
animals to man, and, under the influence of each main branch of
languages, humans had evolved as separate species, which could be
subdivided into races. Haeckel divided human beings into ten races, of
which the Caucasian was the highest and the primitives were doomed to
extinction.
Haeckel claimed that Africans have stronger and more freely
movable toes than any other race, which he interpreted as evidence that
members of the race were closely related to apes. Reasoning that apes
use their toes to cling tightly to tree branches, Haeckel compared
Africans to "four-handed" apes. Haeckel also believed that Blacks were
savages and that Whites were significantly more civilized.
Modern religious adherents
- A tenet of Raëlism holds that the different races of humans were created by separate teams of extraterrestrial scientists.
- Several minor Christian groups still embrace Biblical polygenism (pre-Adamism or co-Adamism).
