history of anthropology

Michael Bérubé writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education: "Why I Resigned the Paterno Chair", with a discussion of academics versus athletics. I'm linking because of this:

The day thousands of alumni cheer "We are Penn State" in celebration of the fact that the anthropology department is No. 1 nationally (having defeated Duke in the prestigious Boas Bowl) will be the day we know we've changed the culture in Happy Valley.

Somehow I don't see it happening, although a Boas Bowl would be entertaining.

Once again, I'm looking through source material for a very different reason, but ran across an interesting piece of history. J. Barnard Davis was a British physician and anatomist who, as a private collector, amassed an immense collection of nearly 1800 skulls. His studies on the cranial capacity of these skulls, including comparisons of skulls of different races, were cited by Darwin in The Descent of Man (which is what brought me to Davis' work).

He published this work on human variation in the critical period between the 1859 publication of Darwin's Origin of Species and the 1871 publication of Descent of Man. During this period, Darwin did not publish on the subject of human evolution, but was engaged in a great deal of reading and correspondence on the subject. In his stead, publications and lectures by Huxley, Wallace, and others began to apply Darwinian principles to human variation.

I may write more about Davis, but I wanted to make a note of a passage in the introduction to the 1867 catalog of his collection, the Thesaurus Craniorum [1]. He addresses the importance of a large collection of skulls, which among other things allows an assessment of the breadth of variation within populations. One consequence of our additional sampling of human variation in the 20th century was the recognition that variation among human populations was clinal -- with characteristics forming a gradient across geographic space.

The extent of a collection is of much moment; for, besides affording more reliable averages of measurements, a large one is far more sure to illustrate the types of each race fully, and to contain its aberrant forms. The statement made by Prof. Theodor Waitz, that only small collections of race-skulls exhibit different forms of skulls strikingly whilst rich collections fill up the apparent intervening gaps and show a continual transition from every one form to every other, is only very partially correct, and is an assertion much more characteristic of a Professor of Philosophy than a Professor of Anatomy, essentially a science of observation. Although large collections, philosophically considered, must of necessity, by containing skulls that have intermediate forms, tend to lessen distinctions, they, at the same time, serve to develope [sic] race-characters more fully, and to define the play of diversities round these race-characters with more precision.

The citation to Waitz is to Anthropologie der Naturvölker, 1859.

From a certain point of view, Davis was correct: An increase of sample size will increase the range of the sample, but not greatly increase the proportion of overlap between samples drawn from two populations with different means. Large samples might increase a statistical precision in the description of races. Yet, Waitz' point is also correct. Large samples destroy the typological description of races by showing that no character uniquely typifies any human race. The effect of large samples on the range is often the key evidence that populations share common biology.

Statistics is fundamental to population biology -- so much so that population geneticists like R. A. Fisher and Sewall Wright invented many statistical concepts. Until they understand statistical concepts, people seem inevitably drawn toward essentialism. Essentialism in the history of biology led to typological concepts of species, race, characters, and developmental stages, all of which explained variation in terms of deviation from the ideal type. We now appreciate that populations transform according to statistical rules, not typological rules.

With his immense collection of skulls, Davis showed the extensive variation within populations. He argued so forcefully for the importance of variation that he predicted that the original Neandertal skull would be soon matched within the cranial diversity of living populations. Davis maintained that the skull's elongated shape and browridges could be explained as a result of craniosynostosis, premature closure of the cranial sutures. He looked to human pathology for anatomical intermediates with the Neandertals, arguing that the variation attributable to craniosynostosis would be found to grade continuously right up to the extreme found in the Neandertal skull. In other words, he argued against typology when it came to pathology.

He turned out to be wrong about Neandertal, it was an overreach of his assumptions about variation in development. At the same time, he believed that "race-characters" were stable and that they reflected a long history of separation of human races. He provides an interesting case of how a nineteenth-century anatomist could toss a typological salad.

References

I want to pass along the news that Phillip Tobias, one of the world's leading paleoanthropologists and anatomists, died earlier this week. The Gauteng Tourism Authority has run a very nice short summary of his work and importance, and I especially like the way it ends:

Although Phillip Tobias never had a family, he said "I have taught over 10 000 students, and all of those are, in some small way, like my children. So it is not a genetic legacy that I leave, but rather a cultural one, orally transmitted through education, the value of which cannot be overemphasized. I like to believe that I have given something valuable to every one of them, and I can tell you quite honestly that almost every one of them has given something very valuable to me, and I remember them as my own family."

My e-mail inbox is filled with short remembrances from many of Tobias' long-time colleagues. and I am sure that he will be well memorialized.

Bronislaw Malinowski, in his 1936 article, "Culture as a determinant of behavior" [1]:

Since in my opinion anthropology should begin at home, let me give you an anthropological impression of modern culture and recount a personal experience in which I very poignantly became aware of the power of things over man.

No experience in my exotic wanderings among the Trobrianders and the Chagga, among the Masai and the Pueblo, has ever matched the shock I received in my first contact with American civilization, on my first visit to New York, when I arrived there ten years ago on a fine spring evening and saw the city in its strangeness and exotic beauty. The enormous yet elegant monsters blinking at me through their thousand starry eyes, breathing white steam, giants which crowded in phantastic clusters over the smooth waters of the river, stood before me -- the living, dominating realities of this new culture. During my first few days in New York, I could not shake off the feeling that the strange "genius" of this most modern civilization had become incarnate in the skyscraper, the subway and the ferry boat. Large insects in the shape of automobiles crept along the gutter called street or avenue, subordinate but important. Finally, as a fairly insignificant and secondary by-product of the enormous mechanical reality there appeared the microscopic bacteria, called man, sneaking in and out of subway, skyscraper or automobile, performing some useful service to their masters, but otherwise rather insignificant. Modern civilization is a gigantic hypertrophy of material objects, and contemporary man will still have to fight his battle in order to reassert his dominance over the thing.

References