Samuel Morton
Samuel George Morton (* 1799 ; † 1851 ) was an American anthropologist and racial theorist . He is considered the first American paleontologist and was, among other things, President of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia . In 1845 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .
Morton had a collection of nearly 1,000 human skulls. By measuring their interior volume, he tried - before Darwin's theory of evolution - to clarify whether the human populations that were then called races were to be classified as different species and thus created separately or created in a single act of creation . Morton's empirical approach to precisely measure a large number of objects of different origins was groundbreaking in his era.
Morton was later accused of correlating races and brain volume on the assumption that the primacy of the white race could be justified biologically from this. More recently, Stephen Jay Gould in particular had accused him, first in 1978 of the journal Science and later in his book The Mismeasure of Man, of having worked with prejudice and only published the data of selected skulls. This device had led to the result that he could describe the European race as those with the highest intellectual disposition; only then did the Asians, the “ Indians ” called native Americans, and finally the black slaves follow . Morton was therefore described by Gould as one of the leading racists of his time.
In his work Crania Americana , Morton summarizes the races as follows: The white race has the highest intelligence and has produced the most important people. Morton already placed the Asians well below the whites. In this context, he mentioned that while Asians are capable of some kind of civilization, they occasionally behave like monkeys. The American race (meaning the natives) is incapable of culture, is aggressive and childish. The blacks would be different from other races in their moral character. You would have a talent for music and the ability to imitate others. In addition, these would "surrender to their fate".
In 2011, however, a research team led by Jason E. Lewis ( Stanford University ) reported that a re-measurement of around half of the skulls in Morton's collection had shown that his measurements and the data reported in his publications were correct. At the same time, Gould was accused of having interpreted Morton's work with prejudice on his part.
Web links
- Who Owns the Past? - English language information on pbs.org
- Native Americans and Anthropologists. - English language information at Palomar College
Individual evidence
- ↑ Stephen Jay Gould : Morton's ranking of races by cranial capacity. Unconscious manipulation of data may be a scientific norm. In: Science . Volume 200, No. 4341, 1978, pp. 503-509, doi: 10.1126 / science.347573
- ↑ Crania Americana; or, A Comparative View of the Skulls of Various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America: To which is Prefixed An Essay on the Varieties of the Human Species. Philadelphia: J. Dobson 1839.
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↑ Jason E. Lewis et al .: The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias. In: PLoS Biol . 9 (6): e1001071, doi: 10.1371 / journal.pbio.1001071
David DeGusta, Jason E. Lewis: Taking the measure of Gould's skulls. In: New Scientist. Volume 211, No. 2822, 2011. pp. 24-25, published online under the title Gould's skulls: Is bias inevitable in science?
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Morton, Samuel |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Morton, Samuel George |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American anthropologist and racial theorist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1799 |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1851 |