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Hi again,
For those that wanted some more information on Carleton Coon, you might check out:
Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case Against Brown v. Board of Education John P. Jackson, Jr., NYU Press, 2005. “Offering a trenchant assessment of the so-called scientific evidence, Jackson focuses on the 1959 formation of the International Society for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics (IAAEE) whose expressed purpose was to objectively investigate racial differences and publicize their findings. Notable figures included Carleton Putnam, Wesley Critz George, and Carleton Coon. In an attempt to link race, eugenics and intelligence, they launched legal challenges to the ruling [of Brown vs. Board of Education], each chronicled here, that were tried and ultimately unsuccessful.”
By way of a little more background: In “The Origin of Races,” Coon was quite clear about which races were inherently superior to others, e.g., “If Africa was the cradle of mankind, it was only an indifferent kindergarten. Europe and Asia were our principal schools.” Coon helped his cousin, segregationist Carleton Putnam, put together materials from Coon’s work for legal challenges to desegregation. In 1963, the American Association of Physical Anthropologists censured Putnam’s book “Race and Reason: A Yankee View.” Coon, who was president of the Association at the time, resigned in protest.
Ashley Montagu was Coon’s great adversary, as staunchly *against* highlighting racial differences as Coon was *for* doing so. In the 1960s, Coon tried to discredit Montagu by “exposing” Montagu’s “secret” – that he was born Israel Ehrenberg, son of Jewish immigrants to England. Apparently, Coon thought it would be self-evident that a Jewish scholar was not to be trusted. Unfortunately for him, others found his attack repugnant.
Peg
Peg Yacobucci Assistant Professor Bowling Green State University Department of Geology 190 Overman Hall Bowling Green, OH 43403 (419) 372-7982
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Hi all,
Sorry, but I can’t let this go. Carleton Coon was a quite famous racist, who worked quietly behind the scenes in the 1950s and 1960s to help those arguing FOR segregation in the U.S. Publicly, he claimed to be “agnostic” on the issue, but in private he was not.
Peg
Peg Yacobucci Assistant Professor Bowling Green State University Department of Geology 190 Overman Hall Bowling Green, OH 43403 (419) 372-7982
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Fair enough. I regard the multiple-origins hypothesis as one of those ideas that can be, and has been, used for racist purposes although the idea is not inherently racist and people who hold it are not necessarily racist. I'm a bit out of my depth here, but I first read about it in this widely read book:
Coon, Carleton S. (1962) . The Origins of Races. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Coon's work was engagingly written and not overtly racist, though he was accused of racism, e.g., by anthropologist Ashley Montagu, and I do not know the truth of that matter. Coon was certainly curious about how humans developed and whether their physical differences represent climatic adaptations. The results, although often interesting, were inconclusive and further research in this area is evidently discouraged.
Setting all thoughts of racism aside, a scientific question can be framed whether isolated populations of a species can all develop simultaneously into another species -- perhaps under the influence of simultaneous climatic change. To me, this hypothesis seems so complex as to make it extremely unlikely. How many identical mutations would have to occur at once on different continents? Or are we supposed to believe that a preexisting genetic switch was turned on, like industrial melanism in several species of moths?
Warning flags are also raised by these considerations: (1) I know of no other species for which such a complex history has been proposed. (2) Coon based his hypothesis on a very small number of specimens.
One can posit nearly isolated populations receiving new genes from a common source as a far more likely scenario, but this compromise is not what Carleton Coon proposed. Coon thought that H. erectus races in Europe, Asia, and Africa developed regionally and independently into H. sapiens races in the same places. But so far, the molecular evidence, such as the "mitochondrial Eve" tree, seems to indicate that this sort of "genetic leavening" of various races of Homo erectus never happened. Instead, a great wave of Homo sapiens erupted out of Africa and replaced the preexisting populations.
I'm at the extreme edge of my knowledge on the topic, so that will be all for me. But if anyone has heard of another totally interfertile species that is supposed to have developed from multiple lines of ancestors, it would be apt to hear about it now.
Your cousin, Andrew K. Rindsberg
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