Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s book The Ends of Race: The Rise and Fall of a Scientific Myth examines how nineteenth-century scientists tried to establish biological divisions among human groups and rank them in fixed racial categories. The studies relied on methods including skull and facial measurements, and were shaped by social and political interests, including slavery.
Among the figures discussed are US anthropologist Josiah Nott and French anthropologist Julien-Joseph Virey, who presented Black people as biologically inferior using evidence that the book describes as deeply flawed. Nott argued that human races were separate species and claimed that interbreeding between distant groups produced weak or infertile offspring.
US physician Samuel George Morton developed another influential version of the theory during the 1830s. He argued that skull size and shape reflected brain size and intellectual ability, then ranked racial groups according to average cranial measurements, placing Caucasians first and people he classified as Ethiopians last.
Harpham traces the origins of this thinking partly to Carl Linnaeus’s 1735 system for classifying living organisms. Although Linnaeus’s taxonomy was a major scientific achievement, it also encouraged later researchers to treat human differences as divisions comparable to those between species.
The book emphasizes that slavery provided an important context for these claims. Nott and Morton portrayed racial hierarchies as permanent laws of nature, helping to legitimize existing relationships between enslavers and enslaved people. Their ideas received little opposition at the time because they served the interests of those benefiting from slavery.
The story changed around 1900, when scholars began publishing research that challenged the oppressive theories of race science. According to the account, the concept of biological race was eventually discredited through the use of more reliable scientific approaches, making its rejection an example of scientific self-correction.
Once natural science moved away from race as a biological reality, writers including W. E. B. Du Bois could instead develop an understanding of race as a social and cultural identity, including as a basis for solidarity among Black people. Harpham’s account presents this shift as a constructive outcome of dismantling a scientific myth, while noting that the effects of the earlier theories remain present.
Sources: Nature.