 Hi, welcome back to history and philosophy of science and medicine. I'm Matt Brown Today, I'm going to give you a brief overview of the topic of scientific racism There's of course a lot of details to this story that are there in the readings for class but I just want to give you a kind of overview of the significance of this topic and Some of the some of the major aspects of it so the thing about scientific racism is that the history of our modern ideas of race and race is is itself a fairly modern idea is Intertwined with the history of scientific racism, right? So race as a kind of political concept race as a scientific concept and The the use of science in a racist sense are all tied together The emergence of each of the human sciences, okay? Anthropology psychology, etc. Is tied up with the emergence of modern ideas about race the two are Are connected in each in each case we start with natural historians and natural philosophers as early as the 16th century and The modern concept of race we see is developed to explain the superficially obvious differences between human geographical populations as Well as to justify the racist atrocities that Europeans began to instigate throughout the world starting in the 15th century Now at the time some argued that racial differences were merely superficial or environmentally caused But many others insisted that racial differences included deep differences in capacities mental abilities Especially and that the differences were biologically determined, right? So That was a that was a very common view in the 19th century concepts and theories of race were further developed by physical anthropologists evolutionary biologists and others pre-Darwinian scientists like Samuel Morton and Louie Agassi made extensive physiological and anthropological comparisons of members of different races in order to argue that the races were different Hierarchically ordered species, right? So this is known as polygyny That's the idea that the races actually are species with separate origins now Many Darwinians and social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer, for example Use the theory of natural selection itself as a mechanism to justify the racist ideology of biological determinism So Darwinian or or pre-Darwinian Scientific racism was a continuing line and Darwin himself Who certainly didn't fully escaped the racism of his time Does seem to have largely been opposed to a biologically determinist view of racial differences, although It's a complicated historical question And in the early 20th century With the emergence of the new scientific psychology There came attempts to measure the differences in mental abilities. We might say cognitive capacities between races that had been posited by earlier thinkers and defended by Samuel Morton among others on on physiological grounds So a variety of Psychophysical behavioral and cognitive tests were developed in the early days of psychology. That was a big a big part of early psychology and the most infamous of course today is the is the intelligence quotient or IQ in the IQ test And we'll talk a lot in class about And maybe in discord about the IQ test But when IQ test became common in the early 20th century, they were soon, you know added to the repertoire of ways That scientific racism attempted to establish the innate hierarchy of races there's lots of irony here including the fact that the originator of the IQ test Alfred Benet Seems not to have believed that IQ Was a heritable trait or even a single that it measured a single property, which we might call general intelligence But the nevertheless the essentialist biological determinist readings of IQ Grew in popularity right as the test became widespread Particularly in America Now by and large this history of thinking on race Reinforced status quo racism and white supremacy By making it seem natural or inevitable, right? So that's the main sort of function of scientific racism now Some sign some some racists did defend racist and paternalist policies on a Cultural or environmental view of racial differences. So it's not that there's an essential link between biological determinism and scientific racism But historically Biological determinism has been more commonly linked to such policies and it does seem To make racial hierarchy more inevitable right that the ideas seem They're not essentially linked, but that there's there's something there right Today and and a lot of the reading focuses on this it's relatively easy to see the fallacy fallacies and The biases behind such research and there's there's been several prominent analyses You know ghouls probably is the most famous So we'll talk both about the essay version and the presentation will be by a group talking about the book the mismeasure of man But there there have been others of course But I think it's key to note that this this research in its time Was well regarded and considered to be of high quality, right? I Think it's also Important to note that this trend in research is not over This kind of research continues to be done That I would group under the heading of scientific racism it reappears regularly in the press There's a lot of interest in it socially speaking Despite the fact that it always turns out to be of poor quality, right? So the research never holds up to scrutiny But by the time the fallacies and problems have been pointed out the attention of the press has kind of moved on, right? Now let me just say I mean a few things about ghouls You know ghouls provides the kind of classic example of racist values Leading to low-quality science. He describes the case of Morton in detail, and I think we'll see We'll discuss that the details of that later on But this sort of cranial capacity physiological research, you know was aimed at Reinforcing the sort of hierarchy of races And ghouls shows how right Morton's Not exceptional sort of run-of-the-mill 19th century racist values Influenced his work and led him to literally mismeasure, right the skulls in his collection I It's worth noting. There's been some scholarly debate Continuing into recent years about whether ghouls defensive Morton is accurate or whether ghouls also had a kind of biased or problematic Approach, you know my own personal view is that there There are some errors in ghouls analysis, but that in essence he was correct about Morton's biases and their effect And I you know, I think there's even a sense in which ghouls himself falls prey to some of the racist assumptions about You know the kinds of questions that Morton was asking in other words he treats them As meaningful or or or valid questions in some cases when there really aren't So the whole the whole project of finding such racial differences is problematic Not just Morton's biased implementation of the project, but the whole project is problematic Now, I think if you know think about what we've learned in this class already There's really nothing about the processes of science as they exist that prevents biases like racism from being reinforced You know Kuhn would say science is a relatively conservative institution That you know focuses on that's dogmatic right that that Uses the paradigm at hand and doesn't question it and this If you think about the social effect of this especially research that bears on human Interests, you know the human sciences This this often reinforces the status quo, right? Not not because Science itself has some kind of big C conservative political values You know in fact most scientists are not conservative in that sense But because you know the paradigm driven or you might say peer review driven An expert evaluated nature of science makes the change slow. This is the kind of thing Actually that that fire Robin railed against but would have to admit was a was a part of the scientific process I think we could add to this, you know a recognition that scientific careers are still somewhat difficult to access For those with less social privilege, right? So in the past, you know scientific careers were closed To all but white men of means, right? Not even all white men um today, right? Uh, that certainly has gotten better, but there are still You know barriers to access barriers to entry For for the those who are less Less privileged, right? Who have less social privilege? And um, you know these things combine to make it quite difficult, I think to Get rid of the racist ideologies If we can use that word that we're with science from the beginning Or at least have been with these parts of science since their beginnings these these sciences And you know insofar as overcoming them as a project. It's a long-term project, right? um now That said, right Science doesn't need to And doesn't always problematically reinforce the status quo Science does have some capacity to self-correct But it's um, it's you don't get it for free, right? Scientists and society have to carefully foster that capacity um, there has to be openness to alternative perspectives In science, that's what fire oven would say. Um, there has to be consideration of social values And um, something we'll see coming up In the future is that that those values used appropriately say anti-racist or egalitarian values Used appropriately actually have helped debunk Bad science and have led to better methods and results across a variety of fields in the human sciences Um Gould, you know made very clear his own values, right when he was writing about this topic Um in the book Miss measure of man, he cited his personal experience in the civil rights movement and he argued A quote we have a much better chance of accomplishing something significant When we follow our passionate interests and work in areas Of deepest personal meaning, right? So gould was not You know shy about the positive value, uh positive influence of values in science. Um So Those are some of my thoughts on on scientific racism in general Kind of brief overview of the topic We'll get into a lot of the more detailed arguments, uh in class or on discord If you have questions, of course, um, you can always leave them on the on the video here Um, otherwise, I will uh, I will look forward to talking to you later Uh and see you next week