Johann Friedrich Blumenbach

Blumenbach's five races

Blumenbach explored the biodiversity of humans mainly by comparing skull anatomy and skin color. His work included a description of sixty human crania (skulls) published originally in fascicules as Decas craniorum (Göttingen, 1790–1828). This was a founding work for other scientists in the field of craniometry. He established a five-part naming system in 1795 to describe what he called generis humani varietates quinae principes, species vero unica (five principal varieties of humankind, but one species). In his view, humans could be divided into varieties (only in his later work he adopted the term "races", which had been introduced by others) but he was aware that a clear separation was difficult:

All national differences in the form and colour of the human body [. . .] run so insensibly, by so many shades and transitions one into the other, that it is impossible to separate them by any but very arbitrary limits.[16]

Blumenbach's classification of the single human species into five varieties (later called "races") (1793/1795):

• the Caucasian or white race. Blumenbach was the first to use this term for Europeans, and he also included Middle Easterners and South Asians in the same category.[17]
• the Mongolian or yellow race, including all East Asians.
• the Malayan or brown race, including Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders.
• the Ethiopian or black race, including all sub-Saharan Africans.
• the American or red race, including all Native Americans.

Blumenbach assumed that all morphological differences between the varieties were induced by the climate and the way of living and he emphasized that the differences in morphology were so small, gradual and transiently connected that it was not possible to separate these varieties clearly.[16] He also noted that skin color was unsuitable for distinguishing varieties. He placed the Caucasian form in the center of his description as being the most beautiful and the most "primitive" or "primeval" one from which the other forms "degenerated". In the 18th century, however, these terms did not have the negative connotations they possess today. At the time, "primitive" or "primeval" described the ancestral form, while "degeneration" was understood to be the process of change leading to a variety adapted to a new environment by being exposed to a different climate and diet.[16] Hence, he argued that physical characteristics like skin color, cranial profile, etc., depended on geography, diet, and mannerism. Further anatomical study led him to the conclusion that "individual Africans differ as much, or even more, from other Africans as from Europeans".[16]

Like other monogenists such as Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Blumenbach held to the "degenerative hypothesis" of racial origins. Blumenbach claimed that Adam and Eve were Caucasian inhabitants of Asia,[18] and that other races came about by degeneration from environmental factors such as the sun and poor diet. Thus, he claimed, Negroid pigmentation arose because of the result of the heat of the tropical sun, while the cold wind caused the tawny colour of the Eskimos, and the Chinese were fair-skinned compared to the other Asian stocks because they kept mostly in towns protected from environmental factors. He believed that the degeneration could be reversed in a proper environmental control and that all contemporary forms of man could revert to the original Caucasian race.[19]

Moreover, he concluded that Africans were not inferior to the rest of mankind "concerning healthy faculties of understanding, excellent natural talents and mental capacities":[20]

Finally, I am of opinion that after all these numerous instances I have brought together of negroes of capacity, it would not be difficult to mention entire well-known provinces of Europe, from out of which you would not easily expect to obtain off-hand such good authors, poets, philosophers, and correspondents of the Paris Academy; and on the other hand, there is no so-called savage nation known under the sun which has so much distinguished itself by such examples of perfectibility and original capacity for scientific culture, and thereby attached itself so closely to the most civilized nations of the earth, as the Negro.[21]

He did not consider his "degenerative hypothesis" as racist and sharply criticized Christoph Meiners, an early practitioner of scientific racialism, as well as Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring, who concluded from autopsies that Africans were an inferior race.[22] Blumenbach wrote three other essays stating non-white peoples were capable of excelling in arts and sciences in reaction against racialists of his time.[23] At his time, Blumenbach was perceived as anti-racist and he strongly opposed the practice of slavery and the belief of the inherent savagery of the coloured races.[24]

Alexander von Humboldt wrote on his and Blumenbach's view: "While we maintain the unity of the human species, we at the same time repel the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races".[25]

However, selected parts of his views were later used by others to encourage scientific racism.[26][16]

In his dissertation, Blumenbach mentioned the name Simia troglodytes in connection with a short description for the common chimpanzee. This dissertation was printed and appeared in September 1775, but only for internal use in the University of Göttingen and not for providing a public record. The public print of his dissertation appeared in 1776.[27] Blumenbach knew that Carl Linnaeus had already established a name Homo troglodytes for a badly known primate, and in 1779 he discussed this Linnean name and concluded correctly that Linnaeus had been dealing with two species, a human and an orangutan, neither of which was a chimpanzee, and that by consequence the name Homo troglodytes could not be used. Blumenbach was one of the first scientists to understand the identities of the different species of primates, which were (excluding humans) orangutans and chimpanzees. (Gorillas were not known to Europeans at this time). In Opinion 1368 the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) decided in 1985 that Blumenbach's view should be followed, and that his Simia troglodytes as published by Blumenbach in 1779 shall be the type species of the genus Pan and, since it was the oldest available name for the common chimpanzee, be used for this species.[28] However, the commission did not know that Blumenbach had already mentioned this name in his dissertation. Following the rules of the ICZN Code the scientific name of one of the most well-known African animals, currently known as Pan troglodytes, must carry Blumenbach's name combined with the date 1776.[29]

Blumenbach shortly afterward wrote a manual of natural history entitled Handbuch der Naturgeschichte; 12 editions and some translations. It was published first in Göttingen by J. C. Dieterich in 1779/1780. He was also one of the first scientists to study the anatomy of the platypus, assigning the scientific name Ornithorhynchus paradoxus to the animal, being unaware George Shaw had already given it the name Platypus anatinus. However, Platypus had already been shown to be used for the scientific name for a genus of Ambrosia beetles so Blumenbach's scientific name for the genus was used.[30]

Blumenbach made many contributions to the scientific debates of the last half of the 18th century regarding evolution and creation. His central contribution was in the conception of a vis formativus or Bildungstrieb, an inborn force within an organism that led it to create, maintain, and repair its shape.[31]

Enlightenment science and philosophy essentially held a static view of nature and man, but vital nature continued to interrupt this view, and the issue of life, the creation of life and its varieties, increasingly occupied attention and "starting in the 1740s the concept of vital power reentered the scene of generation ... there must be some 'productive power' in nature that enabled unorganized material to generate new living forms."[32]

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon wrote an influential work in 1749, Natural History, that revived interest in vital nature. Buffon held that there were certain penetrating powers which organised the organic particles that made up the living organism. Erasmus Darwin translated Buffon's idea of organic particles into "molecules with formative propensities" and in Germany Buffon's idea of an internal order, moule interieur arising out of the action of the penetrating powers was translated into German as Kraft (power).[32]

The German term for vital power or living power, Lebenskraft, as distinct from chemical or physical forces, first appeared with Medicus's on the Lebenskraft (1774).[32] Scientists were now forced to consider hidden and mysterious powers of and in living matter that resisted physical laws – warm-blooded animals maintaining a consistent temperature despite changing outside temperatures, for example.

In 1759, Caspar Friedrich Wolff, a German embryologist provided evidence for the ancient idea of epigenesis, that is preformed life, that is a chick out of unformed substance and his dispute with Albrecht von Haller brought the issue of life to the forefront of natural science and philosophy. Wolff identified an "essential power" (essentliche Kraft, or vis essentialis) that allowed structure to be a result of power, "the very power through which, in the vegetable body, all those things which we describe as life are effected."[32]

While Wolff was not concerned to name this vital organising, reproducing power, in 1780 Blumenbach posited a formative drive (nisus formativus or Bildungstrieb) responsible for biological "procreation, nourishment, and reproduction", as well as self-development and self-perfection on a cultural level.[33]

Blumenbach held that all living organisms "from man down to maggots, and from the cedar to common mould or mucor", possess an inherent "effort or tendency which, while life continues, is active and operative; in the first instance to attain the definite form of the species, then to preserve it entire, and, when it is infringed upon, so far as this is possible, to restore it." This power of vitality is "not referable to any qualities merely physical, chemical, or mechanical."[32]

Blumenbach compared the uncertainty about the origin and ultimate nature of the formative drive to similar uncertainties about gravitational attraction: "just in the same way as we use the name of attraction or gravity to denote certain forces, the causes of which however still remain hid, as they say, in Cimmerian darkness, the formative force (nisus formativus) can explain the generation of animals."[32]

At the same time, befitting the central idea of the science and medicine of dynamic polarity, it was also the physiological functional identity of what theorists of society or mind called "aspiration". Blumenbach's Bildungstrieb found quick passage into evolutionary theorizing of the decade following its formulation and in the thinking of the German natural philosophers.[34]

One of Blumenbach's contemporaries, Samuel Hahnemann, undertook to study in detail how this generative, reproductive and creative power, which he termed the Erzeugungskraft of the Lebenskraft of living power of the organism, could be negatively affected by inimical agents to engender disease.

Gravestone

Kant is said by several modern authors to have relied on Blumenbach's biological concept of formative power in developing his idea of organic purpose.[32][35] Kant wrote to Blumenbach in 1790 to praise his concept of the formative force (Bildungstrieb). However, whereas Kant had a heuristic concept in mind, to explain mechanical causes, Blumenbach conceived of a cause fully resident in nature. From this he would argue that the Bildungstrieb was central to the creation of new species. Though Blumenbach left no overt indications of sources for his theory of biological revolution, his ideas harmonize with those of Charles Bonnet and especially with those of his contemporary Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), and it was Herder whose ideas were influenced by Blumenbach. Blumenbach continued to refine the concept in his De nisu formativo et generationis negotio ('On the Formative Drive and the Operation of Generation', 1787) and in the second edition (1788) of the Handbuch der Naturgeschichte: 'it is a proper force (eigentliche Kraft), whose undeniable existence and extensive effects are apparent throughout the whole of nature and revealed by experience'.[36] He consolidated these in the second edition of Über den Bildungstrieb.

Blumenbach had initially been an advocate of Haller's view, in contrast to those of Wolff, that the essential elements of the embryo were already in the egg, he later sided with Wolff. Blumenbach provided evidence for the actual existence of this formative force, to distinguish it from other, merely nominal terms.

The way in which the Bildungstrieb differed, perhaps, from other such forces was in its comprehensive architectonic character: it directed the formation of anatomical structures and the operations of physiological processes of the organism so that various parts would come into existence and function interactively to achieve the ends of the species.[36]