Word: blumenbach
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...problem is far more complicated than that, as any scientist who has tried merely to determine the biological races has discovered. Among the first to try was the German zoologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1775. On the basis of physical characteristics, he saw five human subspecies or races-a term possibly deriving from the Arabic rds (beginning). Blumenbach divided humans into races that he called Caucasian (white), Mongolian (yellow), Ethiopian (black), American (copper) and Malay (brown...
...Blumenbach's century, other naturalists and philosophers disputed his arbitrary racial census; with equal arbitrariness, it has been reduced and expanded many times in the 192 years since. Sorting men into groups according to their differences may seem a simple task. But even now, anthropologists argue heatedly on how to do it. They have partitioned the human species into anywhere from two to 200 races; some anthropologists maintain that humanity cannot or should not be subdivided into races at all. The debate does not particularly concern the great majority of nonexperts. Man's eyes tell him that...
| 1 |