Nineteenth-Century Attitudes Toward Race
Alfred Russel Wallace - Are Humans One Race or Many? (1870)
Alfred Russel Wallace says that there are two views on race - that mankind is unified or that mankind has always been diverse. He says that those in favor of the unity of mankind say that there are no races without transitions to others and that every race exhibits variations of color, hair, feature, etc., such that there is no gap that separates one race from another. (This idea is that races blend with a variety of skin colors, hair features, body shape, etc, so that there is no distinct difference.) Wallace also says that advocates of the original diversity of man argue that proofs of change in man have never been brought forward and that evidence shows the permanence of man. (This idea of diversity in mankind leads into Wallace's idea of natural selection relating to the permanence of man.)
After Wallace introduces the ideas of mankind as unified or diversified, he discusses natural selection extensively and how it has shaped the human species. His main ideas on natural selection relating to man:
- "Natural selection" is different in man; mental and moral qualities have increasing influence on the well-being of the whole race. Those qualities are dominant factors in human "natural selection." Because of these qualities, man has taken away nature's power of slowly changing the external form and structure of the body.
- "The color of skin is correlated with constitutional peculiarities both in vegetables and animals, so that liability to certain diseases or freedom from them is often accompanied by marked external characters." (Wallace credits Charles Darwin for this idea)
- Through the rapid advancement of mental organization, European races have developed wonderful intellect, while lower races of man and brutes die out. "It is the same great law of 'the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life,' which leads to the inevitable extinction of all those low and mentally undeveloped populations with which Europeans come in contact."
- "The inhabitants of temperate have been superior to those of hotter countries." Northern countries are superior than Southern countries and therefore Northern races thrive over the Southern races. (Europe better than Africa)
- Alfred Russel Wallace believes that man could have been a homogenous race in a long ago period of time. It would have been so long ago, however, that man would still not have developed a wonderful brain, human speech, body form, nor sympathetic or moral feelings. Man was a homogenous race before all those developed. After development of different aspects of man, man became diverse.
