Polygenism
[1] Polygenism has historically been heavily used in service of white supremacist ideas and practices, denying a common origin between European and non-European peoples.
This creation myth asserts that the Asmat themselves came into being when a deity placed carved wooden statues in a ceremonial house and began to beat a drum.
For example, the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate in his Letter to a Priest wrote that he believed Zeus made multiple creations of man and women.
In early classical and medieval geography the idea of polygenism surfaced because of the suggested possibility of there being inhabitants of the antipodes (Antichthones).
In their respective fundamentalist or Orthodox sects, Jewish people, Christians, and Muslims have embraced monogenism in the form that all modern humans ultimately are descended from a single mating pair, named Adam and Eve.
[9][10] To make polygenism compatible with the Biblical account in the early chapters of the Book of Genesis, some argument is needed to the effect that what is in the Bible is incomplete.
In his Concise View from History written in 1800 he maintained that there was a race resulting from a clandestine affair between Eve and the Devil (see Serpent Seed).
[14] In 1591 Giordano Bruno argued that because no one could imagine that the Jews and the Ethiopians had the same ancestry, then God must have either created separate Adams or Africans were the descendants of pre-Adamite races.
In his book Sketches on the History of Man in 1734 Home claimed that the environment, climate, or state of society could not account for racial differences, so that the races must have come from distinct, separate stocks.
[21] Samuel Kneeland wrote an 84-page introduction to the American edition of the book where he laid out evidence which supports polygenist creationism and that the Bible is entirely compatible with multiple Adams.
[23] Biblical polygenists such as Colenso, Louis Agassiz, Josiah Clark Nott and George Gliddon maintained that many of the races on Earth, such as Africans and Asians, were not featured in the Table of Nations in Genesis 10.
[26] In Europe in the 19th century the general public had favored polygenism, as many believed it contradicted the Genesis account and thus was more scientific than religious monogenism.
[34]Historians have suggested that Voltaire's support for polygenism was shaped by his financial investments in French colonial companies, including the Compagnie des Indies.
"[32] In the last two decades of the 18th century polygenism was advocated in England by historian Edward Long and anatomist Charles White, in Germany by ethnographers Christoph Meiners and Georg Forster, and in France by Julien-Joseph Virey.
Georges Cuvier, a French naturalist and zoologist, believed there were three distinct races: the Caucasian ("white"), the Mongolian ("yellow") and the Ethiopian ("black").
[40] Cuvier wrote regarding "Caucasians": The white race, with oval face, straight hair and nose, to which the civilised people of Europe belong and which appear to us the most beautiful of all, is also superior to others by its genius, courage and activity.
[41]Regarding those he termed "Ethiopian", Cuvier wrote: The Negro race ... is marked by a black complexion, crisped or woolly hair, compressed cranium, and a flat nose.
The projection of the lower parts of the face, and the thick lips, evidently approximate it to the monkey tribe; the hordes of which it consists have always remained in the most complete state of utter barbarism.
Scientific polygenism became popular in France in the 1820s in response to James Cowles Prichard's Researches into the Physical History of Man (1813) which was considered a pioneering work of monogenism.
[45] Key French polygenists of this period included the naturalist Jean Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent and Louis-Antoine Desmoulins (1796–1828), a student of Georges Cuvier.
All had contributed to a major ethnological work of 738 pages entitled Types of Mankind which was published in 1854[52] and was a great success; it was followed by a sequel Indigenous Races of the Earth (1857).
Morton's polygenism explicitly stated the Mound Builders were an American Indian race of great antiquity, they did not migrate from Asia, and their physical form has remained essentially unchanged in their descendants.
Oliver Wendell Holmes praised Morton for "the severe and cautious character" of his works, which "from their very nature are permanent data for all future students of ethnology".
An essay of Agassiz promoting this theory with maps of the zoological zones was attached as a preface to Types of Mankind in collaboration with Morton, Gliddon, Nott and others.
[62] The notion that races were separate and came together by hybridism, rather than being variations from a common stock, was cast into doubt with the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859, which Agassiz opposed till his death.
For example, the Hamitic Hypothesis, which argued that certain African populations were the descendants of a proto-white invasion in the ancient past, was influenced by polygenism and continued to hold sway in linguistics and anthropology until the 1950s.
John Thurnam with Joseph Barnard Davis published a work in two volumes under the title of Crania Britannica in 1865, important for craniometry.
Although it took many years, polygenism, which required species to be created in specific geographic locations and to remain immutable, has been almost entirely replaced among scientists by Darwin's theory of evolution from a common ancestor.
[66] At least as late as 1919, the Journal of the American Medical Association published articles that seriously engaged with the possibility that Black and White people might have had separate origins.
[73] In contrast to most of Darwin's supporters, Ernst Haeckel put forward a doctrine of evolutionary polygenism based on the ideas of the linguist and polygenist August Schleicher, in which several different language groups had arisen separately from speechless prehuman Urmenschen, which themselves had evolved from simian ancestors.
