"One of the most influential early Darwinian racists of the last century was Aleš Hrdlička (1869-1943). As a curator of America’s leading museum of natural history for four decades, Hrdlička was a central figure in the international anthropology movement of the earlytwentieth century. Until recently, he had escaped a book-length treatment about his life.
Hrdlička in 1894 quit his private medical practice and was employed at the New York College for the insane, where he became interested in eugenics. His next position was as a field anthropologist studying the different races under the direction of Harvard University anthropologist Frederic Putnam.
He founded, and became the first curator of, the physical anthropology department of the U. S. National Museum, (now the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History (NMNH)), a position he held for the next 37 years.
Under Dr. Hrdlička’s leadership, the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History became the world’s largest scientific repository of human remains focusing on documenting evidence of human evolution.
--The main motivation for the brain collection was to document the racist belief that some people were lower on the evolutionary ladder than other people.
Under Dr. Hrdlička’s leadership, the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History became the world’s largest scientific repository of human remains focusing on documenting evidence of human evolution.
--The main motivation for the brain collection was to document the racist belief that some people were lower on the evolutionary ladder than other people.
The late Harvard professor Steven Jay Gould coined the term “scientific racists,” for those who attempted to base their racism on science, especially on Darwinism.
In 1926 Dr. Hrdlička became an advisory member of the American Eugenics Society.
He collected what today is called a “wet” collection, i.e., soft tissue, especially human brains, in an effort to document that some races were more highly evolved than others.
He collected what today is called a “wet” collection, i.e., soft tissue, especially human brains, in an effort to document that some races were more highly evolved than others.
--Hrdlička eventually collected hundreds of brains from more than 80 countries.
The most “inferior” race, according to Hrdlička, was the Blacks (or Negroid ‘race’).
Other scientific racists believed that the most primitive human races,lower even than African Blacks, were the Hottentots and Australian aborigines.
Charles Darwin agreed with this assessment and concluded that the “European view [was] that . . . so-called Hottentot women provided a ‘somewhat primitive, grotesque nature of black female sexuality.’” Darwin used the term “Hottentots” in derogatory ways at least seven times in his writings.
Committed Darwinist and racist Aleš Hrdlička served as Curator of Physical Anthropology at the prestigious Smithsonian Institution from 1904 to 1941.
This fact illustrates how entrenched Darwinian racism was in American society in the early part of the last century.
It also illustrates the harm that Darwinism has caused to American society."
CEH