The Decline of Darwinism and the Rise of Jewish Anthropology

The Right Stuff
September 12, 2015

Given the popularity of my Who Opened the Borders? post, I’ve decided that I will be writing a Culture of Critique series for you goys. It will be the meat and potatoes of pertinent information from the book. I still highly recommend you read the work of Kevin MacDonald for the fuller picture.

Two of the biggest lies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are that human beings are born as a blank slate, where our behaviors are merely a product of our social environment, and that race doesn’t exist. It is because of these lies that we have had to deal with a variety of issues, i.e. Third-World immigration, desegregation, interracial violence, racial disparities, etc. The propagation of these lies can be traced back to the decline of Darwinism and the rise of Boasian anthropology. Join me, goyim, as we take a trip into the echoey past of American anthropology.

First, why would Jewish intellectuals in particular be interested in downplaying the biological realities of race/ethnicity? One of the motivations cited by many of the anthropologists discussed in Culture of Critique is their desire to combat racism and anti-Semitism. By downplaying the biological realities of race and ethnicity, people would be less likely to view Jews as an ethnic group, and more likely to view them merely as a religious group.

Franz Boas

Franz Boas is often regarded as the grandfather of modern anthropology. He was an ardent anti-Darwinist and dedicated his entire career to assaulting the idea that race was a primary source of the differences found in mental or social capabilities of human groups. Boas developed the concept of culture which would expunge race from the literature of social science.

Boas was raised in a liberal Jewish household. He married within his ethnic group. He was deeply concerned about anti-Semitism growing up. He often felt alienated from and hostile towards Gentile culture. Needless to say, Boas’s strong Jewish identity certainly played an influential role in his work in the field of anthropology. He served as an anthropology professor at Columbia University.

Boas is most notably known for his 1912 study that claimed to show that the skull shapes (“cranial forms”) of the descendants of European immigrants to the United States altered from those of the original immigrants. Boas offered no explanation for why the changes took place, but if they were real, his finding pretty much wiped out the idea that different racial and ethnic types differ in fixed physical characteristics. Nicholas Wade of the New York Times reported that two anthropologists had reexamined Boas’s data and found that Boas had made some “errors.” Samuel Francis over at VDARE correctly noted that Boas did not simply err but had purposely lied.

Boas’s views conflicted with the prevalent theory of civilizational development, which was strongly associated with race, with European Gentile civilization being the highest level. Boas’s theories were meant to counter racialist theories like those of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Madison Grant. Grant also believed that Jews were engaged in a campaign to discredit racial research:

“It is well-nigh impossible to publish in the American newspapers any reflection upon certain religions or races which are hysterically sensitive even when mentioned by name. . . . Abroad, conditions are fully as bad, and we have the authority of one of the most eminent anthropologists in France that the collection of anthropological measurements and data among French recruits at the outbreak of the Great War was pre-vented by Jewish influence, which aimed to suppress any suggestion of racial differentiation in France.”

An important technique of the Boasian school was to cast doubt on general theories of human evolution by emphasizing the vast diversity and chaotic minutiae of human behavior, as well as the relativity of standards of cultural evaluation. Boas also opposed research on human genetics.

Boas and his students were concerned with pushing their ideological agenda within the American anthropological profession. They succeeded in doing so. In 1902, Franz Boas founded the American Anthropological Association (AAA). By 1915, Boasians controlled the AAA and held a two-thirds majority on its Executive Board. In 1919, Boas proudly stated that “most of the anthropological work done at the present time in the United States” was done by his students at Columbia. By 1926, every major department of anthropology was headed by Boas’s students, the majority of whom were Jewish (quelle surprise!). By the mid-1930s the Boasian view of cultural determination of human behavior had strong influence on social scientists.

Boas’s most influential students were Ruth Benedict, Alexander Goldenweiser, Melville Herskovits, Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Margaret Mead, Paul Radin, Edward Sapir, Leslie Spier, Ashley Montagu, Alexander Lesser, Ruth Bunzel, Gene Weltfish, Esther Schiff Goldfrank, and Ruth Landes. With the exceptions of Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Alfred Kroeber, all were Jewish. It is interesting to note that his best-renowned students were Gentiles, Mead and Benedict. As in many other intellectual movements, Gentiles became publicly visible in movements dominated by Jews. Boas recruited Gentiles into his movement out of concern “that his Jewishness would make his science appear partisan and thus compromised.”

Cultural criticism was a central feature of the two most prominent Boasian works, Coming of Age in Samoa by Mead and Patterns of Culture by Benedict. Both works depicted primitive cultures as being free of war, homicide, and concern with wealth accumulation. Children were not disciplined. Sex was casual, there was little concern with virginity, sexual possessiveness, or paternity confidence. Western societies, then, were the exact opposite of these idyllic paradises. This perpetuated the myth of the noble savage. Benedict suggested that we should study such cultures in order “to pass judgment on the dominant traits of our own civilization.” Both works were subjected to devastating criticisms. Other works have come out disproving their findings.

Beyond Boas

Jewish influence in the social sciences extended far beyond Boas.

By 1968, Jews constituted 20% of the faculty of elite American universities and constituted 30% of the “most liberal” faculty. They also constituted 25% of the social science faculty at elite universities (Rothman & Lichter 1982). At this time, Jews were less than 3% of the US population.

Stephen Jay Gould is another prominent Jewish intellectual in the field of anthropology who pushed the Boasian worldview. Gould was a vocal opponent of evolutionary approaches to human behavior. In 1981, Gould authored The Mismeasure of Man where claimed that craniometry and psychological (IQ) testing were “unfounded” theories developed from the belief in biological determinism. In 1996, Gould released a second edition of his book wherein he challenged the methodology of Herrnstein & Murray’s The Bell Curve. Throughout his career, Gould often failed to rebut arguments against his claims or simply ignored them.

Leon Kamin is another Jewish Boasian anthropologist. Kamin has long been an opponent of the idea of heritability of personal traits. In the book Not in Our Genes, which he co-authored with fellow heebs Richard Lewontin and Steven Rose, they heavily criticized sociobiology, genetic determinism, and evolutionary psychology. The book, which is informed by Marxism, is often criticized for purposely misrepresenting the views of E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins. Kamin also argued that there was zero heritability of IQ.

Another heeb, psychologist Richard Lerner, also rejected the idea of biological determinism in his work Final Solutions: Biology, Predjudice, and Genocide (foreword by Lewtonin from above). Not only does he reject biological determinism, but he rejects environmental determinism as well. This is surely wrong as it would mean that human beings could essentially be programmed to accept any manner of exploitation, including slavery.

Here’s a bonus for all you goys still with me. This little tidbit is not found in Culture of Critique. Jared Diamond (and yes, it echoes), in his book Guns, Germs and Steel, makes the Boasian case against biological determinism, and in favor of environmental determinism, to explain why Eurasian cultures have been so successful while other cultures (African, Amerindian, etc) have not. One of his claims is that these cultures lacked animal species that could be domesticated in order to carry out agriculture. Methinks Jared might be lying.

Conclusion

As we’ve seen, Jewish intellectuals have been extremely influential in anthropology. Their works have been the intellectual foundation for race being considered an arbitrary social construct and for humans being born as blank slates. These intellectuals tend to work in an echo chamber, only citing each other’s research and working together to promote their agenda. When rebuttals are made against their claims, they often ignore them, misrepresent their opponent’s arguments, or lay down extremely rigorous standards for their opponents in order to disqualify their works.

This is still an ongoing battle. We have seen recent growth in the new field of human biodiversity (HBD). Many great thinkers are destroying these false narratives, like Stephen Pinker (who echoes as well, to be fair), Richard Dawkins, Nicholas Wade, Henry Harpending, and Greg Cochran. As advancements in genomics are made, we will have even more information available to us in order to crush these egalitarian narratives.

Sources

MacDonald, Kevin. 1998. The Boasian School of Anthropology and the Decline of Darwinism in the Social Sciences.
MacDonald, Kevin. 1998. Culture of Critique.

Also published on Fanghorn Forest