It's rooted in both biblical literalism and the debunked pseudoscientific belief of polygenism.
August 23, 2026 at 9:51 AM
It's rooted in both biblical literalism and the debunked pseudoscientific belief of polygenism.
Nathaniel Shaler (1841-1906). Professor of paleontology and geology at Harvard. Pro-Slavery Aryan supremacist (continuing idea of polygenism), known for writing pieces such as "The [N-word] Problem" for the Atlantic.
February 2, 2026 at 2:57 PM
Nathaniel Shaler (1841-1906). Professor of paleontology and geology at Harvard. Pro-Slavery Aryan supremacist (continuing idea of polygenism), known for writing pieces such as "The [N-word] Problem" for the Atlantic.
Louis Agassiz, professor of zoology and geology at Harvard, founder of their Museum of Comparative Zoology, and promotor of an idea of an "ice age". Also, vocal supporter of a racist idea of "polygenism" (pictured) and promoting scientific racism.
February 2, 2026 at 2:22 PM
Louis Agassiz, professor of zoology and geology at Harvard, founder of their Museum of Comparative Zoology, and promotor of an idea of an "ice age". Also, vocal supporter of a racist idea of "polygenism" (pictured) and promoting scientific racism.
guy who supports polygenism because he believes one species isnt diverse enough
July 10, 2025 at 1:54 AM
guy who supports polygenism because he believes one species isnt diverse enough
It’s the pedantry. It’s the paternalism. It gives them away.
Their “devotion to ‘order’” is rooted in Polygenism (theory that ranked societies and their “evolution” towards “functioning society” based on how dark or light their skin was).
To all the “progress is incremental” people… SAYS WHO?
Their “devotion to ‘order’” is rooted in Polygenism (theory that ranked societies and their “evolution” towards “functioning society” based on how dark or light their skin was).
To all the “progress is incremental” people… SAYS WHO?
January 24, 2025 at 4:30 PM
It’s the pedantry. It’s the paternalism. It gives them away.
Their “devotion to ‘order’” is rooted in Polygenism (theory that ranked societies and their “evolution” towards “functioning society” based on how dark or light their skin was).
To all the “progress is incremental” people… SAYS WHO?
Their “devotion to ‘order’” is rooted in Polygenism (theory that ranked societies and their “evolution” towards “functioning society” based on how dark or light their skin was).
To all the “progress is incremental” people… SAYS WHO?
Nicholai Miklouho-Maclay (1846-1888), Russian of Ukrainian Cossack descent. Used science to refute polygenism (scientific racism), protected rights of indigenous people and actively campaigned against the slave trade and European colonialism.
August 1, 2026 at 4:01 PM
Nicholai Miklouho-Maclay (1846-1888), Russian of Ukrainian Cossack descent. Used science to refute polygenism (scientific racism), protected rights of indigenous people and actively campaigned against the slave trade and European colonialism.
applicants should have incredible attention to detail, be dishonest and racist in equal measure, and be well versed in phrenology, Khazar Theory, and all the arguments in favor of polygenism versus "degeneration theory"
July 5, 2025 at 2:56 AM
applicants should have incredible attention to detail, be dishonest and racist in equal measure, and be well versed in phrenology, Khazar Theory, and all the arguments in favor of polygenism versus "degeneration theory"
Yeah so he's really fucking racist. When he goes to Brazil he writes a letter to his mom about how it offends him to think that a Afrobrazilian lady that serves him food could be considered the same species as him. He also thinks that all the races actually have separate origins (polygenism).
May 30, 2025 at 10:28 AM
Yeah so he's really fucking racist. When he goes to Brazil he writes a letter to his mom about how it offends him to think that a Afrobrazilian lady that serves him food could be considered the same species as him. He also thinks that all the races actually have separate origins (polygenism).
Polygenism and "scientific" racism kept having the problem that people wanted more divisions! It wasn't enough to have just "Caucasian", "Mongoloid", and "Negroid", we had to separate out groups further! "Semite" came from the intersection between polygenism and historical animus for Jewish people
November 24, 2025 at 7:44 PM
Polygenism and "scientific" racism kept having the problem that people wanted more divisions! It wasn't enough to have just "Caucasian", "Mongoloid", and "Negroid", we had to separate out groups further! "Semite" came from the intersection between polygenism and historical animus for Jewish people
my asecs talk
polygenism, monogenism, brownness
I want to begin by saying the talk I’m giving is not the talk I meant to give. As you’ll see I start in one place and end up somewhere else. I apologize if my doing so takes us off topic.
polygenism, monogenism, brownness
I want to begin by saying the talk I’m giving is not the talk I meant to give. As you’ll see I start in one place and end up somewhere else. I apologize if my doing so takes us off topic.
March 31, 2025 at 4:54 PM
my asecs talk
polygenism, monogenism, brownness
I want to begin by saying the talk I’m giving is not the talk I meant to give. As you’ll see I start in one place and end up somewhere else. I apologize if my doing so takes us off topic.
polygenism, monogenism, brownness
I want to begin by saying the talk I’m giving is not the talk I meant to give. As you’ll see I start in one place and end up somewhere else. I apologize if my doing so takes us off topic.
45. Early modern polygenism was generally tied to racist ideas, but was normally less an individual conviction than a means for criticizing religious assumptions. We shouldn't ignore the racist claims of Hume, Voltaire, etc. but describing them as 'polygenists' over-intellectualizes their comments.
August 5, 2025 at 7:43 AM
45. Early modern polygenism was generally tied to racist ideas, but was normally less an individual conviction than a means for criticizing religious assumptions. We shouldn't ignore the racist claims of Hume, Voltaire, etc. but describing them as 'polygenists' over-intellectualizes their comments.
The one-word version makes it a unique category that isn't *really* a woman, like nobody ever writes "tallwoman" or "blondewoman". Likewise, "Semitic" as a label for people is a leftover from the "different races have different origins" "scientific" racism of the 18th and 19th centuries (polygenism)
November 24, 2025 at 7:44 PM
The one-word version makes it a unique category that isn't *really* a woman, like nobody ever writes "tallwoman" or "blondewoman". Likewise, "Semitic" as a label for people is a leftover from the "different races have different origins" "scientific" racism of the 18th and 19th centuries (polygenism)
... then removed in 2020 over Agassiz's racist theories of separate origin of the races (polygenism).
The hall was originally named for Stanford's 1st president, David Starr Jordan, who studied with Agassiz & was a leader in American eugenics movement.
Sorry, had to end on a downer. 😉
The hall was originally named for Stanford's 1st president, David Starr Jordan, who studied with Agassiz & was a leader in American eugenics movement.
Sorry, had to end on a downer. 😉
Stanford will rename campus spaces named for David Starr Jordan and relocate statue depicting Louis Agassiz
President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and the Board of Trustees approved a campus committee’s recommendation both to remove Jordan’s name from campus spaces and to take steps to make his multifaceted history...
news.stanford.edu
April 1, 2025 at 12:59 AM
... then removed in 2020 over Agassiz's racist theories of separate origin of the races (polygenism).
The hall was originally named for Stanford's 1st president, David Starr Jordan, who studied with Agassiz & was a leader in American eugenics movement.
Sorry, had to end on a downer. 😉
The hall was originally named for Stanford's 1st president, David Starr Jordan, who studied with Agassiz & was a leader in American eugenics movement.
Sorry, had to end on a downer. 😉
Like “racialism” or “polygenism”
August 23, 2026 at 8:22 AM
Like “racialism” or “polygenism”
8) Lovecraft is essentially arguing that the more-or-less commonality of humanity (the “one or two earlier primate species” suggests the lingering influence of Haeckel’s polygenism) is a vacuous truth; technically correct but irrelevant.
December 8, 2024 at 6:16 PM
8) Lovecraft is essentially arguing that the more-or-less commonality of humanity (the “one or two earlier primate species” suggests the lingering influence of Haeckel’s polygenism) is a vacuous truth; technically correct but irrelevant.
Every now and then I remember that the CCP’s position is low-key that Chinese people are a separately-evolved part of humanity.
(See particularly Peking Man and the CCP’s continued funding of research into polygenism and rejection of Out-Of-Africa theory).
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
(See particularly Peking Man and the CCP’s continued funding of research into polygenism and rejection of Out-Of-Africa theory).
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
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pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
June 6, 2026 at 4:15 PM
Every now and then I remember that the CCP’s position is low-key that Chinese people are a separately-evolved part of humanity.
(See particularly Peking Man and the CCP’s continued funding of research into polygenism and rejection of Out-Of-Africa theory).
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
(See particularly Peking Man and the CCP’s continued funding of research into polygenism and rejection of Out-Of-Africa theory).
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
'All in all, polygenism has been hugely influential in American scientific racism and its fallout. Indeed, you cannot fully understand American racism without understanding polygenism and its history. So how did polygenism first gain traction?'
Modern racism rests on scientific theories from the 19th century | Aeon Essays
Confused 17th-century Europeans argued that human groups were separately created, a precursor to racist thought today
aeon.co
July 12, 2024 at 9:02 AM
'All in all, polygenism has been hugely influential in American scientific racism and its fallout. Indeed, you cannot fully understand American racism without understanding polygenism and its history. So how did polygenism first gain traction?'
Ah yes, the famously apolitical polygenism, backed up by nothing but the cold hard science of craniology. No political beliefs underlying that one!
Honestly baffled that any academic could hold the belief that science was entirely apolitical until “critical social justice” came along. Really do not think we are training scientists well
![By 'politicization of science', we mean the invasion of ideology into the scientific enterprise. Today, the greatest such threat comes from a set of ideological viewpoints collectively referred to as Critical Social Justice (CS]) (Pluckrose 2021; Pluckrose and Lindsay 2020). But the term is a disarming euphemism; there is nothing 'critical' about the movement in any positive sense, and the movement has about as much to do with social justice as Orwell's Ministry of Love had to do with love. The ideology, with philosophical roots in Marxism, postmodernism, and their offshoots (Pluckrose and Lindsay 2020), fundamentally conflicts with the liberal Enlightenment - the foundation of humanism, democracy, and modern science - the ideas that have made the world healthier, wealthier, better educated, and in many ways more tolerant and less violent than it has ever been (Pinker 2011 2018).](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:46e3r3fp37dl3alwheajaez7/bafkreiay3ab3h2x23bmnn4bzxdwjeqpll2ecc5frkhjy5cl75ocd66jhbq)
November 26, 2023 at 8:54 PM
Ah yes, the famously apolitical polygenism, backed up by nothing but the cold hard science of craniology. No political beliefs underlying that one!
Polygenism would be quite a bit more popular; evolution would probably have been viable earlier.
May 26, 2025 at 12:50 PM
Polygenism would be quite a bit more popular; evolution would probably have been viable earlier.
Historically, Black people and other non-European populations were sometimes referred to as a separate "species" by white Western theorists. This concept is known today as scientific racism or polygenism. It has been thoroughly debunked and rejected by modern genetics and anthropology.
Poor Sandy.
Poor Sandy.
July 18, 2026 at 12:59 PM
Historically, Black people and other non-European populations were sometimes referred to as a separate "species" by white Western theorists. This concept is known today as scientific racism or polygenism. It has been thoroughly debunked and rejected by modern genetics and anthropology.
Poor Sandy.
Poor Sandy.
A couple of years earlier, in 1853, he makes an observation in a letter to his mother that has always suggested to me an awareness--at 17--of theories of polygenism. www.marktwainproject.org/letters/uccl...
Samuel L. Clemens to Jane Lampton Clemens, 24 August 1853 · New York, N.Y | The Letters of Mark Twain
www.marktwainproject.org
August 3, 2026 at 1:09 AM
A couple of years earlier, in 1853, he makes an observation in a letter to his mother that has always suggested to me an awareness--at 17--of theories of polygenism. www.marktwainproject.org/letters/uccl...
Morton was progressive on race where Lovecraft was conservative; James F. Morton was an early member of the NAACP and had authored a tract on "The Curse of Race Prejudice" which you can still read today. They were in a discussion on such matters when HPL brought Keith's polygenism into it.
December 19, 2025 at 2:53 PM
Morton was progressive on race where Lovecraft was conservative; James F. Morton was an early member of the NAACP and had authored a tract on "The Curse of Race Prejudice" which you can still read today. They were in a discussion on such matters when HPL brought Keith's polygenism into it.
It didn't take much for the gender criticals to embrace Nazi (psuedo) scientific racism.
I wonder if they'll get Hilary Cass to resurrect Polygenism and all the evils born of it.
I wonder how long before Graham Lineham makes a post of himself as an ubermensch. 🙄
I wonder if they'll get Hilary Cass to resurrect Polygenism and all the evils born of it.
I wonder how long before Graham Lineham makes a post of himself as an ubermensch. 🙄
May 29, 2025 at 3:12 AM
It didn't take much for the gender criticals to embrace Nazi (psuedo) scientific racism.
I wonder if they'll get Hilary Cass to resurrect Polygenism and all the evils born of it.
I wonder how long before Graham Lineham makes a post of himself as an ubermensch. 🙄
I wonder if they'll get Hilary Cass to resurrect Polygenism and all the evils born of it.
I wonder how long before Graham Lineham makes a post of himself as an ubermensch. 🙄
i was reading a paper about darwin and thought itd be funny/weird if he like tried to do polygenism wokely
July 10, 2025 at 2:07 AM
i was reading a paper about darwin and thought itd be funny/weird if he like tried to do polygenism wokely