Scientific Anti-racism
Friedrich Tiedemann was one the first persons to make a scientific contestation of racism. In 1836 he argued based on craniometric and brain measures taken by him from Europeans and black people from different parts of the world that the then commom European belief that negroes have smaller brains and are thus intellectually inferior is scientifically unfounded and based merely on the prejudice of travellers and explorers.
At the start of the 20th century the work of anthropologists trying to end the paradigms of cultural evolutionism and social darwinism within social sciences such as Franz Boas, Marcel Mauss, Bronislaw Malinowski, Pierre Clastres and Claude Lévi-Strauss was foundational to the end of racism in human sciences and the establishment of cultural relativism as the new dominant paradigm.
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Famous quotes containing the word scientific:
“I am not afraid of the priests in the long-run. Scientific method is the white ant which will slowly but surely destroy their fortifications. And the importance of scientific method in modern practical life—always growing and increasing—is the guarantee for the gradual emancipation of the ignorant upper and lower classes, the former of whom especially are the strength of the priests.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)