Mid-century Contention in The United Kingdom
Around 1850 polygenism was a rising intellectual trend. On the other hand monogenism retained support in London's learned societies. The Ethnological Society of London had the monogenist tradition of Thomas Hodgkin and James Cowles Prichard, continuing in Robert Gordon Latham. Others on that side of the debate were William Benjamin Carpenter, Charles Darwin, Edward Forbes, Henry Holland, Charles Lyell, and Richard Owen. The direction of the Ethnological Society was challenged by James Hunt, a polygenist who became secretary in 1859, and John Crawfurd, who was president two years later, who believed in a large number of separately created racial groups.
In the face of advocates of polygenism, monogenism received a second wind after the recognition of the antiquity of man, and the almost simultaneous publication of Darwin's theory of evolution. Once the biblical timescale of 6000 years was dropped, the objections to environmentalist monogenism were weakened, since the "unity and migration" hypothesis of the origins of human diversity could operate over tens of thousands of years. Since polygenists such as Hunt and Crawfurd were opponents of Darwin, monogenism became part of a larger debate on evolution.
Read more about this topic: Monogenism
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