Humanist Views
In scientific and anthropological circles during the 1850s and 1860s there was much discussion connected with the study of human races and the interpretation of racial peculiarities. There were some anthropologists like Samuel Morton, who tried to prove that not all human races are of equal worth, and that "white people" are predestined by "natural selection" to rule over the "coloured" races. This attitude was used to justify slavery and colonialism.
Scientists like Ernst Haeckel, a teacher of the young Miklouho-Maclay, relegated what they regarded as culturally "backward" people like Papuans, Bushmen and others to the role of 'intermediate links' between Europeans and their animal ancestors. While adhering to Darwin's theory of evolution, Miklouho-Maclay diverged from these racist concepts, and it was this question that led Miklouho-Maclay to gather scientific facts and to study the dark-skinned inhabitants of New Guinea. On the basis of his comparative anatomical research, Miklouho-Maclay was one of first anthropologists to refute polygenism and scientific racism, the view that the different races of mankind belonged to different species and that some human races were inferior.
You were the first to demonstrate beyond question by your experience that man is man everywhere, that is, a kind, sociable being with whom communication can and should be established through kindness and truth, not guns and spirits. I do not know what contribution your collections and discoveries will make to the science for which you serve, but your experience of contacting the primitive peoples will make an epoch in the science for which I serve i. e. the science which teaches how human beings should live with one another.
— Leo Tolstoy, to N. N. Miklhouho-Maclay, September 1886
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