1: RACE AND THE ORIGINS DEBATE


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humans into twelve different species, subdivided into 36 different races. Referring to an earlier classification of the human races than his own, he wrote:


“All these five races of men, according to the Jewish legend of creation, are said to have descended from ‘a single pair’—Adam and Eve, and in accordance with this are said to be varieties of one kind or species. … The excellent paleontologist Quenstedt29


is right in


maintaining that, ‘if Negroes and Caucasians were snails, zoologists would universally agree that they represented two very distinct species, which could never have originated from one pair by gradual divergence.’”30


Haeckel’s attempted ridicule of the biblical account shows that the Bible is antiracism, and that this was noted well before that stance became fashionable.


That his views were driven by ideology more than science is shown in the very same work (pp. 433–434), where Haeckel confirms that there were anthropologists in strong disagreement with his stance on race:


“… there can be no doubt that the innumerable races and varieties of our domestic dog differ in a much greater degree from one another than the different genera and species distinguished by the zoologist in his systematic arrangement of the Dog-tribe. And yet they are generally regarded only as varieties of one single species—Canis familiaris. In the same way most anthropologists dogmatically and firmly hold to the so-called ‘unity of species’ for all the races of Men, and unite them into one species, as Homo sapiens. However, the unprejudiced and critical enquirer, when carefully comparing them, cannot rid himself of the


29. Friedrich August von Quenstedt (1809–1889). 30. Haeckel, E. The History of Creation, or the development of the Earth and its inhabitants by the action of natural causes, vol II, English edition translated from the 8th


German Edition by Prof. Ray Lankester, Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, 1909,


pp. 412–413. See also Niekerk, E. van, Ernst Haeckel: a hostile witness to the truth of the Bible, creation.com/haeckel2, 3 March 2011.


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