Recapitulation also provided an irresistible criterion for any scientist who wanted to rank human groups as higher and lower. The adults of inferior groups must be like children of superior groups, for the child represents a primitive adult ancestor. If adult blacks and women are like white male children, then they are living representatives of an ancestral stage in the evolution of white males. An anatomical theory for ranking races—based on entire bodies, not only on heads—had been found.
Recapitulation served as a general theory of biological determinism. All “inferior” groups—races, sexes, and classes—were compared with the children of white males. E. D. Cope, the celebrated American paleontologist who elucidated the mechanism of recapitulation (see Gould, 1977, pp. 85–91), identified four groups of lower human forms on this criterion: nonwhite races, all women, southern as opposed to northern European whites, and lower classes within superior races (1887, pp. 291–293—Cope particularly despised “the lower classes of the Irish”). Cope preached the doctrine of Nordic supremacy and agitated to curtail the immigration of Jews and southern Europeans to America. To explain the inferiority of southern Europeans in recapitulatory terms, he argued that warmer climates impose an earlier maturation. Since maturation signals the slowdown and cessation of bodily development, southern Europeans are caught in a more childlike, hence primitive, state as adults. Superior northerners move on to higher stages before a later maturation cuts off their development:
There can be little doubt that in the Indo-European race maturity in some respects appears earlier in tropical than in northern regions; and though subject to many exceptions, this is sufficiently general to be looked upon as a rule. Accordingly, we find in that race—at least in the warmer regions of Europe and America—a larger proportion of certain qualities which are more universal in women, as greater activity of the emotional nature when compared with the judgment.… Perhaps the more northern type left all that behind in its youth (1887, pp. 162–163).
Recapitulation provided a primary focus for anthropometric, particularly craniometric, arguments about the ranking of races. The brain, once again, played a dominant role. Louis Agassiz, in a creationist context, had already compared the brain of adult blacks with that of a white fetus seven months old. We have already cited (p. 103) Vogt’s remarkable statement equating the brains of adult blacks and white women with those of white male children and explaining, on this basis, the failure of black people to build any civilization worthy of his notice.
Cope also focused upon the skull, particularly upon “those important elements of beauty, a well-developed nose and beard” (1887, pp. 288–290), but he also derided the deficient calf musculature of blacks:
Two of the most prominent characters of the negro are those of immature stages of the Indo-European race in its characteristic types. The deficient calf is the character of infants at a very early stage; but, what is more important, the flattened bridge of the nose and shortened nasal cartilages are universally immature conditions of the same parts in the Indo-European.… In some races—e.g., the Slavic—this undeveloped character persists later than in some others. The Greek nose, with its elevated bridge, coincides not only with aesthetic beauty, but with developmental perfection.
In 1890 American anthropologist D. G. Brinton summarized the argument with a paean of praise for measurement:
The adult who retains the more numerous fetal, infantile or simian traits, is unquestionably inferior to him whose development has progressed beyond them.… Measured by these criteria, the European or white race stands at the head of the list, the African or negro at its foot.… All parts of the body have been minutely scanned, measured and weighed, in order to erect a science of the comparative anatomy of the races (1890, p. 48).
If anatomy built the hard argument of recapitulation, psychic development offered a rich field for corroboration. Didn’t everyone know that savages and women are emotionally like children? Despised groups had been compared with children before, but the theory of recapitulation gave this old chestnut the respectability of main-line scientific theory. “They’re like children” was no longer just a metaphor of bigotry; it now embodied a theoretical claim that inferior people were literally mired in an ancestral stage of superior groups.
G. Stanley Hall, then America’s leading psychologist, stated the general argument in 1904: “Most savages in most respects are children, or, because of sexual maturity, more properly, adolescents of adult size” (1904, vol. 2, p. 649). A. F. Chamberlain, his chief disciple, opted for the paternalistic mode: “Without primitive peoples, the world at large would be much what in small it is without the blessing of children.”
The recapitulationists extended their argument to an astonishing array of human capacities. Cope compared prehistoric art with the sketches of children and living “primitives” (1887, p. 153): “We find that the efforts of the earliest races of which we have any knowledge were quite similar to those which the untaught hand of infancy traces on its slate or the savage depicts on the rocky faces of cliffs.” James Sully, a leading English psychologist, compared the aesthetic senses of children and savages, but gave the edge to children (1895, p. 386):
In much of this first crude utterance of the aesthetic sense of the child we have points of contact with the first manifestations of taste in the race. Delight in bright, glistening things, in gay things, in strong contrasts of color, as well as in certain forms of movement, as that of feathers—the favorite personal adornment—this is known to be characteristic of the savage and gives to his taste in the eyes of civilized man the look of childishness. On the other hand, it is doubtful whether the savage attains to the sentiment of the child for the beauty of flowers.
Herbert Spencer, the apostle of social Darwinism, offered a pithy summary (1895, pp. 89–90): “The intellectual traits of the uncivilized … are traits recurring in the children of the civilized.”
Since recapitulation became a focus for the general theory of biological determinism, many male scientists extended the argument to women. E. D. Cope claimed that the “metaphysical characteristics” of women were
… very similar in essential nature to those which men exhibit at an early stage of development.… The gentler sex is characterized by a greater impressibility; … warmth of emotion, submission to its influence rather than that of logic; timidity and irregularity of action in the outer world. All these qualities belong to the male sex, as a general rule, at some period of life, though different individuals lose them at very various periods.… Probably most men can recollect some early period of their lives when the emotional nature predominated—a time when emotion at the sight of suffering was more easily stirred than in maturer years.… Perhaps all men can recall a period of youth when they were hero-worshippers—when they felt the need of a stronger arm, and loved to look up to the powerful friend who could sympathize with and aid them. This is the “woman stage” of character (1887, p. 159).
In what must be the most absurd statement in the annals of biological determinism, G. Stanley Hall—again, I remind you, not a crackpot, but America’s premier psychologist—invoked the higher suicide rates of women as a sign of their primitive evolutionary status (1904, vol. 2, p. 194):
This is one expression of a profound psychic difference between the sexes. Woman’s body and soul is phyletically older and more primitive, while man is more modern, variable, and less conservative. Women are always inclined to preserve old customs and ways of thinking. Women prefer passive methods; to give themselves up to the power of elemental forces, as gravity, when they throw themselves from heights or take poison, in which methods of suicide they surpass man. Havelock Ellis thinks drowning is becoming more frequent, and that therein women are becoming more womanly.
As a justification for imperialism, recapitulation offered too much promise to remain sequestered in academic pronouncements. I have already cited Carl Vogt’s low opinion of African blacks, based on his comparison of their brains with those of white chil
dren. B. Kidd extended the argument to justify colonial expansion into tropical Africa (1898, p. 51). We are, he wrote, “dealing with peoples who represent the same stage in the history of the development of the race that the child does in the history of the development of the individual. The tropics will not, therefore, be developed by the natives themselves.”
In the course of a debate about our right to annex the Philippines, Rev. Josiah Strong, a leading American imperialist, piously declared that “our policy should be determined not by national ambition, nor by commercial considerations, but by our duty to the world in general and to the Filipinos in particular” (1900, p. 287). His opponents, citing Henry Clay’s contention that the Lord would not create a people incapable of self-government, argued against the need for our benevolent tutelage. But Clay had spoken in the bad old days before evolutionary theory and recapitulation:
Clay’s conception was formed … before modern science had shown that races develop in the course of centuries as individuals do in years, and that an undeveloped race, which is incapable of self-government, is no more of a reflection on the Almighty than is an undeveloped child who is incapable of self-government. The opinions of men who in this enlightened day believe that the Filipinos are capable of self-government because everybody is, are not worth considering.
Even Rudyard Kipling, the poet laureate of imperialism, used the recapitulationist argument in the first stanza of his most famous apology for white supremacy:
Take up the White Man’s Burden
Send forth the best ye breed
Go, bind your sons to exile
to serve the captive’s need:
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
Teddy Roosevelt, whose judgment was not always so keen, wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge that the verse “was very poor poetry but made good sense from the expansion point of view” (in Weston, 1972, p. 35).
And so the story might stand, a testimony to nineteenth-century folly and prejudice, if an interesting twist had not been added during our own century. By 1920 the theory of recapitulation had collapsed (Gould, 1977, pp. 167–206). Not long after, the Dutch anatomist Louis Bolk proposed a theory of exactly opposite meaning. Recapitulation required that adult traits of ancestors develop more rapidly in descendants to become juvenile features—hence, traits of modern children are primitive characters of ancestral adults. But suppose that the reverse process occurs as it often does in evolution. Suppose that juvenile traits of ancestors develop so slowly in descendants that they become adult features. This phenomenon of retarded development is common in nature; it is called neoteny (literally, “holding on to youth”). Bolk argued that humans are essentially neotenous. He listed an impressive set of features shared by adult humans and fetal or juvenile apes, but lost in adult apes: vaulted cranium and large brain in relation to body size; small face; hair confined largely to head, armpits, and pubic regions; unrotated big toe. I have already discussed one of the most important signs of human neoteny in another context (pp. 132–135): retention of the foramen magnum in its fetal position, under the skull.
Now consider the implications of neoteny for the ranking of human groups. Under recapitulation, adults of inferior races are like children of superior races. But neoteny reverses the argument. In the context of neoteny, it is “good”—that is, advanced or superior—to retain the traits of childhood, to develop more slowly. Thus, superior groups retain their childlike characters as adults, while inferior groups pass through the higher phase of childhood and then degenerate toward apishness. Now consider the conventional prejudice of white scientists: whites are superior, blacks inferior. Under recapitulation, black adults should be like white children. But under neoteny, white adults should be like black children.
For seventy years, under the sway of recapitulation, scientists had collected reams of objective data all loudly proclaiming the same message: adult blacks, women, and lower-class whites are like white upper-class male children. With neoteny now in vogue, these hard data could mean only one thing: upper-class adult males are inferior because they lose, while other groups retain, the superior traits of childhood. There is no escape from this conclusion.
At least one scientist, Havelock Ellis, did bow to the clear implication and admit the superiority of women, though he wriggled out of a similar confession for blacks. He even compared rural with urban men, found that men of the city were developing womanly anatomy, and proclaimed the superiority of urban life (1894, p. 519): “The large-headed, delicate-faced, small-boned man of urban civilization is much nearer to the typical woman than is the savage. Not only by his large brain, but by his large pelvis, the modern man is following a path first marked out by woman.” But Ellis was iconoclastic and controversial (he wrote one of the first systematic studies of sexuality), and his application of neoteny to sexual differences never made much impact. Meanwhile, with respect to racial differences, supporters of human neoteny adopted another, more common, tactic: they simply abandoned their seventy years of hard data and sought new and opposite information to confirm the inferiority of blacks.
Louis Bolk, chief defender of human neoteny, declared that the most strongly neotenized races are superior. In retaining more juvenile features, they have kept further away from “the pithecoid ancestor of man” (1929, p. 26). “From this point of view, the division of mankind into higher and lower races is fully justified [1929, p. 26]. It is obvious that I am, on the basis of my theory, a convinced believer in the inequality of races” (1926, p. 38). Bolk reached into his anatomical grab-bag and extracted some traits indicating a greater departure for black adults from the advantageous proportions of childhood. Led by these new facts to an old and comfortable conclusion, Bolk proclaimed (1929, p. 25): “The white race appears to be the most progressive, as being the most retarded.” Bolk, who viewed himself as a “liberal” man, declined to relegate blacks to permanent ineptitude. He hoped that evolution would be benevolent to them in the future:
It is possible for all other races to reach the zenith of development now occupied by the white race. The only thing required is continued progressive action in these races of the biological principle of anthropogenesis [i.e., neoteny]. In his fetal development the negro passes through a stage that has already become the final stage for the white man. Well then, when retardation continues in the negro too, what is still a transitional stage may for this race also become a final one (1926, pp. 473–474).
Bolk’s argument verged on the dishonest for two reasons. First, he conveniently forgot all the features—like the Grecian nose and full beard so admired by Cope—that recapitulationists had stoutly emphasized because they placed whites far from the conditions of childhood. Secondly, he sidestepped a pressing and embarrassing issue: Orientals, not whites, are clearly the most neotenous of human races (Bolk listed the neotenous features of both races selectively and then proclaimed the differences too close to call; see Ashley Montagu, 1962, for a fairer assessment). Women, moreover, are more neotenous than men. I trust that I will not be seen as vulgar white apologist if I decline to press the superiority of Oriental women and declare instead that the whole enterprise of ranking groups by degree of neoteny is fundamentally unjustified. Just as Anatole France and Walt Whitman could write as well as Turgenev with brains about half the weight of his, I would be more than mildly surprised if the small differences in degree of neoteny among races bear any relationship to mental ability or moral worth.
Nonetheless, old arguments never die. In 1971 the British psychologist and genetic determinist H. J. Eysenck again brought forth a neotenic argument for black inferiority. Eysenck took three facts and used neoteny to forge a story from them: 1) black babies and young children exhibit more rapid sensorimotor development than whites—that is, they are less neotenic because they depart more quickly from the fetal state; 2) average white IQ surpasses average black IQ b
y age three; 3) there is a slight negative correlation between sensorimotor development in the first year of life and later IQ—that is, children who develop more rapidly tend to end up with lower IQ’s. Eysenck concludes (1971, p. 79): “These findings are important because of a very general view in biology [the theory of neoteny] according to which the more prolonged the infancy the greater in general are the cognitive or intellectual abilities of the species. This law appears to work even within a given species.”
Eysenck fails to realize that he has based his argument on what is almost surely a noncausal correlation. (Noncausal correlations are the bane of statistical inference—see Chapter 6. They are perfectly “true” in a mathematical sense, but they demonstrate no causal connection. For example, we may calculate a spectacular correlation—very near the maximum value of 1.0—between the rise in world population during the past five years and the increasing separation of Europe and North America by continental drift.) Suppose that lower black IQ is purely a result of generally poorer environment. Rapid sensorimotor development is one way of identifying a person as black—but a less accurate way than skin color. The correlation of poor environment with lower IQ may be causal, but the correlation of rapid sensorimotor development with lower IQ is probably noncausal because rapid sensorimotor development, in this context, merely identifies a person as black. Eysenck’s argument ignores the fact that black children, in a racist society, generally live in poorer environments, which may lead to lower IQ scores. Yet Eysenck invoked neoteny to give theoretical meaning, and thereby causal status, to a noncausal correlation reflecting his hereditarian bias.