The Great Physiologist of Heidelberg

Natural History, July, 1999 by Stephen Jay Gould

Early in the nineteenth century, Friedrich Tiedemann used science to demonstrate racial equality.

If you suspend both reason and knowledge and then gaze upon the ruins of the medieval castle on the hill, lit so softly at night and visible from all points in the city below; if you recall the lively drinking songs from Sigmund Romberg's The Student Prince and conjure up an image of dashing young men purposely scarring their faces in frivolous duels--well, then, the usual image of Heidelberg as a primary symbol of European romanticism and carefree charm might pass muster. But when you trace the tales of internecine destruction that created these sites (and sights), the visions become fiction (while retaining all their potency in this equally evocative mode), and a gritty historical reality emerges from gentle mythology to explain the local geography and architecture.

Heidelberg boasts an ancient pedigree, for the town's name first appears in a document written in 1196, while its university, founded in 1386, ranks as Germany's oldest. But only one or two medieval buildings still stand (while the castle lies in ruins), because the city suffered the architectural equivalent of genocide--"devoured [unto] the foundations thereof" (Lamentations 4:11)--in several disastrous religious and political wars of the seventeenth century. The Thirty Years' War (1618-48) had wrought enough destruction, but when the Protestant elector (ruler) of the Rhenish Palatinate (with Heidelberg as capital) married his daughter to the brother of France's Catholic king, Louis XIV, he only courted further trouble--for the elector's son died without heir in 1685, and Louis then laid claim to the territory. French armies destroyed Heidelberg in 1689, and the few standing remnants then succumbed to the natural disaster of fire in 1693.

If our all-too-human tendencies toward xenophobia and anathematization of differences can place such closely allied and ethnically similar people on paths of total destruction, what hope can we maintain for tolerance or decency toward people of more different appearance and cultural background? A sad chapter in the history of science must chronicle the support provided by supposedly factual arguments for the designation of different people as inferior beings. Science, to be fair, did not invent the concept of inherent gradation in worth, with the promulgator's own group on top and his immediate enemies and more distant prospects for conquest below. But the doctrine of racism--the claim for intrinsically biological (and therefore ineradicable) differences in intellectual or moral status among peoples--has built a powerful buttress for our ancient inclinations toward xenophobia.

During the heyday of European colonialism in the nineteenth century, scarcely any Western scientist denied such gradations of worth--either as ordained by divine or natural law, in the versions favored before Darwin's discoveries, or as developed by the workings of evolution, in the explanations that triumphed in the closing decades of Queen Victoria's reign. Black Africans of the sub-Sahara received especially short shrift in these racist classifications.

Such opinions flowed with particular ease from basically conservative scientists, including the great French anatomist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), who also favored strict divisions among social classes back home. Cuvier wrote in 1817:

   The Negro race is confined to the area south of the Atlas Mountains. With
   its small cranium, its flattened nose, its protruding jaw, and its large
   lips, this race clearly resembles the monkeys. The people belonging to it
   have always remained barbarians.

But even scientists of more egalitarian bent at home, including such passionate abolitionists as Charles Darwin, did not challenge the general consensus. In his most striking statement (from The Descent of Man, 1871), Darwin argues that a gap between two closely related living species does not disprove evolution, because the intermediary stages--linking both forms to a common ancestor--are now extinct. The large gap that now separates the highest ape and the lowest man, Darwin asserts, will grow even wider as extinctions continue:

   The civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace
   throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the
   anthropomorphous apes ... will no doubt be exterminated. The break will
   then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more
   civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as
   a baboon, instead of at present between the negro or Australian and the
   gorilla.

The few "egalitarians" of these times--defined in this context as scientists who denied inherent differences in intellect or morality among races--limited their views to abstract potentials and did not challenge conventional opinions about gradation in actual achievement. Alfred Russel Wallace, for example, strongly supported inherent equality (or at least minimal difference) but did not doubt that English society had reached a pinnacle of realization while African savages languished in barbarity: "Savage languages," he wrote, "contain no words for abstract conceptions.... The singing of savages is a more or less monotonous howling."