As I noted yesterday, Blumenbach was the one responsible for using the term "Caucasian" to refer to Whites based on his belief that human origins can be traced to the Caucasus Mountain region of Georgia (southern Russia). Gould wrote:
"Blumenbach chose physical beauty as his guide to ranking. He simply affirmed that Europeans were the most beautiful, with Caucasians as the most comely of all. This explains why Blumenbach viewed all subsequent variation as departures from the originally created ideal -- therefore, the most beautiful people must live closest to our primal home."
"Blumenbach's descriptions are pervaded by his subjective sense of relative beauty, presented as though he were discussing an objective and quantifiable property, not subject to doubt or disagreement. He describes a Georgian female skull (Found close to Mount Caucasus) as 'really the most beautiful form of skull which...always of itself attracts every eye, however little observant.' He then defends his European standard on aesthetic grounds: 'In the first place, that stock displays...the most beautiful form of skull, from which, as from a mean and primeval type, the others diverge by most easy gradations...Besides, it is white in color, which we may fairly assume to have been the primitive color of mankind, since...it is very easy for that to degenerate into brown, but very much more difficult for dark to become white.'"
That is not all of what I quoted, but it makes the essential point which I am not sure I emphasized enough in class yesterday: that Blumenbach's supposed scientific judgment was not based on objective fact but subjective aesthetic opinion. As the video program also brought out, later American race scientists were also guilty of placing cultural biases above real science.
We'll get back to our Basic Definitions tomorrow.
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