Discussion on the Biological Concept of Race (Term Paper Sample)

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29th April, 2014
Discussion on the biological concept of Race
The central ideological belief that maintains racism is the false notion that biological races exists in the human class and that individual features such as personality and principles can be recognized from the racial ancestry of an individual. Paradoxically, the theory of race is a result of rather modern historical improvements. There are no apparently expressed racial hierarchy theories in any ancient writings. It was acknowledged that human beings had a few physical differences among each other and the same had resulted in the formation of different cultures. However, it was not largely accepted people of a particular race were naturally superior to people of any other race. Even in the Western civilization, the development of a substantial ideological support of racial theories or classification did not happen immediately.
During the eighteenth century, anthropologists did not mutually agree on the dominance of the Europeans; "Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, considered the founder of anthropology, did not accept the idea that races could be hierarchically classified CITATION Jos02 \l 16393 (Jr.)." Yet by the mid-nineteenth century, schemes of racial hierarchy became entrenched. The racial ideology and its development coincided with the rise of Darwinism, especially a misunderstanding of how the observations made by Darwin applied to the hu...