Because these characteristics found
specific environments congenial, each race had gravitated to its
preordained geographic habitat.
Darwin's theory of evolution offered another explanation for the
existence of differing species in the animal kingdom, and
anthropologists concluded that it would also provide an
explanation for racial differences in mankind. Early
anthropologists and sociologists were preoccupied with dividing
humanity into differing races and trying to catalog and explain
these differences. Phrenology was another pseudo-science which
attempted to construct a system according to which intellectual
and moral characteristics would be correlated with the size and
shape of the human head. On this basis many tried to divide
mankind into physical types and to assign to each its own
intellectual and moral qualities.
Another one who believed that human races could be scientifically
measured and that their superiority and inferiority could thus be
established was Joseph A. de Gobineau, a French anthropologist.
Herbert Spencer took Darwin's concept of the survival of the
fittest and used it as a scientific justification for the
competitive spirit, It became the basis of the explanation why
some individuals moved up the social ladder while others remained
behind.
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