Scientific Racism

Scientific racism, the recourse to science to justify and rationalize hierarchical comparison between human populations, became increasingly important in the second half of the nineteenth century, in parallel with the growing influence of imperial powers on the international arena. At that time, the first truly racist worldviews were elaborated and accompanied by a series of biological measurements of bodily differences between races (for example, craniometry). Whereas nineteenth‐century biological sciences lent key arguments to racism, to assess the impact of twentieth‐century science, human genetics in particular, is more complex. On one side, especially until the 1940s, human genetics was used to uphold profoundly racist ideas. On the other side, not only genetics (hard‐heredity) produced a beneficial separation between race as a biological concept and culture, but also it increasingly emphasized the centrality of the individual (not group or race) as the only significant level of analysis of human variations.