wynalazki: Social degeneration

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

Social degeneration was a widely influential concept at the interface of the social and biological sciences in the 18th and 19th centuries. During the 18th century, scientific thinkers including Georges-Louis Leclerc, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and Immanuel Kant argued that humans shared a common origin but had degenerated over time due to differences in climate. This theory provided an explanation of where humans came from and why people appeared differently from others. In contrast, degenerationists in the 19th century feared that civilization might be in decline and that the causes of decline lay in biological change. These ideas derived from pre-scientific concepts of heredity ("hered…

Evidence: — • authority: 88

Impure Thoughts. Chapter 1 examines the thought of the eighteenth-century ethnologist Johann F. Blumenbach, whose 1775 work On the Natural Variety of Mankind is often represented as precipitating the secular turn in the modern study of race. The chapter offers an alternative account of the intellectual ancestry alive in Blumenbach’s racial theories by recovering the Christian sources of his thinking. Political and philosophical anti-Judaism prevalent in late eighteenth-century Germany, the transformation of the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther into a pioneer of German national identity, and the anti-Jewish writings of Johann David Michaelis in the emergent field of biblical geography at Gö…