The Elegy of Serological Racialism: The Search for 'Biochemical Races'
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Just as scientific racialism was coming of age at the turn of the century, more profound developments were underfoot. The year after the appearance of Ripey's The Races of Europe (1899), Mendel's work was independently rediscovered at the same time by three different workers — after being ignored by them and everyone else for a whole generation. The birth of genetics led to a major rift between geneticists and naturalists that would not be resolved until the modern evolutionary synthesis (1936-1947). The year after the rediscovery of Mendel, in 1901, Karl Landsteiner discovered human blood groups. It took a few years before variation in blood groups could be properly understood. That had to wait for the basic mathematics of population genetics to be figured out. In 1908, Wilhelm Weinberg, a German physician, and Godfrey H. Hardy, the famous mathematician at Cambridge, independently clarified the elementary mathematics of gene frequencies in a stable population.
The Elegy of Serological Racialism: The Search for 'Biochemical Races'
The Elegy of Serological Racialism: The…
The Elegy of Serological Racialism: The Search for 'Biochemical Races'
Just as scientific racialism was coming of age at the turn of the century, more profound developments were underfoot. The year after the appearance of Ripey's The Races of Europe (1899), Mendel's work was independently rediscovered at the same time by three different workers — after being ignored by them and everyone else for a whole generation. The birth of genetics led to a major rift between geneticists and naturalists that would not be resolved until the modern evolutionary synthesis (1936-1947). The year after the rediscovery of Mendel, in 1901, Karl Landsteiner discovered human blood groups. It took a few years before variation in blood groups could be properly understood. That had to wait for the basic mathematics of population genetics to be figured out. In 1908, Wilhelm Weinberg, a German physician, and Godfrey H. Hardy, the famous mathematician at Cambridge, independently clarified the elementary mathematics of gene frequencies in a stable population.