FOUR

Measuring Bodies

Two Case Studies on the Apishness of

Undesirables

THE CONCEPT OF EVOLUTION transformed human thought during the
nineteenth century. Nearly every question in the life sciences was
reformulated in its light. No idea was ever more widely used, or
misused ("social Darwinism" as an evolutionary rationale for the
inevitability of poverty, for example). Both creationists (Agassiz
and Morton) and evolutionists (Broca and Galton) could exploit
the data of brain size to make their invalid and invidious distinc-
tions among groups. But other quantitative arguments arose as
more direct spinoffs from evolutionary theory. In this chapter I
discuss two as representatives of a prevalent type; they present
both a strong contrast and an interesting similarity. The first is the
most general evolutionary defense of all for ranking groups—the
argument from recapitulation, often epitomized by the obfuscating
tongue-twister "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." The second is
a specific evolutionary hypothesis for the biological nature of
human criminal behavior—Lombroso's criminal anthropology.
Both theories relied upon the same quantitative and supposedly
evolutionary method—the search for signs of apish morphology in
groups deemed undesirable.

The ape in all of us: recapitulation

Once the fact of evolution had been established, nineteenth-

century naturalists devoted themselves to tracing the actual path-

ways that evolution had followed. They sought, in other words, to