MEASURING BODIES I 49135): retention of the foramen magnum in its fetal position, under
the skull.
Now consider the implications of neoteny for the ranking of
human groups. Under recapitulation, adults of inferior races are
like children of superior races. But neoteny reverses the argument.
In the context of neoteny, it is "good"—that is, advanced or supe-
rior—to retain the traits of childhood, to develop more slowly.
Thus, superior groups retain their childlike characters as adults,
while inferior groups pass through the higher phase of childhood
and then degenerate toward apishness. Now consider the conven-
tional prejudice of white scientists: whites are superior, blacks infe-
rior. Under recapitulation, black adults should be like white
children. But under neoteny, white adults should be like black chil-
dren.
For seventy years, under the sway of recapitulation, scientists
had collected reams of objective data all loudly proclaiming the
same message: adult blacks, women, and lower-class whites are like
white upper-class male children. With neoteny now in vogue, these
hard data could mean only one thing: upper-class adult males are
inferior because they lose, while other groups retain, the superior
traits of childhood. There is no escape from this conclusion.
At least one scientist, Havelock Ellis, did bow to the clear impli-
cation and admit the superiority of women, though he wriggled
out of a similar confession for blacks. He even compared rural with
urban men, found that men of the city were developing womanly
anatomy, and proclaimed the superiority of urban life (1894,
P- 5t9): "The large-headed, delicate-faced, small-boned man of
urban civilization is much nearer to the typical woman than is the
savage. Not only by his large brain, but by his large pelvis, the mod-
ern man is following a path first marked out by woman." But Ellis
was iconoclastic and controversial (he wrote one of the first system-
atic studies of sexuality), and his application of neoteny to sexual
differences never made much impact. Meanwhile, with respect to
racial differences, supporters of human neoteny adopted another,
more common, tactic: they simply abandoned their seventy years of
hard data and sought new and opposite information to confirm the
inferiority of blacks.
Louis Bolk, chief defender of human neoteny, declared that
fhe most strongly neotenized races are superior. In retaining more
Juvenile features, they have kept further away from "the pithecoid