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I do not support this Idea and it is here just as a reminder to myself so as not to forget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Boas was trained as a physicist. His student work was in \npsychophysics, the science that measures things like sensory thresholds,\n and his dissertation was an effort to determine the degree to which \nlight must increase in intensity for people to perceive a change in the \ncolor of water. This might seem an utterly sterile topic for research, \nbut Boas reached an unorthodox conclusion: it depends. Our perception of\n color is a function of circumstances. Different observers have \ndifferent perceptions depending on their\n expectations and experiences, and those differences are not innate. \nThey are, consciously or unconsciously, learned. It made no sense, Boas \ndecided, to talk about a general law of sensory thresholds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s \nan academic adage that a scholar\u2019s career consists of footnotes to the \ndissertation, and, in a way, this was true for Boas. He was an \nempiricist: he collected facts, and he was not inclined to theoretical \nspeculation. But he thought that the basic fact about human beings is \nthat the facts about them change, because circumstances change. Our \nlives may be determined, by some combination of genes, environment, and \nculture, but they are not predetermined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Boas\u2019s revolutionary work\n was a study, undertaken for a congressional committee and published in \n1911, on the bodily form\u2014head size, height, hair color, age at \npubescence\u2014of the children of recent European immigrants. The impetus \nwas public anxiety that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe \nwould, through intermarriage, dilute the racial stock (sometimes \nidentified as \u201cNordic\u201d). Boas\u2019s finding, which was that the cranial \nindex of children born in America differed from that of children of the \nsame background born in Europe, rocked the field. It upset long-believed\n claims that racial differences, including what we would now call ethnic\n differences, are immutable. The evidence proved, Boas said, \u201cthe \nplasticity of human types.\u201d It also showed that variations within groups\n are greater than variations between groups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1911, this was not what most white scientists and politicians wanted to hear. Boas\u2019s career spanned an exceptionally active period of Aryan supremacy. Boas witnessed the legalization of Jim Crow; the widespread acceptance of social Darwinism and eugenics; imperial expansion, including the American occupation of the Philippines; drastic restrictions on immigration; the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan; and the coming to power of Adolf Hitler. (Boas was Jewish.) Often, science was invoked as a justification for colonization, segregation, discrimination, exclusion, sterilization, or extermination. Boas devoted his life to showing people that the science they were relying on was bad science. \u201cHe believed the world must be made safe for differences,\u201d Ruth Benedict wrote when Boas died. END QUOTE.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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