Climate and Race 



By Carleton Coon 



University of Pennsylvania Museum 



Three-quarters of a centuiy ago, in 1877, J. A. Allen, a zoologist at 

 the American Museum of Natural History, wrote, in an article re- 

 printed, like this one, in a Smithsonian Annual Keport : "The study 

 of man from a geographical standpoint, or with special reference to 

 conditions of environment, offers a most important and fruitful field 

 of research, which, it is to be hoped, will soon receive a more careful 

 attention than has as yet been given it" (Allen, 1877, p. 399) . Allen's 

 paper dealt with geographically correlated variations in North Amer- 

 ican animals and birds, on three axes: color, general size, and the 

 relative size of the peripheral parts ; or more simply, color, size, and 

 form. The first of these had already been studied in 1833 by Gloger, 

 the second by Bergmann in 1847. Only the third was new with Allen. 

 Wholly apart from the study of man, few scientists in the zoological 

 field have concerned themselves, since Allen's day, with the subject of 

 geographical variations within species. An outstanding exception is 

 Rensch (1936-37) who, during the late twenties and thirties tested 

 these rules and added several observations of his own ; but even with 

 this work available, Ernst Mayr (1942, p. 93) was moved to state: 

 "The study of these ecological correlations and the establishment of 

 definite rules is such a new field that we may consider ourselves at the 

 beginning of the work." 



If, 64 years after Allen's statement, an authority of Mayr's stature 

 could say that we were at the beginning of the work, it is clear that 

 up to 11 years ago this aspect of biology had been greatly neglected, 

 and such is still the case. During those 64 years the study of biology 

 passed through several phases of emphasis. First was the Darwinian 

 epoch, in which Allen's work could clearly be rejected as Lamarckian- 

 ism, and then came the era of genetic orthodoxy, during which it 

 could be tossed into the bin of discredited interests, for at this time it 

 was fashionable to call people interested in taxonomy, naturalists. 



^ Copyright 1954 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by per- 

 mission of the publishers from "Climatic Change," edited by Harlow Shapley, Harvard 

 University Press. 



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