Overview

Divine Variations offers a new account of the development of scientific ideas about race. Focusing on the production of scientific knowledge over the last three centuries, Terence Keel uncovers the persistent links between pre-modern Christian thought and contemporary scientific perceptions of human difference. He argues that, instead of a rupture between religion and modern biology on the question of human origins, modern scientific theories of race are, in fact, an extension of Christian intellectual history. Keel's study draws on ancient and early modern theological texts and biblical commentaries, works in Christian natural philosophy, seminal studies in ethnology and early social science, debates within twentieth-century public health research, and recent genetic analysis of population differences and ancient human DNA. From these sources, Keel demonstrates that Christian ideas about creation, ancestry, and universalism helped form the basis of modern scientific accounts of human diversity-despite the ostensible shift in modern biology towards scientific naturalism, objectivity, and value neutrality. By showing the connections between Christian thought and scientific racial thinking, this book calls into question the notion that science and religion are mutually exclusive intellectual domains and proposes that the advance of modern science did not follow a linear process of secularization.

Full Product Details

Author:   Terence Keel
Publisher:   Stanford University Press
Imprint:   Stanford University Press
ISBN:  

9781503610095

ISBN 10:   1503610098
Pages:   200
Publication Date:   19 March 2019
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Contents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThe Introduction lays out the theoretical stakes of the work as a whole. It opens with a critical evaluation of the work of acclaimed geneticist Spencer Wells, whose 2002 publication The Journey of Man has helped frame the now-standard interpretation of human evolution and migration from a single set of ancestors out of Africa. Wells's account of human evolution reveals the epistemic authority that modern genetics has obtained on the question of race and human beginnings. It is argued that contemporary biologists inherited this authority, however, from their Christian intellectual ancestors, who provided modern scientists with a cache of interpretive tools and assumptions that proved useful for narrating the development of human life and constructing theories of racial difference believed to supersede all previous accounts of human origins. After laying out the theoretical ground to be covered, this introductory chapter provides an overview of the chapters that follow. 1Impure Thoughts: Johann Blumenbach and the Birth of Racial Science chapter abstractChapter 1 examines the thought of the eighteenth-century ethnologist Johann F. Blumenbach, whose 1775 work On the Natural Variety of Mankind is often represented as precipitating the secular turn in the modern study of race. The chapter offers an alternative account of the intellectual ancestry alive in Blumenbach's racial theories by recovering the Christian sources of his thinking. Political and philosophical anti-Judaism prevalent in late eighteenth-century Germany, the transformation of the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther into a pioneer of German national identity, and the anti-Jewish writings of Johann David Michaelis in the emergent field of biblical geography at Göttingen University were all crucial political, religious, and intellectual influences during the time Blumenbach developed his racial theories. Drawing on the notion that the epistemological origins of racial science are fundamentally mongrel, this chapter argues that Blumenbach's racial theories were not an expression of pure, untainted, secular rationality. 2Superseding Christian Truth: The Quiet Revolution of Nineteenth-Century American Science of Race chapter abstractChapter 2 analyzes scientific criticism leveled against the theory of common human descent beginning in the 1830s. It focuses on the thought of Josiah C. Nott, a southern physician, early epidemiologist, and major figure of the so-called American School of Ethnology. Nott claimed that humanity's common origin, or monogenesis, was an unscientific belief and a mere carryover from when natural historians were indebted to Christian ideas about nature and human life. Thus, he attempted to establish an account of the history of human racial groups that moved beyond the constraints of the narrative recorded by Moses in the Bible. Despite these secular aspirations Nott ultimately failed to offer an account of race that stood independent of Christian thought. The case of American polygenism illustrates the degree to which modern racial science is indebted to a religious intellectual history it has attempted to deny and supersede. 3The Ghost of Christian Creationism: Racial Dispositions and Progressive Era Public Health Research chapter abstractChapter 3 explores how polygenist carryovers emerged in early twentieth-century medical and public health studies on the links between race and disease. This persistence further embedded ideas about race derived from Christian intellectual history into the methods and reasoning of modern scientists and public health researchers. In the early twentieth century, the concept of biological determinism—the idea that the fixed biological makeup of a racial group determines its members' health, behavior, and intelligence—reoccupies the epistemic space once filled explicitly by a theological view of nature. This chapter also introduces the work of the African American physician, ethicist, and social hygienist Charles V. Roman, who departed from the racial logic of his time. Roman stressed instead that the idea of common human ancestry should push public health researchers to think more critically about the social and environmental factors shaping health outcomes and black susceptibility to disease. 4Noah's Mongrel Children: Ancient DNA and the Persistence of Christian Forms in Modern Biology chapter abstractChapter 4 examines how concepts about racial ancestry and the ontological uniqueness of human life from Christian intellectual history have historically informed scientific research on the Neanderthal. These Christian forms are at play in the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome and the unanticipated discovery that mating occurred between this hominid group and modern humans around forty thousand years ago. Geneticists claim that evidence of this encounter is found almost exclusively in the genomes of Europeans and Asians. This chapter also shows how scientists in both the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries deployed notions of distinct continental groups and fixed racial traits to draw conclusions about human-Neanderthal relatedness. In both centuries, concepts and reasoning strategies implicitly divinize nature while also framing human ancestry into three original groups that represent the reoccupation of the story of Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, into contemporary algorithmic representations of human genetic ancestry. 5Beyond the Religious Pursuit of Race chapter abstractChapter 5 provides a summary of the major claims of the book. It also explains how the conflict thesis for representing the relationship between science and religion fails to capture how Christian intellectual history has been key to the formation of the race concept in modern science. Citing recent data from a 2015 Pew Research Survey, this chapter argues that the conflict thesis remains a fixture in the minds of Americans, which has consequences for shifting public perceptions about the assumed secularity of the scientific study of race. It closes with a call for recognizing that the scientific study of race is involved in providing a solution to the existential dilemma of defining what it means to be human. This solution is neither value-free nor detached from the cultural and religious inheritance that has fastened itself to the work of Euro-American scientists who study race.

Reviews

Terence Keel's book brings needed nuance to the cultural and scientific history of the study of human diversity. He explores the connections between the theology and science of what eventually became human microevolution, and follows the various threads down to the present day. This is an important body of scholarship, with which anyone interested in the scientific origins of human racial theory must engage. -- Jonathan Marks * author of <i>What it Means to be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People and Their Genes</i> * In this brilliantly argued and fascinating account of the development of scientific racial theory, Keel convincingly demonstrates that the modern biological sciences still bear the deep imprint of their religious origins. Divine Variations offers us insightful new ways of thinking about the historical relations between science and religion. -- Peter Harrison * author of <i>The Territories of Science and Religion</i> * The brilliance of Terence Keel's book is to show that when it comes to race, there was no war between science and religion. Instead, this engaging and penetrating study shows how Christian ideas helped create scientific approaches to and explanations of race. Divine Variations is a must-read for all scholars of race, religion, and science. -- Edward J. Blum * co-author of <i>The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America</i> * This volume is a critical contribution to study of the concept of race and a formidable challenge to many commonplace assumptions. Equally important, it compels the reader to reevaluate the extent to which science and religion are clearly distinct realms of thought, and offers new ways of thinking about their relationship.Summing up: Essential. -- S.C. Peterson * <i>CHOICE</i> * At a moment when some evolutionary theorists have become quasi-theologians, offering universal stories of existence that are as imperialistic as their eighteenth- and nineteenth- century versions, and when popular DNA speculations about racial heritage and legacy have brought us back to the door of eugenics, Keel's book reminds us of the theological trajectories from which these concepts arise. This is not an anti-science text, but one that shows us the interrelationship of theology and science and tacit assumptions behind the scientific will to universalize. We will never be able to defeat racial reasoning so long as it is concealed and nurtured in certain kinds of scientific reasoning. Keel's book greatly aids us in separating the two. -- Willie James Jennings * author of <i>The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race</i> * Divine Variations brilliantly traces the roots of modern racial science to Christian intellectual history and ideology. Despite the efforts of genomic researchers to portray current biological concepts of race as purely scientific, Keel shows that these scientists are secular creationists retelling religious folklore about the origins of human life. This book is a crucial contribution to the history of racial science. -- Dorothy Roberts * author of <i>Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century</i> * Terence Keel's Divine Variations<\i> points us to the materials, the old patterns and the stitches that built our modern notion of race.... Keel's work offers us a warning that there is no panacea, no easy ideology or system that is free from the colonial theologies or so called enlightened philosophies. But in the face of this, and in the midst of a world where we are confronted by ever more differences and unknowns, perhaps our hope is best oriented towards theologies and scientific modes of thought that do not try to avoid the mystery, that do not wash out or totalize exceptions. Perhaps we no longer need theories of everything but rather theologies and science that help us to see variation, difference, and change as possibilities rather than as dangers. Keel's work is a vital step toward this endeavor. -- Brian Bantum * <i>Reading Religion<\i> *

Terence Keel's book brings needed nuance to the cultural and scientific history of the study of human diversity. He explores the connections between the theology and science of what eventually became human microevolution, and follows the various threads down to the present day. This is an important body of scholarship, with which anyone interested in the scientific origins of human racial theory must engage. -- Jonathan Marks * author of <i>What it Means to be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People and Their Genes</i> * In this brilliantly argued and fascinating account of the development of scientific racial theory, Keel convincingly demonstrates that the modern biological sciences still bear the deep imprint of their religious origins. Divine Variations offers us insightful new ways of thinking about the historical relations between science and religion. -- Peter Harrison * author of <i>The Territories of Science and Religion</i> * The brilliance of Terence Keel's book is to show that when it comes to race, there was no war between science and religion. Instead, this engaging and penetrating study shows how Christian ideas helped create scientific approaches to and explanations of race. Divine Variations is a must-read for all scholars of race, religion, and science. -- Edward J. Blum * co-author of <i>The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America</i> * This volume is a critical contribution to study of the concept of race and a formidable challenge to many commonplace assumptions. Equally important, it compels the reader to reevaluate the extent to which science and religion are clearly distinct realms of thought, and offers new ways of thinking about their relationship....Summing up: Essential. -- S.C. Peterson * <i>CHOICE</i> * Terence Keel's Divine Variations points us to the materials, the old patterns and the stitches that built our modern notion of race.... Keel's work offers us a warning that there is no panacea, no easy ideology or system that is free from the colonial theologies or so called enlightened philosophies. But in the face of this, and in the midst of a world where we are confronted by ever more differences and unknowns, perhaps our hope is best oriented towards theologies and scientific modes of thought that do not try to avoid the mystery, that do not wash out or totalize exceptions. Perhaps we no longer need theories of everything but rather theologies and science that help us to see variation, difference, and change as possibilities rather than as dangers. Keel's work is a vital step toward this endeavor. -- Brian Bantum * <i>Reading Religion</i> * At a moment when some evolutionary theorists have become quasi-theologians, offering universal stories of existence that are as imperialistic as their eighteenth- and nineteenth- century versions, and when popular DNA speculations about racial heritage and legacy have brought us back to the door of eugenics, Keel's book reminds us of the theological trajectories from which these concepts arise. This is not an anti-science text, but one that shows us the interrelationship of theology and science and tacit assumptions behind the scientific will to universalize. We will never be able to defeat racial reasoning so long as it is concealed and nurtured in certain kinds of scientific reasoning. Keel's book greatly aids us in separating the two. -- Willie James Jennings * author of <i>The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race</i> * Divine Variations brilliantly traces the roots of modern racial science to Christian intellectual history and ideology. Despite the efforts of genomic researchers to portray current biological concepts of race as purely scientific, Keel shows that these scientists are secular creationists retelling religious folklore about the origins of human life. This book is a crucial contribution to the history of racial science. -- Dorothy Roberts * author of <i>Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century</i> *

Terence Keel's book brings needed nuance to the cultural and scientific history of the study of human diversity. He explores the connections between the theology and science of what eventually became human microevolution, and follows the various threads down to the present day. This is an important body of scholarship, with which anyone interested in the scientific origins of human racial theory must engage. -- Jonathan Marks * author of <i>What it Means to be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People and Their Genes</i> * In this brilliantly argued and fascinating account of the development of scientific racial theory, Keel convincingly demonstrates that the modern biological sciences still bear the deep imprint of their religious origins. Divine Variations offers us insightful new ways of thinking about the historical relations between science and religion. -- Peter Harrison * author of <i>The Territories of Science and Religion</i> * Our longing to know where we came from and what lies ahead is fierce. But what if neither science nor religion can offer those comforts?...What I find most gripping about Keel's argument is that he does not denigrate either discipline so much as he goads us to acknowledge their shared problematic epistemological impulse. -- Michelle Wolff * <i>The Journal of Religion</i> * The brilliance of Terence Keel's book is to show that when it comes to race, there was no war between science and religion. Instead, this engaging and penetrating study shows how Christian ideas helped create scientific approaches to and explanations of race. Divine Variations is a must-read for all scholars of race, religion, and science. -- Edward J. Blum * co-author of <i>The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America</i> * This volume is a critical contribution to study of the concept of race and a formidable challenge to many commonplace assumptions. Equally important, it compels the reader to reevaluate the extent to which science and religion are clearly distinct realms of thought, and offers new ways of thinking about their relationship....Summing up: Essential. -- S.C. Peterson * <i>CHOICE</i> * Terence Keel's Divine Variations points us to the materials, the old patterns and the stitches that built our modern notion of race.... Keel's work offers us a warning that there is no panacea, no easy ideology or system that is free from the colonial theologies or so called enlightened philosophies. But in the face of this, and in the midst of a world where we are confronted by ever more differences and unknowns, perhaps our hope is best oriented towards theologies and scientific modes of thought that do not try to avoid the mystery, that do not wash out or totalize exceptions. Perhaps we no longer need theories of everything but rather theologies and science that help us to see variation, difference, and change as possibilities rather than as dangers. Keel's work is a vital step toward this endeavor. -- Brian Bantum * <i>Reading Religion</i> * At a moment when some evolutionary theorists have become quasi-theologians, offering universal stories of existence that are as imperialistic as their eighteenth- and nineteenth- century versions, and when popular DNA speculations about racial heritage and legacy have brought us back to the door of eugenics, Keel's book reminds us of the theological trajectories from which these concepts arise. This is not an anti-science text, but one that shows us the interrelationship of theology and science and tacit assumptions behind the scientific will to universalize. We will never be able to defeat racial reasoning so long as it is concealed and nurtured in certain kinds of scientific reasoning. Keel's book greatly aids us in separating the two. -- Willie James Jennings * author of <i>The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race</i> * Divine Variations brilliantly traces the roots of modern racial science to Christian intellectual history and ideology. Despite the efforts of genomic researchers to portray current biological concepts of race as purely scientific, Keel shows that these scientists are secular creationists retelling religious folklore about the origins of human life. This book is a crucial contribution to the history of racial science. -- Dorothy Roberts * author of <i>Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century</i> *

"""Divine Variations brilliantly traces the roots of modern racial science to Christian intellectual history and ideology. Despite the efforts of genomic researchers to portray current biological concepts of race as purely scientific, Keel shows that these scientists are secular creationists retelling religious folklore about the origins of human life. This book is a crucial contribution to the history of racial science.""—Dorothy Roberts, author of Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-first Century ""At a moment when some evolutionary theorists have become quasi-theologians, offering universal stories of existence that are as imperialistic as their eighteenth- and nineteenth- century versions, and when popular DNA speculations about racial heritage and legacy have brought us back to the door of eugenics, Keel's book reminds us of the theological trajectories from which these concepts arise. This is not an anti-science text, but one that shows us the interrelationship of theology and science and tacit assumptions behind the scientific will to universalize. We will never be able to defeat racial reasoning so long as it is concealed and nurtured in certain kinds of scientific reasoning. Keel's book greatly aids us in separating the two.""—Willie James Jennings, author of The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race ""The brilliance of Terence Keel's book is to show that when it comes to race, there was no war between science and religion. Instead, this engaging and penetrating study shows how Christian ideas helped create scientific approaches to and explanations of race. Divine Variations is a must-read for all scholars of race, religion, and science.""—Edward J. Blum, co-author of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America ""In this brilliantly argued and fascinating account of the development of scientific racial theory, Keel convincingly demonstrates that the modern biological sciences still bear the deep imprint of their religious origins. Divine Variations offers us insightful new ways of thinking about the historical relations between science and religion.""—Peter Harrison, author of The Territories of Science and Religion ""Terence Keel's book brings needed nuance to the cultural and scientific history of the study of human diversity. He explores the connections between the theology and science of what eventually became human microevolution, and follows the various threads down to the present day. This is an important body of scholarship, with which anyone interested in the scientific origins of human racial theory must engage.""—Jonathan Marks, author of What it Means to be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People and Their Genes ""Terence Keel's Divine Variations points us to the materials, the old patterns and the stitches that built our modern notion of race.... Keel's work offers us a warning that there is no panacea, no easy ideology or system that is free from the colonial theologies or so called ""enlightened"" philosophies. But in the face of this, and in the midst of a world where we are confronted by ever more differences and unknowns, perhaps our hope is best oriented towards theologies and scientific modes of thought that do not try to avoid the mystery, that do not wash out or totalize exceptions. Perhaps we no longer need ""theories of everything"" but rather theologies and science that help us to see variation, difference, and change as possibilities rather than as dangers. Keel's work is a vital step toward this endeavor.""—Brian Bantum, Reading Religion ""This volume is a critical contribution to study of the concept of race and a formidable challenge to many commonplace assumptions. Equally important, it compels the reader to reevaluate the extent to which science and religion are clearly distinct realms of thought, and offers new ways of thinking about their relationship....Summing up: Essential.""—S.C. Peterson, CHOICE ""Our longing to know where we came from and what lies ahead is fierce. But what if neither science nor religion can offer those comforts?...What I find most gripping about Keel's argument is that he does not denigrate either discipline so much as he goads us to acknowledge their shared problematic epistemological impulse.""—Michelle Wolff, The Journal of Religion ""[Divine Variations] offers an original and ambitious interpretation of science and religion, one that largely avoids framing these interactions in terms of conflict or compatibility, to address a very timely subject: race.""—Ernie Hamm, Zygon ""It is widely appreciated that current struggles over race and racism are crucially shaped by the history of racism....Terence Keel masterfully demonstrates how this is true not only with respect to the legacy of historical racism on ongoing racialized inequality; it is also manifest in how modern scientific approaches to race have been informed by religious conceptions.""—Bruce Baum, American Historical Review ""[Keel] overturns assumptions of an inherent conflict between religion and science by showing that modern Western science borrows ideas and questions from Christianity.""—Sabrina Danielsen, Sociology of Religion ""[It] is de rigueur to speak of the modern concept of 'race' as solely a product of enlightenment-era scientific thought....It is here that Terence Keel enters the fray and forcefully disrupts the narrative....While the cult of racial essentialism continues to attract new acolytes, Keel's apocrypha certainly threatens its newfound articles of faith.""—Matthew W. Hughey, Ethnic and Racial Studies ""Divine Variations shows that Christianity represents a dominant paradigm for many ways of knowing, and thus its presence in racial science is not unusual but actually expected.""—Ayah Nuriddin, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences ""Keel's framework opens up a new way of looking at the problem of race, and a way to account for the role of both Western science and Christian supremacy in the global work of enslavement, the creation of plantation economies, and the violence of settler colonialism....Divine Variations is a pioneering effort in the historical study of race and racism, as well as science and religion.""—Myrna Perez Sheldon, Religious Studies Review ""Keel provides strong historical evidence for the view that science and religion are to be seen as two cultural efforts that need to be related in much more diverse and complicated ways than is usually accepted....Divine Variations is a book that must be considered by historians, philosophers and scientists alike.""—Juan Manuel Rodriguez-Caso, Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences"

Author Information

Terence Keel is Associate Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, and in the Department of African American Studies.

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