The Origins of Anthropological Genetics

Abstract

Although we often date the conflict of “molecules and morphology” in biological anthropology to the 1962 Wenner-Gren conference “Classification and Human Evolution,” the roots of the conflict extend considerably deeper. In the first half of the twentieth century, two established research traditions applied genetic data to problems in physical anthropology: racial serology and systematic serology. These had a tense relationship with the more mainstream areas of racial anthropology and primate taxonomy. Both produced conclusions that were often difficult to reconcile with traditional physical anthropology but that laid claim to the authoritative voices of genetics and evolution. They were also less relevant and less threatening to general anthropology than the other movement for the application of genetics to anthropological problems—eugenics—had been. I discuss the relations of genetics to anthropology as manifested in the areas of eugenics, race, and primate taxonomy in the early twentieth century and the field’s transformation into anthropological genetics in the 1960s.