In his article "The beautiful skull and Blumenbach's errors: the birth of the scientific topic of race" (2007), Raj Bhopal re-examines one of the most influential scientists on the age-old hunt for a scientific difference between races, claiming that Blumenbach's discriminatory goal of defining different races in order to rank them still exists in many professional fields today, biasing the opinions and works of many scientists. He first talks about Blumenbach's life, about his different studies, and about other contributions he made to several scientists aside from his famous work in anthropology; he then examines the "five races" defined by Blumenbach and discusses how the purposeful separations of different ethnicities has given birth to the majority of not all scientific racism in the last three centuries. Bhopal writes to reveal a foundation in scientific racism and the reason for the perceived gap between ethnicities that provides a working reason to search for the "biological difference" between difference races. He writes for those in the biology, anthropology, and other related fields who wish to understand the origins of the racism inherent in too many modern sciences.
Article Link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2151154/
MLA Citation:
Bhopal, Raj. "The beautiful skull and Blumenbach's errors: the birth of the scientific topic of race." BMJ
Publishing group ltd (2007). Web. 11 April 2012.
Annotation:
This article will allow a quick and easy synthesis of both Blumenbach's work and personal philosophy into the paper, allowing both the irony of his successors' work and the fatal errors made on his behalf to be better introduced during the literature review, and providing with yet another solid scientific model that contributes to modern day race theory.
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