SSS 2009-02-12

（单词翻译）

This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Steve Mirsky . Got a minute ?

February 12th is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. But they’re linked by something else, too. Before Darwin, natural philosophers held to a point of view called typology, or essentialism. Members of a particular class were all the same. For example, all triangles have the same fundamental characteristic: three sides.

This way of thinking, however, extended to the biological world, including humans. As the great evolutionary¹ biologist Ernst Mayr wrote in an essay in the July, 2000, issue of Scientific American, “For the typologist, Caucasians, Africans, Asians or Inuits are types that conspicuously² differ from other human ethnic³ groups. This mode of thinking leads to racism⁴.” But Darwin replaced typology with the new concept of populations. Groupings of organisms are populations of unique individuals—who vary.

Typology offered a philosophical⁵ justification⁶ for a slave being worth three-fifths of a white person in the Constitution. But now science insisted that all people, regardless of race, were fully⁷ human. A viewpoint that finally began to be put in practice in the US by Lincoln.

Thanks for the minute for Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Steve Mirsky .