ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights three critical junctures in which science, politics, and personality interacted: the disputes between Ernst Haeckel and Rudolf Virchow, between Franz Boas and Madison Grant, and finally between Carleton Coon and Ashley Montagu. Anthropology first emerged as the science of race, with researchers measuring fossil skulls and attempting to determine their race and antiquity. Another line of argument that the belief in the biological reality of race and racial differences arose as rationalizations for slavery concerns what has been called the American School of Anthropology. A race that produced a high proportion of highly gifted individuals had a high level of intelligence. The preliminary match in anthropology's fight over race was Virchow versus Haeckel. Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr provided the most cogent response when he pointed out that having a proper concept of race was far more important than terminology.
