Racial Positivists Essay

Racial Positivists Pseudoscience is involved in ranking people according to things like intelligence, fertility, and even genital size (Price, October 13). Good science provides correctable, reversible, and testable information. Pseudoscience on the other hand does none of this, yet still passes as good science because it is complicated by deceiving statistics (Price, October 13). Racial positivists such as J. Philippe Rushton, Francis Galton, and Pieter Camper all utilize pseudoscience to support their illegitimate views. JP Rushton was a Canadian psychologist who argued that race is a biological construct and used pseudoscience to support his inherent racism. One of the ways he did this was by developing “R selection” and “K selection”
He believed that cranial features could be used to classify things such as someone’s race, criminal temperament, and intelligence (Carroll). Camper, along with other craniometrists, used this pseudoscience to justify their racist policies against whom they considered to be inferior races.
One aspect of craniometry is a concept that Camper developed called a “facial angle,” which was a measurement used to rank races by intelligence (Carroll). Camper claimed that Asians had an facial angle of 90 degrees, Europeans had 80 degrees, African Americans had 70 degrees, and Orangutans had 58 degrees (Carroll). This measurement supported a hierarchic view of mankind. It was also very racist because it assumed that African Americans had an intelligence level low enough to resemble an Orangutan. Pseudoscience is a method that should be eliminated completely. Rushton, Galton, and Camper are only three examples out of many racial positivists who used pseudoscience as an outlet for their prejudices. Good science should be correctable, reversible, and testable. Pseudoscience is false, discriminatory, and bigoted and couldn’t be any further from a reputable