[Celebrated 19th-century biologist Ernst Haeckel pushed race
science as his little-known protégé Nikolai Miklucho-Maclay defended
Indigenous rights. A biological anthropologist reflects on the impacts
of their ruptured relationship.]
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HOW THE EARLY BATTLE OVER RACE SCIENCE WAS LOST  
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Vivek V. Venkataraman
February 21, 2023
Sapiens [[link removed]]

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_ Celebrated 19th-century biologist Ernst Haeckel pushed race science
as his little-known protégé Nikolai Miklucho-Maclay defended
Indigenous rights. A biological anthropologist reflects on the impacts
of their ruptured relationship. _

A monument to biologist Nikolai Miklucho-Maclay stands in a park in
Okulovka, Russia., Wikimedia Commons

 

ON SEPTEMBER 20, 1871, a 25-year-old Russian biologist named Nikolai
Miklucho-Maclay stepped off the ship _Vityaz_ and onto the beach at
Astrolabe Bay in New Guinea. He came to meet Indigenous Papuans, who
until that moment had likely never glimpsed a European.

Some onlookers fled and arrows whizzed
[[link removed]] over his head as warning
shots, but Miklucho-Maclay convinced the Papuans to let him remain.
He dashed off a letter
[[link removed]] to
his family in Russia: “I am at my destination. I will stay in New
Guinea for a year. There is much work to do but I hope for success.
Goodbye and don’t forget me.”

Miklucho-Maclay wanted to live among the Papuans, on equal terms, in
order to learn about their culture and biology. During the 1870s and
1880s, he went on to reside with the Native peoples of New Guinea for
years at a time, learning several local dialects and gaining their
trust. At the time, this research was considered strange, if not
dangerous. Anthropology as a discipline did not yet exist.

Through this work
[[link removed]],
Miklucho-Maclay crystalized anti-racist views that were strikingly
progressive for an era when many European scholars believed that
certain human “races” were biologically superior to others.
Recording meticulous observations and measurements, he marshaled
scientific evidence that debunked the racist theories of his peers.
Those empirical insights galvanized him to protest slavery
[[link removed]] and
the exploitation of Indigenous peoples in the South Pacific.

Yet, few people outside Russia know of Miklucho-Maclay. Little of his
work was ever published, and much was destroyed after his death, in
1888, at the age of 41. I first heard of him during my doctoral
studies as I was preparing to conduct my own ethnographic fieldwork in
Southeast Asia.

The author conducts fieldwork in Malaysia, where Miklucho-Maclay also
spent time during his research career in the 19th century. Courtesy of
Vivek V. Venkataraman

Physical anthropology bears a sordid history. The field
concocted intellectual justifications
[[link removed]] for
now-disproven ideas of race science
[[link removed]] and paved the way for
eugenics, the idea that humans could be improved by selecting specific
hereditary traits, most often traits of White Northern Europeans.
These ideas were championed by scientists such as Ernst Haeckel, who
mentored Miklucho-Maclay. Their uneven relationship shows one arena
where the struggle over race science was fought.

Although Miklucho-Maclay’s ideas did not gain prominence, looking
back, his life and work show that the close association between race
science and physical anthropology was not inevitable.

✽

BORN IN 1846 TO a Cossack family in Ukraine, Miklucho-Maclay was
raised in a household of activism and revolutionary thought. As a
politically active youth, he was barred from a Russian university, so
he decided to pursue education abroad. He ended up in Germany, under
the tutelage of Haeckel, an emerging star in the field of evolutionary
biology.

Today Haeckel remains famous yet reviled. He made important
contributions in the fields of evolutionary biology and ecology, and
he elucidated connections between development—changes over an
individual lifespan—and evolution—changes across generations.

But he was also deeply racist and an early advocate of eugenics.

Though Haeckel trained Miklucho-Maclay in ecology and biological
classification, their paths diverged, as a recent study
[[link removed]] by
historians Georgy Levit and Uwe Hossfeld chronicled. Emerging
scientific evidence made Haeckel see differences and entrench himself
more staunchly in scientific racism. Miklucho-Maclay, on the other
hand, recognized the unity of humans worldwide.

✽

IN THE EARLY DAYS of their relationship, Miklucho-Maclay served as
one of Haeckel’s research assistants for an expedition to the Canary
Islands off Africa’s northwest coast. On this mid-1800s trip, the
scientists searched for sea creatures that would yield empirical proof
of evolution.

Ernst Haeckel and his assistant Miklucho-Maclay (standing) pose for a
photograph taken prior to their Canary Islands trip in 1866.
Unknown/Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons

In the azure waters off a volcanic island called Lanzarote,
Miklucho-Maclay found a small sea sponge that was unknown to Western
science at the time. In a testament to his sympathies toward
Indigenous peoples, he gave it the species name _Guancha blanca_—a
tribute to the Guanches, Native people of the Canary Islands who had
been decimated by European colonists.

Miklucho-Maclay noticed that individuals of _Guancha blanca_ showed
extreme variations in shape and the various forms bore striking
similarities to coelenterates, a group of aquatic animals that
includes corals, jellyfishes, and sea anemones. In line with the
research trip’s mission, this observation suggested the creatures
evolved from a shared, _Guancha_-like ancestor. It seemed
Miklucho-Maclay had discovered a primitive relict from the days of
early animals, a missing link that connected sponges to more complex
lifeforms.

The trip’s success could have presaged an enduring friendship and
working relationship. But it was not to be.

✽

IN THE LATE 1800s, the relationship deteriorated as the men
solidified incompatible views about human diversity. Charles Darwin,
who formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection, was
famously cautious about speculating on the details of human evolution.
But not Haeckel. “Of all the individual questions answered by the
theory of descent,” he wrote
[[link removed]],
“there is none of such importance as the application of this
doctrine to man himself.”

In his book The Evolution of Man, Haeckel compared the embryos and
fetuses of dogs, bats, hares, and humans to uncover evidence for the
animals’ shared evolutionary pasts. Science & Society Picture
Library /Getty Images

Though few human fossils had been identified at the time, Haeckel
found evidence for human evolution elsewhere: in development, the
changes organisms undergo as they grow. By studying growing embryos of
various animals, he realized that human embryos first resemble those
of fish
[[link removed]],
then reptiles, then mammals. As Haeckel famously put it
[[link removed]], “ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny.” This maxim among biologists means a
growing embryo resembles successive stages in that creature’s
evolutionary tree. A human embryo, for example, starts as fish-like
with gills, then becomes reptile-like with a tail, before coming to
resemble a human fetus.

While this evidence helped confirm the shared ancestry of all humans,
Haeckel aimed to divide our species. He was a monogenist; he believed
in a single origin of humans. And yet, the biologist expected to find
large—and perhaps unbridgeable—differences between groups of
humans, which would fit onto an evolutionary tree.

In one version
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the human family tree Haeckel constructed, 12 species were scattered
across 36 races. Haeckel organized these groups into a hierarchy
[[link removed]].
Indo-Europeans (specifically, Germans, Haeckel’s nationality) were
at the top. Apes were at the bottom. In between were populations
living far from Europe, including Aboriginal Australians, Southern
African “Hottentots,” and Papuans from New Guinea. Just
as _Guancha blanca_ shed light on the shared ancestor of all
animals, Haeckel believed these populations would reveal humanity’s
past. He was particularly interested in the inhabitants of New Guinea,
whom he relegated near the base of his unfounded hierarchy—closer to
apes than Germans.

✽

AROUND THIS TIME, Miklucho-Maclay also grew interested in humans; he
followed Haeckel’s intuition to New Guinea. This is when their paths
quite literally diverged: They had a falling out, the underlying
reasons for which remain unclear. But unlike Haeckel, who mostly
worked from the comfort of his armchair in Germany, Miklucho-Maclay
wanted to meet these faraway people.

When Miklucho-Maclay pored through books and reports, he realized that
European notions about Papuans were mostly based on fantastical
rumors. No European scientists had mustered the open-mindedness to
live with residents for enough time—much less as equals—to learn
who they really were.

So in 1871, Miklucho-Maclay voyaged to Astrolabe Bay to live among the
Papuans. That was decades before the Polish anthropologist Bronisław
Malinowski developed the methodology known as participant observation
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which requires long periods of immersive fieldwork like
Miklucho-Maclay was about to undertake.

Miklucho-Maclay’s drawing titled “Papuan” published in 1886.
Nicholas Miklucho-Maclay/Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons

The illustration by Miklucho-Maclay features a house with a Russian
flag on top near the village of Bongu in Madang province, Papua New
Guinea. Nicholas Miklucho-Maclay/Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons

Once settled among the Papuans, Miklucho-Maclay slowly earned their
trust and started to measure their physical traits. He soon realized
all of Haeckel’s assumptions about the Papuans were wrong. He found
that physical traits such as skin color, hair texture
[[link removed]], and face shape
failed to divide humans into distinct races. Papuan communities
themselves were diverse; individuals had skin colors and other traits
that varied along gradients. As early as 1872, Miklucho-Maclay had
already disproved several of Haeckel’s assumptions that were key to
his human evolutionary tree.

✽

HAECKEL NEVER PUBLICLY acknowledged Miklucho-Maclay’s work in New
Guinea. During the 1870s and 1880s, he gave lectures throughout Europe
repeating the same arguments about human racial hierarchies that he
proposed in the 1860s. Despite growing evidence against his
classifications, Haeckel never changed his views, which were starting
to look racist even by the standards of his day. In his last book,
published shortly before his death in 1919, Haeckel repeated
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the difference between “highly developed European nations and the
lowest savages” was greater than that between the “savages” and
apes.

Haeckel is said to have brought Darwinism to more people than Darwin
himself. But Haeckel seemed to care little about the social
implications of his evolutionary classifications.

In contrast, Miklucho-Maclay started to prioritize activism. For
example, he led protests against predatory behavior, such
as blackbirding
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of enslavement perpetrated against Indigenous people in the South
Pacific. In these respects, he was a man ahead of his time. In his
era, physical anthropology was largely used to reinforce inequalities
and hierarchies. But for Miklucho-Maclay, findings from physical
anthropology refuted racist hierarchies and demanded action. “The
extermination of the dark races is none other than the use of gross
force. … Any honest man should rise against such atrocities,” he
wrote [[link removed]].

A monument near Bongu Village in Papua New Guinea celebrates the
legacy of Miklucho-Maclay. Bangsuma/Wikimedia Commons

In other respects, Miklucho-Maclay was very much a man of his time. He
uncritically accepted the bodies
[[link removed]] of
executed prisoners in Australia for anatomical examination. He even
dissected his own field assistant
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New Guinea. But he was also no hypocrite when it came to using the
human body for scientific purpose: He donated his own skull
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science and insisted it be placed in the museum cabinet among the
skulls he collected from New Guinea.

Miklucho-Maclay is far less famous than his teacher. While nearly all
biology textbooks mention Haeckel for his work on embryos,
Miklucho-Maclay’s name appears in obscure corners of the scientific
and literary universe: A species of wasp
[[link removed]] and a weevil bear his
name [[link removed]], as does an asteroid
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the subject of a novel written in Esperanto
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a language invented in the late 1800s for global communication.

Yet, his achievements were monumental. Born to an era of baseless race
science, he partly overcame his biases through systematic study and
observation. In a letter to Miklucho-Maclay, Russian author Leo
Tolstoy praised him
[[link removed]]:
“You were the first, who, from your own experience, clearly
demonstrated that humans are everywhere humans.”

The story of Miklucho-Maclay shows it was not inevitable that physical
anthropology would come to justify the intellectual framework behind
race science, and that activism and anthropology can complement each
other in important ways. As racism and race-based thinking continue
today, I sometimes imagine a version of history where Miklucho-Maclay
helped stunt race science during anthropology’s infancy. His story
is a rare and shining example of how scholarly rigor and activism can
be combined to advance social justice—a legacy worth remembering.

_VIVEK V. VENKATARAMAN [[link removed]] is a
biological anthropologist and hunter-gatherer expert who studies the
evolution of human foraging strategies. He received his Ph.D. from
Dartmouth College and is currently an assistant professor at the
University of Calgary. He is a principal investigator of the Orang
Asli Health and Lifeways Project [[link removed]],
which explores how environmental change is impacting the health of the
Indigenous peoples of Peninsular Malaysia. Follow him on
Twitter @vivek_vasi [[link removed]]._

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