Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science by Terence Keel (review)

Terence Keel's Divine Variations disrupts the existing narrative of the history of racial science by showing the centrality of Christian intellectual history to its development. Keel traces the ways in which religious and scientific thinking converge around race, and how the formation of the race concept rests upon Christian history. Keel shows that Christian intellectual history provides the basis for why science has been in search of a common ancestor, and race emerges from what he calls a "mongrel epistemology" of both religious and scientific ways of knowing. Despite historical and current efforts to secularize knowledge of human origin, evolution, and difference, Christian intellectual history has shaped and continues to shape racial science. Polygenism, the belief that different races have independent evolutionary origins, was a centerpiece of this ongoing process to understand the sources of human variation. Using a variety of published articles and treatises, archival material, and film, Keel demonstrates how polygenism continues to shape the study of race.

Divine Variations follows the development of racial science from eighteenth-century Germany, to nineteenth-century American ethnology and Progressive-era public health. The book ends by examining current genetic research. Keel begins with the work of the physician and comparative anatomist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who crafted a racial typology that still influences conversations about race. Blumenbach coined the term Caucasian, which for him represented an Adamic figure and white civilized patriarch. He also divided human beings into groupings of African, Asian, Caucasian, and Malayan, and this typology continues to be present in racial science from the eighteenth century to the present. Keel argues that for Blumenbach and nineteenth-century racial scientists such as Josiah Nott, polygenist visions of racial science relied upon Christian thought despite efforts of racial scientists to secularize their discourse. Keel argues, "American polygenism was a manifestation of Christian supersessionism turned in on itself" (p. 58). These racial scientists adopted a kind of scientific naturalism that replaced the creator God with the idea of nature, leading to what Keel describes as secular creationism. Nott, for example, was explicitly anti-religious and tried to separate human history from the Bible, but remained committed to an inherent natural order.

Keel dedicates a significant portion of the book to examining the life and work of Charles V. Roman, an African American physician, scholar, and activist committed to improving African American public health in the first half of the twentieth century. Unlike other historians of racial science, Keel illustrates the important ways in which Africans Americans such as Roman participated in the production of racial science while critiquing the ways it negatively shaped African American life. However, Keel neglects to note that Roman was not unique in his articulation of the relationship between race, morality, and health. His work was situated in a broader context of racial uplift ideology, which influenced African American physicians, scientists, and other intellectuals for much of the first half of the twentieth century. Roman and his contemporaries took up forms of eugenics as part of this vision of racial improvement, which challenged the scientific racism that Keel traces back to Blumenbach.

The last chapter of Divine Variations focuses on the discovery of Neanderthal DNA and the completion of the Neanderthal Genome Project (NGP) in 2010. Here, Keel shows how the collection and grouping of DNA for the NGP was rooted in the ontology of secular creationism, and mirrored Blumenbach's typology. Keel argues in this chapter that creationist assumptions were embedded into the algorithms and technologies used to calculate and quantify human genetic diversity. By grouping DNA into three or four essential groups based on their geography, Keel shows that the polygenic racial visions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries continue to influence how people mobilize racial ideology.

The most important contributions of Divine Variations are in Keel's ability to trace the presence of Christian intellectual history, language, and metaphor in scientific conversation about race, and how Christian ideas...