The mind of primitive man : $b A course of lectures delivered before the Lowell Institute, Boston, Mass., and the National University of Mexico, 1910-1911Boas, Franz
Science
The mind of primitive man : $b A course of lectures delivered before the Lowell Institute, Boston, Mass., and the National University of Mexico, 1910-1911
Boas, Franz
Ethnopsychology; Race
between the parents, or to a type dependent upon such a middle type.
A number of years ago I had an opportunity to investigate a considerable
number of Indian half-bloods; that is to say, of descendants of Indian
mothers and white fathers. The most characteristic difference between
the American Indian race and the European race, so far as these
differences can be expressed in metrical form, is found in the width of
the face. An extensive series of measurements of width of face made
among half-bloods showed conclusively that the width of face does not
tend to range around a certain intermediate value located between the
width of face of the white race and that of the Indian race, but there
was a decided tendency in the children to resemble either the Indian
race or the white race; in other words, that feature of Mendelian
inheritance which brings about the occurrence of mixed characteristics
in the first hybrid generation was not found, but instead of this a
decided tendency of reversion to either type, and to comparative rarity
of intermediate forms. The results seem also to indicate that the Indian
form in this mixture seems to dominate over the white form, but not in
the Mendelian sense, which would require the presence of dominant
features in a certain definite number of individuals, but only in the
sense that the Indian type was a little more frequent than the European
type, with the effect that the average width of face of the whole series
was a little nearer to the Indian group than to the white group.
While this single observation is not by any means sufficient to
determine fully the characteristic traits of heredity which govern the
phenomenon in question, they indicate decidedly and beyond cavil that,
in this case at least, we find what has been called by Karl Pearson
“alternating inheritance.” It is worth remarking that not all the
features of the body of the half-blood Indian exhibit the same tendency;
that, for instance, in the case of stature, a general increase in the
stature of the mixed people over that of the pure races may be observed.
Attention has been called by Felix von Luschan to a similar phenomenon
which occurs in the mixed population of southern Asia Minor, where he
believes to have found an alternating inheritance of the head-form,
particularly of the proportions between width and length of head; some
of the people retaining the short, high head-forms of the Armenoid type
of the interior of Asia Minor, while the others have the long, low head
of the Semites of Syria.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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