Everyone Claims the Lab Coat: How Boas's Correction Became the Thing It Corrected

2026-08-05 · AI-generated insight

Read side by side, these notes stage a fight over a single rhetorical prize: who gets to say their theory of human nature is just science and their opponent's is just politics.

Degler presents Boas as the empiricist hero — the man who looked at the evidence and found that observable social differences trace to "different histories, not different biological experiences." In that telling, culturism was science dismantling prejudice. Wade inverts the story completely: Boas's doctrine was "designed to support" a political conclusion, with the science reverse-engineered from the desired answer. Same man, same doctrine — scientific liberation in one note, motivated reasoning in the other.

Derbyshire then performs the exact move Wade accuses the Boasians of, just pointed the other direction. His taxonomy of Religionists, Culturists, and Biologians pretends to be even-handed until the last line: "Biologism is just ordinary scientific method applied to humanity." The other two positions get histories and psychological explanations — religionism emerges from cognitive quirks, culturism has roots in Bastian and Locke — while his own position gets no genealogy at all, because things that are simply true don't need one. That asymmetry is the tell. Explaining your opponents' beliefs causally while exempting your own is the signature of every side in this debate.

Diamond is the interesting outlier, because his sentence — different environments, not different biology — is precisely what Wade dismisses as the doctrine of "fortunate accidents such as that of geography." But Diamond didn't offer it as a moral axiom; Guns, Germs, and Steel is hundreds of pages of attempted empirical demonstration. He treated the Boasian position not as a creed to be defended but as a hypothesis to be tested against latitude, domesticable species, and continental axes. Whatever its flaws, that's the only posture here that escapes the loop.

The synthesis: Boasianism began as an empirical corrective to biological determinism that had itself hardened into prejudice-serving dogma. A century later, Wade and Derbyshire argue it has hardened into equality-serving dogma, and offer biology as the empirical corrective. The pattern suggests corrections don't stay corrections. The question worth carrying forward isn't "culture or biology?" but: what would keep the next corrective from ossifying — and Diamond's answer seems to be, make it cash out in testable claims about the world.

Woven from these notes

The social scientists’ official view of race is designed to support the political view that genetics cannot possibly be the reason why human societies differ—the answer must lie exclusively in differing human cultures and the environment that produced them. The social anthropologist Franz Boas established the doctrine that human behavior is shaped only by culture and that no culture is superior to any other. From this point of view it follows that all humans are essentially interchangeable apart from their cultures, and that more complex societies owe their greater strength or prosperity solely to fortunate accidents such as that of geography.

— Nicholas Wade A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History 2026-07-20

There are three theories of human nature enjoying widespread support at present. For convenience, I’ll tag each one of them with a single adjective. Religious. Our species Homo sapiens is the special creation of God, either as a one-off miracle or by God-guided evolution. Human nature is a mix of attributes, some natural ones arising from plain biology, some supernatural ones inserted by God. We are the Chosen Species. The God-given attributes are unique to our species. They are the same in all human populations, forming the foundation of our essential equality. Their existence is independent of our biological nature, even to the degree that they can continue to exist after our deaths. Being nonbiological, they don’t evolve, even if other features of the living world do, so that our evolution, if it ever took place, ended (except perhaps for some incidental biological features) when God decreed we have these supernatural attributes. These God-given attributes include the moral sense, which accesses transcendent truths—i.e., truths that do not dwell in the world of matter. God rules! Cultural. Our species arose, like all other species, from the ordinary processes of evolution. However, these processes ceased in the early history of the species, leaving us with a human nature uniform across all populations and unchanging over time, forming the foundation of our essential equality. This human nature has very little innate structure and is extremely plastic. By placing it in a suitable environment, or applying suitable pressures, the mind (and therefore the behavior, which issues from the mind) can be shaped in any way at all. “Human nature” does not really exist independent of the environment an individual happens to be in, especially that part of the environment made up of other human beings—“the culture.” Moral standards are arbitrary, and are taken in by the individual from the culture. Culture rules! Biological. Our species arose, like all other species, from the ordinary processes of evolution, which have continued to the present day. Human nature is a collection of characteristics all susceptible to biological explanation. Some characteristics of a person’s nature can be shaped to some degree by “cultural” (i.e., social or environmental) forces; some cannot. Human beings are a part of the living world, and nothing more. Our equality consists in being members of a single species; though our species, like any other with very wide distribution, exhibits regional differences. The characteristics of an individual human being are templated in his genome. They may be somewhat modified by womb events or life experiences; or they may need to be “instantiated” by postpartum environment. (An individual’s genome may, for example, predispose him to be eloquent or tongue-tied when using language; but which language he uses will depend on his childhood environment.) The repertoire of human behaviors, and of ideas, including moral ideas, about behavior, are innate, the result of evolutionary processes acting on our social lives across many generations. Biology rules! For convenience in what follows, I’ll label adherents of these three views with the more or less made-up words “Religionists,” “Culturists,” and “Biologians.” Each point of view has a history. Religionism emerges from core features of human thinking, as described by cognitive scientists like Pascal Boyer (Religion Explained, 2001), Scott Atran (In Gods We Trust, 2002), and Bruce Hood (Supersense, 2009). Culturism has roots in the tabula rasa (“blank slate”) theories of Aristotle and Locke. It was put into its modern form by German anthropologist Adolf Bastian (1826–1905). Bastian coined the phrase “the psychic unity of mankind.” His student Franz Boas brought these ideas to the United States, becoming the most influential American anthropologist of the early twentieth century. Biologism is just ordinary scientific method applied to humanity.

— John Derbyshite We Are Doomed 2026-07-20

History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.

— Jared Diamon Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies 2026-07-20

Boas’s rejection of the traditional view was truly radical; it simply denied the existence of any significant innate differences between savage, colored people and civilized, white people. The differences in physical appearance, in short, did not lead to any significant difference in mental or social function. That there were observable social differences was undeniable, but the explanation for those differences. Boas maintained, was that they were the product of different histories, not different biological experiences.

— Carl Degler In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought 2026-07-21