Gould's "The Geometry of Race"

              Gould argued his idea by using racial classification by two different scientists called Linnaeus and Blumenbach. Linnaeus was the founder of taxonomy, and established a theory that people can be divided into four different groups; American, European, Asian and African. Blumenbach who was a German anatomist and naturalist added the Malay to his theory and made a minor change. Though his change of the classification was trivial, the new system radically changed the structure of order. It was changed from geographical model into hierarchical model. Blumenbach believes that human derives from one single region and spread to the world. Also, he believes that there is no superiority or inferiority among each group. The skin color is easily changed by natural causes and the form of head is attributed to the mode of life and art. Racial variations are caused by such outside causes and the differences are obvious because they are inherited for generations. In my opinion, Gould tried to say that the classification of human is meaningless because the classification is imagined and does not have scientific evidence. The classification of both Linnaeus and Blumenbach ignores the race between each group, however, if one tries to classify into more small groups, it would be divided into each individuals. Therefore I think that the bigger topic of this essay is implying that classifying human is nonsense.