monogenism

Hale provides a nice account of Wallace's often overlooked address to London's Anthropological Society that attempted to reconcile its avowed polygenism with the monogenism espoused in Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley's Ethnological Society.

In attempting to understand the origin of living organisms, the ancients quite reasonably reversed (retrojected) the series of immutable organisms back in time to the de novo creation of the first individual (monogenism) or group (polygenism) of every kind of creature.

Embedded in this debate over racial fusion were conflicting debates in France over how races originated: Paul Broca's monogenism, "which posited an original race from which all subsequent races had emerged," and Arthur de Gobineau's polygenism, "which argued that a variety of 'pure' races had existed during the early period of human life." (41) These debates colored all discussions of race in Spain and influenced how "European ideas about origins and racial types" meshed with Spaniards' conceptions of "their own particular national land political] context" (41-42).

Cohen, implied that d'Eichthal was a believer in monogenism, describing the racial mixing he suggested as a"means of improving the black race" (236-7).

Using philology, Prichard looked for evidence that showed a common origin of all humans (monogenism), proclaiming that 'the comparison of languages ...

Eventually both Evangelicals and polygenists were trumped by the new monogenism of the Darwinists who argued for the evolution of a single human species but at different rates that had led to longstanding and profound differences between 'races' measured physically according to the shape of the skull, the hue of the skin or the curl of the hair, or culturally through the progress of institutions, intellect or morality (Kenny 2007; Stocking 1968:56; 1987:148-50).