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Henry Fairfield Osborn, who headed the New York Zoological Society and the board of trustees of the American Museum of Natural History (and, as a member of the U.S. Geological Survey, named...
Part I of II. by Michael Barker. (Swans - February 13, 2012) In common parlance Henry Fairfield Osborn's racial legacy (1857-1935) remains largely unknown, but as the president of the American Museum of Natural History (1908-33) and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1928), Osborn was, in his day, "second only ...
Henry Fairfield Osborn, Sr. FRS [1] (August 8, 1857 – November 6, 1935) [2] was an American paleontologist, geologist and eugenics advocate. He was the president of the American Museum of Natural History for 25 years and a cofounder of the American Eugenics Society .
The second part of the apology addressed two of the group’s founders — Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield Osborn — and their advancement of “eugenics-based, pseudoscientific racism.”
By flooding the market, Osborn, with sympathetic textbook authors and a socially conservative public as accomplices, advanced a racialized theory of evolution that resisted countervailing evidence for decades, survived Piltdown’s fall in 1953, and tainted the teaching of biology in high schools and colleges well into the 1970s.
According to Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History from 1908 to 1933, Piltdown man, the famous fake [1], was proof that Darwin’s theory of natural selection was wrong, and that modern humans did not need trace their ancestry through Africa.
"Study of Osborn's thinking, however, has been obscured by the perception that racism influenced his theories. Brian Regal paints a different and more textured picture in this book - he shows that Osborn's views on race, like his political ideas, were motivated by his science, itself grounded in religious doctrine.
