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From the 17th through the 19th centuries, the merging of folk beliefs about group differences with scientific explanations of those differences produced what one scholar has called an "ideology of race" (Smedley 1999). According to this ideology, races are primordial, natural, enduring, and distinct. Some groups might be the result of mixture between formerly distinct populations, but careful study can distinguish the ancestral races that had combined to produce admixed groups.
In the [[19th century]] a number of [[natural science|natural scientists]] wrote on race: [[Georges Cuvier]], [[James Cowles Pritchard]], [[Louis Agassiz]], [[Charles_Pickering_NMI|Charles Pickering]], and [[Johann Friedrich Blumenbach]]. These scientists made three claims about race: first, that races are objective, naturally occurring divisions of humanity; second, that there is a strong relationship between biological races and other human phenomena (such as [[forms of activity and interpersonal relations]] and culture, and by extension the relative [[materialism|material success]] of cultures); third, that race is therefore a valid scientific category that can be used to explain and predict individual and group behavior. Races were distinguished by [[human skin color|skin color]], [[face|facial]] type, [[cranium|cranial]] profile and size, texture and color of [[hair]]. Moreover, races were almost universally considered to reflect group differences in [[moral]] character and [[intelligence (trait)|intelligence]].
Their understanding of race was usually both [[essentialism|essentialist]] (defining a race by a list of characteristics) and [[taxonomic]] (hierarchical). The advent of [[Charles Darwin|Darwinian]] models of [[evolution]] and [[Gregor Mendel|Mendelian]] [[genetics]], however, called into question the scientific validity of both characteristics, and required a radical reconsideration of race.
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