[17] Cf. Kapital, vol. i, ch. xiii, sect 10.
[18] Cf. Kautsky, Erfurter Programm, ch. v, sect. 13; Bernstein, Voraussetzungen, ch. iv, sect. e.
THE MUTATION THEORY AND THE BLOND
RACE[1]
The theories of racial development by mutation, associated with the name of Mendel, when they come to be freely applied to man, must greatly change the complexion of many currently debated questions of race—as to origins, migrations, dispersion, chronology, cultural derivation and sequence. In some respects the new theories should simplify current problems of ethnology, and they may even dispense with many analyses and speculations that have seemed of great moment in the past.
The main postulate of the Mendelian theories—the stability of type—has already done much service in anthropological science, being commonly assumed as a matter of course in arguments dealing with the derivation and dispersion of races and peoples. It is only by force of this assumption that ethnologists are able to identify any given racial stock over intervals of space or time, and so to trace the racial affinities of any given people. Question has been entertained from time to time as to the racial fixity of given physical traits—as, e.g., stature, the cephalic indices, or hair and eye color—but on the whole these and other standard marks of race are still accepted as secure grounds of identification.[2] Indeed, without some such assumption any ethnological inquiry must degenerate into mere wool-gathering.
But along with this, essentially Mendelian, postulate of the stability of types, ethnologists have at the same time habitually accepted the incompatible Darwinian doctrine that racial types vary incontinently after a progressive fashion, arising through insensible cumulative variations and passing into new specific forms by the same method, under the Darwinian rule of the selective survival of slight and unstable (non-typical) variations. The effect of these two incongruous premises has been to leave discussions of race derivation somewhat at loose ends wherever the two postulates cross one another.
If it be assumed, or granted, that racial types are stable, it follows as a matter of course that these types or races have not arisen by the cumulative acquirement of unstable non-specific traits, but must have originated by mutation or by some analogous method, and this view must then find its way into anthropology as into the other biological sciences. When such a step is taken an extensive revision of questions of race will be unavoidable, and an appreciable divergence may then be looked for among speculations on the mutational affinities of the several races and cultures.
Among matters so awaiting revision are certain broad questions of derivation and ethnography touching the blond race or races of Europe. Much attention, and indeed much sentiment, has been spent on this general topic. The questions involved are many and diverse, and many of them have been subject of animated controversy, without definitive conclusions.
The mutation theories, of course, have immediately to do with the facts of biological derivation alone, but when the facts are reviewed in the light of these theories it will be found that questions of cultural origins and relationship are necessarily drawn into the inquiry. In particular, an inquiry into the derivation and distribution of the blond stock will so intimately involve questions of the Aryan speech and institutions as to be left incomplete without a somewhat detailed attention to this latter range of questions. So much so that an inquiry into the advent and early fortunes of the blond stock in Europe will fall, by convenience, under two distinct but closely related captions: The Origin of the Blond Type, and The Derivation of the Aryan Culture.