Carolus Linnaeus Contribution in Science Free Essay Example

A system was created during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for labeling people because of their race. During the late seventeenth century the term race, was used to categorize people. François Bernier born in France 1625, was a brilliant French Scholar during his time, he was known to be a Traveler and a French Physician. Fançois Bernier was the first person to apply the race system to categorize people. He divided people into categories based upon their qualities of their facial features, skin color and hair texture.

This technique was implemented to make grouping ethnic groups easier.

While within the eighteen century, scientists of Europe, especially the naturalist, Carolus Linnaeus which was born in Sweden, on May 23, 1707, used the idea to classify Humanity. In 1735 Carolus Linnaeus created his Systema Naturae which he pursued to classify all the World’s living creatures by assigning each genus and species. He then created another name for humans which was Homo Sapiens. He then separated into five new subspecies, while four of them were based upon the Geographic origin such as Europe, The Americas, Africa & Asia.

The fifth Subspecies was announced later, which was the name “wild men”. This term was used for the disabled and mythical strange humans. Carolus Linnaeus Geographical Subspecies ranked and identified humans based on his mixture of cultural and physical characteristics put together, per the information he understood to be their forms of his government. Europeans which were at the top of his list, were always paled out and were ruled by rules.

While Africans were at the bottom of the food chain which were allegedly ruled by their own personal whim. Throughout all Carolus Linnaeus did other Europeans scientists began to expand on his system.

Comte de Buffon who was born September 7, 1707, also in France argued that this isn’t an ideal form of humanity, against which humans could be ranked and judged was then found in ancient Nude Greek Sculptures. While using his own methods of characterizing he sided with Carolus Linnaeus and placed Europeans at the top and Africans at the bottom. New groups were being discovered such as the Pacific Islanders. They were also placed in the Hierarchy just in case they were ranked in between Africa & Europe. Europe was not the only country in the world whose way of thinking justified their own sense of Superiority.

The Chinese were very different for they don’t accept other countries’ cultures, only their own would be tolerated. The Chinese also describe foreigners based on their strange physical features and their distinctives. For Europeans they based them off their thick Beards, ash white skin. For persons from Asia they were described as Black wavy-haired devils. After being wrongfully stigmatized, outsiders then reinforced the classifiers’ sense of themself to build back their confidence by categorizing themself as beautiful, attractive, normal, and superior. However, the Chinese still stuck with their own descriptions toward ‘strange outsiders’ which was all it meant to them, just simply descriptions. While Europeans categorization of others in the world while being descriptive, was based upon a different type of criteria. They started to divide outsiders as either ‘uncivilized’ or ‘civilized’ based on certain factors, like a person’s literacy skills, and their culture. This strategy reflected the ranking of other persons with the same characteristics. While Africans place was still at the bottom which reflected the fact that Europeans held millions of slaves who were Africans in the Americas. The Chinese system was very different from the Europeans for it presented descriptions, assumptions, and prejudices about others as a rational, universal system of knowledge.

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