[#NeuroRacism | Eugenics 🧵]

What we hope to show today is that there are real consequences to this racist way of pursuing science. This is more than just an academic debate.

There is, perhaps, no better example than the eugenics movements of the 20th century. Controlling human reproduction for some "greater good" is nothing new. Plato and other ancient Greeks advocated for it.

It was in just 1883 that Francis Galton, who coined the term, consolidated these thoughts with a Darwinistic notion of humans "winning" natural selection.

[#NeuroRacism | Phrenology 🧵]

Phrenology was the study of head shapes and sizes. It was a pseudoscience wildly popular between 1820-1850.

Surprisingly, its beginnings did not completely overlap with race. Instead, it started by looking at criminality The work that Franz Gall, founder of phrenology, did was more related to the origins of what we now call criminology - as in finding biological explanations for crime and criminality.

Gall believed that changes in the brain manifested as bumps on the skull that can be measured.

[#NeuroRacism | Before Neuroscience 🧵]

To start the story of racism in neuroscience, we'll have to go back even before neuroscience existed, to the age of Enlightenment.

This is when the scientists tried, for the first time, to classify humans. As it was in vogue at the time to try to classify and rationalize everything, one of the key debates was between monogenism and polygenism.

The question was: do all races come from one ancestor or did we all come from different origins?

You can imagine how this is gonna go...