Wednesday, March 27, 2019

The Chernobyl Syndrome


      The Chernobyl Syndrome

A worker measuring radiation after the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine, August 1986
TASS/Valery Zufarov/Vladimir Repik/Getty Images
A worker measuring radiation after the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine, August 1986
On the night of April 25, 1986, during a planned maintenance shutdown at the Chernobyl power plant in northern Ukraine, one of the four reactors overheated and began to burn. As plant engineers scrambled to regain control of it, they thought for a moment that there had been an earthquake. In fact, a buildup of steam had propelled the two-hundred-ton concrete top of the reactor’s casing into the air, with masses of radioactive material following close behind when the core exploded. The plant workers had been assured again and again of the safety of the “peaceful atom,” and they couldn’t imagine that the reactor had exploded.
Firefighters rushed to the scene without special equipment or a clear understanding of the potential risks; they had not been trained to deal with a nuclear explosion, because such training would have involved acknowledging that an explosion was possible. They kicked at chunks of radioactive graphite that had fallen around the reactor, and their boots stuck to the melting, flammable bitumen that had been used, against all safety regulations, to coat the roofs of the plant’s buildings. Efforts to douse mysteriously fizzy, incandescent fires only made the conflagrations seethe with radioactive steam. (These fires probably contained uranium dioxide, one of the fuels used in the reactor.)
Feeling hot, the firefighters unbuttoned their jackets and took off their helmets. After less than thirty minutes they began to vomit, develop excruciating headaches, and feel faint and unbearably thirsty. One drank highly radioactive water from the plant’s cooling pond, burning his digestive tract. Over the next few hours, the exposed firefighters and plant workers swelled up, their skin turning the eerie purple of radiation burn. Later it would turn black and peel away. After evacuation and treatment in Moscow, many of these first responders died and were buried in nesting pairs of zinc caskets. Their graves were covered with cement tiles to block the radiation emanating from their corpses.
Moscow officials eventually realized that the reactor had exploded, and that there was an imminent risk of another, much larger explosion. More than thirty-six hours after the initial meltdown, Pripyat was evacuated. Columns of Kiev city buses had been sent to wait for evacuees on the outset.

 Moscow officials eventually realized that the reactor had exploded, and that there was an imminent risk of another, much larger explosion. More than thirty-six hours after the initial meltdown, Pripyat was evacuated. Columns of Kiev city buses had been sent to wait for evacuees on the outskirts of the city, absorbing radiation while plans we tskirts of the city, absorbing radiation while plans were debated. These radioactive buses deposited their radioactive passengers in villages chosen to house the refugees, then returned to their regular routes in Kiev. Over the next two weeks, another 75,000 people were resettled from the thirty-kilometer area around Pripyat, which was to become known as the “Exclusion Zone,” and which remains almost uninhabited to this day.

 General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev was informed that there had been an explosion and fire at the plant but that the reactor itself had not been seriously damaged. No one wanted to be the bearer of catastrophic news. When the occasional official raised the question of whether to warn civilians and evacuate the city of Pripyat, which had been built to house workers from the Chernobyl plant, he was admonished to wait for higher-ups to make a decision and for a committee to be formed. Panic and embarrassment were of greater concern than public safety. The KGB cut Pripyat’s intercity telephone lines and prevented residents from leaving, as part of the effort to keep news of the disaster from spreading. Some locals were savvy enough to try to leave on their own. But with no public warning, many didn’t take even the minimal precaution of staying indoors with the windows shut. One man was happily sunbathing the next morning, pleased by the speed with which he was tanning. He was soon in the hospital.
The Soviet system began to marshal its vast human resources to “liquidate” the disaster. Many efforts to stop the fire in the reactor only made matters worse by triggering new reactions or creating toxic smoke, but doing nothing was not an option. Pilots, soldiers, firefighters, and scientists volunteered, exposing themselves to huge doses of radiation. (Many others fled from the scene.) They were rewarded with cash bonuses, cars, and apartments, and some were made “Hero of the Soviet Union” or “Hero of Ukraine,” but many became invalids or didn’t live to see their new homes. The radiation levels were so high that they made the electronics in robots fail, so “biorobots”—people in makeshift lead protective gear—did the work of clearing the area.
On April 28, a radioactive cloud reached Scandinavia. After attempts at denial, the Soviet government conceded that there had been an accident. Western journalists soon began reporting alarming estimates of Chernobyl casualties. To maintain the illusion that the accident was already under control, Moscow ordered Ukrainians to continue with the planned May Day parade in Kiev, about eighty miles away, thus exposing huge numbers of people—including many children—to radioactive fallout. Thanks to word of mouth and to their well-honed skill at reading between the lines of official declarations, however, Kiev residents were already fleeing. By early May, the exodus had grown so large that it became almost impossible to buy a plane, train, or bus ticket out of the city. Tens of thousands of residents left even before the official order to evacuate children was issued, far too late, on May 15. Thousands of people were treated for radiation exposure in Soviet hospitals by the end of the summer of 1986, but the Soviet press was allowed to report only on the hospitalizations of the Chernobyl firemen and plant operators.
In the 1950s the Soviets developed the High Power Channel Reactor (RBMK). They also developed a much safer alternative model, the Water-Water Energy Reactor (VVER), similar to the Pressurized Water Reactors used in the US. But the RBMK won out because it generated twice as much energy as the VVER, was cheaper to build and run, and produced plutonium that could potentially be used in weapons—though it emitted far more radiation and had not been fully tested before operation began. The four reactors at the Chernobyl plant, opened between 1977 and 1983, were all RBMKs. They generated vast quantities of electricity not only for civilian use but also for the nearby Duga Radar system, which had been built to detect nuclear missiles. In 1985 the shoddily constructed Chernobyl plant managed to overfill its production quotas, in part by reducing the amount of time allotted to repairs.
The Soviet Union had access only to the published results of the “Life Span Study.” But the rapid development of Soviet nuclear power, and the many accidents that accompanied it, provided extensive opportunities to examine the effects of radiation on the human body. By the time Dr. Angelina Guskova cared for Chernobyl responders, she had already treated more cases of radiation illness than anyone in the world. During years of work at a secret Siberian nuclear weapons installation where she was forbidden to ask her patients about the nature of their work, and thus about their radiation exposure, she learned to estimate radiation doses from victims’ symptoms, and she made substantial inroads in the treatment of radiation-related illness. She helped contribute to the Soviet definition of “chronic radiation syndrome,” which included malaise, sleep disorders, bleeding gums, and respiratory and digestive disorders. Guskova’s findings, like the many nuclear accidents that occurred in the Soviet Union in those years, were kept secret.
Chernobyl provided an opportunity to gather a vast body of knowledge about the effects of radiation exposure, but politics trumped science. In the 1990s, when studies of Chernobyl should have been in full swing, Americans and Europeans were suing their governments for exposing them to radioactivity through nuclear tests and accidents—hardly a situation in which Western governments would wish to publicize the many harms of long-term exposure. International agencies and diplomats worked to minimize reports of Chernobyl’s damage. Despite calls from scientists from many countries, there has never been a large-scale, long-term study of its aftermath. In 2011, when an earthquake caused an accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, there was still no firmly established understanding of the effects of chronic exposure to lower levels of radiation, or of the ways in which radioactive fallout continues to circulate years after a disaster.
With bountiful, devastating detail, Brown describes how scientists, doctors, and journalists—mainly in Ukraine and Belarus—went to great lengths and took substantial risks to collect information on the long-term effects of the Chernobyl explosion, which they believed to be extensive. When Soviet authorities were unwilling to accept their results or act on their warnings, these activists put their faith in foreign experts. They were sorely disappointed. In 1989, under public pressure, the Soviet Minister of Health requested that the World Health Organization send a delegation to the area around Chernobyl to determine what levels of radiation were safe for humans. The WHOselected a group of physicists who had already issued reassuring statements about the effects of the radiation spread by the accident. (Brown implies that this selection was connected to pressure from the world’s nuclear powers.) This group soon concluded that there was no association between Chernobyl fallout and the reported rise in noncancerous diseases such as circulatory or autoimmune disorders, and recommended a dramatic increase in the guideline for “safe” lifetime doses of radiation.
A 1990 assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), meanwhile, was sabotaged by the KGB, which was so desperate to conceal sensitive information from foreigners that it stole a large registry of patient data kept on a single computer in Belarus. (It was never recovered.) According to Brown, the IAEA ended up producing inaccurate estimates of radiation exposure, in part because it grossly underestimated the use of contaminated local products by people living around the Zone—especially berries, mushrooms, and milk. The WHO and IAEA results hamstrung fundraising efforts for further Chernobyl studies, and for medical care and resettlement. Ukrainians and Belarusians were told that their health problems were caused by stress and “radiophobia” rather than by radiation itself.
One of the most alarming—though also eerily beautiful—aspects of Brown’s book is her description of the way radioactive material moves through organisms, ecosystems, and human society. Of the infamous May Day parade held in Kiev just after the explosion, Brown writes:
The newsreels of the May holiday did not record the actions of two and a half million lungs, inhaling and exhaling, working like a giant organic filter. Half of the radioactive substances Kyivans inhaled their bodies retained. Plants and trees in the lovely, tree-lined city scrubbed the air of ionizing radiation. When the leaves fell later that autumn, they needed to be treated as radioactive waste.
Radioactive fallout was distributed far beyond the Exclusion Zone, which was, after all, just a circle on a map. Clouds absorbed radiation and then moved with the wind. Red Army pilots were dispatched to seed clouds with silver iodide so that radioactive rain would fall over provincial Belarus rather than urban Russia. Belarusian villagers fell ill, as did the pilots. Livestock absorbed radiation in the immediate aftermath of the disaster by inhaling air and dust, and later by consuming contaminated grass. Cleaned villages were soon recontaminated by radioactive dust from surrounding areas, and buried material leaked radioactivity into the water table.
A reluctance to waste food and other basic goods helped keep the radioactive isotopes in circulation. (Radioactive isotopes are unstable atoms that release dangerous particles until they decay into stable atoms of different elements. Although scientists can estimate the half-life of radioactive isotopes, the process of decay at the level of individual atoms is random.) Contaminated wood and peat were burned for fuel in homes and factories, releasing more radioactivity into the air. The State Committee of Industrial Agriculture had 50,000 animals rounded up and slaughtered during the evacuation from the Zone, and their radioactive wool, hides, and meat sent to different cities for processing. Brown’s findings in a Kiev archive led her to Chernihiv, in northern Ukraine, where workers at a wool factory requested the same benefits received by those who had been at the site of the reactor explosion. The workers had held the Chernobyl wool in their hands and inhaled its fibers. Soon their noses started to bleed, and they became dizzy, nauseous, and fatigued. Their managers pushed them to fulfill their quotas anyway. The authorities eventually made some efforts to clean the factory, but they weren’t willing to bury the highly radioactive wool. Instead, it was piled near the factory’s loading dock, waiting for its isotopes to decay. Wool accumulated for over a year, continuing to emit radiation. Meanwhile, the cleaning efforts caused radiation to be released into the surrounding environment along with the rest of the factory’s waste.
A mother holding a government document certifying that her daughter’s brain tumor was caused by radiation from the Chernobyl disaster, Zamishevo, Russia, 1999
Paul Fusco/Magnum Photos
A mother holding a government document certifying that her daughter’s brain tumor was caused by radiation from the Chernobyl disaster, Zamishevo, Russia, 1999
Moscow agronomists explained how to make sausage with an “acceptable” amount of radioactive meat, and Chernobyl sausages were distributed across the USSR without special labeling. There were instructions on how to salvage contaminated milk, berries, eggs, beets, grain, spinach, potatoes, mushrooms, and tea—often by converting them into products with long shelf lives and simply storing them until the isotopes decayed. This misguided thriftiness was not a uniquely Soviet or authoritarian practice. Chernobyl fallout had contaminated much of Europe. When Italy rejected 300,000 tons of radioactive Greek wheat, Greece refused to take it back; the European Economic Community eventually agreed to buy the wheat, which was blended with clean grain and sent to Africa and East Germany in aid shipments.
The difficulty of the cleanup was increased by the fact that the Chernobyl plant had been built in a marshy area, the worst possible type of land for a nuclear disaster. Mineral-poor soil soaked up radioactive minerals, which were then absorbed by mineral-hungry plants. Meanwhile, seasonal floods spread contaminants into pastureland. Tim Mousseau and Anders Møller, biologists who have been studying Zone ecology since 2000, have found that microbes, worms, spiders, bees, and fruit flies still cannot function normally in the Zone, or that they exist in far lower numbers than they did before the meltdown. This means that leaves do not decay at the normal rate, pollination does not occur often enough to produce the fruit that feeds some birds, birds don’t spread the seeds for new plants, and so on.
Other researchers have issued a much sunnier picture of post-Chernobyl ecology, but Brown argues persuasively that they are grossly underestimating the scale of the damage, in part because they rely too heavily on simplistic measurements of radioactivity levels. Because radioactivity can move across so many environments and exposure to it can come in so many varieties, individual doses are hard to measure or even estimate, and a full understanding of radioactivity’s effects requires fine-grained observation at many levels over a long period. We don’t even fully understand the process of isotope decay. Biologists originally expected that the ecological half-life of cesium-137 would be only fifteen years; now researchers predict that it will take between 180 and 320 years for cesium-137 to disappear from the forests around Chernobyl, though they don’t yet know why.
Wild berry and mushroom picking is one of the few economic options for people in rural northern Ukraine. In her haunting conclusion, Brown describes a trip to the marshy forest a hundred kilometers from the Chernobyl plant. Pickers bring berries to a wholesaler who checks their radioactivity. The excessively radioactive berries are set aside for use in natural dyes, while the others are mixed with “cooler” berries until the assortment meets EU regulations. According to Brown, these regulations, like the American ones, are disturbingly lax. A nuclear security specialist told her that at the US–Canada border, a truck was stopped after officers detected a “radiating mass,” which they thought might be a dirty bomb. But it was only berries from Ukraine. The truck was allowed to pass.
Brown writes about anticipating outraged letters from nuclear scientists and plant workers, oncology clinic staff, and others whose jobs require exposure to radiation. She details her scrupulous efforts to check and double-check her data, consult with scientists from many fields, and account for factors that might skew results. I suspect that she may be accused of alarmism nonetheless.
But we should be alarmed about the ongoing consequences of nuclear leaks and the risk of new nuclear disasters. Higginbotham points out that the United States now operates a hundred nuclear power reactors, including the one at Three Mile Island that suffered a serious accident in 1979, just twelve days after the release of The China Syndrome. France generates 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants, and China operates thirty-nine nuclear power plants and is building twenty more. Some people see nuclear power plants, which do not emit any carbon dioxide, as the most feasible way of limiting climate change, and new reactor models promise to be safer, more efficient, and less poisonous. But what if something goes wrong?
And what about nuclear waste? There are hundreds of nuclear waste sites in the US alone. In February the Environmental Protection Agency ordered the excavation of a landfill near St. Louis containing nuclear waste, dumped illegally, that dated back to the Manhattan Project. For years, an underground fire has been burning a few thousand feet from the dump. It took the federal government twenty-seven years to reach a decision about how to deal with this nuclear waste dump near a major metropolitan area, yet we fault the Soviet government for its inadequate response to a nuclear meltdown that unfolded in a matter of minutes. US failure to adequately address longstanding hazards—not to mention the slow-motion catastrophe of climate change—is yet another indication that poor disaster response is hardly unique to authoritarian regimes.
Then there is the renewed threat of nuclear war. One of Gorbachev’s biggest achievements was the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which eliminated US and Soviet land-based intermediate nuclear weapon systems. This February the US withdrew from the treaty, with President Trump citing Russian noncompliance. His administration recently called for the expansion of the US “low-yield” nuclear force, which includes weapons the size of those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Analysts have pointed out that a greater diversity of nuclear weapons makes it harder for a target to know whether it is facing a limited or existential threat—and therefore raises the risk that the target will overreact.
Radiation has a special hold on our imagination: an invisible force out of science fiction, it can alter the very essence of our bodies, dissolve us from the inside out. But Manual for Survival asks a larger question about how humans will coexist with the ever-increasing quantities of toxins and pollutants that we introduce into our air, water, and soil. Brown’s careful mapping of the path isotopes take is highly relevant to other industrial toxins, and to plastic waste. When we put a substance into our environment, we have to understand that it will likely remain with us for a very long time, and that it may behave in ways we never anticipated. Chernobyl should not be seen as an isolated accident or as a unique disaster, Brown argues, but as an “exclamation point” that draws our attention to the new world we are creating.
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Monday, March 25, 2019

Creationism, Noah’s Flood, And Race

Creationism, Noah’s Flood, And Race

by Paul Braterman      3 Quarks Daily                                                                              
20th-century creationism and racism
Henry M. Morris photo.jpg
Henry Morris, CRI publicity photo
Henry Morris, founding father of modern Young Earth creationism, wrote in 1977 that the Hamitic races (including red, yellow, and black) were destined by their nature to be servants to the descendants of Shem and Japheth. Noah was inspired when he prophesied this (Genesis 9:25-27) [1]. The descendants of Shem are characterised by an inherited religious zeal, those of Japheth by mental acumen, while those of Ham are limited by the “peculiarly concrete and materialistic thought-structure inherent in Hamitic peoples,” which even affects their language structures. These innate differences explain the success of the European and Middle Eastern empires, as well as African servitude.
All this is spelt out in Morris’s 1977 book, The Beginning of the World, most recently reprinted in 2005 (in Morris’s lifetime, and presumably with his approval), and available from Amazon as a paperback or on Kindle.

Morris is no fringe figure. On the contrary, he, more than any other individual, was responsible for the 20th-century invention of Young Earth “creation science”. He was co-author of The Genesis Flood, which regards Noah’s flood as responsible for sediments worldwide, and founded the Institute of Creation Research (of which Answers in Genesis is a later offshoot) in 1972, serving as its President, and then President Emeritus, until his death in 2006.
Nor was this a personal aberration. As we shall see, he was heir to a strong tradition of creationist racism, of which he never managed to rid himself.
Strong accusations require strong evidence. I have therefore included as an Appendix some relevant passages from The Beginning of the World, quoting at length to avoid any risk of misrepresentation.
Very similar views to those of Morris were expressed by the esteemed physiologist Arthur Custance (Noah’s Three Sons, 1975, published by the mainstream Christian publisher Zondervan, now part of Harper Collins). Custance and Morris certainly knew about each other as intellectual opponents, Morris favouring simple six-day creationism, while Custance championed the “Gap Theory”, according to which geological time is concealed within the opening three verses of Genesis. However, Morris clearly got there first, since he had published similar material in 1972 (The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth), while The Beginning of the Earth was an update of a work first published in 1965.

Creationism, Adventism, and institutional racism
Note: Morris and other authors whom I cite used the word “Negro”, as I do for consistency when referring to their work. This word, unlike its toxic cousin, was not historically regarded as offensive, although it now sometimes is. For instance, the University of Chicago’s estimable Journal of African-American History called itself the Journal of Negro History until 2002.
While Morris was the most effective 20th-century exponent of biblical creationism, his theories derived largely from those of the Seventh-day Adventist George McCready Price, whose ideas derived in turn from those of Ellen G. White, founder-prophetess of Adventism. White had spoken of the evils of crossbreeding. Price ascribed the variety of human races to the dispersal after Babel, the deleterious effects of interbreeding, and environmental effects, which had given the Negro his dark skin, while, Price said, “his mind became a blank.”[2]
Apartheid beach sign (Natal, 1989) in English, Afrikaans, and Zulu, Guinogg via Wikipedia
Biblical literalism and creationism were used to support racial discrimination and bans on interracial marriage until quite recently. In South Africa, biblical literalism was used to justify apartheid, on the grounds that when God dispersed the various nations at Babel, He intended them to remain separate. The Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa supported apartheid until 1986. The Southern Baptist Convention, now the largest Protestant denomination in the United States with 15 million members, was formed, in 1845, specifically in defence of slavery, and did not apologise for this until 1995, when it adopted a resolution on racial reconciliation, and committed itself to the removal of racism. Bob Jones University, rigidly creationist and biblical literalist, and the publisher of numerous texts for creationist homeschooling, refused admission to black students until 1971, and denied admission to applicants engaged in an interracial marriage or known to advocateinterracial marriage or dating until 2000.
What about Darwin?
How often have we heard the accusation that evolutionary thinking is responsible for racism, as if Darwin had invented the concept. See for example this quotation from Henry Morris himself, on the Institute for Creation Research website, in 1993:
But what about the origin of races? One searches the Bible in vain for this information, for neither the word nor the concept of “race” appears in the Bible at all! There is no such thing as a race—except the human race! … “Race” is strictly an evolutionary concept, used by Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel, and the other 19th-century evolutionists to rationalize their white racism.
That’s a lie. Morris is denying his own earlier blatant racism, which I described my opening paragraph (the word “race” occurs, without apology, in the chapter title I cited and repeatedly throughout the text). Moreover, I can hardly believe that Morris was completely ignorant of the strength of racism among strongly anti-Darwin churches and colleges, or of the long history of racism and the ways in which pre-evolutionary science had been used to justify it.
Early studies of race
It is, I hope, common knowledge by now that the traditional classification of races corresponds only poorly to genetic reality, that the boundaries between races are fuzzy, arbitrary, and based on minor and quite recent differences, that the variation within a race (however defined) is far greater than the differences between races, and that sub-Saharan Africans, traditionally classified as a single race, are in reality more genetically diverse than the rest of humanity put together. Conversation about the concept of race is made enormously difficult by the damage done its name, but I hope this can be set aside in the present discussion.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/68/Carl_von_Linn%C3%A9.jpg
Carfl Lnnaeus, Nationalmuseum. Public domain via Wikipedia
The idea of racial stereotypes goes back at least as far as Linnaeus’ Systema naturae (1735 – 1768), in which he contrasts Europaeus, active and smart, with Afer, crafty, slow, and foolish. Such views were widespread. David Hume, in 1742, wrote that he was “apt to suspect” on the basis of history that Negroes were inferior to whites. Scientific study can be traced to Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who in the 1790s classified humans on the basis of skull shape as Caucasian (Blumenbach popularised this term, still in common use), Mongolian,  Malayan including Southeast Asian and Pacific Islanders, Ethiopian or sub-Saharan African, and American. Very presciently, he noted that variation among Africans was as great as in the rest of humankind, and wrote that Africans had shown themselves capable of the highest levels of attainment. Georges Cuvier, the outstanding naturalist of the early 19th-century, also compared skulls, and distinguished between Caucasian, Mongolian, and Ethiopian, all descended eventually from Adam and Eve. Cuvier made enormous advances in comparative anatomy, based on his understanding of the relationship between form and function, and argued against the then new-fangled idea of evolution on the grounds that since each species was well-adapted to its niche, with parts that worked well together, change would be impossible. I’m reminded here of current arguments against evolution, on grounds of irreducible complexity.
Stereotyping of non-Whites sharpened throughout the nineteenth century. One obvious reason, in the US, was the need to justify slavery. Another, operating more strongly in England, was, according to the historian of ideas Kenan Malik, the emerging class structure of capitalism, and the obvious desirability for the upper classes of thinking that their position was the result of intrinsic merit.
The biblical literalist’s dilemma
Faced with the variety of humankind, and the Genesis account of the Flood, the biblical literalist has two options. The more usual one, and as we have seen the one adopted by Morris, is to regard the different branches of humanity as descended from the three sons of Noah. Since Semitic and Japhethic branches are generally identified as Middle Eastern and European, the rest of humanity is then presumed (as in Morris’s discussion) to descend from Ham. This despite the fact that in Genesis the listed descendants of Ham, just as much as those of Shem, are all Middle Eastern or North African. So here, as in other matters, self-proclaimed biblical literalists are recklessly projecting their own imaginings on the Bible.
Middle East map showing plausible locations for nations named in Genesis 10, from Readers Digest KJV
Separate origin theories and 19th-century Flood Geology
The other, even more objectionable, option is to deny that the coloured races (to use an old-fashioned expression) were descended from Adam in the first place. In this version of events, Negroes were a separate creation, and therefore not fully human. This kind of belief regards racial segregation as natural, and mixed marriages as perversion. In some versions, Negroes were created before Adam in order to serve his descendants, while in others, inferior races (Negroes, Chinese, and, some more recently say, Jews) are the offspring of Eve and the Serpent.
Separate origin theory (polygenism) has a long history and was at one time considered intellectually respectable. The eminent naturalist Louis Agassiz, who discovered the Ice Ages, thought that Whites and Blacks were separate creations, although he believed they should be equal under the law. He commissioned photographs of slaves (see on right) for his anthropological studies, and last week these became the subject of an ownership lawsuit between Harvard University and one of the slaves’ descendants. The creationist Alexander Winchell, Professor in turn at Vanderbilt, the University of Michigan, and the University of Syracuse, argued as late as 1878, in Adamites and Preadamites, that humans existed before Adam, and maintained that this belief was consistent with Scripture.

However, separate origin theory was soon used, especially in the run-up to the American Civil War, to justify racism, slavery, and segregation. In the 1840s, Samuel George Morton, for a while Professor of Anatomy at Pennsylvania Medical College, and his collaborator George Gliddon (for a while US Vice-Consul in Alexandria), argued for separate creation on biblical grounds. From examining mummies, they had correctly concluded that African and Middle Eastern peoples were in existence three thousand years ago much as they are today. But this was only a thousand years after the date that the Bible gives for Noah’s flood. It followed that such diversity could not have arisen in so little time, forcing them to conclude that the black race had a separate origin. Measuring their skulls, they concluded (are you surprised?) that blacks had lower cranial capacity and hence lower mental capacity than whites, among 
other defects. John Van Evrie in a series of publications between 1848 and 1868 (note the dates), argued that the Negro was a separate creation for whom slavery was the natural state, accused abolitionists of promoting the evil of miscegenation, appealed to discontented and underprivileged whites in the North where he lived, and during the Civil War campaigned for an immediate peace on the Confederacy’s terms. Van Evrie thought that the success of democracy (which was of course for Whites only) depended on Negro subjugation, and his populist writings, as we would now describe them, may have contributed to the 1863 New York Conscription Riots.

The clergyman and publisher, Buckner H. Payne  (Ariel: or the Ethnological Origin of the Negro, 1867, Reply to the Scientific Geologist and Other Learned Men, in Their Attacks on the Credibility of  Account of the Mosaic Account of the Creation and of the Flood, 1876) regarded the Curse of Ham as irrelevant to the issue of slavery, since the Negro was a Preadamite creation without a soul. Miscegenation was the sin that 
led to the Flood, and (here Payne anticipates modern Young Earth creationism) the mountains were raised to their present height by the convulsions associated with Noah’s Flood, when (Genesis 7:11) the Fountains of the Deep were broken up. Here Payne’s geology anticipates that of Whitcomb and Morris’s The Genesis Flood, already mentioned as the foundational document of 20th-Century Young Earth creationism. Payne earned a brief and rather dismissive obituary in the New York Times on his death in 1883, but other obituaries to Payne described him as the South’s leading logician. Charles Carroll (The Negro as Beast; or, In the Image of God, 1900) cited Winchell (see above), and described Negroes as Preadamite, one of the Genesis “beasts”, but equipped with hands and the power of speech, the better to serve his master, the white man. Carroll acts as a bridge between 19th-century separate origin creationism, and the present-day extremist groups discussed in the next section.

Separate origin creationism and the American Far Right
Separate origin theory persists among White extremist groups in America. According to Alexander Schiffner’s The Origin of the Races; and Pre-Adamic Man (Prophetic Herald, 1968), the yellow races as well as Negroes are beasts created before Adam. Carroll’s ideas also re-emerged in Destiny Publishers’ 1967 In the Image of God, which regards miscegenation as a wicked perversion, the real sin of Cain, and the sin that provoked the Flood. Ham was of part-Negro descent, and the demands of the Civil Rights Movement for racial integration were inspired by Satan.
At this point separate origins theory merges with anti-Semitism and anti-Communism. W. Clyde Odeneal, in Segregation: Sin or Sensible? (Destiny Publishers, 1958), argued that “Segregation is an Anglo-Saxon principle because… The Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and related races are predominantly the Bible-reading, Bible-disseminating peoples of the world”, and condemned racial equality as a Communist notion, promoted by non-Christians. I understand this as a clear reference to Jewish Civil Rights activists. Charles Magne, The Negro and the World Crisis (Kingdom Identity Ministries, 1980), also considered Negroes as apes, created before Adam, and wrote that they were being used by Jews to destroy the White Nordic race. The Christian Identity movement, which has strong historical links to the KKK, is closely related to the British Israelites. Both Identity and the British Israelites regard the Anglo-Celtic race as God’s favoured people, the true descendants of Israel, and maintain that the inferior (i.e. non-White) races were created before Adam. Similar separate origin beliefs are also held by other fringe groups, such as Aryan Nations, which shares a website with the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, and maintains that “The Canaanite Jews [i.e. Jews] are a literal descendent of Satan and the natural enemy of our white Christian race.” Aryan Nations is affiliated with the Aryan Brotherhood, the most powerful White gang in US prisons.
There are a few self-styled ministries (whom I do not intend to publicise) who reprint obscure 19th Century separate origins pamphlets. Destiny Publishers is still in existence, linked to the British Israelite movement, and describing itself on its front page as “devoted to revealing the Book of the People to the People of the Book.” Kingdom Identity Ministries continues to distribute books and cassettes from its website and from its “American Institute of Theology”, and to broadcast. Its homepage shows a serpent with the head of a caricature Jew and, just in case you don’t get the message, a bright yellow body covered in six-pointed stars.
Creationism and Nazism
We can now place Nazi racism in its context. Despite creationist claims, it has nothing to do with evolution science or any other kind of science, but is an extreme form of separate origin mythology. It places great emphasis on the distinct origins of races, together with a mystic belief in race, blood, and soil. Thus Alfred Rosenberg, official Nazi philosopher, taught that God had created Man as separate races, with of course the Aryan race superior to all others, and destined to rule over them. It followed that it was the duty of Aryans to purify their lands by eliminating non-Aryans as cancer is cut from diseased body. Rosenberg powerfully influenced Hitler, who in Mein Kampfwrote that God and nature had created the races as separate, so that miscegenation was a sin against nature and God’s will. Hitler did believe in evolution within a race (microevolution), but regarded the races as separate creations and explicitly rejected the evolution of humans from non-human ancestors. (I could not bring myself to read Rosenberg’s or Hitler’s actual writings, but have relied here and in much of my discussion of creationist racism on Tom McIver’s compilations of creationist writings,Anti-Evolution, and his article “The Protocols of Creationism”, Sceptic Magazine2(4), 1994, p. 76. For more on Hitler’s views, see e.g. this from the Evolution Institute, of which I am a supporter, and references therein)
Mainstream creationism today
To return to mainstream creationism, I looked up the word “race” on the website of leading creationist organisations. Answers in Genesis, historically an offshoot of the Institute for Creation Research, and probably the leading biblical literalist organisation today, goes out of its way to downplay racial differences. It advances a fantastical family tree for humankind (with the peoples of Japan and Java related to the Ionian Greeks), but does say that Noah’s prophecy referred specifically to the interaction between the ancient Israelites and their Canaanite neighbours. Creation Ministries International says little about Noah’s curse (or prophesy), heavily emphasizes the biological unity of humankind, and explicitly condemns Christian Identity
What, then, of Morris’s own Institute for Creation Research? That, you may remember, is where Morris had written that “race” was an unbiblical concept introduced by evolutionists in order to maintain their belief in white superiority. Did that mean that he had transcended, as well as disavowing, his earlier racism? I doubt it. A search for “Canaan” on the Institute for Creation Research website leads to the study notes for his New Defenders Bible (2006, the last year of his life), which refer to “Ham, with his physical and materialistic bent,” and speak of “Noah’s own insight into the developing characters of his sons and grandsons and, therefore, of their descendants.” [Emphasis added]
As Malik very recently (18 March 2019) put it, “The idea of abstract, essential differences between specially-defined populations is what lies at the heart of racial thinking”. Morris, by this standard, was a racial thinker to the end. He had sanitised his vocabulary, and his self-image, but not his thinking. And if his followers still think, as he did, that Noah’s words refer to anything beyond the ancient Near East, they have cause for soul-searching.
1] KJV, And he said, Cursed be Canaan, as servants of servants shall he be and to his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tens of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.
2] Ronald Numbers, The Creationists p.102.
I thank Tom McIver for helpful correspondence, and for drawing my attention to his catalogue updates, https://www.librarything.com/catalog/tmciver and https://www.librarycat.org/lib/tmciver/search/text/racism. Embedded links to AiG, ICR, and CMI set at no-follow to avoid boosting.
Appendix: extracts from The Beginning of the World
With the deepest hearts of his own sons thus laid bare before him, Noah was moved to make the great prophetic declaration of Genesis 9:25 – 27. To some extent the insight thus revealed into the future was no doubt based on the insights he had into the hearts of his sons… But, more importantly, he spoke in the Spirit, prophesying as the Spirit gave utterance. [p 127]
As he knew the characters of his own sons, he could foresee that their respective descendants would be characterised chiefly by religious zeal (Shem), mental acumen (Japheth) and materialistic drives (Ham).) [p 128]
The prophecy is worldwide in scope and, since Shem and Japheth are covered, all Ham’s descendants must be also. These include all nations which are neither Semitic nor Japhetic. Thus, all of the earth’s “coloured” races, – yellow, red, brown, and black – essentially the Afro-nation group of peoples, including the American Indians – are most likely to be Hamitic in origin and included within the scope of the Canaanitic prophecy, as well as the Egyptians, Sumerians, Hittites, and Phoenicians of antiquity. [p 129]
Truly they have been ‘servants’ of mankind in a most amazing way. Yet the prophecy again has its obverse side. Somehow they have only gone so far and no farther. The Japhethites and Semites have, sooner or later, taken over their territories, and their inventions, and then developed them and utilised them for their own enlargement. Often the Hamites, especially the Negroes, have become actual personal servants or even slaves to the others. Possessed of a racial character concerned mainly with mundane matters, they have eventually been displaced by the intellectual and philosophical acumen of the Japhethites and the religious zeal of the Semites.… Neither Negroes nor any other Hamitic people are intended to be forcibly subjugated on the basis of this Noahic declaration. The prophecy would be inevitably fulfilled because of the innate nature of the three racial stocks, not by virtue of any artificialconstraints imposed by man.” [p 130] 
Every little Indian or African tribe seems to have developed its own language, by virtue of its own isolation and the peculiarly concrete and materialistic thought-structure inherent in Hamitic peoples. [p. 142. Morris regards all languages other than Indo-European and Semitic as Hamitic]

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