Scientific racism refers to the belief that empirical evidence can prove the superiority or inferiority of particular races. A common example from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the misuse of the scientific method to promote the idea of racial hierarchies, such as:
- The measurement of skull sizes (phrenology and craniometry) to claim that certain races were more intelligent or superior than others.
- The eugenics movement, which advocated for the selective breeding of humans to improve the human population and was often justified by pseudoscientific claims about the genetic inferiority of certain races.
These examples highlight how scientific ideas were distorted to support racist ideologies during that time.
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