Charles Davenport



Charles Benedict Davenport (June 1, 1866–February 18, 1944) was a prominent American biologist and eugenicist.

Biography
Davenport was born in Stamford, Connecticut. He went to Harvard, getting a PhD in biology in 1892. He married in 1894. He became an instructor of Zoology at Harvard University.

In his biological work, Davenport became known as one of the most prominent American biologists of his age, pioneering attempts at developing quantitative standards of taxonomy. Davenport had a tremendous respect for the biometric approach to evolution pioneered by Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, and sat on the editorial committee of Pearson's journal, Biometrika. However after the "re-discovery" of Gregor Mendel's laws of heredity, he became a strict convert and major participant in the Mendelian school of genetics.

He became director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1910, where he founded the Eugenics Record Office. He began to study human heredity, and a large amount of his efforts were later turned in order to promote eugenics. His 1911 book, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, was a major work in the history of American eugenics, and was used as a college textbook for many years. Davenport was elected to the National Academy of Sciences the year after it was published.

Davenport, along with an assistant, also attempted to develop a comprehensive quantitative approach to the question of miscegenation, or, as he put it, "race crossing" in humans. The resulting work, published in 1929, Race Crossing in Jamaica, purported to give statistical evidence for biological and cultural degradation following interbreeding between white and black populations. It is today considered a work of scientific racism, and was criticized in its time for drawing conclusions which stretched far beyond (and sometimes counter) to the data it presented.

Davenport also had connections to various institutions and publications within Nazi Germany, both before, and even during W.W.II. These have been well documented by the sociologist Stefan Kühl. For example, Davenport held editorial positions at two influential German journals, both of which were founded in 1935, and in 1939 he wrote a contribution to the festschrift for Otto Reche, who became an important figure within the plan to "remove" those populations considered "inferior" in eastern Germany.

He died of pneumonia in 1944.

Selected works

 * Observations on Budding in Paludicella and Some Other Bryozoa (1891)
 * On Urnatella Gracilis (1893)
 * Experimental Morphology (1897-99)
 * Statistical Methods, with Special References to Biological Variation (1899; second edition, 1904)
 * Introduction to Zoölogy, with Gertrude Crotty Davenport (1900)
 * Inheritance in Poultry, Carnegie Institution Publication, No, 52 (Washington, 1906)
 * Inheritance of Characteristics in Domestic Fowl, Carnegie Institution Publication, No. 121 (Washington, 1909)
 * Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911)
 * Heredity of Skin-Color in Negro-White Crosses, Carnegie Institution Publication, No. 188 (1913)
 * Race Crossing in Jamaica (1929)