This is a very important book. Kaufmann's The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America is another. Anyone who is interested in the decline of racialism within American academia should check it out:

"The story I tell in these pages is how Americans like me, that is, students of human nature -- social scientists -- made the momentous shift from believing that biology explained some human actions to seeing culture or human experience -- history, if you will -- as the primary if not the sole source of the differential behavior of human beings. What kinds of evidence and arguments were used to bring that shift in outlook, who made them, and why, are among the questions I seek to answer in the first part of the book. More is involved, of course, than identifying and explicating the crucial ideas or even the advocates of those ideas. As in any study of the acceptance of a new paradigm or way of thinking, the crucial historical question is why did nothers accept and then begin to work within the new dispensation that some innovative leaders were propounding? Why did so many repudiate the traditional in favor of the novel?

That part of the story was not easy to find answers for. As all historians know, "why" questions on the grand scale are the most fundamental, but also the most difficult to document fully. I have made some suggestions and offer some supporting evidence, but much of the story, I fear, remains recalcitrantly undocumented; too much of it remains in the heads of the dead and the living alike. What the available evidence does seem to show is that ideology or a philosophical belief that the world could be a freer and more just place played a large part in the shift from biology to culture. Science, or at least certain scientific principles or innovative scholarship also played a role in the transformation, but only a limited one. The main impetus came from the wish to establish a social order in which innate and immutable forces of biology played no role in accounting for the behavior of social groups. Individuals certainly differed in ability and achievement, but those differences derived from their individual inheritances, not from the biology of the social groups to which they may have belonged. To the proponents of culture the goal was the elimination of nativity, race, and sex, and any other biologically based characteristic that might serve as an obstacle to an individual's self-realization.

That an ideological purpose should thus shape the answers to what might otherwise seem to be a scientific question is not a novel idea. Scientists, social and natural, are human beings and for that reason alone, if not other, their investigations have been known to be initiated, even directed by unspoken values or hopes. Those scholars who have exposed or criticized the past misuse of biological ideas in social science have quite properly called attention to the large part ideology played in fostering those uses of biology. But much less widely acknowledged is the view that ideology also underpinned the repudiation of biology in social science and encourages the present widespread acceptance of culture as the alternative explanation of the behavior of human beings."

Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p.vii-viii