Ashley Montagu

Ashley Montagu was a British-American anthropologist who became one of the most prominent public critics of the biological concept of race in the mid-twentieth century. In Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (1942), written in the tradition of his teacher Franz Boas, he argued that race as commonly understood was not a valid biological category but a social and political construction with no scientific foundation, a position that was controversial when first published but became increasingly influential in later decades of anthropology and genetics. Montagu was also a prolific public intellectual who wrote widely on human nature, cooperation, and the relationship between biology and culture for a general audience.