Science Quote by Franz Boas

Boas’s sentence reads like a polite bow at the end of a lecture, but it’s also a strategic repositioning of his field. The key move is “however imperfectly”: a ritual modesty that signals scientific temperament while insulating him from charges of overreach. Anthropology, in Boas’s telling, isn’t a doctrine he’s delivering; it’s a set of “currents of thought” he’s mapping. That metaphor matters. Currents suggest motion, mixture, and force without a single commanding source, letting him acknowledge Darwin’s gravity without reducing anthropology to Darwinism.

The phrase “immortal Darwin” does double duty. It flatters a canonical founder, yes, but it also situates anthropology inside the prestige economy of the natural sciences at a moment when the discipline was still fighting to be taken seriously. Boas is telling his audience: this isn’t parlor speculation about “savages”; it’s an intellectual enterprise shaped by the same revolution that remade biology.

The subtext, though, is more pointed. Boas came of age when Darwinian ideas were routinely laundered into racial hierarchies and social policy. By emphasizing “currents” rather than conclusions, he hints at selection and adaptation as tools, not verdicts. He’s legitimizing evolution’s impact while quietly prying anthropology away from crude evolutionary ladder-thinking. The intent is field-making: credit the seismic influence of Darwin, then claim anthropology’s right to interpret that influence on its own terms - historically, culturally, and with skepticism toward easy, deterministic stories about human difference.