Enlightenment biologists were preoccupied with classifying all earthly creations, whether plants, insects, or animals, into a natural hierarchy. Their chief scientific method was taxonomy: observing, naming, and ordering the world by partitioning living things into biologically different types. Applying this method to human bodies, naturalists made race an object of scientific study and made European conquest and enslavement of foreign peoples seem in line with nature.4 The insistence on finding differences among people so they can be categorized governs the study of human biology to this day.
