Throughout the 20th century, human biological diversity has been a challenging research topic for life scientists. Its political implications constantly undermined the ideal of scientific objectivity, while at the same time the social situatedness of empirical research on human test objects made it difficult to approach human variation with the same analytical tools like variation in other mammals. Parallel and interwoven with its being an epistemic object for the life sciences, human biological diversity also served as an instrumental object in medical research, in genealogy and other fields of application. In our paper we take a broader perspective on this issue than the conventional historiography of race science allows for: Investigations of human biological diversity are contextualized in transnational, (post-)colonial, and social constellations and within discourses on health, reproduction and population.
