Chardin, who travelled to Persia and described theories resembling those of Ibn Khaldun. Western colonial period Environmental determinism has been widely criticized as a tool to legitimize colonialism, racism, and imperialism in Africa, The Americas, and Asia. Environmental determinism enabled geographers to scientifically justify the supremacy of white European races and the naturalness of imperialism. The scholarship bolstered religious justifications and in some cases superseded them during the late 19th century. Many writers, including Thomas Jefferson, supported and legitimized African colonization by arguing that tropical climates made the people uncivilized. Jefferson argued that tropical climates encouraged laziness, relaxed attitudes, promiscuity and generally degenerative societies, while the frequent variability in the weather of the middle and northern latitudes led to stronger work ethics and civilized societies. Adolf Hitler also made use of this theory to extol the supremacy of the Nordic race. Defects of character supposedly generated by tropical climates were believed to be inheritable under the Lamarckian theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics, a discredited precursor to the Darwinian theory of natural selection. The theory begins with the observation that an organism faced with environmental pressures may undergo physiological changes during its lifetime through the process of acclimatization. Lamarckianism suggested that those physiological changes may be passed directly to offspring, without the need for offspring to develop the trait in the same manner. Geographical societies like the Royal Geographical Society and the Société de géographie supported imperialism by funding explorers and other colonial proponents. Scientific societies acted similarly. Acclimatization societies directly supported colonial enterprises and enjoyed their benefits. The writings of Lamarck provided theoretical backing for the acclimatization doctrines. The Société Zoologique d'Acclimatation was largely founded by Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire—son of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a close colleague and supporter of Lamarck. Ellen Churchill Semple, a prominent environmental determinism scholar, applied her theories in a case study which focused on the Philippines, where she mapped civilization and wildness onto the topography of the islands. Other scholars argued that climate and topography caused specific character traits to appear in a given populations. Scholars thereby imposed racial stereotypes on whole societies. Imperial powers rationalized labor exploitation by claiming that tropical peoples were morally inferior. The role of environmental determinism in rationalizing and legitimizing racism, ethnocentrism and economic inequality has consequently drawn strong criticism. David Landes similarly condemns of what he terms the unscientific moral geography of Ellsworth Huntington. He argues that Huntington undermined