While we cannot reject Cook's scientific contribution simply on the
basis of his embrace of racist pseudoscience, we also can't simply
ignore it either. Sloppy thinking, after all, is sloppy thinking.
This is a question that has plagued me for a long time. In what context can you safely separate the person from the work that person has created? According to Patrick French's biography The World Is What It Is, Trinidadian author V.S. Naipaul is a thoroughly awful person. While that doesn't make him any less deserving of his Nobel Prize, but it still influences the way I see his work.
Working in Puerto Rican dry forest, Leslie Holdridge's Life Zone Ecology is crucial. While I have major issues with the whole idea (but that's another post), the life zone model is the working model that is used there. Of course, you don't actually read Holdrige's book - rather, you use the life zone map of the island that Ewel and Whitmore produced. Of course I felt the need to actually read Holdridge's book, including the last chapter on humans in life zones. I was taken aback when I realised that (a) he was citing Carleton Coon's work on race (long discredited and often seen as racist...Afarensis' review of the book is perhaps as generous a consideration of his work as you're likely to see; most people see Coon's work as racist), and (b) Holdridge had referred to Coon as Koons...which suggests that was working from memory and hadn't bothered to check his source, if he had read it at all.
The life zone model continues to be useful; it provides a means of predicting vegetation based on a small number of variables. With the rise of computer modelling, it's probably far more useful than it was. But reading that last chapter of Life Zone Ecology creates doubt. Holdridge should have been aware of the controversy surrounding Coon's idea about human evolution. Or should he have? When you're faced with a topic that's outside of your field, you pick up a good reference work and get a sense of it. You don't evaluate it with the same thoroughness that you would works in your own field. So do you cut Holdridge some slack? Or does it cast doubt on all of his work?
Sometimes you can separate it, sometimes you can't. "Breakfast at Tiffany's" is a great movie to a lot of people and I think Mickey Rooney is terrific in almost everything, but I can't enjoy the movie because of his Asian caricature in that.
The point remains, sometimes good things, and good knowledge, can happen from bad. Muhammad Ali put it in a funny way that makes the point when he returned from his boxing match in Zaire and they asked him what he thought of the place. He said,"Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat."
Obviously he wasn't endorsing the slavery concept and you aren't endorsing Coon or even Holdridge by finding value in the life zone model.
Afarensis makes the point nicely when he talks about Coon going off the rails halfway through the book when he says "We have learned quite a bit about primate evolution since Coon wrote these words."
We did, so we have to keep that in mind, and maybe he was racist but we don't want political correctness to inhibit valid discussion of kernels of scientific goodness actually present in there. Where is that line? It's too big an issue for me to decide.