The New Criterion

What response would you get were you to ask almost any college student or member of the current, self-identified American intelligentsia, “What is this society’s most serious problem?” Almost certainly, a large proportion of your eligible interviewees would give this answer without hesitation: “Race!” But here is an oddity: The same interviewees who answer your question with “Race!” will assure you, also without hesitation, that there is no such thing. They will maintain that for humans the concept of “race” is meaningless: that there are no biologically significant human group differences, hence no human races.

This is a public catechism: it is recited regularly, with conviction and feeling, in the media and in the social sciences. The au courant, including well-known scientists and a good many official voices of science, insist that race is—speaking of biology or genetics —a recent illusion, fostered by European imperialism and triumphalism. If pushed, most respondents will try to invoke some authority on this, although of course the vast majority has not understood or even heard of the relevant science. The reference is usually to “modern biology.” Or, if the respondents have actually read some popular writing on the subject (or watched The Power of an Illusion, the much admired 2003 PBS documentary), they will appeal to some such visible scientific name as “Gould” or “Lewontin,” or to one of the leaders of the Human Genome Project, or to a science journalist at, say, The New York Times.

Why then do governments set so bad an example? Why do they appear to insist that race does exist—as evidenced by the requirement that we specify, inter alia, our race (choose one of three? of nine? of seventeen?) in responding to the census-taker, or when completing an application for admission, bidding for a contract, being tested for a job? The answer you get, if you get one at all, will take this form: “Well, there is no such thing as race. We’re all the same, and the little differences in various competences noted among us are due to upbringing, lifestyle, unequal social services, and the like. The differences we see are no more than skin deep; any difference we can measure is socially constructed. But: bad people argue that we are not all the same. Therefore we must assemble and keep data and records on this false category—race—so as to defeat the racists and to undo the social evils they propagate.”

Did you follow that? If not, not to worry. That explanation is incoherent. There has long been the need for a scientifically reliable, accessible trade book on the biology and anthropology of human differences, on what the research actually says about them so far: about group variations in human genetics, morphology, and physiological function—and how those variations, such as they are, must have arisen in the course of our species history. An epitome thereof is what Vincent Sarich, a biochemist and anthropologist, and Frank Miele, a senior editor at Skeptic, set out to produce in their compact volume Race.

About the relevant qualifications of this pair there is no doubt. Miele is an able editor of Skeptic, Michael Shermer’s literate journal investigating the phenomena of belief and of controversial claims on science, consciousness, and physical and social reality. Sarich, a professor of anthropology at Berkeley, was one of those young turks associated with the distinguished Berkeley biochemist Allan Wilson, who, forty years ago, first applied the then new molecular-level understanding of genetic change over time—the “molecular clock”—to the problems of primate classification and evolutionary history. They attacked the problem of genetic relationships and the timing of speciation among the apes (including us). Sarich contributed to the eventual recognition of the close relationship between gorillas, chimpanzees, and humans, and, more importantly, of the genetic difference—the genetic “distance”—separating these species. Such a distance translates directly to a time of evolutionary separation. This work, expanded and refined in succeeding decades by the explosion of new methods in molecular genetics, especially the shift from studies of protein polymorphisms to direct study of the genes, established the chimps as our closest relatives and the age of our own lineage at not more than five million years.

“Race” is a word used widely and traditionally in biology to identify subpopulations within a species, that is, varieties, extended families, fuzzy subsets of individuals of common descent, sets more or less differentiable one from the other by appearance and/or behavior. It is no surprise that races or recognizable varieties in other species turn out to be distinguishable—although not necessarily easily—at the level of genetics. To put this another way: obvious external differences among the races of a plant or animal species turn out to result from genetic differences, although those can sometimes be subtle. But of course this must be so! For a race or variety to persist in time, its obvious distinguishing traits must be to some significant extent heritable. And if heritable, the traits must reside ultimately in genes (or more likely) in combinations of genes. “Traits” are the products of gene sets —genomes—acting in particular environments over particular life histories.

The book’s title announces that Sarich and Miele recognize human group differences, and that however fuzzy these sets may be, they are still sufficiently stable as biological subpopulations, varieties, extended families, and “races” to be identified as such. Which word one uses doesn’t matter: the physical reality does. They argue that the recognition of group differences, of races, among humans is very ancient, a cognitive capability (i.e., not an invention of capitalism or colonialism, as is claimed by all politically correct commentators), of a piece with other category-making competences we share. The burden of the book’s central scientific sections is that those differences have a highly plausible evolutionary (and therefore genetic, biological) basis. Far from minimizing the significance of group differences, the relatively short history of our species implies that they must have been very strongly selected for in the several different environments in which our ancestors first flourished. None of which, as the authors insist (perhaps in vain) is any excuse for racism or racial discrimination.

It is not hard to predict the response to this book, not just the general response, but the scientific, technical one. For here, as in no other domain of contemporary science except, perhaps, in global climate research, political correctness reigns. There will be denunciations of Sarich and Miele; it has already begun. The general-professional weekly magazine Nature, based in London, is one of the two world-class journals of its kind (the other is Science, based in Washington). Nature commissioned a review from the leftish historian Robert N. Proctor, who relates the argument of this book, at gratuitous length, to questions of racial injustice. He connects, and thereby dismisses, its claim for the reality of race to the works of such often abused “raciologists” as Arthur R. Jensen and J. Philippe Rushton (with whose work in fact this book has very little to do). He describes the case made by Sarich and Miele as “an exercise in bombast and overstatement”; and, remarkably for this distinguished science magazine, he offers no analysis of the scientific arguments that are the core of the book.

But in Race, those arguments do lead with hard, new, molecular-genetic data to a general conclusion. Here is a recent, independent statement of it:

[W]hen the taxonomic term [race] is used consistently across species, it’s difficult to see any justification for the common assertion that human races are merely ‘social constructs.’ The motivation behind the assertion is a positive one, but denying biological realities at the outset is unlikely to lead to productive social dialogue on coping with human differences.[1]

There is no bombast in Race. It is an effort to define for the general reader, in broadest terms, those features of human genetics and anthropology testifying to a surprisingly recent origin of our lineage, but also to a long interval (before the present) of sufficient geographic separation of human subpopulations to have given rise to the currently recognizable races. The message is the opposite of typology: among the races of man, now that we can move freely over the planet and because we are a single species, able to interbreed, differences will become steadily less marked, the sets fuzzier. Eventually, in a distant future, they will disappear. Barring world-wide catastrophe, the prospects for re-segregation and new raciation are nil. But the differences acquired in our evolutionary history haven’t disappeared yet. I know of no other popular work that makes this scientific case so simply and places it so clearly in social context as Race.

Would that it had been better edited! The publisher seems not to have invested much effort in bringing the separate contributions of the co-authors into tonal consonance. And the courageous decision on the part of the authors to publish such a book would have justified filling out and documenting more fully the core scientific argument. It is perfectly sound so far as it goes, but nevertheless sketchier than it needed to be given the commitment to book-length exposition. Still, the primary literature is available for those who care and know how to examine it. The best summary of its conclusions is like the one quoted above: Human subpopulations are “races”; they exist. They are familial subdivisions of the one species, Homo sapiens, to which we all belong. General readers who wish to be informed on the biology of race, in preparation for the next official hyperventilation on the subject, will do well to start with this book.

Notes
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1. This is from the conclusion of the July, 2002 essay by J. Goodrum. See http://www.goodrumj.com/ RFaqHTML.html Go back to the text.