Race

by Vincent Sarich, Frank Miele

The conventional wisdom in contemporary social science claims that human races are not biologically valid categories. Many argue the very words '”race” and “racial differences” should be abolished because they support racism. In Race, Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele challenge both these tenets. First, they cite the historical record, the art and literature of other civilizations and cultures, morphological studies, cognitive psychology, and the latest research in medical genetics, forensics, and the human genome to demonstrate that racial differences are not trivial, but very real. They conclude with the paradox that, while, scientific honesty requires forthright recognition of racial differences, public policy should not recognize racial-group membership. The evidence and issues raised in this book will be of critical interest to students of race in behavioral and political science, medicine, and law.

Genres: Science, Anthropology, Genetics, Race, Politics, Nonfiction

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 7, 2004

Reviews

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's "The Bell Curve" in different clothes

I jotted down more than 200 words of notes on just the first 10 pages of this book, so egregious are its wrongs.

That includes lies told from within his own scientific field of expertise by anthropologist Vincent Sarich.

An example?

On page 9, Sarich claims that the Out-of-Africa hypothesis of modern Homo sapiens dates that to about 50,000 BCE.

This is not incontrovertible. To the point, anthropology shows modern Homo sapiens outside Africa long before that date. And, even if 50,000 BCE is taken as the point for some final "breakout" beyond Africa and the neighboring edge of the Middle East, Sarich's idea deliberately glosses over "backwash" -- migration back into Africa, primarily from neighboring parts of the Middle East, but also from elsewhere. (Witness the colonization of Madagascar by people from south India in the last few thousand years.)

Besides, how can Sarich fit those "smart as a whip" Jews, living oh so close to "Darkest Africa," into this hypothesis?

More seriously, the Jebel Qafzeh skull from Israel is the most commonly known candidate for the oldest modern Homo sapiens skull ever found. It dates to between 92,000-115,000 years of age.

On page 1, the authors misinterpret a Lincoln quote about the difference between races, and infer that, rather than talking about the sociological fallouts from a clearly perceived difference in skin colors, Lincoln was talking about deeper differences in physical attributes.

The last paragraph of page 3 has a logically fallacious appeal to authority, which the authors continue throughout the first chapter of the book.

At the bottom of page 4, the authors appear to make a logically and empirically unwarranted jump, from all humans distinguishing other humans and classifying/chunking them into certain groups, to an almost Platonic-ideal concept called "race." (Update: So called "races" of humans have less genetic variability than different breeds of dog. Sarich & Miele won't tell you that.)

Page 9 - Going with their unproven -- and logically fallacious idea-generating -- 50,000 year date for the evolution of modern Homo sapiens, Miele and Sarich then use this to bootstrap their own arguments about the degree of difference between races, claiming this shows how rapidly human evolution can progress. It's clear circular reasoning based on an already assumed point of view.

Pages 9-10 have a laughably racist "genetic" rather than sociological assumption of evidence for various types of athletic prowess. (I await every new world-class African swimmer or hockey player to refute "athletics of the gaps" thoughts like this.)

More seriously, here's a sociological counterexample. Chinese children, and adults, are known from research to have an above-average percentage of musical perfect pitch. Genes?

No, not at all. Mandarin is a "tonal" language. Hence, attention to pitch comes with Chinese speakers learning their language. Even if it's learned as a second language, that's still going to come into play. Pay attention, both Wittgensteinian philosophers and cultural sociologists.

And, the piece de resistance on page 10 -- the "mean sub-Saharan African IQ of 70." All together, now, can we say Bell Curve?

(Update: This is simply untrue. Formal IQ testing is "normalized" so that the mean for a particular country will be 100, per recent reading. Therefore, we can't even talk about "the mean sub-Saharan African IQ of 70," because 70 ≠ 100 AND because "sub-Saharan Africa" isn't a single country.)

How ironic that coauthor Miele is a senior editor of Skeptic magazine, because this book warrants incredible amounts of skepticism. (Sidebar: This is also a finding of fault about Michael Shermer for letting him be there.)

[VEL – The Contemporary Heretic · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published in 2003, ‘Race: The Biology of Human Differences’ is the last time a mainstream publisher published a hereditarian book on race. Unfortunately, it is disappointing.

Law
The authors begin by discussing the recognition accorded race in the US legal system:

“The most adversarial part of our… society, not only continues to accept the existence of race, but also relies on the ability of the average individual to sort people into races” (p14).

But folk-taxonomies are part socially-constructed too (e.g. the ‘one-drop rule’).

It is unfortunate that the authors restrict their analysis to US law today. How was race determined under Apartheid, the Nuremberg laws or Jim Crow where the stakes were much higher?

Race-Recognition
Citing Hirschfeld’s research on race recognition in infants, they claim:

“Evolutionary psychology provides… evidence that there is a species-wide module in the human brain that predisposes us to sort the members of our species into groups based on appearance, and to distinguish between ‘us’ and ‘them’” (p31)

But, since races were, until recent advances in transportation, largely separated from one another by the very oceans, deserts and mountain-ranges that reproductively isolated them and hence permitted their evolution into distinguishable races, it is doubtful races have been in contact for sufficient time to have evolved a race-classification module.

Moreover, if race differences are real and obvious, then there is no need to evolve such a module. General intelligence is capable of doing the job.

Ancients
Far from race being a recent western invention, the authors show that humans sorted themselves into races ever since different races came into contact.

African rock paintings distinguish Pigmies, Bushmen and Bantu and Egyptian monuments are “not mere ‘portraits but an attempt at classification’” (p33). They even describe “History’s first color bar”—an Egyptian stele reading“No Negro shall cross this boundary… save for the purpose of trade” (p35).

Ancient peoples mostly viewed their own group as superior. This reflected, not only ethnocentrism, but also the fact that civilizations of the sort that leave behind artwork and literature sophisticated enough to permit moderns to ascertain their views on race were indeed often surrounded by less advanced neighbors (p56)

Science and Slavery
Chapter three continues the history of racial thought into the Age of Science—and of pseudoscience.

They trace the history of anthropology, from its beginnings as ‘The Science of Race’, to its current incarnation as the study of ‘culture’, most of whose practitioners deny the biological reality of race and some of whom deny the possibility of anthropology being a science.

Ironically, it was polygenism—the belief that races had separate origins, a view that naturally lends itself to racism—that was associated with free-thinking and the Enlightenment, since monogenism echoed the orthodox interpretation of the Bible.

Thus, defenders of slavery in America did not draw on race science. They preferred biblical doctrine.

‘Race’ focuses on two debates—between Boas and Grant; and Montagu and Coon. These conflicts were themselves arguably racial. Grant and Coon were WASPs; Boas and Montagu were Jews (see The Culture of Critique: reviewed here)

The current consensus of race-denial is traced to Boas.

“Franz Boas… remade American anthropology in his own image… [and had] more influence on American intellectual thought than Darwin” (p86).

Is Race Real?
Sarich and Miele define races as:

“Populations, or groups of populations, within a species, that are separated geographically from other such populations or groups of populations and distinguishable from them on the basis of heritable features” (p207).

But, due to recent migration, human races are often no longer separated geographically. The key element is whether they were separated during their evolution.

Sarich and Miele protest that critics of the race concept often define races out of existence by demanding discrete boundaries. But, since races are distinguished from species by the fact that only the former interbreed, it is inevitable that
racial boundaries will be blurred (p209).

“The simple answer to the objection that races are not discrete, blending into one… is… they’re supposed to blend into one another and categories need not be discrete”

Characterizing races as “fuzzy sets” (a “recently developed mathematical concept”), they use the analogy of color:

“Red… shade[s] imperceptibly into orange and orange into yellow but we have no difficulties in agreeing as to where red becomes orange, and orange yellow” (p208-9)

But colors don’t exist. The electromagnetic spectrum varies continuously. Colours are imposed only by human visual system.

If race differences were similarly continuous, it would be inappropriate to divide people into races, because wherever one drew the boundary would be arbitrary.

But the authors argue:

“Races necessarily grade into one another, but they… do not do so evenly” (p209)

They cite the example of the Sahara, an obstacle that impeded gene-flow for millennia, and hence the “ancient boundary between… Caucasians and Negroes” (p209-10).

But migration, miscegenation and intermarriage mean fuzzy boundaries are fast becoming fuzzier. If races exist, perhaps they won’t for much longer.

But, even if races didn’t exist, race differences still would. They would just be clinal rather than discrete.

Debunking Diamond
Diamond argues that racial classification is arbitrary, because:

“Depending on whether we classified ourselves by antimalarial genes, lactase, fingerprints or skin color, we could place Swedes in the same race as… either Xhosas, Fulani, the Ainu of Japan or Italians” (Diamond 1994: p164)

Sarich and Miele respond:

“The sickle-cell allele can never go above about 40 percent in any population, and nor does the proportion of lactose-competent adults in any population ever approach 100 percent. Thus on the basis of sickle-cell, there are two groups of Fulani, one without the allele, the other with it. So those Fulanu with the allele would group not with other Fulani, but with Italians with the allele” (p165)

But this only reinforces Diamond’s point. If a legitimate system of racial classification demands that some Faluni tribesmen be grouped with Italians, this indeed suggests that racial classifications are silly. It also suggests most variation is within-race.

Sarich and Miele then argue:

“[The absence of sickle-cell] is a meaningless association because [this] is an ancestral human condition… [and] thus… says only that [groups with this trait] are both human, not a particularly profound statement” (p165)

Thus, biologists favor cladistic taxonomy. Species are grouped, not by shared traits, but shared ancestry. Shared traits are relevant only as evidence of shared ancestry.

Ancestral traits are irrelevant, as are traits like lactose tolerance, which evolved independently in different populations.

But Diamond’s classifications are especially silly. Even pre-Darwinian taxonomies classified species on multiple traits that cluster together.

Yet Diamond proposes to classify races on the basis of single traits, chosen arbitrarily—or, one suspects, to illustrate his point.

Genes
Lewontin famously claimed that 85% of genetic variation occurred within populations and only 6% between races.

The usual rejoinder is that, while Lewontin’s figures are correct if you look at individual loci, we can identify race with a precision that approaches 100% the more loci are used (Edwards 2003).

But Edwards’ paper was published only year before Sarich and Miele’s book. They respond differently.

“[Lewontin’s] analysis omits a third level of variability–the within-individual one [because] we are diploid, getting one set of chromosomes from one parent and a second from the other. [Therefore] the… 85 percent will then split half and half (42.5%) between the intra- and inter-individual within-population comparisons” (p168-9).

This just seems to be playing with numbers: If most variation is within-race, then, even if people mate endogamously, offspring will inevitably show much variation between the portion of genes inherited from each parent.

Morphology
Sarich and Miele next argue that it is actually better to look at morphological differences.

After all, humans and chimpanzees share 98% the same DNA, but we are not 98% similar. A few genes can have large effects while others have few, at least on the sort of differences we are concerned with here.

Thus, much genetic variation within a population is likely maintained by frequency-dependent selection, since rare alleles often confer resistence against fast-evolving pathogens that evolve to target more common alleles. This is known as ‘rare allele advantage’.

Clearly for some traits between-individual variation does not dwarf that between groups (p167).

“Group differences can be much greater than the individual differences within them; in, for example, hair from Kenya and Japan, or body shape for the Nuer and Inuit” (p218)

That human populations are genetically similar shows that we separated only recently; That large morphological differences evolved in this short period indicates strong selective pressure for differentiation

“So much variation developing in so short a period of time implies, indeed almost requires, functionality. There is no good reason to think that behavior should… be exempt from this pattern” (p173)

Measuring Morphology
The authors claim that human races differ more from one another morphologically than do some separate species of animal (p170). They then seek to prove this statistically.

Relying on “cranial/facial measurements”, Sarich and Miele conclude that a greater percentage of the total variation among humans is found between different human races than between some separate species of non-human primate (p170-3).

Yet their analysis is quite technical. The more appropriate place to publish this would be a journal, with full methodology section and peer-review.

Dogs
Only in domestic dogs, they argue, are constituent races so differentiated.

Yet genetic differences between breeds are so slight that, at the time Sarich and Miele wrote, researchers had only just begun to genetically distinguish breeds (p185).

However, this likely reflected the lesser funding devoted to the canine genome as compared to humans.

Among dogs, unlike for humans, “Genetic variation between dog breeds is much greater than the variation within breeds” (Ostrander 2007).

Dog breeds also differ behaviorally (Freedman 1958)

Indeed, recognition of behavior differences even has statutory force, with ‘breed specific legislation’ restricting the breeding, sale and import of some breeds (e.g. Pitbulls) and ordering their registration, neutering and sometimes destruction—the canine equivalent of the Nuremberg laws!

Physical & Behavioral Differences
In their chapter on physical differences, the authors focus on differences in athletic performance, particularly a statistical analysis performance in just one sport—long-distance running.

Their chapter on behavior, focuses, perhaps inevitably, on intelligence.

They focus on two issues:

• Brain size;
• African IQ.

Brain Size
Brain-size correlates with IQ (Pietschnig et al 2015).

The authors note that one study found no association between brain size and IQ among siblings (Schoenemann et al 2000).

This suggests the relationship between brain-size and IQ is not causal, but rather that some factor that differs between families is responsible for causing both bigger brains and IQs. However, they lament, “the obvious candidates” (e.g. income, nutrition) do not have a big enough effect to explain this (p222).

But other studies have established a correlation even within families (Jensen & Johnson 1994; Lee et al 2019).

Species with larger relative brain-size are also more intelligent. But if you think a ‘culture-fair’ IQ test is impossible, try designing a ‘species-fair’ one!

Yet the race with the largest brains are Eskimos, who are not noted for their scientific achievements and, according to Richard Lynn, their average IQ is just 91.

Alternatively, race differences in brain-size evolved might reflect ‘Bergmann’s Rule’, whereby, in cold climates, larger bodies are favored to minimize surface-area to volume.

Intelligence differences could have emerged as a byproduct these differences.

But it is unlikely that increases in metabolically-expensive brain tissue would evolve purely for temperature regulation when the same result could be achieved by modifying only the external shape of the skull.

African IQ
Citing an average IQ of 70 for sub-Saharan Africa, the authors conclude, “One can perhaps accept [this]… as a well-documented fact” (p225). Including “perhaps” and “well-documented” in a single sentence is ambiguous.

Such an IQ is, in the West, indicative of borderline mental retardation. Yet, the authors report, “Interacting with [Africans] belies any thought that one is dealing with an IQ 70 people” (p226).

They observe, “Whites with 70 IQ are obviously substantially handicapped over and above their IQ scores” (p225).

Thus, Jensen distinguishes “biologically normal mental retardation” (i.e. individuals at the tail-end of a normal distribution) from victims of conditions such as Down syndrome who are impaired in other ways besides IQ (Straight Talk About Mental Tests: p9).

Thus, most Africans with IQs<70 are not retarded. They are within the normal range for their group.

It would be no more sensible to say that chimps are retarded because they are dumber than humans!

Sarich and Miele propose, instead of comparing sub-Saharan Africans with the mentally-handicapped, we do better to compare them to Western 11-year-olds (p230).

But this analogy is also misleading. Just as retarded adults differ from normal adults in many ways beside IQ, so do 11-year-olds, the latter usually lacking worldly wisdom and emotional maturity.

Bushman IQ
The authors suggest one group of Africans may be more intelligent, quoting Harpending as observing:

“All of us have the impression that Bushmen are really quick and clever and are quite different from their neighbours… There will soon be real data available about the relative performance of Bushmen, Hottentot, and Bantu kids—or more likely, they will supress it” (p227).

Two decades on, the only data I am aware of is that of Lynn. Relying on just three very limited studies, Lynn estimates the average Bushmen IQ at 54 (Race Differences in Intelligence: p76).

Politics
Finally, the authors discuss the political impliations of their findings.

Favoring meritocracy, they caution against creeping re-segregation and affirmative action.

More surprisingly, they also warn against one proposed antidote to racism, namely miscegenation.

“Intermarriage is the factor most likely to cause some extremist terrorist group to feel the need to launch such an attack [because] from a racial solidarist perspective, intermarriage is an act of race war. Every ovum… impregnated by the sperm of a member of a different race is one less of that precious commodity to be impregnated by a member of its own race” (p255-6)

This represents a crude group-selectionist interpretation of race conflict—and might explain why rumors of interracial rape so often provoke race riots (e.g. in Springfield in 1908, Omaha in 1919, Tulsa in 1921, Rosewood in 1923, and Birmingham in 2005).

On this view, as a character in a Houellebecq novel puts it:

“What is really at stake in racial struggles… is neither economic nor cultural, it is brutal and biological: It is competition for the cunts of young women” (Platform: p82)

Full (i.e. vastly overlong) review available here.

References
Diamond (1994) Race without color, Discover
Edwards (2003) Human genetic diversity, BioEssays 25(8):798–801
Freedman (1958) Constitutional and environmental interactions in rearing of four breeds of dogs. Science 127:585-86
Jensen & Johnson (1994) Race and sex differences in head size and IQ, Intelligence 18(3):309-333
Lee et al (2019) The causal influence of brain size on human intelligence, Intelligence 75:48-58
Lewontin (1972). Apportionment of Human Diversity, Evolutionary Biology
Ostrander (2007) Genetics and the Shape of Dogs, American Scientist 95(5): 406
Pietschnig et al (2015) Meta-analysis of associations between human brain volume and intelligence differences, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 57: 411-432.
Schoenemann et al (2000) Brain-size does not predict general cognitive ability within families. Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, 97:4932–4937

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

The authors argue persuasively that race is more than a social construct and races provide biologically valid categories. They cover some of the measurable differences in average physical, behavioral, and intellectual traits between the races. Most people will concede that there are average differences in physical traits, such as skin color, but there is much shrieking and fainting over the well established, but controversial, differences in behavior and intelligence (see Richard Lynn's "IQ and the Wealth of Nations" or Herrnstein and Murray's "The Bell Curve"). I was not as interested in the chapters that covered the history of the researchers and found the last three chapters the most interesting. Those chapters covered differences in physical and behavioral abilities, like the Kalenjin tribesmen of Africa being 1.5 SD above the world average in running ability. There was some speculation on being able to use biological warfare to target racial groups, which won't surprise me if it come to pass in the next 10-20 years. The later chapters got the most critical reviews because they cover the most controversial subjects.

[Steven H · Rating 1 out of 5]

ANOTHER PURPORTED ‘SCIENTIFIC’ DEFENSE OF ‘RACIAL’ IQ DIFFERENCES, ETC.

Vincent Matthew Sarich (1934-2012) was an American anthropologist and biochemist, who was Professor Emeritus in anthropology at UC Berkeley; he is perhaps best known for his use of molecular data in estimating a ‘timeline’ of evolutionary developments. Frank Miele (born 1948) is a senior editor at Skeptic magazine, as well as a contributor to ‘Mankind Quarterly.’

They wrote in the Preface to this 2004 book, “While we were preparing the final draft of this book, [PBS]… aired a highly acclaimed documentary, ‘Race: The Power of an Illusion.’ The contemporary scientific and ethical consensus in both the media and the social sciences regarding race was concisely summarized in … ten numbered statements … The authors of this book… disagree with each of these ten points… we present the evidence we believe refutes the first eight points and explain why we reject points nine and ten, not only for economic but ethical reasons as well… We present what we believe is compelling evidence to support the propositions that race IS a valid biological concept, and that human variations… reflect both genetic and environmental factors. On matters of social policy, we are both individualists. We oppose any governmentally sanctioned benefits or handicaps being applied SOLELY on the basis of group membership.”

In the ‘Acknowledgements,’ they state, “We could not have written this book without the help, encouragement, and patience shown by so many. First, we thank Michael Shermer, publisher and editor-in-chief of Skeptic magazine, and its entire staff for inviting us to write and speak freely on so controversial an issue as race, even when our views conflicted with those of others.”

They outline, “the case for race hinges on recognition of the fact that genetic variation in traits that affect performance and ultimately survival is the fuel on which the evolutionary process runs… Strong evidence in the case for race comes from examining the amount of variation actually present in a proper a comparative context… human racial differences exceed those for any other nondomesticated species. Also important is … how long it took for human racial differences to evolve. The amount of variation that took approximately one million years to evolve in chimpanzees took only 50,000 years to evolve in humans. This much shorter time for the evolution of comparatively larger racial differences must mean that these differences are more (not less) significant, and that adaptation, not chance, is the only mechanism capable of explaining this.” (Pg. 8-9)

They assert, “If ‘race’ were a mere social construction based upon a few highly visible features, it would have no statistical correlation with the DNA markers that indicate genetic relatedness… Unless race is a biological reality that gives important information about an individual’s degree of genetic resemblance to the various human populations… it would be inconceivable to achieve the level of accuracy obtainable through the DNAPrint methodology. Indeed… such analysis is capable of not only identifying race but predicting skin tone as well.” (Pg. 23)

They note that Samuel G. Morton (born 1799) was a physician and professor of anatomy. “The PBS documentary states that in his measurements Morton ‘made systematic errors in favor of his assumptions’ that whites should have ‘decided and unquestioned superiority over all the nations of the earth.’ The accusation that Morton … finagled his measurements gained popularity in Stephen Jay Gould’s book ‘The Mismeasure of Man’… The obvious way to resolve the issue would be to measure the skulls in Morton’s collection. This has, in fact, been done. The results show that any errors were Gould’s, not Morton’s; Gould, though made aware, simply ignored them in his second edition… The most extensive study of race differences in cranial capacity to date measured 20,000 skulls… and reported East Asians, Europeans, and Africans … Asians [were] now slightly on top, but the average cranial capacity of Africans remains significantly below them.” (Pg. 71-72)

They explain that “[Carleton] Coon believed that race was a central issue and his job as an anthropologist was to study race. [Ashley] Montagu felt his was to banish race to the periphery and replace it with the concept of ‘ethnic group.’ He began his effort … in his 1942 book, ‘Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. When he was selected to draft the initial (1950) UNESCO Statement on Race, Montagu was given a platform from which to present his view to a much larger, nonacademic audience.” (Pg. 92)

They add, “The most important of Coon’s books for this discussion is ‘The Origin of Races’… What made the book and its author the center of a raging controversy was that Carleton Putnam… used it in support of his campaign against the U.S. Supreme Cout’s ‘Brown v. Board of Education’ decision. Putnam’s book, ‘Race and Reason,’ was denounced as a work of racist pseudoscience by many in anthropology… Coon was elected to a two-year term as president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) in 1961. He replaced his friend, W. Montague Cobb, an African American from Howard University… a resolution was proposed that the AAPA declare that there were no race differences in intelligence. Cobb agreed with Coon that the honest scientific position was agnosticism and so no vote should be taken.” (Pg. 94-95)

They recount, “After the Coon affair, anthropology increasingly drew away from the subject of race. First, in 1969 psychologist Arthur Jensen returned the question of the nexus between intelligence, race, and genetics to the mainstream of behavioral science… Then in 1995 another psychologist, J. Philippe Rushton published ‘Race, Evolution, and Behavior’… around the world, he reported, Asians and blacks fell at the opposite ends of a continuum with whites in between…” (Pg. 100)

They acknowledge that ‘Races aren’t species,’ and “This has made it difficult to decide objectively among the competing scenarios. Once possible gene flow is factored into the equations, and that is essential when dealing with races, then a measured genetic distance among populations could refer to any number of times of original separation… This makes the time dimension of the within-human trees… potentially very squishy. Thus, the area is by definition messy…” (Pg. 133)

They argue, “Richard Lewontin… apportioned the variability observed into its within- and between-population components… 85 percent of the genetic variability was seen among individuals within populations, and only an additional 15 percent was added by comparing individuals in different populations. Lewontin’s assessment was correct for its time…But the 85:15 somehow still feels wrong---and it is in two ways. First, it is simply an average across the genetic loci… Eighty percent of the variation in skin color? In hair form? … Hardly, and no calculations are necessary to know it…” (Pg. 166-167)

Sarich asserts, “It is time to revisit African dominance in road and track. Well, let me say this: (1) It’s genes, genes, and more genes; (2) nobody knows why Africans should be so dominant… the results over the past few decades are consistent with a genetic model, and inconsistent with the ‘it’s all society and culture’ model. If the latter model held, then… The NBA would be about 10 percent black; we’d see a Kalenjin only every few years at the cross-country championships… Body-fat levels seem to be at a minimum among African populations… and Africans in training can apparently achieve lower body-fat levels more readily than is the case for Europeans and Asians. These factors are an adequate springboard to explaining such African dominance as exists in the sporting world.” (Pg. 181-182)

They state, “The most extensively documented research on race differences in behavior concerns the fifteen-point difference between the average IQs of white Americans and African Americans, whites being higher, but Asians have a slightly higher average IQ than whites… What is in dispute is the cause or causes of the difference… During the ongoing controversy surrounding ‘The Bell Curve,’ in 1994 the American Psychological Association appointed a special task force to .. evaluate the book’s conclusions… the task force for the most part agreed … that within the white population the heritability of IQ is ‘around .75.’ As to the cause of the mean black-white group difference, however, the task force concluded: ‘There is certainly no support for a genetic interpretation.’ (Pg. 196-197)

They contend that “we have ‘improved’ the environment… as much as possible,” and that [‘Bell Curve’ co-author] Charles “Murray’s results suggest that much the same is happening with respect to cognitive improvement… That is a controversial viewpoint, but we haven’t seen a substantive critique of Murray’s work… [His] basic conclusions are holding up…” (Pg. 224-225)

Very controversially, they argue, “Whites with 70 IQ are obviously substantially handicapped over and above their IQ scores… Black kids with an IQ of 70 … are eminently normal. Happy, functional, and so on… The same is of course true for Africans in Africa. Interacting with them belies any thought that one is dealing with IQ 70 people…” (Pg. 225-226) They add, “no one has demonstrated a method of compensatory education that produces relatively permanent increases in mental ability, as opposed to learning how to answer specific test questions correctly… there is a significant heritable component to virtually every human ability, and … there is substantial evidence for some genetic component in average group differences.” (Pg. 239)

Most controversially, they also suggest, “In selecting an instructor for … largely minority youth, it may be desirable to select a qualified candidate from that race because arguably the person might establish better rapport. But under the principles of the meritocracy, the argument could also be turned around: The world of work still remains largely one of white, male bosses, and thus it might be preferable to select such an applicant so that the students learn as soon as possible to deal with what they are likely to face in the real world.” (Pg. 244) They add, “Society is not omnipotent. It can provide opportunity, but it cannot mandate that individuals will make equal use of those opportunities. It can in no sense make groups equal. It cannot level up---only down---and any such leveling is necessarily at the expense of individual freedom and, ultimately, the total level of accomplishment.” (Pg. 246) They conclude, “[Arthur] Jensen’s laws and [Richard] Herrnstein’s syllogism re the bitter facts of life that come with meritocracy. That is one reason so many people find it ethically unacceptable.” (Pg. 261)

Sarich’s prominence in the evolutionary field perhaps gives this book more ‘respectability’ (superficially, at least) than it deserves. Miele’s contributions to Mankind Quarterly (which has been characterized as a ‘white supremacist journal’) also casts doubt on his ‘skeptical, scientific’ claimed orientation.

[Ushan · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 2003, a California Newsreel series about race was aired on PBS. The TV series made some astonishing assertions that Sarich, an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, found to be not just wrong, but pseudoscientific; he made use of UC Berkeley's anthropology library to refute them. The TV series claimed that race was a 19th century Western invention; on the contrary, says Sarich, ancient Romans and ancient Egyptians distinguished between whites and blacks, and modern Bushmen distinguish between whites, blacks and themselves. The TV series also claimed that race has no genetic basis and it is just skin-deep. This of course is utter nonsense. Read the Wikipedia articles Human mitochondrial DNA haplogroups and Human Y-chromosome DNA haplogroups to see that genetics can distinguish with high probability not just between whites and blacks, but between the pygmies and the Hadzabe hunters-gatherers of Tanzania and everyone else, or between the Ainu and the Nivkhs of Hokkaido, the Kuriles, Sakhalin and the Amur valley and everyone else. The TV series also claims that there are no human subspecies. Well, despite all of us belonging to the same species, we are more than twice as diverse morphologically (the Taita people of Kenya and the Buryat people of Siberia are especially different from one another) than the two species of chimpanzees, and a little less than twice as the two species of gorillas. So far so good. However, in the later chapters Sarich and Miele try to revive the argument of The Bell Curve about genetically based intellectual differences between the races without addressing the large amount of criticism this book has attracted. Sorry, Professor Sarich, but you are an expert in measuring the molecular clock, and not psychometry.

[Friedrich Mencken · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a five star book right up until the last chapter when it all fell apart. One would think someone would tell them to leave their personal views on politics out, especially when that view is (partly?) motivated by a fear of biological warfare… Read the first 8 chapters, skip the last one, you will not be missing anything.

[Ivan L. · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Race: The Reality of Human Differences, Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele have made it a point to shatter some long-held taboos. In contemporary Western society, the topic of race has been surrounded by an aura of sanctity. Just as one could not, without potentially deadly consequences, question the authority of the pope during the Christian Middle Ages, the inerrancy of the Quran during the reign of the Abbasid Caliphs, the soundness of Marxist theory and collectivized agriculture during the great terror of Stalin, and the theory of the allegedly inferior intelligence of Jews during the Nazi period — so one cannot today question the doctrine of the innate biological equality of the races without incurring severe censure and ostracism. For the mere act of breaking this taboo with their book, Sarich and Miele immediately deserve credit.

On the whole, this is an intriguing and stimulating book. Though I do have one criticism to make of it — and a significant one at that — any objections that I will go on to voice should not be understood to convey the impression that the book is wrong, worthless, or anything other than fundamentally excellent. Despite a major gripe with three of its central chapters, which I will explain in a moment, I am entirely in agreement with the book's central thesis: race is a meaningful biological reality with major consequences for our society, and any attempts to impose a penumbra of silence around it, in the effort to pay obeisance to the peculiar political pieties of the day, can only produce the very same results that embracing delusion always inevitably produces.

Each chapter in the book has its peculiar interest. After an opening statement in which they declare what things they wish to challenge — among them, the idea that race is merely a social construct rather than a biological reality and that, before the age of European colonialism, societies did not divide themselves by race — Sarich and Miele proceed to briefly discuss the place of the concept of race in the law. Despite the contentiousness of the legal system, the law easily and immediately recognizes what it means to call someone "white" or "black" or "Asian." The common-sense definition of "race," according to which races are distinguished by phenotypes like skin color and hair texture, causes no confusion. When the FBI uses DNA testing to establish criminal culpability, its test use a total of 13 genetic markers, which are enough to pinpoint an individual perpetrator with 99% accuracy. And as Sarich and Miele point out, a test which uses 50-100 single-nucleotide polymorphisms can sort people into races with the same sort of precision.

Chapter 2 presents an interesting discussion of the racial views of older civilizations, including the Egyptian, the Greek, the Roman, the Islamic, the Assyrian, the Chinese, and the Indian. The authors point out that the Egyptians divided the world into four races: the red, which was themselves; the black, which referred to Nubians and other Sub-Saharan Africans; the yellow, which were Asiatics and Semites; and the white, which referred to Westerners or Northerners who had "blue eyes and fair beards." The Pharaoh Sesostris III, who reigned in the 19th century BC, was also responsible for one of the world's oldest racial exclusion laws, banning blacks from Egypt. There are also interesting but short discussions in this chapter of the Tocharians, white people whose mummified remains were found in China and date as far back as 2,000 BC., and of the racial views of some Islamic writers who lived during the Golden Age of Islam, including the philosopher Avicenna and the jurist Sa'id al-Andalusi. To put it mildly, these views were not complementary to black people and could scarcely be distinguished from those of a 19th-century American plantation owner.

The pre-modern world also had its theories about the origin of racial differences. Sarich and Miele devote some space to the climatic racial theories of the Greeks, which argued that Africans' black skin was the result of a hot climate and the constant beaming down of the sun upon them, and that the progressively fairer skin one found as one went further north through Europe was caused by a cold climate and the relative lack of sunlight. This chapter does not provide many details on pre-modern societies' views of race, but it gives enough information to whet the appetites of those who are interested.

Chapter 3 presents a short history of anthropology, moving from the early modern period to the aftermath of World War II. The general thrust of this narrative is that, for most of history, people regarded the notion that there are innate race differences as being almost too obvious to require comment. Particularly interesting to me was the short discussion of the debate, starting in the Renaissance period, between those who believed in a single origin for humankind from which the existing races then emerged and divided, and those who believed that the existing races were created separately. This echoes the equivalent debate today between the monogenic out-of-Africa theory, to which Sarich was a major contributor, and the current evolutionary polygenic theory, which posits that the races may have emerged in parallel with one another in different parts of the world.

When discussing the Renaissance version of this debate, Sarich and Miele point out that polygenists tended to be persecuted and that the Church and the then-reigning political power structure, owing to a rather literal interpretation of the book of Genesis which favored monogenic theories. This fact makes mincemeat of the argument that Europeans invented the concept of race in order to justify colonialism and oppression of non-white peoples. If that were the case, the European power structure would have favored polygenic theories. Again, the discussions of polygenists like Lucilio Vanini and Isaac de la Peyrere, as well as 19th-century American biological anthropologists like Samuel George Morton, George Gliddon, Josiah Nott, and George Squier, are not terribly detailed, but they provide an excellent introduction to those who long to learn more about the subject.

Starting in the 19th century, however, the tide began to shift in anthropology, and the dominance of biological explanations for race differences began to give way to the view that race is nothing but a social construct. Sarich and Miele tell the history of this change through the prism of three debates: the first between Ernst Haeckel and Rudolf Virchow; the second between Madison Grant and Franz Boas; and the third between Carleton Coon and Ashley Montagu (real name, Israel Ehrenberg). While I was already familiar with most of this information, the discussions taken from Coon's autobiography were especially interesting. Despite a clear overall sympathy for the biological point of view, Sarich and Miele are fair enough to point out that older racial theories had excessively strong tendencies to portray races as fixed and immutable types; contemporary theories admit that biological categories are somewhat looser, though this looseness is no mark against their basic reality.

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 are much more technical than the others, and they are the ones upon which my criticisms of the book will fall. The purpose of these chapters is to tell, in some detail, the story of how, starting in the 1960s, Sarich and many of his colleagues discovered the notion of a "molecular clock" that could help them date the occurrence of important events in our evolutionary history. In brief, the theory went like this: In 1961, Emile Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling, in a paper examining the metabolic and molecular origins of diseases, pointed out that certain proteins in the blood of some animals seemed to mutate in a predictable and regular way. Sarich and his mentor Allan Wilson, leaped upon the notion that this predicable and periodic rate of mutation could, when paired with the appropriate paleontological evidence, allow us to determine, with a high degree of accuracy, both when the human lineage diverged from the lineages of other primates and when the races diverged from one another. Also, by tracing the mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal DNA of sample human populations — which are respectively passed down matrilineally and patrilineally — scientists could determine when and where the human species originated. Chapters 4 and 5 tell the history of Sarich's involvement with these discoveries, and chapter 6 offers some further speculations on possible solutions to some open questions about these matters.

However, when one reads Sarich's description of how this molecular clock is supposed to work, some critical — perhaps even insurmountable — problems emerge. First, in order for a clock to reliably keep time, its hands must move at a constant rate. Each mutation of the protein or proteins that Sarich is interested in tracking thus represents one tick of the clock. By counting up the number of differences in the proteins of two particular organisms, one can determine how many mutational periods have elapsed since their lineages diverged. However — and this is the crucial point — unless one is sure that mutations happen at a uniform rate, this fact can tell us nothing at all about how long ago these divergences occurred.

To deal with this problem, Sarich attempts to calibrate his clock to fossil evidence. Suppose that you wish to discover when the lineages of organisms A and B diverged. After examining their proteins or DNA, you find a difference of X mutations between them. Hence, the divergence happened X mutational periods ago. Then, by examining and radiometrically dating some fossils of organisms A and B, you find evidence of their independent existence Y years ago, and no earlier. Then, you divide Y by X to get the length of each mutational period. Then, you compare the DNA of other organisms, count the number of mutational differences between them, and multiply that number by Y/X to get their time of divergence.

This seems perfectly acceptable, but there is some trouble in paradise. One immediate implication of this technique is that, since fossil evidence is used to calibrate the clock, the two dating methods should never contradict one another. Yet, they do. In fact, Sarich makes the point that his technique led to a revision in the time at which humans are estimated to have emerged from 20 million years ago to 5 million years ago. How can this be? The answer, in a word, is that Sarich uses some fossils to calibrate his clock and then ignores the other fossils that contradict his estimate. If we calibrate the clock using fossil A, and the clock tells us that two organisms diverged X years ago, but fossil B tells us that they diverged Y years ago, then we ignore fossil B. We know that our clock is right because fossil A calibrated it, and we know that fossil B is wrong because our clock is right. If this sounds like a circular argument to you, then you have perceived that the emperor has no clothes.

There is also a more fundamental issue. How do we know that the mutational periods by which we count are uniform? How do we know that proteins or DNA mutate at the same rate? The very simple answer is that, since we don't have any general theory about what causes mutations to happen in the first place, we don't know. At various times, and for reasons that we don't understand, the rate of mutation might either slow down or speed up. If so, then equal numbers of mutational periods might translate to very different amounts of traditional time.

As I read through these three critical chapters, the question of whether Sarich would ever deign to provide any evidence for the uniform mutational periodicity of his molecular clock nagged at me. To my genuine astonishment, he never did so. In fact, he appears to unwittingly provide evidence against this crucial thesis. At one deeply revealing moment in the book, Sarich discusses the work of Rebecca Cann, who, as a graduate student, worked with Sarich in his lab and did some pioneering research on tracing lineages through the use of mitochondrial DNA. As she set out to create her phylogenetic trees, Cann ran into some trouble:

The problem for Becky was that, in a very real way, she knew too much and too little at the same time. The basic problem lay in the fact that rates of change vary enormously among segments of the mtDNA molecule; in particular, the 1,000 or so positions in the "control region" (D-loop) are accumulating mutations at about ten times the rate of the other 15,500. But even that is just an average across the whole control region; detailed study showed a decidedly nonrandom pattern of change. Certain mutations were much more likely than others, and certain positions were much more likely than others to experience a mutation, resulting in the apparently paradoxical result that human-chimp percent sequence difference across the control region was no greater than the figure for the rest of the molecule (in fact, it was less) (Italics mine). (p. 143)

Logically, this should have led Sarich to doubt the validity of the whole practice of using molecular clocks to date the occurrence of important evolutionary events. Instead, despite lacking any viable general theory about the causes of genetic mutations, Sarich chose to plow ahead, evidently cocksure that, while some mutations may accumulate at non-uniform rates, the ones that he needs to accumulate uniformly will do so. A crisper demonstration of what most scientists tend to do in the face of what Imre Lakatos called a "degenerating research program" can scarcely be imagined.

Indeed, Sarich's commitment to uniform mutational periodicity leads him to adopt a bizarre heads-I-win-tails-you-lose logic when dealing with aspects of the archaeological record that contradict his theory. Sarich recounts that, in 1991, Anna DiRienzo examined the control regions of the mitochondrial DNA of 100 people from Sardinia and the Levant and discovered that a massive profusion of new lineages suddenly appeared when the mtDNA differed about 0.6-0.7% from the current mtDNA of people in the region. Previous calibration of the molecular clock with existing fossils and archeological evidence shows that 0.6-0.7% corresponds to a timescale of about 30,000-40,000 years ago — which is about the time that Cro Magnon man first appeared in the Mediterranean region.

However, in 1992, Sarich worked with Steve Mack to extend this analysis to American Indians, he found that, among this group, an enormous amount of new lineages also suddenly appeared at the level of a 0.6-0.7% difference. The problem with this, of course, is that, as Sarich acknowledges, there is absolutely no evidence of any human habitation in the Americas 30,000-40,000 years ago. What Sarich says next must be read to be believed:

So Steve and I agreed unanimously that there were two potential rational interpretations of his data: (1) Perhaps there was a human presence in the America's 30,000-40,000 years ago but archeologists simply hadn't found it yet, or (2) the calibration was simply wrong. Given the choices, we would opt for the second every time. In other words, as far as we were concerned, the absence of evidence of 30,000-40,000-year-old humans in the Americas was indeed evidence of absence, and our job was to figure out how to square the 0.7 percent difference figure in New Guinea, the circum-Mediterranean area, and the Americas with major population expansions dating around 10,000 years ago. To ask that question was to answer it. The problem has been getting around to asking it, and no one had contemplated the possibility of interpreting the mtDNA data within so recent a timeframe — for, as explained later, what appeared to be an excellent reason.

For the Americas, it was straightforward: an empty continent to expand into beginning 13,000 years ago. The other two areas were also simple: the coming of agriculture — well known in the Middle East, though not so well known in New Guinea but very likely existing in the highlands — around 10,000 years ago, with the inevitable consequence of human population suddenly increasing ten- to a hundredfold and leaving evidence of those increases in the patterns of diversity among contemporary mtDNAs. So that first step was not a major problem, but its implications were. Suddenly our dates had been cut by a factor of three or four, and the out-of-Africa or, at least, out-of-somewhere event was taking place at most some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago (p. 149).

There is simply no way to sugarcoat what I am about to say: This is the sheerest nonsense. On the assumption of uniform mutational periodicity — which Sarich doggedly refuses to let go of — these strange results can only mean one thing: either DiRienzo is wrong or Mack is. There is no other possibility. Sarich, in effect, opts to say that DiRienzo is wrong. But why? After all, the dating methods used to establish the age of the archaeological evidence that DiRienzo used to calibrate her molecular clock are the same as the dating methods used to establish the age of the archaeological evidence that Mack used to calibrate his. What is the basis for saying that one set of archaeological evidence is valid while the other is not, when the ages of both sets were established using the same radiometric techniques? This logically implies that either the clock does not have uniform periods or that our theories of radiometric dating are wrong. There is no way out of this.

Of course, if Sarich were simply willing to abandon the assumption of unchanging mutational periodicity, all of these issues would disappear. But he does not wish to do so because it would render his molecular clock useless. It would also, as a side effect, utterly explode the out-of-Africa theory of human origins. Before reading this book, I knew nothing at all about the theoretical basis for the out-of-Africa theory; now that I have read it, I am more skeptical of it than I ever was before. Sarich, one of the theory's progenitors, should be as competent to make the case for it as anyone; and yet, he has done little for me but expose its fundamental flimsiness. Now that I understand the theory, I simply cannot take it seriously.

At this stage, my critical comments on this book end. Despite everything I've said, I do not wish to advance any other impression than that, on the whole, it is quite good. Its discussion of race and IQ and its responses to the likes of Stephen Jay Gould are superb. Therefore, despite one major reservation, I heartily recommend this book.