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Racial Realities Or Bombast? When Is It Helpful to Categorize People According to Race?

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Racial Realities Or Bombast? When Is It Helpful to Categorize People According to Race? books and arts Racial realities or bombast? When is it helpful to categorize people according to race? Race: The Reality of Human Differences by Vincent Sarich & Frank Miele MAGAZINE Westview Press: 2004. 320 pp. $27.50 Robert N. Proctor SKEPTIC HARVARD UNIV. PRESS HARVARD This is a disturbing book, especially given the stature of its primary author, Vincent Sarich, as one of the founding pioneers of molecular anthropology. In 1967, in a paper with Allan Wilson, Sarich, then a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, used a simple protein-molecular clock to show that humans share a common ancestor with the great apes from as recently True colours? The Greeks and Egyptians seemed to be aware of differences in race. as 5 million years ago — overturning previ- ous estimates of more 20 million years. Flaws in this book are so numerous that to cause some extremist terrorist group to Here he teams up with Frank Miele, a it would be difficult to list them all. Long feel the need to launch such an attack”. senior editor at Skeptic magazine, to lament passages are quoted without attribution, The authors add some old-style eugenics the neglect of “racial realities” by social sci- and many strong claims are presented with rhetoric, worrying about “plunging” birth entists. The voice is one of loners crusading little or no supporting evidence.We hear that rates in the United States and Western against conventional wisdom, although the children as young as three classify people on Europe and the “evolutionary irony lurking book also reads as if it were a legal brief pre- the basis of racial characteristics that they on the horizon” that, having conquered and pared for use in court to counter affirmative already recognize as immutable.The authors colonized the world, Europeans and their action. The authors’ ‘case for race’ draws postulate “an inborn tendency to sort people descendants now risk bringing about “their heavily on contentious claims by raciolo- into groups” and a “module” in the human own extinction”from having too few babies. gists such as Arthur R. Jensen and J. Philippe brain that predisposes people to distinguish Towards the end of this book,the authors Rushton, notorious for having postulated an “us” from a “them”. There are blanket tell of a bioanthropologist colleague, Henry natural racial hierarchies in intelligence, assertions that “the Greeks believed in race” Harpending, who was travelling in the Kala- criminality, athletic performance, sexual and that “few of us resent a rich kinsman or hari and got stuck when his pick-up broke endowment and the capacity to accumulate coethnic”. Historians will be disturbed to down. An ingenious bushman in the party wealth. This is a shame, because there are hear that Giordano Bruno was burned at the suggested jacking up the vehicle and jump- good reasons to believe that certain aspects stake for affirming that “the earth was the starting it by running a rope around the back of race are very real, and that important center of the universe”, an assertion which, tyres and pulling. The trick worked, and the questions of human origins, prehistoric like several others in this volume, comes authors are clearly puzzled that an African migrations and medical therapeutics can be closer to the truth when inverted. could have come up with such an imagina- fruitfully addressed by properly re-examin- Stronger claims are made that border tive solution, given “the mean sub-Saharan ing human biovariation. on the incendiary. In a chapter attacking IQ of 70”. Harpending’s explanation is that Here, though, we have an exercise in affirmative action, the authors write that “a “bushmen are really quick and clever”and in bombast and overstatement.The book begins large number of white Americans harbor this respect quite different from their “black by claiming that, throughout history, people the suspicion that all minority members in African neighbors”. Sarich and Miele then have always had pretty much the same con- high-status positions are there only because ponder whether the development of agricul- ception of race.Miele explains their method- of affirmative action and not because of ture may have dulled the intelligence of the ology:“Vince suggested that I (Frank Miele) ability or achievement”. A large number? continent’s former hunter-gatherers. search the anthropology library at the Uni- Where’s the evidence? The authors write that What I found remarkable about this story, versity of California-Berkeley for examples “All around the world downwardly mobile however, is how willing the authors are to of the way ancient civilizations … described males who perceive themselves as being accept this low figure for the sub-Saharan IQ, themselves and other races in their art, their deprived of wealth, status, and especially based on so little supporting evidence. The literature, and their oral tradition. Did they females by up-and-coming members of a authors cite an apartheid-era study of a South distinguish races … as we do today?” Based different race are ticking time bombs”.Time African high school and an ‘in press’ litera- on this quick review, the authors conclude bombs? Again,where’s the evidence? ture review by Rushton and Jensen, ignoring that people from ancient Egypt, Greece, Sarich and Miele make similar claims in a the many ways that such a sweeping and Rome,India,China and the Islamic world all discussion of South African plans under the grotesque generalization could be flawed. sorted peoples “based on the same set of apartheid regime to develop “pigmentation The authors scoff at the idea of race as a characteristics — skin colour,hair form,and weapons”that would “target only black peo- social construct, but the historical account head shape” that we do today. As evidence, ple”. After outlining how such weapons they present is full of idealized white-and- the authors display an Egyptian jug with a might be developed, the authors propose black polarities. The authors side with Ernst negroid head on one side and a rather racial intermarriage as a “best defense” but Haeckel over Rudolf Virchow, Madison European-looking face on the other, from also warn that “intermarriage, particularly Grant over Franz Boas, and Carleton Coon which they infer a universal “common sense” of females of the majority group with males over Ashley Montagu. There is little effort reality of race. of a minority group, is the factor most likely to explore which of the myriad historical NATURE | VOL 427 | 5 FEBRUARY 2004 | www.nature.com/nature © 2004 Nature Publishing Group 487 books and arts ‘realities’ postulated for race might have alternative explanations. I suspect that the impact of this book could be the opposite of the authors’ inten- tions. There is much to be said for studying human genetic variability to explore ques- tions of prehistoric ancestry and migration, and to investigate how different human pop- ulations respond to medical interventions. But the leap from these to immoderate spec- ulations about the permanence of present- day inequalities is likely to give sceptics even more reason to question racial ‘realities’. Anthropology has a mixed history of dealings with human racial injustice (think of Carleton Coon’s view that Africans became human some 200,000 years after white Europeans). The present book, so full of flim-flam and loose speculations, is more likely to re-arm than to deflate sceptics. I Pride comes before a fall: artist Ippolito Caffi shows how the Roman Empire was left in ruins. Robert N. Proctor is in the Department of History, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, book to develop quantitative cyclical theory non-states. States, of course, inculcate some- Pennsylvania 16802, USA. in two main areas: territorial expansion and thing akin to asabiya in their armed forces. contraction in agrarian states, and popu- Ask soldiers why they fight and they will lation growth and decline in relation to answer: “For my buddies” — rather like political stability. He has taken care to write nomads. Asabiya was strangely ineffective for historians: the verbal theories and math- during the centuries when North African Plotting the downfall ematics are clearly presented, and the work nomads failed to expel the Carthaginians, is thoroughly researched and erudite. Romans, Vandals and Byzantines. And one of society Turchin bases his ‘mature’ approach on wonders about the ethnic solidarity of Historical Dynamics: Why States the work of the fourteenth-century Arab his- Renaissance armies that were filled with mer- ORTI DI ROMA/DAGLI ARCHIVE/MUSEO ART Rise and Fall torian Ibn Khaldun, who sought to explain cenaries, a matter that Turchin ignores when by Peter Turchin why desert nomads topple North African he simulates European territorial changes. Princeton University Press: 2003. 264 pp. dynasties. Ibn Khaldun argued that the ‘Demographic-structural theory’ builds £22.95, $35 founders of dynasties rule well and tax lightly. on Jack Goldstone’s excellent work on popu- Joseph A. Tainter Succeeding generations, though, develop a lation growth and state breakdown, and taste for luxury, resulting in higher taxation on Turchin’s own experience in population In one of history’s most extraordinary fore- and declining welfare. Late-phase dynasties biology. This exercise quantifies how polit- casts, the Greek historian Polybius in the are challenged by desert nomads who have ical instability and population interact. second century BC predicted the demise of high degrees of asabiya, defined as collective Unsurprisingly, Turchin’s models show that the Roman Empire some 600 years before it solidarity or a capacity for collective action. interaction between population dynamics fell. Like others of his time, Polybius held a Nomads with asabiya topple dynasties that and a state’s fiscal health produces cycles of cyclical view of history in which societies, lack it, starting the cycle anew.
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