The influence of racial pseudo-science on state policy makes welcome critical books on race and race theory, in the hope that, they will provide arsenals of scientific fact and argument that will check the spread of the epidemic of obscurantism that threatens to engulf the world. Huxley and Haddon have written a popular book which will serve that function well. They have reviewed evidence and theories on race long known to scientists but fresh to non-academic audiences, and have done so in easy comprehensible terms. Their arguments follow lines familiar to students: there are no pure races because of the universal prevalence of intermarriage; race classifications are based on arbitrary criteria and are tenuous because of overlappings; human types are biologically instable subject to cultural, environmental influences; there is no positive correlation of a specific race and superior intelligence; the concepts race, language and nation must be kept sharply distinct. In short, they conclude that the term race has lost its value as a scientific instrument and philosophies of history based upon it are specious. Materials have been gathered from diverse fields of history, anthropology and genetics, to buttress these contentions, and they are in general persuasive. [my emphasis]Anthropologists today generally tend to find the concept of race to be not particularly helpful (to put it mildly).
However, the fact that race is an important social category also influences anthropology. I saw a presentation in 11/12/2010 by Alexis Boutin on The Reality of "Race": A Bioarchaeological Perspective. One of the things she pointed out is that forensic anthropologists working on criminal cases must look for indications of characteristics that indicate visible characteristics of the victims being examined, such as ancestral origin and skin color.
But what was true in 1936 is also true today. Those like Nazi race theorists or segregationists who use alleged scientific characteristics to justify their social categories of race are promoting pseudoscience.
The most provocative notion Boutin mentioned in her lecture was that there is more variation within (socially-defined) racial groups than between them. Elaborating on the point in response to audience questions, she said that characteristics like skin color that are taken as markers of social definitions of race are actually very recent developments, a blink in evolutionary time. In other words, they are biologically superficial.
She also explained that genetic bottlenecks account for part of that phenomenon. She used the example of the ancestors of present-day humans migrating from Africa to Europe. In such migrations, there is typically a drop in population. As DNA evidence indicates, what happens in those population drops is that a significant portion of the genetic variation in the original population is lost, the surviving groups carry only a portion of them, i.e., the genetic “bottleneck”.
One such genetic bottleneck may have occurred fairly early in the history of homo sapiens. Curtis Marean reported in the August 2010 Scientific American, “When the Sea Saved Humanity”, on the evidence showing changing climate conditions between 195,000 and 123,000 years ago (an ice age named Marine Isotope Stage 6) which may have reduced the homo sapien population to a small group living on the tip of Southern Africa. A slideshow on the article is available online.
Boutin also pointed out that current social categories of race lump together very diverse populations. In biological terms, in other words, they are basically arbitrary.
Tags: frankfurt school, race, racism
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