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The Concept of Race

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Anthropologist Ashley Montagu (who earlier wrote the marvelous book, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy Of Race) has assembled a collection of writings by a variety of scientists (including Sherwood Washburn and Paul Ehrlich) who "attack the concept of race as a biologically unsound, socially invalid and prejudicial means of human classification."

Montagu writes in the Introduction to this 1964 book, "The contributions to this volume have been written by seven physical anthropologists and three anthropologically sophisticated biologists. The concept of race examined in this volume is the concept of race that physical anthropologists have, in common with most biologists, worked with and subscribed to. It is the biological concept of race which is the subejct of critical examination in this book."

Here are some quotations from the book:

"The process of averaging the characters of a given group, knocking the individuals together, giving them a good stirring, and then serving the resulting omelet as a 'race' is essentially the anthropological process of race-mixing. It maybe good cooking but it is not science, since it serves to confuse rather than to clarify." (Pg. 6)
"The fact that it is not possible to classify the various groups of mankind by means of the characters which anthropologists customarily use, because these characters do not behave as pre-Mendelian, anthropologists think they should behave, namely, as complexes of characters which are relatively fixed and are transmitted as complexes. Those characters instead behave in a totally different manner as the expressions of many independent units which have entered into their formation." (Pg. 7)
"As far as research and observation have been able to prove, the chromosome number of all the human races is the same, and all of the five, seven, or ten races (depending on whom we follow) are inter-fertile. The blood of all races is built of the same pattern of agglutinins and antigens, and the appropriate blood type from one race can be transfused into any of the others without untoward effect. Thus in spite of the unquestionable physical differences ... between groups of people, an imposing substrate of similarity underlies these differences." (Pg. 11)