Customer Reviews

Race: The Reality of Human Differences

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I agree with Dr. Ralph L. Holloway, Professor of Anthropology, at Columbia University. He states that "Miele is exactly that antidote to the pernicious loss of respect for our own evolutionarily-derived biological diversity, and it will hopefully reach all who are ready and willing to think more clearly and empirically about our diversity and celebrate it. This reader has been very favorably struck by the careful and non-sarcastic exposure of some of our most common chestnuts regarding racial diversity, and in particular some of the sillier pronouncements regarding within- and between-group differences in genetic frequencies that have abounded in all of the media, academic and non.

As more genetic research, particularly at the molecular level comes to our attention, it seems clear to this writer that this book will represent an important milestone in reducing the millstone of the myths that have accumulated denigrating and/or ignoring our genetic diversity. This book will certainly be a must for my students, and it is surely long overdue!"

Most people who consider themselves intellectuals pride themselves on how far removed their theorizing is from contact with mundane reality. After all, if daily life could provide answers to lofty questions, we might not need so many professional intellectuals. And that subversive thought must be suppressed at all costs!

Consider the topic of race. The trendiest idea among intellectuals is that Race Does Not Exist. Last year, a three-night PBS documentary summed up the new orthodoxy: Race: The Power of an Illusion. That this strikes the vast majority of Americans as a self-evidently stupid notion only heightens its appeal to those who view themselves as superior because of their ability to mentally juggle esoterica.

Geneticist Vincent Sarich, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Berkeley, and journalist Frank Miele, senior editor of Skeptic magazine, have stepped in to this debate with a new book Race: The Reality of Human Differences. It documents overwhelmingly that the weight of scientific knowledge is on the side of the man-in-the-street's commonsense view of race. Sarich and Miele demonstrate that all ten of the PBS documentary's summary statements on the nonexistence of race are wrong. Indeed, they bring so much firepower to bear against the series' assertions that it's a little like breaking a butterfly on a wheel. (Or, considering the mendacity of the PBS offering, a more accurate phrase might be "like crushing a cockroach with a cannonball.")

Rejecting the straw man argument that the existence of race would require a race for everyone and everyone in his race, Sarich and Miele call races "fuzzy sets." They write, "Human races are not, and never were, distinct, mutually exclusive, Platonic entities into which every living person, unearthed skull, or set of bones could be pigeonholed."

Miele is perhaps the best interviewer of scientists in the business. He's also a dog enthusiast, and his deep knowledge of breeds (which are artificially selected races) adds perspective to "Race."

Sarich won't make himself popular with the politically correct at Berkeley, but he is a hard man to intimidate. A hawk nose and piercing eyes make him look like the world's tallest ayatollah. Approaching 70, he still has the dimensions of an NBA quick forward at 6'6" and a muscular 215 pounds. (In fact, he holds the world record for his age group in the small sport of indoor rowing.) Being the rare scientist who is also an enthusiastic fan of spectator sports makes Sarich far more aware of racial differences than his colleagues, who tend to only pay attention to unthreatening subjects for which they can win grants from the government or big foundations.

In a 1989 book review in the New York Times, Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, praised "the enormously important work of the American biochemist Vincent Sarich." As Sarich recounts in an autobiographical section of Race, as a graduate student back in 1967, he famously teamed with Allan C. Wilson to launch the use of the "molecular clock," which led to a revolution in evolution studies. At a time when experts on fossils believed that proto-humans had diverged from our closest ape relatives around 25 million years ago, Sarich and Wilson estimated, by counting the number of mutations that distinguished humans from chimpanzees and gorillas in a single serum protein, that our ancestors had broken away only about five million years ago. Although greeted with howls of protest from famous paleontologists, their figure has stood up well, and their molecular clock technique has become fundamental to both physical anthropology and population genetics.

Stephen Jay Gould insisted we chant along with him, like Dorothy trying to get home from Oz, "Say it five times before breakfast tomorrow: ... Human equality is a contingent fact of history." As a staunch Darwinist, however, Sarich understands that natural selection requires hereditary inequalities. Sarich and Miele write, "Simply stated, 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."

Sarich became the rare physical anthropologist expert on both genes and bones. So, when he saw PBS proclaim, "Despite surface differences, we are among the most similar of all species," he dusted off the measurements of 2,500 human skulls from 29 different racial groups and compared them to 347 chimpanzee skulls from the two separate species of chimp (the common chimp and the bonobo). Sarich discovered that the dissimilarity in head and face measurements between these species was less than half that found between the two most morphologically dissimilar human racial groups in the sample (the narrow-faced Taita of Kenya and the wide-faced Buriat of Siberia). Sarich concludes, "I am not aware of any other mammalian species where the constituent races are as strongly marked as they are in ours... except those few races heavily modified by recent human selection; in particular, dogs."

The book is packed with fascinating information. For instance, in response to PBS's claim that, "Race is a modern idea. Ancient societies did not divide people according to physical differences..." Miele writes a definitive chapter showing, "The art of the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, Rome, India, and China, and the Islamic civilization from AD 700 to 1400 shows that these societies classified the various peoples they encountered into broad racial groups. They sorted them based upon the same set of characteristics -- skin color, hair form, and head shape -- allegedly constructed by Europeans when they invented 'race' to justify colonialism and white supremacy."

Will Race: The Reality of Human Differences change the minds of the prominent advocates of the Race Does Not Exist theory? No, because I can't imagine they'll even read it. One striking difference between the two schools is that the realists pore over the writings of the social constructionists, while the No Race theorists prefer to keep themselves ignorant of all troubling facts.

This is the first serious book i have read about race and I learnt alot about the early evolution of ape and man and how the development of DNA testing proceeded to reach its current accurate stage of been able to differentiate not only individuals but races.
This book covers 3 basic topics in order-
1) a historical account of how ancient civilizations like Aztecs, Egytians and Romans etc recognised and treated the racial groups in their empires.
2)Early anthropolgy and its disputes between its famous scientists, leading to DNA methods that prove the birthdates of man-ape and modern man.
3)Showing how real race differences exist today, in sport, medicine and measured IQ. Also examples of how race can be integrated into modern societies by either Meritocracy, Affirmative Action or EthnoStates.
The author Sarich? is occasionally a bit glib in some of his remarks but there is nothing controversial or heretical in this book. Both authors do get a bit personal with their ideological opponents but anyone with any interest in DNA/race is aware of the ideologies that some vehemently proscribe to in the name of denying race.
I really enjoyed this book and although i would have liked it to contain more data on the modern race groupings it really brought my understanding of race and evolution into the new millennium.

After years of non-stop media and academia misrepresentations, suppressions, and outright lies about race, it is wonderful to have another famous scientist break free of Politically Correct (PC) conformity and tell the public the truth.

This book was written to refute the highly PC Public Broadcast System (PBS) television program, "Race: The Power of an Illusion." That program laid out 10 points about race, of which the authors say 8 are "facts" that they refute and the remaining two they reject "for economic and ethical reasons." The book carefully and convincingly shows that evolution requires variation and that variation carries across racial groups, even, or especially, in the highly-charged area of IQ. There is even a frank discussion of the most politically incorrect fact anywhere - that the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans is only 70.

I have only two quibbles about this excellent book. First, they make this fascinating statement, "As we have shown, the morphological differences between human races can exceed those found between subspecies [i.e., races] or even species of our nearest relatives, the chimps and gorillas, and other nondomesticated animals." In particular, the racial distance between the common chimpanzee and the bonobo chimpanzee is 14.6%, which exceeds the racial distance between some human races. An explanation of why the two chimpanzees groups are different species but the human groups are only different races seems to be needed here, but is not supplied.

My second quibble is that the authors accept the Out-of-Africa theory of human origins based on DNA, mtDNA, and Y chromosome data. While they do show how that data supports Out-of-Africa, I don't think the debate is quite over yet. As an example of another view see: www.rafonda.com.

The subject of race is one of the most controversial and polemical ones in today's American intellectual circles. Almost any statement that can be made about race is bound to provoke a strong reaction from at least some quarters. Keeping in mind a long and difficult history of race relations in the US, this sort of attitude is to be expected. Unfortunately, because of the strong reactions that the topic of race elicits, many social scientists, anthropologists, and other experts treat it like the third rail and avoid engaging in any form of discussion about it. This has even lead some intellectuals to declare that human races don't really exist, and that race as such is nothing more than a "myth" or an "illusion." Such attitudes fly in the face of common sense, and are actually completely at odds with the legal, social and political system in the US. For better or for worse, humans are one of the most genetically diverse species and the racial differences are far from being just "skin deep."

In this book the two authors, Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele, attempt to give a rational, evidence-based account of the reality of racial groupings. Much of the book reads as one long refutation of the acclaimed 2003 PBS documentary Race: The Power of the Illusion. The book is very well written, with detailed background research and plenty of sources and references. It guides the reader through a variety of topics relating to race: the history of racial attitudes, the various social connotations of race, the modern research on racial differences that started in the nineteenth century, the genetic research of the past few decades, and the main trends in the social science throughout the twentieth century. The book is very convincing in providing the evidence for the perceptual consistency of the race differences that have been used for several millennia, and it provides an interesting insight into the recent research in human biological makeup on the molecular level.

My biggest problem with this book is that it's rather uneven, especially when it comes to the chapters which were written by Miele vs. those that had been written by Sarich. Miele is a much more competent writer, particularly when it comes to presenting difficult material for the general audience. Sarich, on the other hand, tends to get lost in the scientific jargon and topics that are very difficult for non-specialist to appreciate. He also has a tendency, which I've seen in many scientist, to overestimate the importance of the obscure research and topics at which he himself is an expert. This would have been a much more readable book if some of the nitty-gritty details of the scientific research had been left out. The authors also gratuitously pepper the narrative with some of their own pet peeves (like the high prevalence of the lack of communication skills among the faculty job candidates). These detours are rather distracting, but thankfully there aren't too many of them in this book.

All things considered, though, this is a well presented and adroitly argued case for the reality of racial differences. The book is a valuable and thought-provoking contribution to the public discussion of a very controversial topic. People of all intellectual and political persuasions would greatly benefit from reading it.

Prevailing social dogma, from which dissent is effectively prohibited, asserts that "race does not exist." "Racism," however, does (a neat trick), thereby justifying institutional accumulation of data on race and the systematic implementation across the legal and cultural spectrum of laws and policies discriminating against a single group.

It is manifestly obvious to everyone, including race deniers, that race does in fact exist. Race denial is driven by ethnic and ideological animus, not scientific empiricism. The leading academic architects of the dogma--Franz Boas, "Ashley Montagu" (Israel Ehrenberg), Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, and Jared Diamond--as well as the creator of PBS television's race denial documentary, Race: The Power of an Illusion (all are discussed in the book), belong to an ethnic group exempt from official discrimination, and share a Left-wing ideological tilt that is sometimes extreme (Marxist).

In an ideologically Orwellian atmosphere there is always a need for the statement of simple truths. This the authors set out to do.

Both are associated with Skeptic magazine, journalist Frank Miele, the author of Intelligence, Race, and Genetics: Conversations with Arthur R. Jensen, as senior editor, and Vincent Sarich, emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, as a member of the magazine's editorial board. Sarich's most notable career achievement is the co-development of the "molecular clock," a genetic technique for constructing phylogenetic trees and determining dates when species (or human races) diverged.

Do the authors succeed in their aim? This question must be answered on two levels: the societal, and the inner court of the mind.

On the first level they necessarily fail, as everyone must. "Race does not exist" is dogma maintained by laws and social sanctions. Societies that scorn freedom of thought do not permit proscribed positions to be rationally discussed in the public arena. Therefore, the authors' failure in the social realm is a foregone conclusion completely unrelated to evidence or arguments; it is purely a function of force. For this book to have an impact, a culture of intellectual freedom and honesty would have to exist.

What of the independent, rational (if there be such) mind, which power and group conformity don't yet control? There, the argument succeeds--though not without difficulty. The problem is that key elements of the authors' case rely heavily upon technical expertise in genetics, and are difficult for educated non-technical readers to evaluate. Nevertheless, there is sufficient common sense scattered throughout the book to insure that the authors ultimately succeed in making their case.

Miele and Sarich define races as fuzzy sets of "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."

Humans and chimpanzees are genetically 98.9% the same, and different human races 99.9% the same, race deniers assert. (Anthropologist Peter Frost calls this ploy the "small percentage fallacy.") And yet, say the authors, imagine "a random assortment of fifty humans and fifty chimpanzees. No one . . . would have any difficulty in reconstituting the original fifty-member sets by simple inspection . . ." Likewise, applied to 150 humans selected 1/3 each from Japan, Malawi, and Norway, "[a]gain, by simple inspection, we would achieve the same 100 percent sorting accuracy." Moreover, if the 100% rule is relaxed so the criterion is "nearer the 75 percent that has often sufficed for the recognition of races in other species, then obviously the number [of identifiable human races] would be very large." The great population geneticist Sewall Wright (died 1988), who asserted the reality of race throughout his life, likewise employed this technique.

A uniquely useful feature of the book is a table entitled "Three possible scenarios for race in the new millennium." For each scenario the authors objectively identify a list of accompanying advantages and disadvantages.

The first scenario they call "Meritocracy in the Global Marketplace"--globalization characterized by non-discrimination, including non-discrimination against whites. It embraces the physical extinction of European-derived populations worldwide, while de facto preserving non-whites. In other words, it represents current thinking, but with explicitly anti-white laws and policies removed. An international, racially intermarrying cosmopolitan elite will dominate. This is the authors' preferred option.

The reason why a globalist order, even with present anti-white laws removed, will lead to the extinction of whites (which, again, does not perturb the authors) is simple: the racial makeup of vast regions of the world, "including China, India, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East, which have not changed in recorded history," are also not going to change anytime soon. "This is not the case in the developed world, however, where birthrates have been plunging for the past two centuries to the point that they are currently below replacement level . . ." Barring some radical change in ideology and social policy, "the United States and Western Europe each year will see an increasing percentage of the population composed of . . . immigrants . . . from the underdeveloped countries of the Third World." The "ultimate evolutionary irony" is that Europeans, "having conquered and colonized the world," "brought about their own extinction."

The remaining scenarios, both disfavored by the authors, are intensified "Affirmative Action and Race Norming" (anti-white discrimination) or "Resegregation and the Emergence of Ethno-States."

A thought-provoking section near the end of the book discusses bioweapons designed to kill only members of specific races--which genetics has rendered feasible. South Africa and Israel have researched the development of such weapons. (White South Africa, of course, no longer exists.) This says much about the race deniers' position: for if Jews are not a race, then bioweapons targeting Arabs or Europeans would also kill Jews. But such evidently is not the case.

In sum, a worthwhile book containing useful information and insights.

Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele construct here a great case for the reality of race were it not for their selective use of evidence and their inability to answer one crucial question: how does one create meaningful and accurate racial groupings if more than eight-five percent of the genetic variation amongst individuals is the result of other genetic factors? Thus, Sarich and Miele are forced to rely on meaningless studies on such scientifically irrelevant phenomena as skull size variation (which interestingly Franz Boas destroyed a century ago as a persuasive argument) to bolster their case and to present alternative subjective classification schemes based on "fuzzy sets" rather than the commonly accepted and objective metric of genetic variation. Indeed, the authors do their best to ignore facts like the black males of the Lemba tribe of Central Africa thanks to migration are more significantly related from a genetic disease standpoint to male white Israelis than to the contiguous tribes of Cameroon--only illustrating the problems that a genuine, science-based racial classification scheme would run into. Yet, preconceived notions die hard and Sarich and Miele come from a physical anthropology school uncomfortable with the reams of new evidence from the Human Genome Project, etc. that have overturned cherished theories. To anyone genuinely interested in the topic, Mapping Human History by Steve Olson, a former science writer for the Economist, provides a more realistic account of what conclusions modern science has reached. For more advanced readers, anything by Luca Cavalli-Sforza should give one a more technical grasp of how studies into race, genetics and human evolution are progressing.

This book has the advantage that it is by a serious human geneticist and anthropologist(Sarich--Miele seems to be purely a journalist, helping Sarich write the prose and adding some minor points). Sarich knows about human evolution and explains it well, though professionals will have various quibbles. Previous racist books have been rendered worthless by ignorance of the simplest human genetic truths. Sarich is aware that "race" is only 15% of the variance between any two distant-origin individuals, and, more important, that one can recognize any number of "races" by making finer and finer distinctions--there could be thousands of "races" in Europe alone. (Anthropologists abandoned "race" not because they don't believe in human differences, but because the number of different populations they could recognize got unmanageably large--we work with thousands now.) Sarich reasonably critiques the claims that "race does not exist," but seems not to realize that this claim, when seriously made, refers to the ridiculous "races" of American folk speech--Mexican, Latino, Asian-Pacific, Irish, Arab, and other non-biological categories. (Even "African-American" refers not to a biological population, but to a gradient from basically African to almost pure white--remember, "one drop of African blood" makes you African-American in the US.)
The book points out that human races differ enough biochemically to necessitate some differences in medical treatment. True enough (though the differences are very minor and merely statistical). But Sarich and Miele don't emphasize enough the point that this is true only of actual biological populations (Europeans vs Sub-Saharan Africans, for instance), not of folk or social races. American doctors treating African-Americans who are 98% White as if they were "Africans" are doing no one a favor.
The serious problem with this book concerns IQ differences. Here, Sarich does not control the relevant psychological and behavioral-genetic literature so well. Intelligence is now known to be affected by countless genes and environmental factors, and they do not work together in some neat, harmonious system. If local populations differ in innate intellectual gifts, this could well involve a bunch of verbally superior people next to some not-so-verbal math geniuses, or a bunch of spatial-perception hotshots next to some who are weak in that area. Sarich buys the claims of a "g factor" that underlies intelligence; this "g" shakes out of factor analyses of IQ test performance, but remains impossible to ground in genetics or brain physiology, both of which indicate a much more complex reality. It is not demonstrated in psychological performance other than standard IQ tests, either; again the evidence is for more complexity. For instance, a unique gene found among certain Amish makes them more prone to bipolar disorder, which would surely screw up their performance on at least some tests. In any case, IQ testing has avoided like poison any attempts to control for malnutrition, illness, lead poisoning, lack of knowledge of tester's language (monolingual Spanish speakers are still tested in English in my area), etc.
The worst thing in the book is that Sarich accepts the guesstimate of 70 as the IQ of Sub-Saharan Africans, which is ridiculous in view of the high levels of education and performance seen in those African cities and regions that have anything like a functioning educational system (to say nothing of adequate nutrition). An adult with a 70 IQ can barely walk or talk; African nations now produce physicists and biologists and poets. To their credit, Sarich and Miele present a lot of evidence that Africans are perfectly sharp people, but don't really know what to do with it and wind up unconvincingly trying to explain it away. (And, just to prove that African-American IQ testing problems aren't genetic, those 98% White "African-Americans" test the same as the 100% African ones.)
The other really silly thing in the book is comparing human races with breeds of dogs. Dog breeds have been artificially selected for differences in behavior and ability. Human groups have not. They are more comparable to wild subspecies of animals. If there are any demonstrated differences in intelligence and behavior between naturally evolved subspecies of any species of animal, I don't know about it.
I think this book will be valuable in that it will teach racists something about actual human evolution and variability. Above all, it will teach them that real races are, as Sarich says, "fuzzy sets"--loosely defined regional populations--not ironclad and utterly different creatures, and not the ridiculous "races" of American folk speech. It will teach them something about actual human evolution and genetics. However, psychologists and psychological anthropologists will cut it to pieces when it trespasses on their turf. (See e.g. U. Neisser, ed., THE RISING CURVE; Jencks and Phillips, ed., THE BLACK-WHITE TEST SCORE GAP.)

I picked up this book as a critical companion to o Joseph Graves book The Race Myth. I was interested to hear the authors critique of the PBS series also. The first chapter quickly made it clear that this was a book born of more anger than analysis. The authors set up a straw man--the "no race" perspective--and proceed to offer a long and disconnected string of arguments ranging from sociology to highly selective genetic research to prove races do exist. Most often they are content to simply say they are challenging the status quo and therefore must be listened to. But what are they saying? In part, they are agreeing with a great deal of the science in the PBS series regarding genetic variation. The PBS series does not say that there are no genetic differences among humans. What it does say is that skin color and other physical features are not a useful marker for categorizing those differences. Miele and Sarich never, in my judgment, explain how human races can be coherently differentiated or how we would identify them. They discuss the dominance of "Africans" in track and field but their evidence is all drawn from a small group of Kenyans and African-Americans who, as Dr. Graves points out, could well be as European genetically as African. So, what does "African" mean? Why is it a coherent genetic category? The authors never tell us. THe book frustrates the reader continually in this regard--unless the reader already assumes that the authors' arguments are correct. In their introduction, they say that Chapter 6 will show there are sub species among human beings. But chapter 6 is mostly about the development of language. The following chapters don't answer the question either. Given the harsh history of racism in the United States, those who would rehabilitate race as a concept have both the scientific and moral responsibility to make clear how we are to determine who are members of a given race. They also have a moral responsibility to say what we are to do with our received racial categories which are are based largely on visual cues which have been given powerful sociological meanings. Otherwise, these authors are telling the lay person, with evidence presented in a manner that seem intended to impress and obfuscate, that the racial categories that society has taught them to view as "common sense" are indeed valid. Blacks are athletic, Asians are smart, whites are pretty good at everything--its all true. But at the end of the book, none of those things have been proven. This is simply another book which uses its claim to being "anti-PC" as a way to challenge the integrity of critics and shield their work own work from close examination. It simply extends the justifications for racism.

Can I give zero stars? I would if I could. This is a dreadful book, destroying science to pander to racist goals. Sarich is a known and respected scientist but in this book he mostly leans on that respect to promote his most unscientific racist agenda. He ignores a great deal of evidence of the range of human variation, the lack of correlation of most genes with color. He says that those of us who attack the race concept won't provide a workable definition to refute. But there is, in fact, a perfectly workable definition of race that has been stated many times, but that they ignore. Races, if they existed would be tightly bound groups of people, very homogeneous within and markedly distinct from others. This is a preposterous idea to defend given what is known of human variation across and WITHIN groups and the authors for the most part don't even try. Variations like color and nose shape are each on a continuum and cannot be partitioned clearly except in an absolutely arbitrary way; and supposed "Racial" traits like color, shapes of nose, eyes, lips,hair and hair color, the sickle cell trait and many others don't correlate with one another. (Sickle cell disease, despite popular stereotypes, is relatively rare among dark skinned populations, found in only a few groups; and it also occurs in many light skinned populations. Black skin has appeared many times separately in human evolution. The authors simply ignore the enormous number (in fact great majority) of highly varied populations around the world that don't match their stereotypes in order to stick to their recognition and manipulation of three great "races."

But when the book moves from the genetics of human variation to IQ and cultural performance, the author's ignorance is even more appalling. They know nothing at all about variations in human behavior or the science of IQ testing and the problems with tests described repeatedly in the literature. Their claim, offered twice out of the blue, that the average intelligence of Sub-Saharan Africa is 70, would imply individuals and whole societies that were simply dysfunctional. Even my IQ-believing friends find that number absolutely preposterous. Anyone with any knowledge of African cultures and accomplishments would find the number silly. The sense of IQ and the culture and life histories of blacks comes from JP Rushton, a noted racist who the authors make no attempt to challenge in any way. Rushton uses a bizarre choice of questions and highly manipulated data that are easily dismissed by anyone with anthropological knowledge Sarich and Miele know nothing about the content of the tests, the conditions under which they were given, the tested population, the language in which tested--literally hundreds of languages if the results refer to all of SubSaharan Africa.

They and the people who's work they use ignore all of these problems and ignore the power of human culture including our own to limit peoples perception of the culture of others. They completely ignore the enormous problems of testing IQ across cultural boundaries, which are sometimes very subtle. I could go on at great length but I will conclude by saying that the only reason to read this book is to recognize parody of science.