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32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Erudite, fascinating, arguable, November 25, 1998
Baker is an extraordinarily learned biologist, who approached the topic of race among humans with the same thoroughness that he brought to studying race among non-humans animals. Much of his data comes from before political correctness completely enshrouded anthropology in the late 1960's, so the vocabulary often seems dated. Nonetheless, many of his views on the ancestry of different populations, based on morphology, linguistics, archaeology and the like, have been confirmed by recent genetic testing (see Cavalli-Sforza's "History and Geography of Human Genes" -- and, please, do read C-S' book, don't just satisfy yourself with C-S's deceitful cover stories about how poltically correct his finding are.) Baker's focus in the concluding chapters is on different races' capabilities to found a civilization. He gives a 23 point test of whether a culture can be reasonably considered a civilization, and examines various races' accomplishments in this regard. This book is worth reading in tandem with Jared Diamond's Pulitzer prize-winning "Guns, Germs, and Steel," in which Diamond argues that every racial group in the world did as well as any other group could have with the resources of that region. Baker anticipated a number of Diamond's arguments and refutes them (e.g., could sub-Saharan Africans have put elephants to work like Asians and Carthaginains did?), but the truth probably lies somewhere between the two authors' views. Baker's exploration of the capability of different groups to start true civiliations is certainly interesting, yet, I wonder how relevant this question is to the modern world. The Japanese, for example, have shown relatively little talent at originating a civilization, but vast skill at borrowing others' novel ideas and adapting and, often, improving them. Similarly, the question of whether Africans could have invented a civilization on their own is interesting, but it's not as germane as Baker seems to assume to the more pressing question of how African-Americans can best fit into the existing American civilization. Further, some groups that did little to build their own civilizations, and still seem to have a certain amount of trouble fitting into others' civilizations -- e.g., sub-Saharan Africans and the Irish -- have contributed an extraordinary amount to the culture of modern life. Steve Sailer
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28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Controversial or common sense approach to Race?, December 17, 1998
By A Customer
News and entertainment entities have almost always promoted the idea that to believe in any racial differences other than skin color means that you are uneducated and ignorant. A torrent of scholarly books on the explosive subject of race have disproved that dogma. In Part 1, Baker examines the historical thought on race, from the earliest attempts to define who we are, to the recent Hitler era. In Part 3, Baker approaches the issue from a biologic or taxonomic point of view. In order to diffuse the explosiveness of the issue, Dr. Baker examines the different races of various vertebrae animals and then moves on to more complex organisms -- humans. The differences in racial characteristics increases in proportion to how closely the subject is examined, and Dr. Baker examines racial features right down to the most detailed physical attributes. In Part 4, Dr. Baker examines the most critical attribute -- that of intelligence and race. It is here that Dr. Baker treads onto late twentieth century taboos. Dr. Baker's conclusion surprised me when I first read the book, though he tempers his understanding of racial inequality with the statement that "no one can claim superiority simply because he or she belongs to a particular ethnic taxon."
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
I Got Through It!, January 21, 2005
Baker's Race is not exactly meant for the amateur student of the "ethnic problem" , as he puts it. It has a lot of intimidating zoological terms in the book, which are often not explained. He also has a tendency to use French, German, Greek, and Latin words and quotes without explaining what he means. It is assumed you would know already. The book seems to be written for graduate students in biology and zoology and other academics. That being said there are some interesting sections in the book that aren't too pedantic and I only gave up and skimmed through about thirty pages when Baker's scientific zeal to analyze his subject down to the minutest details got the better of me. I preferred Rushton's Race, Evolution and Behavior over this one because of its conciseness and readability. Both are committed to objectivity.
One of the best sections covers pre-colonial Africa in which Baker chooses seven authors who were early explorers of Africa based on their ability to describe the societies accurately and objectively. He comes to the conclusion that S.W. Baker was the best writer of the seven because of his writing's humor and pathos and his avoidance of tedious subjects such as tribal taxes. John Baker covers the cannibalism and the arbitrary and numerous executions that occurred in many of the tribes during the nineteenth century. There wasn't much law or value placed on life; one motion from the king could end the life of one of his subjects. There is a recounting of executions occurring after the death of one king's mother. Slavery was commonplace in pre-colonial Africa in which other captured tribes would become slaves of the other one dominating over them. Slaves were traded among tribes also.
Before getting into the meat of his arguments, Baker likes to define important terms. Quoting a statement from the UN saying that we are all equal because we are all of the same species, Baker goes on to try to define what is meant by the word "species". Looking at other animals in nature, such as birds, he finds that birds with very small differences usually don't mate with each other and therefore can't be of the same species ,even though they are very similar. However, he states that animals in confinement and are domesticated become less choosy about their mates and many hybrids begin to occur. He then says that humans in civilization are the most domesticated of animals and therefore have the greatest tendency to become hybridized, much more than you would see among wild animals in nature. He comes to ambivalent conclusions as to whether we are all of the same species, mainly because it cannot be proven that hybridized types can remain fertile over many generations.
The europids are examined fairly well. To the taxonomist, skin color is not an important factor in classifying race, so some taxon like the Aethiopids who look Negrid to the untrained eye are classified as predominately Europid by looking at the skull and other features of the body. It is in these other features that ethnic differences are determined by the taxonomist. Speaking of the Europids in Europe, they are actually hybrids of three subraces predominating in different areas: the Nordid in Northern Europe, the Alpinid in central Europe, and the Mediterranid in Southern Europe. Examples of hybrids would be the dark-haired Welsh in Britain who are Nordids with some of the Mediterranid blood of the people who settled there in early times before the invasion of the Nordid tribes like the Jutes, Angles, and Saxes who eventually mixed with them. Some of the features of the different subraces are mentioned such as the round head and stocky body of an Alpinid, as opposed to the narrow face and slender body of a Nordid.
Bakers also examines the Jews, saying the Ashkenazi Jew that most people are referring to when they speak of Jews is closely related to the Armenians, a middle eastern Europid. There also seems to be some Orientalid blood in their lineage related to what are loosely called Arabs. There is also some unusual cases of a small percentage of people who are Jews by religion, but not related genetically to the Ashkenazim. There was a Khazar empire at one time that converted to Judaism, but their kingdom was destroyed by the Russians in the 10 century AD. They were not related to the Ashkenazi Jews of today. Baker also covers the physical features of the Ashkenazim.
As far as the intelligence of the races go, Baker examines the IQ tests and the achievements of civilization of the races. He looks at whether race has created an achievement by itself or whether it has merely borrowed an idea from another race. He comes to conclusion that some Europid and Mongolid subraces have created their own civilization with the rest just borrowing or not getting to the point of civilization. He has a list of what would be an achievement that moves people from primitiveness to civilization such as whether they have invented the wheel, higher mathematics, language written in script referring to abstractions, a legal system, personal hygiene, or domestication of animals. Some Indianid races got halfway there such as the Mayans and Aztecs who had higher mathematics, but had the nasty habit of human sacrifice and cannibalism and no use of a wheel, deficiencies that kept them from being a high civilization.
After studying the IQ test results, Baker says that Europid and Mongolids have about the same IQ, with Indianids further behind, and Negrids further still. He also does an interesting examination of hybrids of whites and blacks in the US showing that more Europid the hybrid the better they did on IQ tests. He looks at some of the black leaders such as Dubois and shows that these were actually Europids with a small amount of Negrid blood.
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by Michael Levin
