Race: The Reality Of Human Differences [ILLUSTRATED] (Hardcover)

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!"

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.