Race: The Reality of Human Differences

  • Vincent Sarich &
  • Frank Miele
Westview Press: 2004. 320 pp. $27.50
True colours? The Greeks and Egyptians seemed to be aware of differences in race. Credit: SKEPTIC MAGAZINE

This is a disturbing book, especially given the stature of its primary author, Vincent Sarich, as one of the founding pioneers of molecular anthropology. In 1967, in a paper with Allan Wilson, Sarich, then a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, used a simple protein-molecular clock to show that humans share a common ancestor with the great apes from as recently as 5 million years ago — overturning previous estimates of more 20 million years.

Here he teams up with Frank Miele, a senior editor at Skeptic magazine, to lament the neglect of “racial realities” by social scientists. The voice is one of loners crusading against conventional wisdom, although the book also reads as if it were a legal brief prepared for use in court to counter affirmative action. The authors' ‘case for race’ draws heavily on contentious claims by raciologists such as Arthur R. Jensen and J. Philippe Rushton, notorious for having postulated natural racial hierarchies in intelligence, criminality, athletic performance, sexual endowment and the capacity to accumulate wealth. This is a shame, because there are good reasons to believe that certain aspects of race are very real, and that important questions of human origins, prehistoric migrations and medical therapeutics can be fruitfully addressed by properly re-examining human biovariation.

Here, though, we have an exercise in bombast and overstatement. The book begins by claiming that, throughout history, people have always had pretty much the same conception of race. Miele explains their methodology: “Vince suggested that I (Frank Miele) search the anthropology library at the University of California-Berkeley for examples of the way ancient civilizations ... described themselves and other races in their art, their literature, and their oral tradition. Did they distinguish races ... as we do today?” Based on this quick review, the authors conclude that people from ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, India, China and the Islamic world all sorted peoples “based on the same set of characteristics — skin colour, hair form, and head shape” that we do today. As evidence, the authors display an Egyptian jug with a negroid head on one side and a rather European-looking face on the other, from which they infer a universal “common sense” reality of race.

Flaws in this book are so numerous that it would be difficult to list them all. Long passages are quoted without attribution, and many strong claims are presented with little or no supporting evidence. We hear that children as young as three classify people on the basis of racial characteristics that they already recognize as immutable. The authors postulate “an inborn tendency to sort people into groups” and a “module” in the human brain that predisposes people to distinguish an “us” from a “them”. There are blanket assertions that “the Greeks believed in race” and that “few of us resent a rich kinsman or coethnic”. Historians will be disturbed to hear that Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for affirming that “the earth was the center of the universe”, an assertion which, like several others in this volume, comes closer to the truth when inverted.

Stronger claims are made that border on the incendiary. In a chapter attacking affirmative action, the authors write that “a large number of white Americans harbor the suspicion that all minority members in high-status positions are there only because of affirmative action and not because of ability or achievement”. A large number? Where's the evidence? The authors write that “All around the world downwardly mobile males who perceive themselves as being deprived of wealth, status, and especially females by up-and-coming members of a different race are ticking time bombs”. Time bombs? Again, where's the evidence?

Sarich and Miele make similar claims in a discussion of South African plans under the apartheid regime to develop “pigmentation weapons” that would “target only black people”. After outlining how such weapons might be developed, the authors propose racial intermarriage as a “best defense” but also warn that “intermarriage, particularly of females of the majority group with males of a minority group, is the factor most likely to cause some extremist terrorist group to feel the need to launch such an attack”. The authors add some old-style eugenics rhetoric, worrying about “plunging” birth rates in the United States and Western Europe and the “evolutionary irony lurking on the horizon” that, having conquered and colonized the world, Europeans and their descendants now risk bringing about “their own extinction” from having too few babies.

Towards the end of this book, the authors tell of a bioanthropologist colleague, Henry Harpending, who was travelling in the Kalahari and got stuck when his pick-up broke down. An ingenious bushman in the party suggested jacking up the vehicle and jump-starting it by running a rope around the back tyres and pulling. The trick worked, and the authors are clearly puzzled that an African could have come up with such an imaginative solution, given “the mean sub-Saharan IQ of 70”. Harpending's explanation is that “bushmen are really quick and clever” and in this respect quite different from their “black African neighbors”. Sarich and Miele then ponder whether the development of agriculture may have dulled the intelligence of the continent's former hunter-gatherers.

What I found remarkable about this story, however, is how willing the authors are to accept this low figure for the sub-Saharan IQ, based on so little supporting evidence. The authors cite an apartheid-era study of a South African high school and an ‘in press’ literature review by Rushton and Jensen, ignoring the many ways that such a sweeping and grotesque generalization could be flawed.

The authors scoff at the idea of race as a social construct, but the historical account they present is full of idealized white-and-black polarities. The authors side with Ernst Haeckel over Rudolf Virchow, Madison Grant over Franz Boas, and Carleton Coon over Ashley Montagu. There is little effort to explore which of the myriad historical ‘realities’ postulated for race might have alternative explanations.

I suspect that the impact of this book could be the opposite of the authors' intentions. There is much to be said for studying human genetic variability to explore questions of prehistoric ancestry and migration, and to investigate how different human populations respond to medical interventions. But the leap from these to immoderate speculations about the permanence of present-day inequalities is likely to give sceptics even more reason to question racial ‘realities’.

Anthropology has a mixed history of dealings with human racial injustice (think of Carleton Coon's view that Africans became human some 200,000 years after white Europeans). The present book, so full of flim-flam and loose speculations, is more likely to re-arm than to deflate sceptics.