Race: The Reality of Human Differences

Rating:
Summary: An Argument Well Presented Were it 1980
Review: 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.