This Is What The New York Times Doesn't Want You To See

 

Race and Science

The race controversy engendered by the recent Executive Order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” represents only one front in this administration’s general antagonism against science, and against specialized knowledge more broadly. Science is being catastrophically defunded, its facilities and offices in the government are being shuttered, and the field of higher education is in a general uproar. Truth and sanity are always welcome, but they generally represent what science is providing, not what science needs to have imposed upon it by decree.

Biological anthropology, the study of our species and its origin, has had two watershed discoveries. In the 19^th century, we learned that our species is descended from earlier, extinct species similar to living apes. In the 20^th century, we learned that race and human variation are quite different things. 

By “race”, we generally mean the idea that the human species is composed of a fairly small number of fairly distinct kinds of people, each with their own inherent properties. It certainly seemed that way in the 1700s and 1800s. Over the course of the 20th century, however,  anthropology began to ask the question, what would the human species look like if we removed the lenses of race from our own eyes? Would we still see it? And if not, what would we see?

The answer has emerged gradually over the last few decades. Groups of people are differentiated from one another primarily culturally, in terms of their language, belief systems, personal adornment, traditions, knowledge, tastes, family relations, and all of the other things that cultural anthropologists began to study intensively in the early part of the 20^th century.

Now if you decided, for whatever reason, to focus only on biological distinctions, ignoring the primary dimension of human variation, what would you see? Actually, you would see that you can't make that distinction so readily, because so much of human biology is in fact strongly influenced by culture, from the shape of your head to your likelihood of dying from tuberculosis. Human bodies indeed absorb a great deal of the cultural world.

But suppose, however perversely, that you decide to ignore both cultural differentiation and bodily differentiation, and decide to focus exclusively on the human gene pool. Would you see race there? And if not, then what would you see? And the big discovery of human population genetics towards the end of the 20th century was that you don't see race; rather, you see nearly all detectable genetic variations nearly everywhere. Human genetic variation is primarily polymorphic and cosmopolitan. However it is measured, upwards of 85% of the detectable human genetic variation is variation within groups rather than between groups. That doesn't mean that there are no geographical patterns, of course.

So if we ignore the cultural variation, the bodily variation, and the primary, polymorphic, pattern of genetic variation, and we decide to focus only on genetic variation from group to group, what patterns do we find? Is race finally there? No, we find gradual change across geographical gradients, a pattern that genetic anthropologists describe as clinal. We find that people are similar to those nearby, and different from those far away – although even then, only in an ideal, non-urbanized, precolonial world.  The genetics of New York City is something else entirely.

If we ignore the cultural, the physical, the polymorphic and clinal genetic variation, then what is left? Do we finally uncover the primordial human divisions? No, we find that there are all kinds of interesting local genetic patterns in the human gene pool, with different cultural identities being associated with different genetic histories and with different probabilistic genetic risks at present. But those different genetic risks don’t map on to race: Pennsylvania Amish have their risks (polydactyly); Ashkenazi Jews have their risks (Tay-Sachs Disease); Afrikaners have their risks (variegated porphyria); Northern Europeans have their risks (cystic fibrosis). Racializing these differences only confuses things. Sickle-cell anemia is found in Saudi Arabia and Greece, as well as in West Africa. Why? Because it is associated with malaria, not with being African.  And these remain risk factors for particular populations, still afflicting only a small minority within each population – just simply a larger minority than in other populations.

When you look at the human species scientifically, this is what you find. It isn’t race. Race comes from somewhere else.

What then, do we mean when we say race is a “social construction”? We mean that it is a product of history, not of biology. What we have come to understand as race is the outcome of centuries of political relations between powerful Europeans and the less powerful – the English versus the Irish, the Christians versus the Jews and Muslims, European colonists versus Native Americans, traders versus African slaves. What they have in common is the formation of symbolic boundaries that function to establish and maintain inequalities. Those cultural boundaries sometimes correlate with biological features, which affords them some camouflage as apparent products of nature rather than of human invention. That is why even scientists were confused about it for two hundred years.

The fact is, however, that the average difference in lifespan between Blacks and Whites in America is due to racism, not to sickle cell anemia.  The lie of race is that it misrepresents the actual biology of our species. The fact that race is also there to perpetuate injustice makes race less of a fact of nature, and more of a fact of biopolitics.       

 This administration isn't making human biology unpolitical, they are making it exactly as political as it always has been. In this case, their convictions about race are anachronistic and their scientific ideas are from an earlier century, which is why they need to be presented as an order, rather than as a discovery.  There is no unpolitical human biology.

Critical Hominin Theory

[Note: Both reviewers recommended publication of the following essay for Paleoanthropology, but it has not yet been accepted. If you like it and want to cite it, go ahead and cite this page. I'll let you know if it ever gets officially published.]

Introduction: Physical anthropology as pseudo-taxonomy

At one time, the field of physical anthropology was occupied primarily with establishing the number and natures of the elementary natural units of the human species. Radical biologists, like Ernst Haeckel (1868) , W. C. Osman Hill (1940) and Reginald R. Ruggles Gates (1944) even held the different varieties of living peoples to be themselves species, rejecting the familiar interbreeding criterion. Nevertheless, once that question was resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, in the early 1960s, (e.g., Barnicot 1963), the question still remained about how to understand the elementary units of the human species taxonomically below the species level. 

In Nature, Campbell (1962) formally identified H. sapiens sapiens, H. sapiens afer, H. sapiens asiaticus, H. sapiens americanus, H. sapiens australasicus, and H. sapiens neptunianus. Concurrently, based on serological genetic considerations, Boyd (1963) proposed thirteen human “races,” clustered into seven “groups” in Science.  Garn (1961) identified nine “geographical races” and 32 “local races”. Coon (1962) identified five subspecies of living Homo sapiens (ignoring the additional nonsense about their having evolved in parallel from five subspecies of Homo erectus, and its possible bearing on school integration), namely: Caucasoids, Mongoloids, Negroids, Capoids, and Australoids.

In the intervening decades, we stopped thinking about and teaching about human variation that way in physical anthropology.  We have learned to talk about human variation without formal biological taxonomy. The actual empirical biological structure of our species is “regarded as constituting a widespread network of more or less interrelated, ecologically adapted and functional entities” (Weiner 1957: 80), or in contemporary language, a “structured metapopulation” that defies taxonomic precision.  The groups that compose our species are created for particular purposes, and while they may correlate with some biological patterns, they do not represent natural divisions, but political identities. Classifying our species as Linnaeus did turned out to be a square peg – round hole problem (Livingstone 1962). Race can thus be modeled on the classic anthropological example of African witchcraft (Evans-Pritchard 1937; Fields and Fields 2012), which structures people’s lives in spite of not having any material, naturalistic existence.

Indeed, partly as a result of the historical baggage associated with treating the human species in such a pseudo-taxonomic fashion, we terminated physical anthropology altogether and rebranded ourselves formally as biological anthropology. Yet even as biological anthropology, we retain the urge to try and make sense of the ostensible lineages in our ancestry taxonomically (e.g., Wood and Boyle, 2016; Reed et al., 2023), a daunting task that even Linnaeus himself never faced back in the 18^th century.

A popular science bestseller, Harari’s (2014) Sapiens, told readers on its back cover that “[o]ne hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth”. That, of course, might indeed be true. What are the six species he identified 100,000 years ago? One, Homo sapiens, modern people. Fair enough, if a bit on the robust side. Two, Homo neanderthalensis. Indeed, according to the best genetic data thirty years ago (Krings et al. 1997); but now the geneticists say I may have 2% Neanderthal DNA, which presumably changes the status of Neanderthals, or the status of species, or both (Harvati and Ackermann 2022; Weasel 2022). Three, Homo denisova. Yet even the geneticists, who are the only people to whom it is visible, say this is a genomic subgroup of Neanderthals (Meyer et al., 2012) – who, as just noted, may not even be their own species in the first place. Four, Homo erectus. That is largely uncontroversial as a taxon; but not at 100,000 years ago, unless perhaps we regard species #6 as H. erectus. Five, Homo floresiensis. Clearly, the mysterious and isolated H. floresiensis was something (Madison 2023). And six, Homo soloensis, named for a different set of Indonesian fossils than H. floresiensis, which are generally regarded as archaic H. sapiens (Swisher et al., 1996) on account of their anatomical continuity with both H. erectus and H. sapiens.

All of a sudden, we are down from “at least six different species” to humans, the hobbit, and possibly Neanderthals. This is not to single out Harari for criticism, but rather to note that biological anthropologists know that all of these species are vexatious at best (e.g., Athreya and Hopkins 2021; Bae et al., 2023), while outside of biological anthropology, the nuanced winks that generally accompany these taxa tend to get lost.

The problem is not a new one. Reviewing mammalian systematics in 1945, G. G. Simpson was frustrated by the difference he encountered between paleontological and paleoanthropological taxonomy. Since human are mammals, it stands to reason that an expert on mammalian species should be able to make sense of extinct hominin[1] species. Like any other biological taxonomic enterprise, there is a proper taxonomic scheme, reflecting a proper understanding of the fossil species in that particular evolutionary lineage. It’s simply a matter of finding it. Some people see too few species (lumpers), and some people see too many species (splitters), while a competent paleontologist should produce results that are as Goldilocks found the baby bear’s porridge: just right.

The problem, however, is not simply that everybody fancies themselves to be the baby bear; but rather, lies more fundamentally in the assumption that the elementary units in paleoanthropology and the elementary units of paleontology are equivalent. I think it is time to call that assumption into question. The units of paleontology, and of biology more generally, are different from the units of paleoanthropology, in that the latter are units in a story of our ancestors, and the ancestors are invariably sacred.

What are primate species?

A species, like a culture or a gene, is infamously difficult to define precisely and satisfactorily. Species appear to be units of nature of some sort, but different kinds of units than species among plants or bacteria (Godfrey and Marks 1991; Barraclough 2019). Nevertheless, for multicellular animals at least, it appears to be an elemental unit of ecology, as a cell is an elemental unit of physiology, a genotype is an elemental unit of a population genetics, and an organism is an elemental unit of society. If we restrict ourselves just to the more familiar mammalian and primate species, we can ideally identify several properties possessed by a species: (1) it is composed of organisms related to one another as either potential mates or competitors for mates, thus bounded by the limits of a gene pool; (2) it constructs and is adapted to a niche, filling a role in a dynamic ecosystem; (3) it has a locus in space and a duration in time as an evolutionary lineage; and (4) it can replicate, making more species, each slightly different from itself. Different definitions of species, from Buffon (1753; Farber 1973) through Mayr (1942) and beyond, highlight one or another of these features.[2]

A more recently-appreciated feature of species is that they are also units of conservation legislation, and thus partly cultural as well. That is why the number of extant primate species has risen so dramatically in recent decades, from about 170 in the mid-1980s (Richard 1985) to over 500 today (Strier 2022). It is not simply that the number of species is being taxonomically inflated, and is thus less accurate than it used to be (Rosenberger 2012); or that new species are finally being recognized, and their number is thus more accurate than it used to be (Groves 2014). In a sense, comparing the number of living primate species 35 years ago and today is simply unfair, because they are actually tabulating different things than they used to.

 However entropic the universe of extant primate species seems to have become, it is disconnected from extinct primate species, which are of course unaffected by conservation legislation. They nevertheless have their own issues, and their status is constantly being negotiated by the community of primate paleontologists. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the closer we get to ourselves, the more complex things seem to become (Kimbel and Martin, 1993).

Hominin species seem just as vexed today as they did to Simpson back in 1945. His explanation was that the people doing the paleoanthropology were generally coming from medical anatomy, and simply didn’t understand taxonomy well enough: “much of the work on primates has been done by students who had no experience in taxonomy and who were completely incompetent to enter this field, however competent they may have been in other respects” (Simpson 1945:181). In particular, he noted, “Dart's placing of Australopithecus in a family ‘Homo-simiadae’ (1925) only served to exemplify the total ignorance of zoology so common among the special students of these higher primates (although, of course, Dart's work is excellent in his own field)” (Simpson 1945:188).

The ontology of hominin species

The underlying presupposition is that hominin biological history is composed of zoological units that are equivalent to species, however species may be defined biologically. Thus, Homo naledi, Homo longi, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo luzonensis, etc., either are or are not distinct phylogenetic lineages, and only a proper taxonomy will resolve and describe it.
Suppose, however, that there are no recoverable biological species in the history of our lineage, perhaps because much of that history is occupied biologically by a structured meta-population rather than by distinct species (Pääbo 2015; Scerri et al. 2019). Perhaps because there is more at stake in identifying our ancestors than there is in identifying the ancestors of other species. Perhaps because the names themselves represent not so much biological ancestors, as anthropological ancestors.

What do I mean by an anthropological ancestor? I mean the subject of a sacred narrative about our past, a story intended to explain who we are and how we came to be here. The diverse manners by which peoples construct relations of (horizontal) kinship and (vertical) ancestry was among the earliest discoveries of anthropology (Morgan 1871; Franklin & McKinnon 2001). And while we have talked for decades about looking at science as a culture (Snow 1959), we are only recently actually getting around to doing it (Franklin 1995). I want to suggest that the reason that hominin taxonomy is, and has always been, so vexed, is because its elements are not biological species. The species that compose our own lineage are mythic ancestors, which are intended to resemble biological species. But they are actually elements in a story, the bricolage (Lévi-Strauss 1962) out of which scientific narratives of our origins (Landau 1985) are constructed.

In one story, the actor in a creation story might be Mother Corn Spirit. In another, it might be Homo luzonensis. In still another, it might be Homo soloensis. And they might have precisely the same ontological status: as nonexistent naturalistic entities in human ancestry. As some other kind of entities, namely as characters in an origin narrative, they may have a very different kind of existence.
The persistent confusion over hominin taxonomy is a result of misunderstanding the nature and existence of hominin species. It is not that there is a correct taxonomic interpretation of the fossils, which will reveal itself under the proper analytic technique. It’s that (1) this taxonomic practice is different from other ostensibly zoological taxonomic practices, by virtue of being reflexive; (2) the origin of this difference lies in the fact that it is naming and describing our own ancestors, and (3) ancestors are invariably sacred (in the broad anthropological sense of “special”, rather than in the narrower sense of “holy,” although the ancestors may of course sometimes be that too; Zerubavel 2012).

Figure 1: A notoriously sacred ancestor,
Eoanthropus dawsoni, or Piltdown Man.

Anthropologically speaking, hominin species are sacred ancestors. In some cases, this is more obvious than others. The role of Eoanthropus dawsoni as a sacred British ancestor (Figure 1), which effectively precluded its exposure as a hoax for decades, is well-known (Weiner 1955). Another notable example is Sinanthropus pekinensis. We often retell the story of the loss of the Peking Man fossils on Pearl Harbor Day. They were being transported for safe keeping to the naval base in Hawaii to protect them from the Japanese, who were very interested in taking control of the fossils (Roberts et al. 2021). We never tell a parallel story in Europe: After all, there were hominin fossils scattered around Europe in 1941, but they didn’t require special protection from the Germans. Why did Peking Man require protection from the Japanese? Presumably, because the fossils were regarded as ancestors of the Chinese (Sautman 2001; Schmalzer 2008), and thus possessed symbolic power and value to East Asians, which was quite different from the cultural meanings of European fossils.

And it wasn’t even Homo erectus at the time, but Sinanthropus pekinensis. That is what all of these names represent: not elements of biological history, but elements of stories about biological history. They are attempts to create formal biological characters and distinctive elements in order to convey a story of human origins, where there are, in fact, no such formal biological distinctions in nature.  This situation is familiar from the neontological end of physical anthropology, in the form of two centuries of misguided racial classification. I am suggesting that the problem with paleoanthropological taxonomy today is the same problem with racial taxonomy decades ago: namely, a fundamental confusion of categories, mistaking units of symbolic culture for units of biological nature.

Figure 2: An ancestor (STS-5 or Mrs. Ples)
on a postage stamp 

Some famous fossil ancestors have appeared on national postage stamps (Figure 2), an unusual location for scientific data. My point is that studying and narrating one’s own ancestry is a culturally powerful activity. The elements of a scientific story of our ancestors are species, and those species are not like other species, by virtue of being our ancestors (Walker et al., 2021). We are humans studying human ancestors; the reflexivity is built into the system. In order to break out of the loop (Huxley 1863:69), we can pretend to be space aliens (“scientific Saturnians, if you will”), but that is hardly a scientific solution to any problem.

We no longer teach the pattern of extant human variation as being taxonomically structured, because we have come to realize that the taxonomies of race did not in fact represent what they purported to: the existence of a fairly small number of fairly discrete and fairly natural clusters of people. By shifting the ontological status of race from the biological to the cultural (obviously, sometimes correlated with a bit of biology), race has become no longer a subject of formal biological taxonomy. Consequently, whether the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature recognizes Homo sapiens afer as a valid subspecies is irrelevant, for it isn’t actually a biological thing. It is simply one of the many cultural ways that humans form politically salient groups, and consequently one of the identities that are available for people to adopt in a particular time and place. 

Similar reasoning can be applied to human ancestry. We may begin to regard Homo heidelbergensis, for example, as ontologically equivalent to Homo sapiens asiaticus. That is to say, as an attempt to apply scientific taxonomic rigor where it is inapplicable, by naming something and thus willing it into existence. This is the fallacy of reification, or misplaced concreteness. There is no Homo sapiens asiaticus, although we can certainly discuss the peoples of East Asia, their gene pools, and their adaptations. We do not recognize Linnaean subspecies taxa as describing our species at present. Are the Linnaean species taxa that ostensibly describe our ancestry any realer? Or are they primarily serving to conceal the actual structure of human prehistoric biology? It is, after all, at least conceivable that the human lineage was more like a structured metapopulation than like a clade, all the way down. If that were true, then gene flow would presumably be occurring, which becomes a mechanism for the horizontal transmission of derived characters. If derived characters are transmitted horizontally by gene flow, rather than vertically by common ancestry, that would render any ostensible phylogenetic analyses untenable; in which case the goal of establishing a proper taxonomy and phylogeny for recent hominin fossils (e.g., Bae et al., 2023) would be impossible.

Conclusion

Figure 3: Five official kinds of living people, from 1911 

            We talk today about a species Homo sapiens, and even about a subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens, without further formal taxonomic structure, although with real and studiable patterns of biological diversity below that level. But instead of characterizing Homo sapiens europaeus as if it were a naturalistic taxon, today we ask instead why scientists thought it existed as such for two or three centuries when it actually doesn’t (Figure 3). Instead of asking how many and what the human races are, we ask how and why they get made, and what work they do. We may look similarly at the question in paleoanthropology of how hominin species get made and manipulated – without necessarily assuming that hominin species are biological things, because that is what we think our prehistory is supposed be composed of. It may be that the quest for a proper and correct taxonomy of hominin species is itself a vain one.

The 18th century Linnaean tree of classification does not map perfectly on to the 19th century Darwinian tree of phylogeny. Why not? Because adaptive Darwinian divergence creates paraphyletic Linnaean categories – such as invertebrates (minus vertebrates), fish (minus tetrapods), reptiles (minus birds), monkeys (minus hominoids), and apes (minus humans). Consequently, 21st century cladistic classifications often have weird components, as they attempt to make all recognized taxa monophyletic (Withgott, 2000). Nevertheless, even Linnaeus was not faced with trying to incorporate extinct taxa into his work; he didn’t even believe in extinction. Moreover, Linnaeus did not know about macro-and micro-evolution when he formulated his system, and the distinction has vexed systematists ever since, since speciation is a process and not an event, and thus reproductive isolation (if that is your criterion of species) is often incomplete (Dobzhansky, 1937).

The recent paper by Meneganzin and Bernardi (2023) about Neanderthal specieshood underscores the problem. With imprecise definitions of what “human,” “Neanderthal,” and “species” mean, the Linnaean system simply breaks down here. They may well be right: Neanderthals may indeed be a “good” species, assuming that species actually mean something real and biological in this context. But I would suggest that Neanderthals are neither a “good” species nor a “bad” species; the imposition of biological species labels where the species are at best biologically ambiguous is the problem. That would be a problem anywhere on the “tree” of life; but Neanderthals have the added burden of sitting on the boundary between the human and the nonhuman, which is about as singularly symbolically charged as any place you can imagine. 

Perhaps hominin species do more harm than good at present, when it comes to understanding the bio-historical processes and patterns that got us here. Perhaps hominin species are examples of scientific pareidolia: projecting patterns like faces onto objects like clouds and tortillas. If you really want them to be there, you can always find them. The problem lies in convincing everyone else that they are there.

References

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[1] Although I reject the two premises that led to the adoption of “hominin” (only naming clades, and privileging our genetic intimacy with the apes over our ecological difference from them), I use the term for its hipness.

[2] I regard a species to be a group of organisms composed of potential mates and competitors for mates, and representing a temporarily stable state in a biopolitical field of evolution, ecological relations, capitalism, conservation science, and governmental action.

Wade, weighed

            There are three interesting differences between Nicholas Wade’s new book A Troublesome Inheritance and The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray twenty years ago.  The first is that The Bell Curve really did try to make itself look like science.  Herrnstein was a real psychologist, and it was a big fat book with statistics and graphs.  And several critical volumes later, we know that it was bullshit from top to bottom.

               Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance, by contrast, doesn’t even try to pretend to be science or to look like science.  It is purely a work of the second- (and sometimes third-) hand:  Here is a scientific conclusion I heard about.  Wade even tells the reader that the second half is "speculative,"  which makes it sound as if the book belongs in the genre of racist sci-fi.

               The second difference is that The Bell Curve took us all more or less by surprise, because we thought that we had put to rest the nested set of falsehoods that ideologue psychologists like Arthur Jensen had been saying even earlier in the century: that IQ measures an innate, linear and generalized brain force that some people have more of and some people have less of;  that IQ is largely determined by one’s genetic constitution; that since some groups score worse than other groups on IQ tests, it means that they are genetically condemned, on average, to be less intelligent.  Actually, it turns out that although isolated for decades in an intellectual racist ghetto, those kinds of things were still being said; and The Bell Curve cited over twenty papers each by Arthur Jensen, and by that new scientific racist on the block, Phil Rushton.  A Troublesome Inheritance, by contrast, was being promoted months in advance; and although the scientific community didn’t get advance copies as quickly as the white supremacists did, we did have some prep time, so that we didn’t have to be totally reactive after its publication. 

               The third difference is possibly the most important, and it is that Nicholas Wade’s book is coming out in the age of the internet and social media.  Back in 1994 there were a lot of naive reviewers who said, “Well, this sounds fishy, but it seems true, and these guys seem to know that they’re talking about....”  But in 2014, any reviewer who wants to be minimally conscientious has ready access to some quick and strong critical responses to the book.  I wrote two of them: one for In These Times, and one for the American Anthropological Association, which came out in the Huffington Post.

  

             Agustín Fuentes had his critical comments in Psychology Today and the Huffington Post, and debated against Wade on a AAA podcast, showing pretty clearly that Wade did not know what he was talking about, and has egregiously misrepresented the state of scientific knowledge about human diversity.  Alan Goodman  had his critical comments published in Counterpunch.  And Jennifer Raff, a post-doc who actually works on the DNA of ancient human populations, wrote a strong critique on her blog and the HuffPost.  The point is that there are substantive criticisms out there on the web for naive, or just curious, reviewers and readers to draw on – which weren’t so easily accessible immediately after the publication of The Bell Curve.

Yes, conspiracy nuts.  That would be me and Alan Goodman presenting Ashley Montagu
with the Darwin Award from the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, circa 1994.

  

             I think this has had an effect, because there aren’t too many reviews out there saying that Wade’s rubbish is erudite and sounds possible and darn it all, just might be true.  There was one early one, I think.  You’ve got the positive reviews by political radicals and by the political theorist who co-authored The Bell Curve, and a couple of graduate students in evolutionary psychology who will probably be wishing they had known a lot more about the subject before posting that review, when they eventually hit the job market.  And then you’ve got the negative reviews by everyone else.  Geneticist H. Allen Orr.  Geneticist Jerry Coyne. Sci-tech writer Ian Steadman. Biological anthropologist Eric Michael Johnson. Biologist P. Z. Myers.  Writer Patrick Appel.  Science writer Pete Shanks.  Editor Brian Bethune.  The X.  Arthur Allen.  Science historian Nathaniel Comfort.  

               Now, in an act of apparent desperation, Mr. Wade is taking on his critics.

               Let us review the main points of the book, shall we?

• ·        Racism is bad, and there have been abuses of science in the past.
• ·        Everybody else sees human variation as a bio-political issue, but it really isn’t.
• ·        Modern scientific views about human variation are politically correct myths produced by Marxist anthropologists, who are stifling serious discussion of human variation.
• ·        The human species really does come naturally divisible into a fairly small number of fairly discrete kinds of people, or “races”.
• ·        These races have genetic distinctions that cause personality distinctions.
• ·        So do economic strata and nations.
• ·        Global geo-political history has a significant genetic component.

(Just to show you I’m not making this up, Wade actually purports to be exploring “the possibility that human behavior has a genetic basis that varies from one race to another”; “trust has a genetic basis”; and “national disparities in wealth arise from differences in intelligence”.)   

               The idea that there is a conspiracy to prevent discussing human diversity within the academy is particularly bizarre, since that has been a regular – indeed, central – part of the curriculum of biological anthropology for many decades.  After The Bell Curve, the American Anthropological Association and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists produced position papers on race, so that the public could know what we have learned about it, the state of the science of human variation, so we can move on.

               Wade dismisses both statements categorically.  Even if they summarize the data and scientific knowledge that we possess, they are, says Wade, the products of politically deluded minds.  Unlike his.

               Wait a minute, isn't that a political statement?

               Interestingly, though, the most positive reviews of Wade’s book have come from political extremists, of the sort that you wouldn’t want to invite to family reunions.

               Makes me wonder whether his claim to political neutrality is just amazingly stupid, or a simple lie.  For what it’s worth, history can sometimes be illuminating:  the paranoid claim that you can’t talk about human variation on campus because of the commie thought-police was put out there first in the early 1960s by the segregationists; then revived by Jon Entine in his horrid 2000 book, Taboo:  Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid To Talk About It; it isn’t even original with Wade. 

               The taboo on race in the study of human variation is directly parallel to the taboo on creationism in the study of human origins.  We used to think it was true, we now know differently, and to talk about it today marks you as someone who is ignorant of the science, and is irrationally committed to an outmoded and  false understanding of biological anthropology. 

               What does Wade have to say in his defense?

It takes only a few vigilantes to cow the whole campus. Academic researchers won't touch the subject of human race for fear that their careers will be ruined. Only the most courageous will publicly declare that race has a biological basis. ... The understanding of recent human evolution has been seriously impeded, in my view, because if you can't study the genetics of race (a subject of no special interest in itself), you cannot explore the independent evolutionary histories of Africans, East Asians and Europeans.

There is an element of truth to that.  It’s not in the accusation of vigilantism, since the position opposite to Wade's is the normative position of the community of scholarly experts.  It’s not in the courage to talk about race as a natural category (“has a biological basis” is a vacuous statement, since there is a biological basis for everything; the scholarly issue is whether races are primarily categories of nature or of social history).  It’s the last statement that contains the element of truth.  And it’s not in the first clause; the study of the genetics of race is an old research program in biological anthropology, and I’ve written about how it killed itself off.  No, it’s in the thought that “you cannot explore the independent evolutionary histories of Africans, East Asians and Europeans.”  If you believe that there are “independent evolutionary histories of Africans, East Asians and Europeans” then you misunderstand human evolution, for human histories are not independent of one another.  They may be separate to varying extents, but they are also biologically connected in all kinds of interesting ways, and if you aren’t prepared to acknowledge that, then you don’t know enough to be taken seriously.  Nor are they units of nature, to be taken for granted.  The idea that the continents somehow represent natural units of human biology is empirically false, and when you read up on the history of the continents – the intellectual history, not the geological history – you quickly see how it could not be otherwise.

The attacks on my book come from authors who espouse the social science position that there is no biological basis to race.   It is because they are defending an ideological position with a counterfactual scientific basis that their language is so excessive. If you don't have the facts, pound the table. My three Huffington Post critics -- Jennifer Raff, Agustín Fuentes and Jonathan Marks -- are heavy on unsupported condemnations of the book, and less generous with specific evidence.

               Speaking just for myself, all of my condemnations of the book were entirely supported.  There is hardly anything I’ve enjoyed more in the last few months than quoting this horrid anti-intellectual book to my friends.  Why?  Because I think Wade can speak for himself, and when he does, you hear words that are familiarly ignorant and racist.  I don’t like ignorance and racism, and correcting them is kind of my job.

Despite their confident assertions that I have misrepresented the science, which I've been writing about for years in a major newspaper, none of these authors has any standing in statistical genetics, the relevant discipline. Raff is a postdoctoral student in genetics and anthropology. Fuentes and Marks are both anthropologists who, to judge by their webpages, do little primary research. Most of their recent publications are reviews or essays, many of them about race. Their academic reputations, not exactly outsize to begin with, might shrink substantially if their view that race had no biological basis were to be widely repudiated. Both therefore have a strong personal interest (though neither thought it worth declaring to the reader) in attempting to trash my book.

               There is a self-interest at work, but it’s the same self-interest that we have vis-a-vis a creationist.  We have devoted our adult lives to understanding the subject of human origins and diversity.  The only appropriate way for you, as an amateur, to challenge the authority of science on the subject is to show that you know more than your biological anthropology interlocutors, not to impugn their scholarly credentials (that you have none of, in any event).   It’s also weird, again, coming from the standpoint of scholarship, that Mr. Wade is first discovering our work, from our webpages, and that “many of [our publications] are about race”.  Then I must say that I find it odd that he didn’t read them before he published a book on the subject. 

               And hey, when did statistical genetics – which Mr. Wade doesn’t speak for, anyhow – suddenly become the only relevant intellectual area?  The fact is that statistical genetics doesn’t support Wade – as indeed the history of the statistical genetical study of human diversity, and the work Wade himself cites, both show.   Wade makes reference to the 2002 study in Science that used a computer program called Structure on the human gene pool. 

Raff and Marks take issue with one of these surveys, which used a computer program to analyze the clusters of genetic variation. The program doesn't know how many clusters there should be; it just groups its data into whatever target number of clusters it is given. When the assigned number of clusters is either greater or less than five, the results made no genetic or geographical sense. But when asked for five clusters, the program showed that everyone was assigned to their continent of origin. Raff and Marks seem to think that the preference for this result was wholly arbitrary and that any other number of clusters could have been favored just as logically. But the grouping of human genetic variation into five continent-based clusters is the most reasonable and is consistent with previous findings. As the senior author told me at the time, the Rosenberg study essentially confirmed the popular notion of race.

               Two fairly big things wrong there.  First, Wade's unscientific reasoning, which is quite different from that of the authors.  Wade says that since the runs for K<5 and K>5 yield racial nonsense, then we should accept the run at K=5 as being racially meaningful simply because it fits in with his a priori notion of human diversity.  If that logic had been used in the paper itself, it would not have been publishable. The correct conclusion is that unless you have a better (i.e., independent) reason, you have to assume that the result at K=5 is just as racially nonsensical as the rest of them.  In science, we don’t juggle variables until we find a result that we like and then say that it is correct because we like it.  Second, “the senior author” was Marcus Feldman of Stanford, whom Wade indeed quoted in 2002 in the Times: "Dr. Feldman said the finding essentially confirmed the popular conception of race.”  Except that I’ve heard Feldman specifically deny having said that to Wade, claiming he was abjectly misquoted there. 

               In fact, it was at the very conference that inspired Deborah Bolnick to write her trenchant critique of the racial abuse of Structure.  So I don’t think Wade knows the statistical genetics, quite frankly, any more than he knows the biological anthropology. Geneticist Jeremy Yoder is none too satisfied with Wade's treatment of the Structure work, either.

               I honestly also don’t think that the ontology of race is the most important stupid idea in the book – it’s kind of a red herring beside the stupider idea that the industrial revolution in England was driven by the genes for “nonviolence, literacy, thrift, and patience” that Wade imagines to have arisen as mutation in the upper classes in the Middle Ages, and then diffused by gene flow into the lower classes.  As I mentioned above, even Wade tells the reader that he's speculating, in which case we either judge it as science fiction, or place it in context of all of the other genetic theories of history that have been proposed and rejected.  

               But let’s return to try and make some sense of what Wade means by “race” in his rebuttal. 

[R]aces are not and cannot be discrete ....  In fact, the races are not demarcated at all. They differ only in relative allele frequency, meaning that a given allele may be more common in one race than in another. ...

             Humans cluster into five continental groups or races, and within each race there are further subclusters. So the number of human races depends on the number of clusters one wishes to recognize.... [T]his has no bearing on whether or not races exist.

               Once again, there is truth here, but Wade can't identify it.  There is geographic structure in the human gene pool, but that is not race.  There, I said it.  I’ve said that every semester for thirty years.  Nobody denies that there is geographic structure in the human gene pool.  But if you call that “race” then you are using the word “race” in a new and heretofore unprecedented way.  It's similar to the way some geneticists were redefining it in the 1960s, but then realized it was intractable. Why?  Because if the only factor that determines the number and kinds of clusters that you see in the human gene pool is how closely you examine it, then race (as genetic cluster) is not a natural feature, but a bio-cultural construction.  The most relevant variable is simply the scope of your analysis, which is arbitrary.  The genetic clusters are real, but there's no sense in calling them races.  They're just arbitrarily-sized clumps of allele frequencies.  Or, for lack of a better word, "populations".  

               What’s the alternative?  That the human gene pool is homogeneous?  No anthropologist has ever thought that.

               The lesson here is a basic one at the undergraduate level in biological anthropology: Discovering difference is not race; discovering geographic difference is not race; and if race is all you can think about, then you aren’t going to get very far in understanding the nature of the human gene pool.

               But as I said, I think race is a bit of a red herring here, since when all is said and done, the only people who merit their own chapter in Wade’s book are the Jews.  And yes, we do have a lot of familiarity in the history of anthropology with people who are obsessed with race and with Jews.  We can just add Mr. Wade to that list of unscholarly writers who don’t know the modern data or literature on human diversity, and who mistake their feelings and prejudices for thoughts. 

               So who actually likes Wade’s book anyway, aside from Charles Murray, some snot-nosed evolutionary psychology students, and the white supremacists?  I suspect that even other elitist Etonians are running away at full stride, rather than be caught in such company.