Guest post: Carleton Coon made me do it, by Barry Bogin

 

I loved Jonathan Marks’s Legacy Review of The Origin of Races (Marks, 2022). The review is good history with an important lesson that academics must take responsibility for their research in terms of the way we interpret our findings and the way that others use or misuse our work. Marks is spot-on when he says that Coon’s writings on ‘race’ were, “…quite simply evil…” and that, “Scientists are not trained to grapple with evil.” We need such training, as many evils such as racism, sexism, and ethnic cleansing are ever-present.

Marks's Legacy Review dredged-up memories of how I became an anthropologist and this is the theme of this letter. Perhaps my story will resonate with others. My start toward anthropology had little to do with combating evil, but did involve reading another book co-authored by Carleton Coon, Anthropology A to Z (Coon & Hunt, 1963). More about this book in a moment but first I want to state that like Marks, I was never taught The Origin of Races. I do not recall that Coon was even mentioned in any of my anthropology courses. I learned about ‘Races’ sometime after earning my Ph.D. in 1977 and purchased a used copy. The perverse nature of the book’s argument was, I thought, a fascinating footnote in the history of anthropology. When relevant, I explained to my students Coon’s proposals and classroom discussion often became animated with incredulity!  About 10 years ago, I gave away ‘Races’ and my few other books that tried to make ‘race’ a serious anthropological topic (e.g., Garn, SM 1960 Readings on Race; Mead M, Dobzhansky T, Tobach E, Light RE 1968 Science and the Concept of Race). The pseudo-scientific concept of ‘race’ had long since become an embarrassment to anthropology and, besides, I needed the shelf space for more useful books.    

I purchased a new, paperback edition of Anthropology A to Z in in 1969, near the end of my junior year of university in Philadelphia. At that time I was miserable. I was the third member of my immediate family to attend a university. Previously two aunts had completed courses in elementary education and physical therapy. My parents expected me to pursue a similarly applied vocation, especially medicine. Being mostly naïve, I thought that a major in biology was the only route to success in medicine. The biology of the late 1960s was strongly molecular and my instructors lectured toward genetics. I appreciated the marvels of the genome, but whole organisms held more interest. One lecturer was RL Miller, a developmental biologist who was the first to discover fertilization by sperm chemotaxis in an animal (Miller, 1966). Human sperm chemotaxis toward ova was shown 25 years later (Ralt et al., 1991). In my junior year (1969) I enrolled in Prof. Miller’s marine biology course, did well, and was able to secure a job in Miller’s lab. My work was to tie to glass slides male and female hydrozoans of the genus Campanularia, then feed and care for them until needed for further experiments. Later, I was trained analyze film images recorded by means of dark-field cinephotomicrography and trace the paths that spermatozoa from male animals followed toward the female gonangium (the reproductive members of the hydrozoan colony). Doing so allowed me to observe fertilization and the formation of new hydroids. This job stimulated my interest in growth and development.  

In other third year courses I was failing. At the end of the semester the university placed me on the ‘Dean’s List’, the one for students threatened with dismissal.  A few weeks into the second semester I had physical-emotional meltdown. I missed three weeks of classes, the lab work and two other jobs I had at that time, and all social life. A physician prescribed a barbiturate tablet, to which I developed a nasty allergic reaction, but it did help to regulate my emotions. When I returned to the university I went to the bookstore and discovered Anthropology A to Z. The text is mostly about ‘race’ and ‘constitution’ but there are sections on growth and development, paleoanthropology, primates, demography, and social anthropology. The material on fossil and non-human primates grabbed my attention. I bought the book ($2.95) and decided to change my major to anthropology. I took the three required introductory classes (Social, Biological, Archeology) in the summer term between my junior and senior years. My performance went from failing to As and Bs. I found my place and my profession.   

Anthropology A to Z was translated, with new material added, from the original German book Anthropologie. Das Fischer Lexikon (Heberer, Kurth, & Schwidetzky-Roesing, 1959). The German book was designed as single-volume encyclopedia (the meaning of the German word ‘lexicon’). There is an ‘A Z’ artistic design on the cover, but not used in the official title. The authors were Gerhard Heberer, Gottfried Kurth, and Ilse Schwidetzky-Roesing. Heberer was a zoologist and anthropologist who was a member of the Nazi Party SS and was a high ranking "racial researcher " for the SS ‘German Ancestral Heritage (Ahnenerbe) Research Association’. Heberer was interned after the war because of his SS membership, but was declared ‘reformed’[1] in 1947. From 1949 to 1970 he was director of an "anthropological research center" at the Georg-August University in Gottingen. Gottfried Kurth was an anthropologist who studied the ‘races’ of German villages and paleoanthropology. His publications contributed to Nazi ideology on ‘racial hygiene’ and education. Years later, Kurth edited a festschrift to the professional life of Heberer, which was given a mostly positive review by C. Loring Brace (Brace, 1963). Ilse Schwidetzky-Roesing was an anthropologist who in the 1930s was assistant to Egon Freiherr von Eickstedt, one of the leading ‘race theorists’ of the Third Reich. After the war she worked at Mainz University from 1946, eventually succeeding Eickstedt as Mainz Professor of Anthropology in 1961 until her retirement in 1975. I found no information that either Kurth or Schwidetzky-Roesing were interned or ‘reformed’. Instead, both seemed to have assumed traditional academic lives after the war and Schwidetzky-Roesing was even an honored member of several European academic societies and in 1974 the Vice President of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences.

Both in its original German and in English translation, Anthropology A to Z is a neo-Nazi racist diatribe. In English it includes the racist ideology of Carleton Coon that is exemplified by Marks’ Legacy Review. On page 129, for example, Coon and Hunt write, “The hypothesis to be presented here was suggested by Franz Weidenreich in 1947, and has been much elaborated since by C. S. Coon in The Origin of Races (1962).”  A few sentences later, Coon and Hunt succinctly precis the hypothesis by writing that Coon’s elaborations boil down to, “…some racial differences seen today can be traced all the way back to Homo erectus.” Much of the text of Anthropology A to Z, both before and after page 129 is a summary of material first published in The Origin of Races (A to Z is 277 pages long). The work of Franz Boas, towards whom Coon was personally and professionally antithetical (Jackson, 2001), is mentioned one time in Anthropology A to Z, with a sentence on Boas’ studies of the offspring of immigrants. There is no citation of that work, but Coon and Hunt dismiss the importance of Boas’ research and explain it away by stating that the plasticity of phenotypes Boas reported was merely due to selective migration. It is an understatement to say that it is ironic that Coon and Hunt’s Anthropology A to Z helped me become an anthropologist who dedicated his professional work to Boasian-style research and ideology. In the latest edition of my book

Patterns of Human Growth (Bogin, 2021), I devote a paragraph to Coon’s hypothesis and show that his ‘evidence’ from anthropometric studies was incorrect. More importantly, I devote many pages to explaining and critiquing the on-going research by contemporary genetic determinists from biology, psychology, bioinformatics, medicine, and other fields who promote claims of biological, cognitive, and emotional differences between ‘races’, ethnic groups, and socioeconomic classes.  

There is one more anecdote to relate about how I came to read Anthropology A to Z. This story begins with Coon’s television career and ends with a possibly racist high school guidance counsellor. I grew-up in Philadelphia. About the time when I was 10 years old (1960ish), it was difficult for me to get out of bed on school days, but I was up and running by 6 AM on Saturday. I ate some breakfast in front of the TV and often watched a repeat showing of What In The World (WITW), which was a co-production of the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia TV station WCAU. The Penn Museum website provides the basic history of WITW. Watch the video at that site, with its dry ice ‘smoke’, mysterious flute music excerpts from Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and images of worlds in space, and you will understand the show’s impact on my 10-year-old mind! WITW won the Peabody Award for television in 1951, was shown by 89 affiliates of the CBS television network, and ran for 16 years (1950-1966). This is incredible for show that was based on a panel of academic ‘egg-heads’ trying to guess the identity of an archeological object held by the University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The host of the show was Froelich Rainey, director of the Museum. One regular panelist was Carleton Coon, who was then Curator of Ethnology at the Museum. I marveled at the wisdom of Coon and the other tweed-jacketed, pipe-smoking professors as they debated the symbolism, beauty, and use of the mysterious object. Today, I suspect that the objects were selected by Rainey and Coon and that Coon may have prepared some text for the other panelists to help make the show more entertaining.

The show must have made a lasting impression because when it came time for me to think of life after high school, I went to my guidance counsellor to ask about a career as an archeologist. I still recall that she looked at me with a condescending expression and said, “There is only one place you can study archeology – the University of Pennsylvania, and you cannot get in there.”  I guess that WITW made a lasting impression on her as well! As a 16-year-old I interpreted her words to mean that I was too stupid to successfully apply to the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania. I did attend Temple University, a public, state-supported university in Philadelphia. In the 1990s I had occasion to reminisce about my high school counselor’s words and realized that what she really meant was that Penn would likely reject me because of its desire to be international and cosmopolitan. Many elite universities had admission quotas for local residents, so that the student body would be geographically diverse. There were also quotas for ethnic and religious ‘diversity’ – meaning lack thereof in most cases – and my counselor may have thought that I was too Jewish for that quota. In fact, Penn never had a ‘Jewish quota’ and was the Ivy League school with the highest percentage of Jewish students. Was my guidance counselor an anti-Semite? Was she trying to promote her favorite students for admission to Penn?  I will never know. But the impact of WITW stayed with me and when I saw Anthropology A to Z in the Temple University bookstore the name Carleton Coon must have stirred something that lead to my life-long excitement for biological anthropology and all it has to offer.

Barry Bogin

Member, UCSD/Salk Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA), USA

Professor Emeritus of Biological Anthropology, Loughborough University

Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of Michigan-Dearborn, USA, Member Diversity Scholars Network

References

Bogin, B. (2021). Patterns of Human Growth (3rd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108379977

Brace, C. L. (1963). Review of Evolution und hominisation:Evolution and hominisation. Edited by Gottfried Kurth. 228 pp.; 43 figures; 3 tables. Published by Gustav Fischer Verlag, Stuttgart, Germany. D.M. 45,50. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 21(1), 87–91. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.1330210117

Coon, C. S., & Hunt, E. E. (1963). Anthropology A to Z. New York, NY: Grosset & Dunlap.

Heberer, G., Kurth, G., & Schwidetzky-Roesing, I. (1959). Anthropologie. Das Fischer Lexikon. Frankfurt-Main: Fischer Bücherei, K.G.

Jackson, J. . (2001). "In Ways Unacademical”: The Reception of Carleton S. Coon’s The Origin of Races. Journal of the History of Biology, 34, 247–285. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1010366015968

Marks, J. (2022). Legacy review: Carleton S. Coon (1962) The origin of races . New York: Knopf. American Journal of Biological Anthropology, 178:193–195 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.24482

Miller, R. L. (1966). Chemotaxis during fertilization in the hydroid Campanularia. Journal of Experimental Zoology, 162(1), 23–44. https://doi.org/10.1002/jez.1401620104

Ralt, D., Goldenberg, M., Fetterolf, P., Thompson, D., Dor, J., Mashiach, S., … Eisenbach, M. (1991). Sperm attraction to a follicular factor(s) correlates with human egg fertilizability. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 88(7), 2840–2844. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.88.7.2840

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[1] The term used in the 1940s was ‘denazified’. That word is used by Putin as part of Russian aggression against Ukrainian people and has taken on a new, evil meaning.

The Good, The Bad, and the Scientists Who Don't Know the Difference

     One of the things I’ve been giving a bit of thought to, as I begin to contemplate retiring and not doing the stuff that I’ve been doing for the last few decades, is the biggest gap in my own education. I take no responsibility at all for the gap, for it is totally not my fault: I am the victim of a good science education that gave me no moral education. Like other scientifically-trained scholars, moral arguments intimidate me, I don’t know how to construct them and I don’t know how to evaluate them. I just know, like other scientists, that I’m good and I'm right and that you are a fucking asshole for doubting it.

    Looking back on the beginning of my career, which is what one does at this stage, I realize that there were three things I was most concerned with thirty years ago, aside from my actual lab research. These were questions involving:

(1) Racist science  

(2) Dishonest science

and

(3) Colonial science

    In retrospect, all three of these were linked by the moral question in science. Right and wrong, good and evil.  But having no background in philosophy or theology, I lacked the intellectual framework to understand my own interests, much less any vocabulary with which to describe them. The point is that scientists are expected to develop into moral beings without any education in it, which seems opposed to the rest of both education and the history of our species.

    Yet the public positions I adopted early in my career, which made me a dangerous radical to the older farts in physical anthropology, aren’t so radical any more, at least within contemporary biological anthropology. But some of our colleagues in cognate fields are a bit behind us, and it can be very frustrating to argue about basic moral issues with biologists, who have as little training in the subject as I do. Many of them, after all, spend their lives torturing vermin like fruit flies in order to unravel the mysteries of life. Is it worth it? Sure, ok, yeah, torment the damn flies for the good of science. 

    Back in 1871, John Murray in London published a very important two-volume work on human ancestry. The intellectual times and context were important. There was an important question out there, being debated by first-generation evolutionary biologists.  The Bible clearly states that Adam and Eve were placed in a garden, to till the field. Where, then, did hunter-gatherers come from? Were modern foragers degenerate descendants of the biblical horticulturists? Or were the foragers primordial, and the biblical story simply wrong?

    That question had been definitively answered by Darwin’s neighbor, John Lubbock, in his Pre-Historic Times (1865). Those times had been times of foraging, and they preceded agricultural times.  But that raised a second question: What of the living hunter-gatherers? What’s the matter with them? Why are they even there? The first Darwinian answer to that question came from the German Darwinian, Ernst Haeckel, in 1868. To Haeckel, the difference between the “savage” and the European was zoological. They were different species altogether.  In fact, Haeckel argued, savages should not even be classified with people; they should be classified with apes. But don’t take my word for it. Here's the English translation of 1876.

If one must draw a sharp boundary between them, it has to be drawn between the most highly developed and civilized man on the one hand, and the rudest savages on the other, and the latter have to be classed with the animals.

Lovely guy, Haeckel. And a great Darwinian. A credit to his field. Remember that line when you admire his artwork. Now his explanation for the existence of savages has a lot of biopolitical implications, which we need not dwell on here. Suffice it to say that it was not regarded as a very satisfactory answer in much of the rest of the scholarly community. 

    The next year, 1869, another first-generation Darwinian took a crack at the question: Why were there still savages?  Alfred Russel Wallace acknowledged that savages were smart. In fact, he reasoned, they were too smart. The savage has a brain as large and powerful as that of an Englishman, reasoned Wallace, but the savage doesn’t need it. It doesn’t take much brains to be a savage. And yet the savage has a brain. Moreover, most of human prehistory involved brainy savages, who evolved by natural selection. And yet, natural selection can’t make an organ that the body doesn’t use. So if apes evolved into savages, that process must have involved the acquisition of a big brain that natural selection couldn’t make because the savages don’t need or use it. 

    So if natural selection didn’t produce the big powerful brain that separates savages from apes (and allies them with Europeans, contra Haeckel) then what did produce that big unused brain?

The brain of pre- historic and of savage man seems to me to prove the existence of some power, distinct from that which has guided the development of the lower animals through their ever-varying forms of being.

You know what produced it. And Who. It was a miracle. From God.

    Charles Darwin wrote to him, “I hope you have not murdered too completely your own and my child.”

    So by 1870 the Darwinians were batting 0 for 2 in trying to explain the evolutionary relationship between savages and civilized people. Which brings us up to 1871 again, and the publication by John Murray of that very important two-volume work on human ancestry. Of course the author was Edward B. Tylor and the book was Primitive Culture.

    What Tylor did in Primitive Culture (1871) was to give yet a third explanation for the difference between the savage and civilized person. It was not a distinction of biological evolution, as Haeckel had it in 1868. Nor was it a distinction of supernatural evolution, as Wallace had it in 1869. Nope, in 1871 it was a distinction of cultural evolution. That was the correct, and ultimately paradigmatic, answer.

    Also, Darwin published The Descent of Man that year. And sadly, it doesn’t stand up much better under a modern reading than Tylor’s Primitive Culture does. They’re both quaint, insightful, and important in their time and place, and dated now. But what makes them all of those things? Graduate students should definitely try to find out with careful, critical readings.

    And that brings me to the direct inspiration for this rant. A few weeks ago, Agustín Fuentes, with whom I agree on the great majority of things I hold a professional opinion about, published an editorial in Science. Science is the leading scientific journal in America, and a guest editorial in it is way up high on the prestige scale. You can bet they vetted the essay pretty carefully. And they published it with some of Fuentes's pretty uncontroversial assessments, like these.

“Descent” is often problematic, prejudiced, and injurious. Darwin thought he was relying on data, objectivity, and scientific thinking in describing human evolutionary outcomes. But for much of the book, he was not. “Descent,” like so many of the scientific tomes of Darwin's day, offers a racist and sexist view of humanity....

Today, students are taught Darwin as the “father of evolutionary theory,” a genius scientist. They should also be taught Darwin as an English man with injurious and unfounded prejudices that warped his view of data and experience.

No book on any science from 1871 stands up scientifically today. If you read a science book from 1871 you are probably reading it because someone told you it was important, and maybe it was. But you will have to probe to find what identifies it as a classic, and while you get there, you will struggle through the intellectual primitiveness of the work itself. And it will hopefully be a rewarding exercise, and then you can go back to reading the pdfs on line of the articles that aren’t even published yet in your favorite journals.

    Alas, there are some scientists out there who don’t countenance any critical reading of Darwin. Any criticism of Darwin is fodder for creationists, and therefore he must be defended at all costs. Which is pretty much what the Darwinian All-Stars managed to splutter out in their angry letter to the editor. 

    But first, let's go over the Darwinian All-Stars lineup. Leading off? Psychologist Andrew Whiten. Second, Walter Bodmer. That's right, Sir Walter Fucking Bodmer. Third, the geneticists: Brian and Deborah Charlesworth and Jerry Coyne. Next, psychologist Frans de Waal. And then six more of them, because, one supposes, something about group selection. And what is their top complaint?

We fear that Fuentes’ vituperative exposition will encourage a spectrum of anti-evolution voices... 

    Now if you bothered to read Fuentes's essay (and here's the link again), you may be puzzled by their use of the adjective "vituperative". Let's just assume for the sake of parsimony that they don't know what the word means.

    So anything that we perceive as critical of Darwin must be suppressed, because it may aid the creationists. That is about the most pathetic admission of abject failure on the part of science educators that I have ever encountered. These scientists have been so unsuccessful in convincing the American public we evolved from apes, that they are going to respond by placing Darwin on a pedestal and reading his 19^th century sexist and colonialist views uncritically. Good lord, could they possibly sound more like a cult?

    Without belaboring the essay or the response, I want to shift back to the general moral question in science. I’m expending a little bit of mental energy here pondering what appears to be scientists trying to shield students from confronting sexism, racism, and colonialism in scientific literature. That is an amazing corner to paint yourself into, rather like being anti-antifa, which would seem to be the equivalent of pro-fascist. 

    But to return to the moral question. While Darwin was rewriting the Journal of Researches (aka The Voyage of the Beagle) there was a lot going on politically, and the 1845 second edition contains a digression about how slavery really and truly sucks: 

if the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin... It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty: but it is a consolation to reflect, that we at least have made a greater sacrifice, than ever made by any nation, to expiate our sin.

And folks have from time to time, trotted out that passage to show what a socially concerned and morally advanced fellow Darwin was.

    But let’s look a bit more closely at that thought. I think we would agree with Darwin (and even with his imaginary interlocutors, who are trivializing slavery by comparing it to mere poverty) that if the misery of the poor is due to our institutions, then great is our sin. But let’s turn the thought around. Suppose the misery of the poor is indeed actually due to the laws of nature. Then what? Fuck them and their misery, because at least we haven’t sinned?

    Darwin’s moral thinking here isn’t very moral at all. It’s weirdly amoral. The point Darwin is making is that slavery is much worse than mere poverty, no matter how much some people may try to equate them. Fair enough. But isn't there a problem with poverty too? The proper reaction to the misery of the poor is to work to alleviate it, not to try and figure out who to blame for it. Darwin is less concerned with the suffering and misery of the poor than he is about the cleanliness of his own soul, and perhaps that of his entire economic class (“our”).  And here is the moral problem for future generations: If the issue is who caused the misery, not how do we alleviate the misery, then that places a scientific premium on showing that at least you aren’t the cause of that misery.

    Which is why Charles Davenport blamed genes, C. C. Brigham blamed IQ scores, and Charles Murray blames them both. The important thing is to somehow blame the misery of the poor on “the laws of nature,” rather than on “our institutions”. For then, not only is “our” social class blameless, but we have used science to answer the unthreatening question we posed, yet actually done nothing to alleviate the suffering of the poor, regardless of why the fuck it’s there.

    The suffering is the problem, its etiology is secondary.

    That is a moral statement, however, and I don’t know how to defend it. Which is why I’m angry at my scientific education. And from the look of things, at a lot of other people’s scientific education as well.

    But this is funny. What had gotten me interested in scientific fraud was the DNA hybridization work of Sibley and Ahlquist back in the 1980s. Sibley is long dead, but Jon Ahlquist only expired recently, and his passing was noted ruefully by the creationists. You see, after a career falsifying data and committing scientific sins, it seems as though Ahlquist gave his life to Jesus, to absolve himself and atone for them.

    Well, that was convenient.

I coined the phrase “Human Biodiversity”. Racists stole it.

The essay that follows was declined by the NY Times. However, a few days later (27 December 2019), they published a column by Bret Stephens on Jewish genius (or, Jewnius©) that actually cited the horrid 2005 paper on that subject by the late biological anthropologist Henry Harpending. Harpending was regarded by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a White Nationalist.

That is a very unusual status for an anthropologist. It raises an interesting issue, though, about Harpending’s legacy. I am in favor of his total erasure. I think his racism probably tainted everything he published, however nice he may have been in person, and I do not see what value there is in talking about him at all politely or respectfully, when his legacy is a black eye for the field of anthropology. Adam Rutherford has been crapping on him over on twitter.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s page on Harpending also uses the phrase “human biodiversity” quite a bit.

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I coined the phrase “Human Biodiversity”. Racists stole it.
Jonathan Marks

It is rare for a professor to birth a meme. We inhabit ivory towers, very few of us are in the public eye, and those that aspire to be so are often regarded disdainfully by our peers.

For me, it increasingly seems as though my lasting contribution will be to have coined the phrase “human biodiversity” in my 1994 book of that name. Unfortunately it has come to mean the opposite of what I meant, due to the distortions of internet racists. In fact, they have even abbreviated “human biodiversity” as a meme for the semi-literate, HBD.  Journalist Angela Saini describes the appropriation of the phrase in her recent book, “Superior: The Return of Race Science.”

I was proud of the coinage a quarter-century ago, because I intended it to encapsulate the major discovery of the science of biological anthropology over the course of the 20^th century. That century began with the scientific assumption that the human species came naturally divisible into a fairly small number of fairly discrete and homogeneous pseudo-taxonomic groups. We called them “races”. By century’s end, however, a great deal of empirical research had shown that our species does not in fact come structured that way. 

“Human biodiversity” was intended to label our newer understanding of the patterns by which people actually differ from one another, as an alternative to the earlier “race”.

“Race” and “human biodiversity” are quite simply different things, two sets of patterns that map very poorly onto one another – and it took the better part of the 20^th century to demonstrate it. The subtitle of my book was “Genes, Race, and History” – to suggest that genes demonstrated that the proper place for race in science lay in its history, along with phlogiston, pangenesis, and creationism.

Race exists, of course, but its reality is not primarily biological. The reality of race is in the domain of the symbolic. Race is most real in the sense that, as is well-known, Thomas Jefferson fathered children with his black slave, Sally Hemings. Yet according to the only extant descriptions of her, Sally Hemings had light skin and long, straight dark hair. Why? Because only one of her four grandparents was African. She was a slave because of her symbolic ancestry, not because of her biological ancestry or her appearance.

Race is thus now recognized to be very real, as a system of human classification, as lived experience in a society of inequality. While it sometimes correlates with biology, the proper study of race lies in the study of law, discrimination, sociology, and political economy; the primary exception being in how social prejudice can affect the body itself.

“Human biodiversity” was intended as an alternative way of talking about human variation without the overarching assumption that our species sorts out into fairly discrete, fairly homogeneous races – as was assumed by scientists a century ago. But in the late 1990s, racists began to coopt the phrase as a more genteel and sciencey way to simply say “race”. In other words, they began to synonymize what should be antonyms.

Today all sorts of ideas that were only recently outmoded and unthinkable have become thinkable and real. The advancement of knowledge is clearly unsteady at best. I doubt whether the racists who invoke the phrase actually consult my book and learn that they are misapplying it. They probably wouldn’t care anyway.

To have provided racists with a scientific-sounding cover for their odious ideas is not something to be particularly proud of, but I can’t take it back. All I can do is disavow it.

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Postscript:: on 12/29, The New York Times published this apology.

There's an arrogant anti-intellectual hereditarian at Harvard who isn't Steven Pinker! Who would have thunk it?

Harvard geneticist David Reich had an op-ed in the New York Times today that I find stimulating. As stupid genetics rants about human variation go, actually this one is better than many of them. Reich positions himself against Henry Harpending, James Watson, Nicholas Wade, and Hitler. So far, so good.

                But Reich, like many geneticists writing about race, does not really know what he is talking about. One of the major scientific accomplishments of the 20^th century was to distinguish the study of race from the study of human variation. Reich works on the latter. But he writes about the former because (1) it’s more interesting; and (2) he doesn’t understand the difference.

                He argues against two groups of non-existent scholars: Those who believe everyone is the same, and those who believe genetics has no effect on cognition or behavior. He condescendingly refers to the first category of strawmen as “well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations.”

                Anthropologists have in fact been studying the differences among populations for a long time. At issue are its patterns. They are, in order: (1) cultural; (2) quantitative; (3) clinal;  and (4) local. If there were no differences among populations, we would not have been able to find that.

                The other category of strawman involves the denial of genetic “influences on behavior and cognition”.  Once again, nobody denies it; at issue are its patterns.  Time was, when geneticists were taught to distinguish between the causes of variation within groups and between groups. The old Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin explained it back in the days of the racist psychologist Arthur Jensen and the racist physicist William Shockley. Suffice it to say that Reich’s examples are all within-group examples.  (They are also correlations, which he implies are causative.  Time was when geneticists were taught that distinction as well.)

This is why it is important, even urgent, that we develop a candid and scientifically up-to-date way of discussing any such differences, instead of sticking our heads in the sand and being caught unprepared when they are found.

Yes, indeed.  The problem is that apparently he has not read widely enough to encounter such a framework.

This is why knowledgeable scientists must speak out. If we abstain from laying out a rational framework for discussing differences among populations, we risk losing the trust of the public and we actively contribute to the distrust of expertise that is now so prevalent. We leave a vacuum that gets filled by pseudoscience, an outcome that is far worse than anything we could achieve by talking openly.

I generally don’t use the word pseudoscience, since it’s usually being propounded by scientists, and only visible in retrospect, like phrenology and eugenics.  Unfortunately the biggest boost that racial pseudoscience has traditionally gotten is the combination of arrogance and ignorance that geneticists have brought.  Remember Bruce Lahn, who identified the genes responsible for the backwardness of Africans in Science in 2005?  It’s not that, as Reich says, “discoveries could be misused to justify racism.” It’s that racism inheres in the research, because the people doing it have often been ignorant and myopic. They are technologists, not scholars; that is the danger.

                Reich fears, like Lahn, that the rest of us may be “anxious about any research into genetic differences among populations.”  Again, no, that’s not the problem at all. It’s that we don’t want racists studying human variation any more than we would want creationists studying bipedalism. We know that their intellectual prejudices corrupt their research.  It’s been going on for a long, long time.

     I can’t wait to read his new book on the racial invasions throughout prehistory.

     And so I guess this reinforces that the answer to the question I posed last year is still "yes".  It's a newer and more benign scientific racism - not the scientific racism of Harpending, Watson, and Wade - but whether it's ankle-deep or hip-deep, racist bullshit is still racist bullshit.

Who wants Charles Murray to speak, and why?

Some years ago, I wrote a broad critique of The Bell Curve, that old Social Darwinist psychology tome from 1994 by the hereditarian psychologist Richard Herrnstein and conservative political theorist Charles Murray. It was in a very nice collection edited by Besteman and Gusterson (who ought to be a law firm, but are actually cultural anthropologists), called Why America’s Top Pundits are Wrong.

             A few years later, Paul Erickson and Liam Murphy included it in their reader on the history of anthropological theory. In fact, the third edition of that reader (2010) actually began with Marx and ended with Marks.  That was pretty cool.  The fourth edition (2013) also started with Marx and included Marks, but had a couple of more readings after Marks.

             They kicked me out of the fifth edition (2016).  No hard feelings, though, because I’m cited in their companion volume, A History ofAnthropological Theory.  But I know why they did it, too.  My essay was very dated. It was criticizing a twenty-year-old bit of pseudoscience, which only old people remember.  Richard Herrnstein is dead.  Charles Murray is just a distant irrelevancy.

            Well, the joke’s on them.  

Charles Murray is back again.  He had surfaced briefly a couple of years ago, when Nicholas Wade’s racist anti-science bullshit called A Troublesome Inheritance was published.  That’s the book that stimulated an issue of critical, negative reviews in the scholarly journal Human Biology, by the likes of Agustin Fuentes, Jennifer Raff, Charles Roseman, Laura Stein, and your humble narrator. It also stimulated a letter in the New York Times by nearly 150 geneticists repudiating Wade’s invocation of their scientific field.  And they ought to know.

In fact, pretty much the only mainstream review of Nicholas Wade that was positive was the one in the Wall Street Journal, by Charles Murray.  So on this side, we have the biological anthropologists and human geneticists in accord that Wade’s racist screed is a perversion of the relevant sciences, in which they are, for all intents and purposes, experts.  And on the other side, the political theorist  Charles Murray, who seems to wish that the "science" in Wade’s book were true, regardless of what the data show and the experts think.  That’s pretty anti-science.  It’s just like the creationists, anti-vaxxers, and climate-change-deniers. What do they all have in common? They like to argue the science with the scientists.

It’s like mansplaining, only less gendered.  Moronsplaining.

So Charles Murray is still out there, still sponsored by the right-wing think-tank called the American Enterprise Institute, and ever ready to publicly hawk a book of pseudoscience that the scientific community repudiates. Still ready to peddle his own antiquated ideologies about rich people being genetically smarter than poor people. And since social programs designed to assist the poor are doomed to failure because the poor are innately stupid, they should be abolished.

              To the extent that class and race are correlated in the US, Murray’s ideas about the poor being genetically stupid make an easy transition into the world of scientific racism.  And it wasn’t accidental.  The Bell Curve cited literature from The Mankind Quarterly, which no mainstream scholar cites, because it is an unscholarly racist journal, supported by the Pioneer Fund, that wacko right-wing philanthropy that has thrown money at wacko eugenicists, racists, segregationists, and hereditarians of all stripes, since its inception in 1937 under the aegis of the wacko eugenicist Harry Laughlin. The Bell Curve also cited the work of that racist wacko psychologist Philippe Rushton – who believed that the mean IQ of Africans is genetically set at 70, and that Africans had been r-selected for high reproductive rate and low intelligence – and then pre-emptively defended his wacko racist ideas in an appendix.  Even the wacko evolutionary psychologists distanced themselves from Rushton, appreciating the toxicity of his ideas: “Bad science and virulent racial prejudice drip like pus from nearly every page of this despicable book,” wrote David Barash in the journal Animal Behaviour.

                But Charles Murray wasn’t smart enough to see it.  He couldn’t see the virulent racial prejudice in the work he was defending.  Or else he was blinded by his own prejudices.  It’s age-old bind: ideologue or idiot?

                And now the alt-right has gained political ascendancy, and Charles Murray is on a speaking tour.  And he gets shouted down and driven off of Middlebury College.  But he gets invited to other colleges and his message is heard. 

He is invited to Notre Dame by a political science professor named Vincent Phillip Muñoz, and is civilly and effectively rebutted by Agustín Fuentes.

But let’s back up a clause or two.  Who is inviting Charles Murray to speak at their college, and why?  At Middlebury, he was invited by Allison Stanger, a professor of international politics and economics, who told her story in the New York Times, as wanting to engage with his ideas. Likewise, Muñoz argues that “Murray makes an important argument that should be heard”. Even the New York Times agrees he should say his piece.

                I’m going to disagree.  Charles Murray talks science that is bogus, and political philosophy that is evil, and uses one to justify the other.  He doesn’t need to be heard by anybody, any more than a creationist, or a pedophile, or an anti-vaxxer deserves to be heard. 

                So this is what I find confusing. In the free marketplace of ideas in contemporary political science, we still entertain the scientific hypothesis that the poor deserve what little they have because they are genetically stupider than the rich? First of all, I don’t know any geneticist who agrees to the the second clause.  A hundred years ago, geneticists believed that. Since the Great Depression, however (which democratized poverty), not too many geneticists have believed it.  (The late Henry Harpending did. That was probably an example of Planck’s Principle.)

                Rather, nearly all contemporary geneticists seem to think that the old lefty J. B. S. Haldane more or less got it right when he said, “The average degree of resemblance between father and son is too small to justify the waste of human potentialities which an hereditary aristocratic system entails.” Let me translate: You inherit a lot of stuff, and some of that stuff is genetic.  But a lot of the most important stuff – like, privilege – is not. And it is a big mistake to confuse the two categories. Consequently, if you are committed to the proposition that genetic properties are more important than everything else, that is a moral proposition not supported by genetics itself, you smug bastard.

                Class advantages are very real, but they aren’t genetic. Doesn’t everybody know that?

                I think it’s kind of weird that political scientists would be willing to entertain ostensibly scientific ideas – in this case about human genetics – that the relevant scientists themselves do not take seriously.

                But Charles Murray isn’t a geneticist.  He is a genetics fanboy. Imagine that you were a professional magician, with a three-year-old child trying to convince you, and everyone else around, that everything important in life is caused by magic.

                That said, however, don’t think I’m going to let geneticists off the hook so easily. Sad to say, there are, and always have been, opportunistic geneticists who recognize the self-interest in telling the public that everything important in their lives is genetic. Over a century ago, there was Reginald C. Punnett, inventor of the eponymous Square, who ended the first English textbook on Mendelian genetics with the conclusion that “progress is question of breeding rather than of pedagogics; a matter of gametes, not training…. [T]he creature is not made, but born.”  The American geneticist Charles Davenport jumped on the Mendelian bandwagon, and soon explained class differences just as Charles Murray does.  But rather than speak of cryptic factors, as Murray does, Davenport  isolated the cause of those class differences in the gene for feeblemindedness.  Rich white people from northern Europe had one allele; everybody else had another. But whether you speak of specific genes for feebleminded or cryptic genetic factors that cause the poor to be stupid, it’s still fake science. 

               The Bell Curve capitalized on the popularity of the Human Genome Project in putting forth its thesis about the genetic stupidity of poor people in the 1990s.  Some geneticists repudiated it, but others recognized, as the geneticists of the 1920s did, that it was good for the business of genetics.  When Science reviewed Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race – a classic of American racist thought, which was read in defense of Karl Brandt at the Nuremberg trials to show that the Germans had simply been doing what the Americans were advocating – it concluded with a sobering thought: “This is a book that will … help to disseminate the ever-growing conviction among scientific men of the supreme importance of heredity.” Sure, the genetic theory in question might be inane, might be evil, and it might be false, but it definitely is good for business. More recently, the Human Genome Project was backed up with all sorts of purple prose about how your DNA sequence was the most important thing about you: The Code of Codes, The Book of Man, and the like.  They knew it was bullshit then, and that’s why there is such interest in epigenetics now. 

               These geneticists are reprehensible, because they provide the hereditarian soil for scientific racism.  The geneticists may not themselves be racists, but their idiotic statements about what they think their knowledge applies to have indeed sometimes crossed over.  James D. Watson, who knows more about DNA than you do, caused a stir a decade ago, when he said that different groups of people have different “powers of reason”.  The rest of the genetics community disagreed, and challenged his own powers of reason.

                And here is the newest exhibit. A video from the famous mouse genetics lab in Bar Harbor, Maine.  It tells you about genetics and genomics, and how genetics controls things like your  eye color and good taste.

Wait, what? (It’s at 0:15). Good taste is genetic?

Well she was a bit coy about it, wasn’t she?  She delivered the line with a giggle, and the disclaimer, “maybe even good taste”.

Geneticists know that good taste is not genetic, because good taste is context-dependent and locally-specific. Geneticists of the 1920s knew that it was in their short term interests to have the public believe that any and all shit was innate.  But the field evolved, and can’t afford to devolve.

It would be nice if we could get beyond genetics-vs-culture, so we could talk more comprehensively about “embodiment”.  But the hereditarians and racists won’t allow it.

We should not be debating the innate intelligence of black people, or of the poor, on college campuses or anywhere.  It is a morally corrupt pseudoscientific proposition. 

It's like inviting a creationist or an inventor of a perpetual motion machine. The university should not be a censor, but it sure as hell is a gatekeeper.  At this point, sometimes they go all radical epistemological relativist and and say that all ideas deserve a hearing.  But all ideas don't deserve a hearing.  The universe of things that do get discussed and debated on college campuses is rather small in proportion to the ideas that people have debated over the years.  Should we stone witches? No. Might the speed of light be 140,000 miles per second, rather than 186,000? No.  Might the universe just be made up of earth, air, water, and fire? No.  Might Africans just be genetically stupid? Might people who want to debate this point have their fundamental civic morality called into question instead?

This also raises bigger problems.  Geneticists that mislead the public about what human genetics explains.  College faculty that can’t identify pseudoscience.  There were, after all, any number of serious refutations of every aspect of The Bell Curve. 

Let me give the last word, then, to Allison Stanger, who invited Charles Murray out to Middlebury College and got roughed up a bit, because she thinks that the innate intelligence of black people ought to be a debatable topic; which apparently ruined the pleasure she ordinarily derives from tormenting marginalized people. As she casually explained it in the New York Times:

I had tough questions on both the controversial “Bell Curve,” in which he partly blames genetics for test score differences among races ... But the event had to be shut down, lest the ensuing dialogue inflict pain on the marginalized.

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[Note:  Apparently Stanger herself did not invite Murray, but “welcomed the opportunity to moderate a talk with him on campus.”  In any case, we still disagree on the central issue of whether the innate intellectual capacities of non-white people should be a subject open for debate on campuses in 2017.]