A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (3 page)

PERVERSIONS OF SCIENCE

Imperialists, calling upon Darwinism in defense of the subjugation of weaker races, could point to
The Origin of Species
, which referred in its subtitle to
The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life
. Darwin had been talking about pigeons, but the imperialists saw no reason why his theories should not apply to men.

—R
ICHARD
H
OFSTADTER
¹

I
deas about race, many of them generated by biologists, have been exploited to justify slavery, to sterilize people deemed unfit and, in Hitler’s Germany, to conduct murderous campaigns against innocent and defenseless segments of society such as Gypsies, homosexuals and mentally ill children. Most chilling of all was the horrific fusion of eugenic ideas with notions of racial purity that drove the National Socialists to slaughter some 6 million Jews in the territories under their control.

Because there could be no more serious caution for any who would
inquire into the nature of race, the errors that lured people and governments down these mistaken paths need first to be understood.

Racism is a surprisingly modern concept, the word first appearing in the
Oxford English Dictionary
only in 1910. Before that, ethnic prejudice existed in profusion and still does. The ancient Greeks applied the word barbarian to anyone who didn’t speak Greek. China has long called itself the Central Kingdom, regarding as barbarians all who live outside its borders. The click-speaking bushmen of the Kalahari Desert divide the world into Ju|’hoansi, or “real people,” such as themselves, and !ohm
,
a category that includes other Africans, Europeans and inedible animals such as predators. Europeans link nationality with edibility in devising derogatory names for one another. Thus the French refer to the English as
les rosbifs
(“roast beefs”), while the English call the French
frogs
(as in frogs’ legs, a French delicacy) and Germans
krauts
(from sauerkraut, or fermented cabbage).

The central premise of racism, which distinguishes it from ethnic prejudice, is the notion of an ordered hierarchy of races in which some are superior to others. The superior race is assumed to enjoy the right to rule others because of its inherent qualities.

Besides superiority, racism also connotes the idea of immutability, thought once to reside in the blood and now in the genes. Racists are concerned about intermarriage (“the purity of the blood”) lest it erode the basis of their race’s superiority. Since quality is seen as biologically inherent, the racist’s higher status can never be challenged, and inferior races can never redeem themselves. The notion of inherent superiority, which is generally absent from mere ethnic prejudice, is held to justify unlimited abuse of races held to be inferior, from social discrimination to annihilation. “The essence of racism is that it regards individuals as superior or inferior because they are imagined to share physical, mental and moral attributes with the group to which they are deemed to belong, and it is assumed that
they cannot change these traits individually,” writes the historian Benjamin Isaac.
²

It’s not surprising that the notion of racial superiority emerged in the 19th century, after European nations had established colonies in much of the world and sought a theoretical justification of their dominion over others.

At least two other strands of thought fed into modern ideologies of racism. One was the effort by scientists to classify the many human populations that European explorers were able to describe. The other was that of Social Darwinism and eugenics.

In the 18th century Linnaeus, the great classifier of the world’s organisms, recognized four races, based principally on geography and skin color. He named them
Homo americanus
(Native Americans),
Homo europaeus
(Europeans),
Homo asiaticus
(East Asians) and
Homo afer
(Africans). Linnaeus did not perceive a hierarchy of races, and he listed people alongside the rest of nature.

In a 1795 treatise called
On the Natural Variety of Mankind
, the anthropologist Johann Blumenbach described five races based on skull type. He added a Malay race, essentially people of Malaya and Indonesia, to Linnaeus’s four, and he invented the useful word Caucasian to denote the peoples of Europe, North Africa and the Indian subcontinent. The origin of the name was due in part to his belief that the people of Georgia, in the southern Caucasus, were the most beautiful and in part to the then prevailing view that Noah’s ark had set down on Mount Ararat in the Caucasus, making the region the homeland of the first people to colonize the earth.

Blumenbach has been unjustly tarred with the supremacist beliefs
of his successors. In fact he opposed the idea that some races were superior to others, and he conceded that his appraisal of Caucasian comeliness was subjective.
³
His views on Caucasian beauty can more reasonably be ascribed to ethnic prejudice than to racism. Moreover Blumenbach insisted that all humans belonged to the same species, as against the view then emerging that the human races were so different from one another as to constitute different species.

Up until Blumenbach, the study of human races was a reasonably scientific attempt to understand and explain human variation. The more dubious turn taken in the 19th century was exemplified by Joseph-Arthur Comte de Gobineau’s book
An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races
, published in 1853–55. Gobineau was a French aristocrat and diplomat, not a scientist, and a friend and correspondent of de Tocqueville. His book was a philosophical attempt to explain the rise and fall of nations, based essentially on the idea of racial purity. He assumed there were three races recognized by the skin colors of white, yellow and black. A pure race might conquer its neighbors, but as it interbred with them, it would lose its edge and risk being conquered in turn. The reason, Gobineau supposed, was that interbreeding leads to degeneracy.

The superior race, Gobineau wrote, was that of the Indo-Europeans, or Aryans, and their continuance in the Greek, Roman and European empires. Contrary to what might be expected from Hitler’s exploitation of his works, Gobineau greatly admired Jews, whom he described as “a people that succeeded in everything it undertook, a free, strong, and intelligent people, and one which, before it lost, sword in hand, the name of an independent nation, had given as many learned men to the world as it had merchants.”

Gobineau’s ambitious theory of history was built on sand. There is no factual basis for his notions of racial purity or racial degeneration through interbreeding. His ideas would doubtless have been forgotten but for the pernicious theme of an Aryan master race. Hitler
adopted this worthless concept while ignoring Gobineau’s considerably more defensible observations about Jews.

To Gobineau’s assertion of inequality between races was then added the divisive idea that the various human populations represented not just different races but also different species. A leading proponent of this belief was the Philadelphia physician Samuel Morton.

Morton’s views were driven into error not by prejudice but by his religious faith. He was troubled by the fact that black and white people were depicted in Egyptian art from 3000
BC
yet the world itself had been created only in 4004
BC
, according to the widely accepted chronology drawn up by Archbishop Ussher from information derived from the Old Testament and elsewhere. This was not enough time for different races to emerge, so the races must have been created separately, Morton argued, a valid inference if Ussher’s chronology had been even remotely correct.

Morton amassed a large collection of skulls from all over the world, measuring the volume occupied by the brain and other details that in his view established the distinctness of the four principal races. He effectively ranked them in a hierarchy by adding subjective descriptions of each race’s behavior to his careful anatomical measurements of their skulls. Europeans are the earth’s “fairest inhabitants,” he wrote. Next were Mongolians, meaning East Asians, deemed “ingenious, imitative and highly susceptible of cultivation.” Third place was assigned to Americans, meaning Native Americans, whose mental faculties appeared to Morton as locked in a “continual childhood,” and fourth were Negroes, or Africans, who Morton said “have little invention, but strong powers of imitation, so that they readily acquire mechanic arts.”

Morton was an academic and did not promote any practical consequences of his ideas. But his followers had no hesitation in spelling out their interpretation that the races had been created separately,
that blacks were inferior to whites and that the slavery of the American South was therefore justified.

Morton’s data present an interesting case study of how a scientist’s preconceptions can affect his results, despite the emphasis in scientific training on the critical importance of objectivity. The Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould, a widely read essayist, accused Morton of having mismeasured the cranial volumes of African and Caucasian skulls in order to support the view that brain size is related to intelligence. Gould didn’t remeasure Morton’s skulls, but he recomputed Morton’s published statistical analysis and estimated that all four races had skull volumes of about the same size. Gould’s accusations were published in
Science
and in his widely cited 1981 book
The Mismeasure of Man.

But in a surprising recent twist, the bias now turns out to have been Gould’s. Morton did not in fact believe, as Gould asserted, that intelligence was correlated with brain size. Rather, he was measuring his skulls to study human variation as part of his inquiry into whether God had created the human races separately. A team of physical anthropologists remeasured all of the skulls they could identify in Morton’s collection and found his measurements were almost invariably correct. It was Gould’s statistics that were in error, they reported, and the errors lay in the direction of supporting Gould’s incorrect belief that there was no difference in cranial capacity between Morton’s groups. “Ironically, Gould’s own analysis of Morton is likely the stronger example of a bias influencing results,” the Pennsylvania team wrote.
⁴

The authors noted that “Morton, in the hands of Stephen Jay Gould, has served for 30 years as a textbook example of scientific misconduct.” Moreover Gould had suggested that science as a whole is an imperfect process because bias such as Morton’s is common. This, the authors suggested, is incorrect: “The Morton case, rather
than illustrating the ubiquity of bias, instead shows the ability of science to escape the bounds and blinders of cultural contexts.”

There are two lessons to be drawn from the Morton-Gould imbroglio. One is that scientists, despite their training to be objective observers, are as fallible as anyone else when their emotions or politics are involved, whether they come from the right or, as in Gould’s case, from the left.

A second is that, despite the personal failings of some scientists, science as a knowledge-generating system does tend to correct itself, though often only after considerable delay. It is during these delay periods that great harm can be caused by those who use uncorrected scientific findings to propagate injurious policies. Scientists’ attempts to classify human races and to understand the proper scope of eugenics were both hijacked before the two fields could be fully corrected.

A firm refutation of the idea that human races were different species was supplied by Darwin. In
On the Origin of Species,
published in 1859, he laid out his theory of evolution but, perhaps preferring to take one step at a time, said nothing in particular about the human species. Humans were covered in his second volume,
The Descent of Man,
which appeared 12 years later. With his unerring good sense and insight, Darwin decreed that the human races, however distinct they might appear, were not nearly different enough to be considered separate species, as the followers of Samuel Morton and others were contending.

He started out by observing that “if a naturalist, who had never before seen a Negro, Hottentot, Australian or Mongolian, were to compare them . . . he would assuredly declare that they were as good species as many to which he had been in the habit of affixing specific names.”

In support of such a view (Darwin is making the best contrary case before he knocks it down), he noted that the various human races are fed on by different kinds of lice. “The surgeon of a whaling ship
in the Pacific”—Darwin had a far-flung network of informants—“assured me that when the Pediculi, with which some Sandwich Islanders on board swarmed, strayed onto the bodies of the English sailors, they died in the course of three or four days.” So if the parasites on human races are distinct species, it “might fairly be urged as an argument that the races themselves ought to be classified as distinct species,” Darwin suggested.

On the other hand, whenever two human races occupy the same area, they interbreed, Darwin noted. Also, the distinctive traits of each race are highly variable. Darwin cited the example of the extended labia minora (“Hottentot apron”) of bushmen women. Some women have the apron, but not all do.

The strongest argument against treating the races of men as separate species, in Darwin’s view, “is that they graduate into each other, independently in many cases, as far as we can judge, of their having intercrossed.” This graduation is so extensive that people trying to enumerate the number of human races were all over the map in their estimates, which ranged from 1 to 63, Darwin noted. But every naturalist trying to describe a group of highly varying organisms will do well to unite them into a single species, Darwin observed, for “he has no right to give names to objects which he cannot define.”

Anyone reading works of anthropology can hardly fail to be impressed by the similarities between the races. Darwin noted “the pleasure which they all take in dancing, rude music, acting, painting, tattooing and otherwise decorating themselves; in their mutual comprehension of gesture-language, by the same expression in their features, and by the same inarticulate cries, when excited by the same emotions.” When the principle of evolution is accepted, “as it surely will be before long,” Darwin wrote hopefully, the dispute as to whether humans belong to a single species or many “will die a silent and unobserved death.”