by Vincent Sarich, Frank Miele
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Product Description
The conventional wisdom in contemporary social science claims that human races are not biologically valid categories. Many argue the very words '”race” and “racial differences” should be abolished because they support racism. In Race, Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele challenge both these tenets. First, they cite the historical record, the art and literature of other civilizations and cultures, morphological studies, cognitive psychology, and the latest research in medical genetics, forensics, and the human genome to demonstrate that racial differences are not trivial, but very real. They conclude with the paradox that, while, scientific honesty requires forthright recognition of racial differences, public policy should not recognize racial-group membership. The evidence and issues raised in this book will be of critical interest to students of race in behavioral and political science, medicine, and law.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
 Slow Progress?, 2008-02-09
Prevailing social dogma, from which dissent is effectively prohibited, asserts that "race does not exist." "Racism," however, does (a neat trick), thereby justifying institutional accumulation of data on race and the systematic implementation across the legal and cultural spectrum of laws and policies discriminating against a single group.
It is manifestly obvious to everyone, including race deniers, that race does in fact exist. Race denial is driven by ethnic and ideological animus, not scientific empiricism. The leading academic architects of the dogma--Franz Boas, "Ashley Montagu" (Israel Ehrenberg), Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, and Jared Diamond--as well as the creator of PBS television's race denial documentary, Race: The Power of an Illusion (all are discussed in the book), belong to an ethnic group exempt from official discrimination, and share a Left-wing ideological tilt that is sometimes extreme (Marxist).
In an ideologically Orwellian atmosphere there is always a need for the statement of simple truths. This the authors set out to do.
Both are associated with Skeptic magazine, journalist Frank Miele, the author of Intelligence, Race, and Genetics: Conversations with Arthur R. Jensen, as senior editor, and Vincent Sarich, emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, as a member of the magazine's editorial board. Sarich's most notable career achievement is the co-development of the "molecular clock," a genetic technique for constructing phylogenetic trees and determining dates when species (or human races) diverged.
Do the authors succeed in their aim? This question must be answered on two levels: the societal, and the inner court of the mind.
On the first level they necessarily fail, as everyone must. "Race does not exist" is dogma maintained by laws and social sanctions. Societies that scorn freedom of thought do not permit proscribed positions to be rationally discussed in the public arena. Therefore, the authors' failure in the social realm is a foregone conclusion completely unrelated to evidence or arguments; it is purely a function of force. For this book to have an impact, a culture of intellectual freedom and honesty would have to exist.
What of the independent, rational (if there be such) mind, which power and group conformity don't yet control? There, the argument succeeds--though not without difficulty. The problem is that key elements of the authors' case rely heavily upon technical expertise in genetics, and are difficult for educated non-technical readers to evaluate. Nevertheless, there is sufficient common sense scattered throughout the book to insure that the authors ultimately succeed in making their case.
Miele and Sarich define races as fuzzy sets of "populations, or groups of populations, within a species, that are separated geographically from other such populations or groups of populations and distinguishable from them on the basis of heritable features."
Humans and chimpanzees are genetically 98.9% the same, and different human races 99.9% the same, race deniers assert. (Anthropologist Peter Frost calls this ploy the "small percentage fallacy.") And yet, say the authors, imagine "a random assortment of fifty humans and fifty chimpanzees. No one . . . would have any difficulty in reconstituting the original fifty-member sets by simple inspection . . ." Likewise, applied to 150 humans selected 1/3 each from Japan, Malawi, and Norway, "[a]gain, by simple inspection, we would achieve the same 100 percent sorting accuracy." Moreover, if the 100% rule is relaxed so the criterion is "nearer the 75 percent that has often sufficed for the recognition of races in other species, then obviously the number [of identifiable human races] would be very large." The great population geneticist Sewall Wright (died 1988), who asserted the reality of race throughout his life, likewise employed this technique.
A uniquely useful feature of the book is a table entitled "Three possible scenarios for race in the new millennium." For each scenario the authors objectively identify a list of accompanying advantages and disadvantages.
The first scenario they call "Meritocracy in the Global Marketplace"--globalization characterized by non-discrimination, including non-discrimination against whites. It embraces the physical extinction of European-derived populations worldwide, while de facto preserving non-whites. In other words, it represents current thinking, but with explicitly anti-white laws and policies removed. An international, racially intermarrying cosmopolitan elite will dominate. This is the authors' preferred option.
The reason why a globalist order, even with present anti-white laws removed, will lead to the extinction of whites (which, again, does not perturb the authors) is simple: the racial makeup of vast regions of the world, "including China, India, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East, which have not changed in recorded history," are also not going to change anytime soon. "This is not the case in the developed world, however, where birthrates have been plunging for the past two centuries to the point that they are currently below replacement level . . ." Barring some radical change in ideology and social policy, "the United States and Western Europe each year will see an increasing percentage of the population composed of . . . immigrants . . . from the underdeveloped countries of the Third World." The "ultimate evolutionary irony" is that Europeans, "having conquered and colonized the world," "brought about their own extinction."
The remaining scenarios, both disfavored by the authors, are intensified "Affirmative Action and Race Norming" (anti-white discrimination) or "Resegregation and the Emergence of Ethno-States."
A thought-provoking section near the end of the book discusses bioweapons designed to kill only members of specific races--which genetics has rendered feasible. South Africa and Israel have researched the development of such weapons. (White South Africa, of course, no longer exists.) This says much about the race deniers' position: for if Jews are not a race, then bioweapons targeting Arabs or Europeans would also kill Jews. But such evidently is not the case.
In sum, a worthwhile book containing useful information and insights.
15 of 82 people found the following review helpful:
 One of the silliest, most blatant agenda-driven books ever, 2006-01-20
Recently, leading intellectuals in the fields of genetics, human biology, and physical anthropology have been engaged in an ongoing debate as to the validity (or lack thereof) of "race" as an accurate way of measuring human biological variation. While this is one of the pre-eminent matters of current debate in each of these fields, most scientists today are rejecting racial categories as biologically meaningless.
After reading this book in its entirety, it was painfully obvious that the authors created a strawman argument and based their entire book off of it. Their strawman is the ridiculous act of asserting that those who question the scientific validity of racial categories are denying that there are any biological differences whatsoever across human populations. This illogical stunt may fool the layreader, but will fool no one with a background in human biology. Certainly there are physical and genetic differences across the human species (as a quick glance around the streets of Chicago or New York indicate). The real question is not weather diversity exists, but weather such biological diversity can consistently and precisely be classified into racial categories.
Evolutionary biologists and physical anthropologists cite four key points that discredit the idea of biologically discrete human races: no agreement or even measurement as to the number of human races that exist, the nature of continuous variation of most human phenotypic traits, nonconcordance of what most people assume to be "racial" genetic traits (a la sickle cell anemia and skin color), and variation between "racial" groups.
Sarich and Miele have attempted to pull the wool over people's eyes by presenting a strawman argument loaded with political rhetoric (post-modernist this and that, liberal agenda, political correctness, etc), all the while preaching to the choir and failing to prove that racial categories are biologically valid.
10 of 99 people found the following review helpful:
 the same old same old..., 2006-01-09
There's "scientific" hype attached to this argument, but it's the same stuff we've been treated to since the earliest attempts by Europeans to rationalize colonialism and slavery. When you've got some moron blathering about "communist propaganda" in a short review lauding this book, you know this is just red meat for the dogs. And Steve Sailer is a notorious far-right apologist for racialist theories who regularly hangs his hat at the neo-racist VDARE website. If you want a taste of what's behind this line of argument and where it all leads, check them out. The fact that the author invokes breeds of dogs to rationalize his discredited theories is proof enough of how far out on a limb these guys are. I, incidentally, live in a town and a neighborhood that's as mixed ethnically as any in America and have a "racially mixed" family, so I know up close and personal how this crap is just feeding some very ugly strains in our body politic and that it has all of the scientific gravitas of one of Charles Murray's synthetic tracts or the "Hutu" vs. "Tutsi" faux-tribal inheritance of European colonial masters that was used to justify genocide in Rwanda. Europeans aren't the only guilty parties, but any notion of European genetic superiority is a grotesque legacy of one of history's ugliest epochs. Read "Guns, Germs and Steel" if you want to dig into the basis of human "difference" in a historical as opposed to a recycled racist context.
38 of 54 people found the following review helpful:
 good introductory book to race and evolution using modern DNA science, 2005-08-21
This is the first serious book i have read about race and I learnt alot about the early evolution of ape and man and how the development of DNA testing proceeded to reach its current accurate stage of been able to differentiate not only individuals but races.
This book covers 3 basic topics in order-
1) a historical account of how ancient civilizations like Aztecs, Egytians and Romans etc recognised and treated the racial groups in their empires.
2)Early anthropolgy and its disputes between its famous scientists, leading to DNA methods that prove the birthdates of man-ape and modern man.
3)Showing how real race differences exist today, in sport, medicine and measured IQ. Also examples of how race can be integrated into modern societies by either Meritocracy, Affirmative Action or EthnoStates.
The author Sarich? is occasionally a bit glib in some of his remarks but there is nothing controversial or heretical in this book. Both authors do get a bit personal with their ideological opponents but anyone with any interest in DNA/race is aware of the ideologies that some vehemently proscribe to in the name of denying race.
I really enjoyed this book and although i would have liked it to contain more data on the modern race groupings it really brought my understanding of race and evolution into the new millennium.
40 of 140 people found the following review helpful:
This is a dreadful book, 2005-06-20
Can I give zero stars? I would if I could. This is a dreadful book, destroying science to pander to racist goals. Sarich is a known and respected scientist but in this book he mostly leans on that respect to promote his most unscientific racist agenda. He ignores a great deal of evidence of the range of human variation, the lack of correlation of most genes with color. He says that those of us who attack the race concept won't provide a workable definition to refute. But there is, in fact, a perfectly workable definition of race that has been stated many times, but that they ignore. Races, if they existed would be tightly bound groups of people, very homogeneous within and markedly distinct from others. This is a preposterous idea to defend given what is known of human variation across and WITHIN groups and the authors for the most part don't even try. Variations like color and nose shape are each on a continuum and cannot be partitioned clearly except in an absolutely arbitrary way; and supposed "Racial" traits like color, shapes of nose, eyes, lips,hair and hair color, the sickle cell trait and many others don't correlate with one another. (Sickle cell disease, despite popular stereotypes, is relatively rare among dark skinned populations, found in only a few groups; and it also occurs in many light skinned populations. Black skin has appeared many times separately in human evolution. The authors simply ignore the enormous number (in fact great majority) of highly varied populations around the world that don't match their stereotypes in order to stick to their recognition and manipulation of three great "races."
But when the book moves from the genetics of human variation to IQ and cultural performance, the author's ignorance is even more appalling. They know nothing at all about variations in human behavior or the science of IQ testing and the problems with tests described repeatedly in the literature. Their claim, offered twice out of the blue, that the average intelligence of Sub-Saharan Africa is 70, would imply individuals and whole societies that were simply dysfunctional. Even my IQ-believing friends find that number absolutely preposterous. Anyone with any knowledge of African cultures and accomplishments would find the number silly. The sense of IQ and the culture and life histories of blacks comes from JP Rushton, a noted racist who the authors make no attempt to challenge in any way. Rushton uses a bizarre choice of questions and highly manipulated data that are easily dismissed by anyone with anthropological knowledge Sarich and Miele know nothing about the content of the tests, the conditions under which they were given, the tested population, the language in which tested--literally hundreds of languages if the results refer to all of SubSaharan Africa.
They and the people who's work they use ignore all of these problems and ignore the power of human culture including our own to limit peoples perception of the culture of others. They completely ignore the enormous problems of testing IQ across cultural boundaries, which are sometimes very subtle. I could go on at great length but I will conclude by saying that the only reason to read this book is to recognize parody of science.
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