Excerpts from the chapter on Race of Evolution and the big questions – sex, race, religion, and other matters by David N. Stamos. Italics in original, boldface and hyperlinks added by me. Published electronically by HonestThinking on 12 April 2008.
My primary motivation for making the below excerpts of Chapter 6, Evolution and Race, available here at the HonestThinking web site is to promote what I consider to be an excellent book. My hope is that this will wet the reader's appetite and that he or she will buy the book and read it in its entirety.
My secondary motivation is to use these excerpts as part of a currently ongoing (as of March and April 2008) public debate in Norway, where Dr. Torgeir Skorgen of the University of Bergen has claimed support from this book to his view that race is nothing but a social construction. I consider that a misrepresentation of Stamos’s view, and submit the below excerpts as partial evidence.
My layman’s understanding is that my use of Stamos’s material is in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988, in particular its Chapter III. Should my understanding be in error here, I apologize in advance to Stamos and Blackwell Publishing, and ask to receive instructions telling me what kind of modifications would be necessary in order to bring my use of Stamos's material in line with the pertinent rules and regulations.
Compiled by Ole Jørgen Anfindsen, Ph.D., editor, HonestThinking
Stamos begins this chapter with a general discussion of the legitimacy or lack of such of the very concept of race as applied to Homo sapiens. Quoting from the beginning:
The question of human races and racial differences, as E. O. Wilson (1978) put it, is “the most emotionally explosive and politically dangerous of all subjects” (47-48). It is emotionally explosive because of the horrid history of racism, from slavery and Nazism to the kind of discrimination that fuels the civil rights movements. Certainly the topic has to be treated with great sensitivity. Indeed, I should think that, as with the topic of feminism, empathy is the operative concept here. What is needed is the ability to imagine oneself, as seriously and fully as one can, in the shoes of one who lives with racism every day.
Keeping this in mind, we shall look in this chapter at some common misconceptions about race that are undermined by a basic understanding of evolutionary biology. We shall then look at the standard arguments by biologists for why the concept of race is illegitimate and should be discarded. We shall also, however, look at some recent attempts to revive the concept and give it legitimacy. Next, assuming for the sake of argument that human races are real in some objective sense, we shall examine a variety of arguments concerning the question of whether there are innate behavioral differences between human races, focusing mainly on the hot question of race and IQ. Finally, we shall examine the question of whether there evolved in humans a racism instinct, an innate propensity for racial discrimination. With all of these topics, the search for scientific knowledge and understanding must be tempered with sensitivity toward those who have suffered and continue to suffer the injustice and humiliation – the pain – of racism, and I shall try my best to maintain this balance.
[…]
The real question is whether modern evolutionary biology has any relevance for modern race issues. The answer, quite simply, is a most definite yes, although many people have it stuck in their heads that evolution can only make matters worse. Evolution teaches that we came from monkeys, after all. In the Appendix I deal with this and other misconceptions. Here, in this chapter, it is important to show how evolution undermines many racist assumptions and is actually a powerful ally in the fight against racism. Or at least it is to a large extent, as we shall see when we get into some of the controversies.
For a start, we can quickly dispense with the view that some of the human races came out of the trees later than others, or any similar view. A now dead theory of human evolution is the multiregional model. According to this theory, advocated most famously by the anthropologist Carleton Coon (1962), our species Home sapiens, did not evolve once from our immediate ancestral species, Homo erectus, but five times in five different localities and not all at the same time. Homo erectus evolved in Africa from an earlier hominid species, Homo habilis. Part of erectus then eventually migrated out of Africa, spreading to various regions of the world and diverging into four geographic races or subspecies, resulting in five races or subspecies once one includes the original African population. One by one each of these five races of erectus evolved separately into Homo sapiens, with European erectus passing through the threshold first and African erectus last. As universally recognized today, this is poor evolutionary reasoning (never mind the apparent racism). While Homo erectus did spread out of Africa in a number of migrations, beginning possibly as far back as two million years ago, being well established in China a million years ago and in Europe 800,000 years ago, all the evidence accumulated by paleoanthropology points to the conclusion that anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens, evolved in a single locality in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago and spread out of Africa roughly 100,000 years ago (Tattersall 2000). But more importantly, the probability that five races of the same species in five very different geographic localities would evolve separately into the same species (let alone at different times), with all of the resulting races perfectly reproductively compatible, is so vanishingly small that the theory is not worth the paper it is written on. In spite of the fact that evolutionary convergence is a widespread and well known phenomenon – eyes, for example, evolved at least 40 times in the animal kingdom – convergence at the species level, let alone five times over, is the poorest kind of evolutionary thinking. No professional biologist takes it seriously today.
In short, we are all African under the skin. This brings us to another common misconception about human races, namely, that they divide along color lines. This view, popular among the public, is completely undermined by evolutionary biology. Quite simply, skin color does not correlate with geography. One cannot say that blacks, for example, are from Africa, or that whites are from Europe. This is because dark skin is an equatorial trait (not an African one), and adaptation to high UV levels. […] In all of this, there is no higher or lower, no moral superiority or inferiority. Instead, what we have here are traits that evolved adaptively to different environments. Nothing more, nothing less. The same applies to other traits that are typically focused on as racial characteristics, such as hair types, nose types, and body structure types, the short stocky build of Eskimos, for example, being an adaptation for minimizing heat loss, while the tall lean build of Kenyans being an adaptation for promoting heat loss (see Feder and Park 1993, 337).
[…]
This leads us to what many consider the ultimate implication of modern evolutionary biology for racial issues, namely, the elimination of the concept of race altogether. This, however, is where the real debate begins.
[…]
This feature of reproductive compatibility between all human populations need not, however, preclude the concept of human races (plural), since if geographically separate populations each breed from within (endogamy) for enough generations they could then evolve distinguishable features from other human populations (potential interbreeding is not actual interbreeding, after all). And, of course, ever since our species spread out from Africa roughly 100,000 years ago via the Middle East, it has migrated and settled in virtually all parts of the world, reaching Australia, for example, at least 40,000 years ago and North America roughly 15,000 years ago (Feder and Park 1993, 301). Moreover, cultural separation has often served to keep human populations apart when geographic separation has not. Not surprisingly, then, many biologists have argued that the concept of different races does indeed apply to the human species.
For example, this was the consensus arrived at in a symposium held in 1966 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a symposium dedicated to provide “an inventory of what science has to say about race” so as to “help to dispel the evil myths that persist about race” (Light 1968, vii, viii), in particular “pseudoscientific statements which … have attempted to prove the innate biological inferiority of the group of Americans who are socially classified as Negro” (Mead 1968a, 3). As Mayr (1968) put the consensus, “Quite rightly all the speakers said that if you define races properly, then, yes, there are races” (103). For Mayr and many others, that meant geographic races, local populations that are describable and distinguishable in statistical terms. Indeed, for Mayr, “when you look at animals (and a botanist finds the same thing with plants), there is hardly a species that does not also have geographic races.” The problem is when to group local populations into races. As Mayr points out, in one anthropology textbook one finds that there are five human races, in another that there are sixty-five human races. For Mayr, “how to draw the line between them is not only difficult, it is impossible” (103). However, if the idea that there is at present an objective number of human races is erroneous, there is also, according to Mayr, “the equally erroneous extreme thinking of the total identity of everybody” (105).
Mayr’s view seems to be, then, that the reality for most species (really, for all but extremely small and local species – endemic species) is geographic variation and that the term used to classify this variation, race (often also subspecies in zoology, variety in botany), is vague and flexible but necessary. This view was (and remains, as we shall see later) hardly idiosyncratic. Dwight Ingle (1968), for example, another participant in the symposium, pointed out that the concept of cancer is equally difficult to define and yet it would be ridiculous to say that cancer “does not exist and should not be studied” (114). Theodosius Dobzhansky (1968a) added that if the definition of race were so clear as to permit “exact, nonoverlapping, discrete entities,” then “we would not have races, we would have distinct species” (165). Yet for Dobzhansky, one of the key architects of the Modern Synthesis, “To deny the existence of racial differences within the human species is futile” (166). Indeed, for Dobzhansky (1968b), “If man has no races … why then are the inhabitants of different countries often recognizably different?” (78).
Remarkably, only a few years earlier, in an anthology edited by the British physical anthropologist Ashley Montagu (1964), Montagu and nine others concluded that the concept of race, including that of human races, is illegitimate from a scientific point of view, that the concept is a myth. As Montagu put it, the “unanimity of the views independently arrived at” (xviii) was that “Race is the phlogiston of our time” (xii). For Montagu and his contributors, there are no “different populations of the same species which are distinguished one from another by the possession of certain distinctive hereditary traits” (xi), no “discrete unit characterized by a particular complex of physical attributes (xviii). Such “typological thinking” is mistaken. The reality, instead, is continuous variation within a species, such that “whatever populations are considered they are always found to grade gradually into or incline toward others” (xvii).
What is interesting when comparing these two anthologies is that both represent a mixed bag of academics (Mead’s anthology includes nine biologists, six anthropologists, and four psychologists, while Montagu’s anthology includes seven anthropologists and three biologists), both are against racism and any idea of racial superiority or inferiority, both accept evolution and the biological species concept, and yet both come to diametrically opposite conclusions on the concept of race, one concluding that it is a legitimate biological concept, the other that it is a myth, a social construction. We cannot attribute this difference to the national backgrounds of the contributors, since for both anthologies they were mainly American. Of course, the period in which both anthologies appeared is surely significant. It was the highly turbulent 1960s, the decade in which the civil rights movements reached their peak, and as many outside of science have argued, scientists are not as immune to social, political, and cultural influences as they generally like to think. But I do not believe that is the fundamental reason for the profound difference between the two anthologies. Instead, I believe the difference trades on a longstanding ambiguity lurking within the concept of race. If one focuses on the concept of race as a primarily geographic concept, in some degree that of an incipient species, as those in the Mead anthology did, then one gets the view that races are in some sense real, whereas if one focuses on the concept of race as a primarily character-trait concept, as those in the Montagu anthology did, then one gets the view that races are arbitrary and hence not real.
After a discussion of three possible concepts of race (geographic, ecotypical, and cladistic), Stamos turns his attention to “two fairly recent and highly controversial works on human race and IQ that actually feed off of each other”:
The first is The Bell Curve (1994) by Richard Herrnstein, a Harvard psychologist, and Charles Murray, a political scientist at The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative thinktank in Washington DC. The second is Race, Evolution, and Behavior (1995, 2000) by Philippe Rushton, a Canadian psychologist.
After discussing scientific objections to The Bell Curve, Stamos remarks that
All of this cannot, however, be used to deny that the difference in average IQ scores between blacks and whites in America is partly genetic. It still might be. It might also be that blacks in America have a higher average genetic IQ than whites in America. But is that the end of it? Is there nothing else that weighs in on the question of race and IQ?
This is where Philippe Rushton’s work comes in. I said earlier that Rushton’s book and The Bell Curve feed off of each other. In Race, Evolution, and Behavior, Rushton often cites an earlier work by Herrnstein, agreeing with its data and conclusions. And in the Preface to the third edition of Rushton’s book (2000), which serves as an abstract and an update, he does the same for The Bell Curve. In The Bell Curve on the other hand, Herrnstein and Murray favorably cite earlier publications by Rushton in which he applies r- and K-selection theory to explain racial differences in IQ as well as other differences such as athletic ability, promiscuity, and crime rates. […] Humans clearly are a K-selection species, but according to Rushton the three basic human races did not involve the same degree of K-selection. […]
As Rushton (2000) is quick to point out, “these three-way differences are averages. The full range of behaviors, good and bad, is found in every race” (P11). This is the sort of thing one should expect for an evolutionary argument, since biology is, after all, statistical. What is interesting is the kind of replies Rushton’s evolutionary argument has evoked. The biologist Joseph Graves, for example, […] [makes the following claim]:
Professional biologists now consider r- and K-selection theory as virtually useless. Biologists began to expose the fallacies in this concept in the late 1970s. Since that time, multiple experiments have failed to corroborate the core premises of r- and K-selection theory. (175)
The problem with this claim, however, is that it will come as a total surprise to many professional biologists. For example, in an anthology devoted to concepts in ecology (Cherrett 1989), published over a decade after Graves’s supposed demise of r- and K-selection theory, the theory continued to be applied to many examples in nature. […] The upshot of all this is that while it is too strong a claim to say that r- and K-selection theory is dead, its application to human evolutionary history is at best controversial.
Even more serious is the main criticism of Rushton by Alland (2002), who devotes a chapter to Rushton in his book. According to Alland, Rushton and all the scientists who provide quoted support for his book in the inside cover of the third edition – his “coterie of admirers” (161), which includes famous race researchers such as Arthur Jensen, Hans Eysenck, and Charles Murray – received generous research grants from the Pioneer Fund. This organization, Alland is quick to point out, is “noted for its support of racist research,” it had in its earliest years “praised aspects of Nazi Germany’s racial policies” (8), [and some more along these lines].
Whether these allegations are true or not, it does not really matter, since, from a logical point of view, they commit at least three fallacies when used, as they are by Alland, to reject an argument, in this case Rushton’s evolutionary argument for racial differences. The first is the genetic fallacy, […] The next is guilt by association. […] Finally, there is circumstantial ad hominem. A person’s motive in making an argument, whether that motive is conscious or not, has no bearing whatsoever on the logical worth of the argument. An argument is an autonomous entity, and it needs to be analyzed accordingly, in terms of whether the premises are true, relevant, and sufficient. The motive of the person who provided the argument is totally irrelevant. All of these points are readily available in books on what is known as informal logic, and students will readily agree with them when they examine them in theory and see them applied to mundane examples, but it all has a habit of going out the window in the context of hot topics such as race (others are feminism and religion). […]
[…]
[…] What [a particular argument by Richard Lewontin] seriously ignores, however, are two basic facts about genes. First, all it takes is a single base change in a gene, a single change in a DNA letter, to make a significant change in the phenotypic expression of the gene. Hence a little genetic variation can go a long way. Second, not all genes are on a par. Most genes are structural genes, but some genes are master or regulatory genes, turning structural genes on and off during development. A small variation in a master or regulatory gene, then, can go an even longer way in making a difference between two phenotypes. […] As it turns out, what [Lewontin] says about genetic variation in human populations is actually perfectly consistent with claims about racial differences such as Rushton’s. The racial differences can reside in relatively few key differences in structural and in master or regulatory genes, some of them the result of genetic drift, but more importantly some of them favored by natural selection. The averages cited by Lewontin are just plain irrelevant, since they are only averages in genetic variation and nothing more; as such, they cannot help but to obscure the above point. […]
At this point my own motives have probably come under suspicion, but I really do not care. My only desire has been to argue that, from an evolutionary point of view, there is nothing inherently mistaken or wrongheaded, let alone evil, in supposing that there are racial (geographic, cladistic, or ecotypic) differences in IQ or in other character traits within wide-ranging species such as Homo sapiens. Any aversion to research in this area is basically socially and politically motivated, it is not biologically motivated. At the end of the day, when all is said and done, it remains possible – indeed, quite possible – that from a modern evolutionary point of view there are innate statistical differences, even significant differences, in aptitude and behavior between different human races. […] Equal opportunity combined with a positive environment is the moral imperative. But we should not let the value of this imperative fool us into believing that biology makes us equal. Like it or not, biology just does not work that way. We need to be realistic, and to remember that we are always dealing with statistical phenomena. At any rate, for my own part, I prefer to rest content with the wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr., who said it is not the color of a man’s skin that matters but the content of his character. Truer words were never spoken, possibly even if repeated from an evolutionary point of view.
See also excerpts from the introductory chapter of the same book.
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