Race Unreal?

Key Words: Race, geographical races, race prejudice, racial classification, ciassificatory systems.

Despite its length and abundant references, Biondi and Rickards 2002 present scarcely any argument against the race concept. Their survey of the history of this concept is not germane to its validity, and while the pronouncements cited of contemporary scientists and scientific organizations would normally carry great weight, in this case public disparagement of race may not express private judgment. Denial of race supports current atacks on race prejudice in the strongest way possible, by affirming that bigots literally are talking nonsense. Hoping to do good, scientists may be as ready to say what is deemed wholesome as what they think is true.

In fact, Biondi and Rickards rely on a single datum to invalidate race, the genetic continuity of all human populations. They repeat this point numerous times: "Races 'graduate into each other' [Darwin] said," "'[Similarities between neighboring races are so great that individuals cannot be assigned with certainty to one group or another' [citing Boas]," "The use of the dine concept or the gradual transition. . . turned out to be so damaging for the concept of race," "Human biological variability is continuously distributed; human biological classifications are [therefore?] arbitrary," "Menozzi, Piazza and Cavalli-Sforza (1987) showed that allele frequencies were overlapping with continuous distribution patterns, called clines, among populations," and "'let us not fall into the trap of accepting races as valid biologically discrete categories' [citing Sauer]," Presumably this is how "the concept of race was falsified by comparing the prediction of the hypothesis to empirical observation." I note that many other critics of race rest their case on the continuity of populations.

By itself, this point does not impugn racial classifications, since many classification schemes draw borders through flux. The North Pole is regarded as "arctic" and Sarawak "tropical," although Sarawak can he reached from the Norlh Pole by tiny steps no one of which is marked hy noticeable climatic change. Despite continuous variation in stellar temperatures, astronomers put stars neatly into spectral types. Swedes may be grouped with Swedes and Bantus with Bantus so long as the mean Swede differs from the mean Bantu, despite the existence of intermediate individuals or fertile Swedish/Bantu matings. Certainly, observers will almost always noncollusively agree in classifying individuals by race. Appeal to continuity as a disproof of race needs the added assumption that races must be discontinuous - an assumption Bondi and Rickards never formulate explicitly and endorse only by implication: "'Variability does not conform to the discrete packages labeled races'" (citing Livingstone). Nonetheless, the assumption is critical.

And (to repeat), given that some arbitrariness and vagueness at the margins is tolerated elsewhere, it is not clear why-populations must be biometrically or psychometrically or genetically discrete to count as races. Bondi and Rickards never say, and neither, to my knowledge, do other critics of race.

Actually, phenotypic or genotypic continuity is a red herring, since in its basic use race does not involve these factors, and is in fact not vague at all. 'Race" as understood by ordinary speakers and population biologists denotes the descendents of some individual or set of individuals, usually specified geographically. In particular, the conventionally recognized races - Negroid, Caucasoid, and Mongoloid - are, respectively, the descendants of sub-Saharan Africans, Europeans and Asians. This conventional conception must be adjusted to accommodate the successive branching of Europeans from sub-Saharan Africans and Asians from Europeans. Multi-region ancestries must also be provided for, but that is easy enough; a part-Asian part-Caucasoid is to be described in just those terms. (No-one can now guess what hard-to-dassify monsters may someday be genetically engineered.) But these refinements aside the concept of race is clear, definite and operational. Races as comnmonly understood are clades defined by continent. That is all there is to them. Hence, unless one is prepared to deny the existence of sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and Asia, races plainly exist. Authors cited hy Bondi and Rickards complain that race is unsuitable for explaining human variability, but race is not supposed to be explanatory. It is classificatory - it groups people by geographical origin, which may correlate with genetic factors that do help to explain variability but is not itself causal and need not be thought oi as such.

Ancestral groups need not be identified by continent. Narrower regions can also be used, in which case more races will be recognized. Biondi arid Rickards allude to this proliferation as an embarassment for racialists, but it is not, since the threefold scheme of common sense is wholly consistent with more refined ones, just as the ordinary division of continents is consistent with recognition of countries within and across them. It is no embarassment to geography that Europeans can also be Italian. Thus, there are four races when individuals of north Asian ancestry are distinguished from those of south Asian ancestry, five races if furthermore individuals of northern European ancestry are distinguished from those of southern European ancestry, and so on.

This freedom to choose geographical criteria may seem to support the charge that races are arbitrary, hence scientifically unsound, but that charge must be brought with greater care than Biondi and Rickards exercise. They refer to the initial acceptance of the race concept as a "scientific fallacy," by which they seem to mean that the existence of race is, or was, empirically, untestable - not "a hypothesis amenable to empirical investigation. . . |F]or about two centuries physical anthropologists refused to be led by the only criterion of truth that natural sciences recognize, namely empirical validation." Quite apart from what "fallacy" - that is, a tempting but invalid inference � was committed, this complaint is doubly confused. Testability is a property of statements, one, we may grant, that every scientific statement should possess. Every scientific statement should, by itself or together with additional uncontroversial assumptions, imply some observable outcome whose occurrence will confirm the statement and whose nonoccurrence will disconfirm it. But since a classificatory system, whether of the races of man or terrestrial climate zones or anything else, is not a statement, it implies nothing, hence is not so much as a candidate for testability. That Jupiter is a planet rather than a star is a statement (and one subject to test); the division of heavenly bodies into star/planet/ asteroid/meteor/comet is not. Although parts of science, classificatory systems are no more testable than spectroscopes. So it is, first, inappropriate to judge race by criteria appropriate to hypotheses; and, second, while the vagueness of racial boundaries may represent a difficulty of some sort for the race concept, this concept cannot have been "falsified by [comparing] prediction to observation."

This confusion may also account for Biondi and Rickard's remark that "For anthropologists involved in forensic medicine the concept of race means everything and nothing. . . if race is everything, it is able to explain nothing." The remark is puzzling because racialists do not use race to explain "everything," and the critics Biondi and Rickards cite are at pains to point out what race doesn't explain. Perhaps their thinking is as follows. Popper and other empiricists have long urged that unfalsifiable hypotheses, those flexible enough to accommodate any experimental finding, are actually devoid of meaning and therefore cannot explain any data, even those they (appear to) entail. What "explains" everything explains nothing. Since Biondi and Rickards regard the old race concept as untestable, they may conclude that it must be vacuous as well,"

A reflective critic might grant that racial categories are not testable hypotheses, and that races do exist in the obvious sense that there are people of Sub-Saharan African, Asian and European ancestry. His claim, rather, is that these categories have turned out to be scientifically sterile, unenlightening, and unrelated to the actual causes of human variation. It is in this sense that race has been "falsified."

However, racial categories, while not the last word in understanding human variation, are a useful first word. Even Biondi and Rickards (and the authors they cite, such as Brues) recognize population differences in gene frequencies, raising the prospect that genes with respect to which populations vary may contribute to important phenotypes. The empirical evidence favors this prospect, in two ways.

The first is that, as Biondi and Rickards are doubtless aware, Cavalli-Sforza and his co-workers have calculated and factor-analyzed the genetic distances between dozens of human populations. These populations turn out to cluster into what Cavalli-Sforza, Menotti and Piazza fastidiously call "major groups," the sub-Saharan African, Caucasian, East Asian and South Asian populations. Additionally, each sub-Saharan African population is farther from any non-sub-Saharan African population than any pair of non-Sub-Saharan African populations are from each other. Ordinary perception is thus congruent with underlying genetic reality.

Second, evidence continues to accumulate of group differences in heritable traits.3 Some of these differences - in skin reflectance, body build, and facial bone structure - are, once again, obvious to ordinary perception. Others, for instance in twinning rates, are less widely recognized but familiar to anthropologists. Still others, such as race differences in response to certain medications, are just now being verified. And of course discussion continues of differences in heritable cognitive abilities and personality traits which parallel continental clades -with north Asians tending to be most intelligent and least impulsive, Africans least intelligent and most impulsive, and Europeans intermediate. I will not pursue this latter topic except to note that rejection of these latter differences is virtually all conceptual in character: Critics deny the validity of psychometric tests, or the causal significance of heritability, or the very reality of psychological traits, but the empirical facts of low African and African American IQ test scores and high income for north Asians worldwide go largely unchallenged. To the extent that the issue is empirical, the data all support the validity of racial distinctions.