‘Race’, by John R. Baker, Oxford University Press, 1974.

John Baker’s ‘Race’ represents a triumph of scholarship across a range of fields, including biology, ancient history, archaeology, history of science, psychometrics and anthropology.

First published by Oxford University Press in 1974, it also marks a watershed in Western thought – the last time a major and prestigious publisher put its name to an overtly racialist work.

As science writer Marek Kohn writes:

“Baker’s treatise, compendious and ponderous, is possible the last major statement of traditional race science written in English” (The Race Gallery: p61).

Inevitably for a scientific work first published over forty years ago, ‘Race’ is dated. In particular, the DNA revolution in population genetics has revolutionized our understanding of the genetic differences and relatedness between different human populations.

Lacking access to such data, Baker had only indirect phenotypic evidence (i.e. the morphological similarities and differences between different peoples), as well as historical and geographic evidence, with which to infer such relationships and hence construct his racial phylogeny and taxonomy.

Phenotypic similarity is obviously a less reliable method of determining the relatedness between groups than is provided by genome analysis, since there is always the problem of distinguishing homology from analogy and hence misinterpreting a trait that has independently evolved in different populations as evidence of relatedness.^[1]

However, I found only one case of genetic studies decisively contradicting Baker’s conclusions. Thus, whereas Baker classes the Ainu People of Japan as “Europid” (p158; p173; p424; p625), recent genetic studies suggest that the Ainu have little or no genetic affinities to Caucasoid populations and are most closely related to other East Asians.^[2]

On the other hand, however, Baker’s omission of genetic data means that, unusually for a scientific work, in the material he does cover, ‘Race’ scarcely seems to have dated at all. This is because the primary focus of Baker’s book – namely, morphological differences between races – is a field of study that has become politically suspect and in which new research has now all but ceased.^[3]

Yet in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth century, when the discipline of anthropology first emerged as a distinct science, the study of race differences in morphology was the central focus of the entire science of anthropology.

Thus, Baker’s ‘Race’ can be viewed as the final summation of the accumulated findings of the ‘old-style’ physical anthropology of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, published at the very moment this intellectual tradition was in its death throes.

Accessibility

Baker’s ‘Race’ is indeed a magnum opus. Unfortunately, however, at over 600 pages, embarking on reading ‘Race’ might seem almost like a lifetime’s work in and of itself.

Not only is it a very long book, but, in addition, much of the material, particularly on morphological race differences and their measurement, is highly technical, and will be readily intelligible only to the dwindling band of biological anthropologists who, in the genomic age, still study such things.

This inaccessibility is exacerbated by the fact that Baker does not use endnotes, except for his references, and only very occasionally uses footnotes. Instead, he includes even technical and peripheral material in the main body of his text, but indicates that material is technical or peripheral by printing it in a smaller font-size.^[4]

Baker’s terminology is also confusing.^[5] He prefers the ‘-id’ suffix to the more familiar ‘-oid’ and ‘-ic’ (e.g. ‘Negrid‘ and ‘Nordid‘ rather than ‘Negroid’ and ‘Nordic‘) and eschews the familiar terms ‘Caucasian’ or ‘Caucasoid’, on the grounds that:

“The inhabitants of the Caucasus region are very diverse and very few of them are typical of any large section of Europids” (p205).

However, his own preferred alternative term, ‘Europid’, is arguably equally misleading as it contributes to the already common conflation of Caucasian with white European, even though, as Baker is at pains to emphasize elsewhere in his treatise, populations from the Middle East, North Africa and even the Indian subcontinent are also ‘Europid’ (i.e. Caucasoid) in Baker’s judgement.

In contrast, the term ‘Caucasoid’, or even ‘Caucasian’, causes little confusion in my experience, since it is today generally understood as a racial term and not as a geographical reference to the Caucasus region.^[6]

At any rate, a similar criticism could surely be levelled at the term ‘Mongoloid’ (or, as Baker prefers, ‘Mongolid’), since Mongolian people are similarly quite atypical of other East Asian populations, and, despite the brief ascendancy of the Mongol Empire, and its genetic impact (as well as that previous waves of conquest by ‘horse peoples’ of the Eurasian Steppe), were formerly a rather marginal people confined to the arid fringes of the indigenous home range of the so-called Mongoloid race, which had long been centred in China, the self-styled Middle Kingdom.^[7]

Certainly, the term ‘Caucasoid’ makes little etymological sense. However, this is also true of a lot of words which we nevertheless continue to make use of. Indeed, since all words change in meaning over time, the original meaning of a word is almost invariably different to its current accepted usage.^[8]

Yet we continue to use these words so as to make ourselves intelligible to others, the only alternative being to invent an entirely new language all of our own which only we would be capable of understanding.

Unfortunately, however, too many racial theorists, Baker included, have insisted on creating entirely new racial terms of their own coinage, or sometimes new entire lexicons, which, not only causes confusion among readers, but also leads the casual reader to underestimate the actual degree of substantive agreement between different authors, who, though they use different terms, often agree regarding both the identity of, and relationships between, the major racial groupings.^[9]

Historical Focus

Another problem is the book’s excessive historical focus.

Judging the book by its contents page, one might imagine that Baker’s discussion of the history of racial thought is confined to the first section of the book, titled “The Historical Background” and comprising four chapters that total just over fifty pages.

However, Baker acknowledges in the opening page of his preface that:

“Throughout this book, what might be called the historical method has been adopted as a matter of deliberate policy” (p3).

Thus, in the remainder of the book, Baker continues to adopt an historical perspective, briefly charting the history behind the discovery of each concept, archaeological discovery, race difference or method of measuring race differences that he introduces.

In short, it seems that Baker is not content with writing about science; he wants to write history of science too.

A case in point is Chapter Eight, which, despite its title (“Some Evolutionary and Taxonomic Theories”), actually contains very little on modern taxonomic or evolutionary theory, or even what would pass for ‘modern’ when Baker wrote the book over forty years ago.

Instead, the greater part of the chapter is devoted to tracing the history of two theories that were, even at the time Baker was writing, already wholly obsolete and discredited (namely, recapitulation theory and orthogenesis).

Let me be clear, Baker himself certainly agrees that these theories are obsolete and discredited, as this is his conclusion at the end of the respective sections devoted to discussion of these theories in his chapter on “Evolutionary and Taxonomic Theories”.

However, this only begs the question as to why Baker chooses to devote so much space in this chapter to discussing these theories in the first place, given that both theories are discredited and also of only peripheral relevance to his primary subject-matter, namely the biology of race.

Anyone not interested in these topics, or in history of science more generally, is well advised to skip the majority of this chapter.

“The Historical Background”

Readers not interested in the history of science, and concerned only with contemporary state-of-the-art science (or at least the closest an author writing in 1974 can get to modern state-of-the-art science) may also be tempted to skip over the whole first section of the book, entitled, as I have said, “The Historical Background”, and comprised of four chapters or, in total, just over fifty pages.

These days, when authoring a book on the biology of race, it seems to have become almost de rigueur to include an opening chapter, or chapters, tracing the history of race science, and especially its political misuse during nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries (e.g. under the Nazis).^[10]

The usual reason for including these chapters is for the author or authors to thereby disassociate themselves from the earlier supposed ‘misuse’ of race science for nefarious political purposes, and emphasize how their own approach is, of course, infinitely more scientific and objective than that of their sometimes less than illustrious intellectual forebears.

However, Baker’s discussion of “The Historical Background” is rather different, and refreshingly short on disclaimers, moralistic grandstanding and benefit-of-hindsight condemnations that one usually finds in such potted histories.

Instead, Baker strives to give all views, howsoever provocative, a fair hearing in as objective and sober a tone as possible.^[11]

Only Lothrop Stoddard, strangely, is dismissed altogether. The latter is, for Baker, an “obviously unimportant” thinker, whose book “contains nothing profound or genuinely original” (p58-9).

Yet this is perhaps unfair. Whatever the demerits of Stoddard’s racial taxonomy (“oversimplified to the point of crudity,” according to Baker: p58), Stoddard’s geopolitical and demographic predictions have proven prescient.^[12]

Overall, Baker draws two general conclusions regarding the history of racial thought in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

First, he observes how few of the racialist authors whom he discusses were anti-Semitic. Thus, Baker reports:

“Only one of the authors, Lapouge, strongly condemns the Jews. Treitschke is moderately anti-Jewish; Chamberlain, Grant and Stoddard mildly so; Gobineau is equivocal” (p59).

The rest of the authors whom he discusses evince, according to Baker, “little or no interest in the Jewish problem”, the only exception being Friedrich Nietzsche, who is “primarily an anti-egalitarian, but [who] did not proclaim the inequality of ethnic taxa”, and who, in his comments regarding the Jewish people, or at least those selectively quoted by Baker, is positively gushing in his praise.

In fact, however, Nietzsche’s views regarding the Jewish people are rather more complex than Baker allows, including as they do both critical comments and no few backhanded complements, since he primarily blames the Jews for the invention of Christianity and of the slave morality that was its legacy.

Thus, anti-Semitism often goes hand-in-hand with philosemitism. Thus, both Nietzsche and Count de Gobineau indeed wrote passages that, at least when quoted in isolation, seem highly complementary regarding the Jewish people. However, it is well to bear in mind that Hitler did as well, the latter writing in Mein Kampf:

“The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is represented by the Jew. In hardly any people in the world is the instinct of self- preservation developed more strongly than in the so-called ‘chosen’. Of this, the mere fact of the survival of this race may be considered the best proof” (Mein Kampf, Manheim translation).^[13]

Thus, as a character from a Michel Houellebecq novel observes:

“All anti-Semites agree that the Jews have a certain superiority. If you read anti-Semitic literature, you’re struck by the fact that the Jew is considered to be more intelligent, more cunning, that he is credited with having singular financial talents – and, moreover, greater communal solidarity. Result: six million dead” (Platform: p113) 

Baker’s second general observation is similarly curious, namely that:

“None of the authors mentioned in these chapters claims superiority for the whole of the Europid race: it is only a subrace, or else a section of the Europid race not clearly defined in terms of physical anthropology, that is favoured” (p59).

In retrospect, this seems anomalous, especially given that the so-called Nordic race, on whose behalf racial supremacy was most often claimed, actually came relatively late to civilization, which began in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, arriving in Europe only with the Mediterranean civilizations of Greece and Rome, and in Northern Europe later still.

However, this focus on the alleged superiority of certain European subraces rather than Caucasians as a whole likely reflects the fact that, during the time period in which these works were written, European peoples and nations were largely in competition and conflict with other European peoples and nations.

Only in European overseas colonies were Europeans in contact and conflict with non-European races, and, even here, the main obstacle to imperial expansion was, not so much the opposition of the often primitive non-European races whom the Europeans sought to colonize, but rather that of rival colonizers from other European nations.

Therefore, it was the relative superiority of different European populations which was naturally of most concern to Europeans during this time period.

In contrast, the superiority of the Caucasian race as a whole was of comparably little interest, if only because it was something that these writers already took very much for granted, and hence hardly worth wasting ink or typeface over.

The Rise of Racial Egalitarianism

There are two curious limitations that Baker imposes on his historical survey of racial thought. First, at the beginning of Chapter Three (‘From Gobineau to Houston Chamberlain’), he announces:

“The present chapter and the next [namely, those chapters dealing with the history of racial thinking from the mid-nineteenth century up until the early-twentieth century] differ from the two preceding ones… in the more limited scope. It is are concerned only with the growth of ideas that favoured belief in the inequality of ethnic taxa or are supposed—rightly or wrongly—to have favoured this belief” (p33).

Given that I have already criticised ‘Race’ as overlong, and as having an excessive historical focus, I might be expected to welcome this restriction. However, Baker provides no rationale for this self-imposed restriction.

Certainly, it is rare, and enlightening, to read balanced, even sympathetic, accounts of the writings of such infamous racialist thinkers as Gobineau, Galton and Chamberlain, whose racial views are today usually dismissed as so preposterous as hardly to merit serious consideration. Moreover, in the current political climate, such material even acquires a certain ‘allure of the forbidden’.

However, thinkers championing racial egalitarianism have surely proven more influential, at least in the medium-term. Yet such enormously influential thinkers as Franz Boas and Ashley Montagu pass entirely unmentioned in Baker’s account.^[14]

Moreover, the intellectual antecedents of Nazism have already been extensively explored by historians. In contrast, however, the rise of the dogma of racial equality has passed largely unexamined, perhaps because to examine its origins is to expose the weakness of its scientific basis and its fundamentally political origins.^[15]

Yet the story of how the theory of racial equality was transformed from a maverick, minority opinion among scientists and laypeople alike into a sacrosanct contemporary dogma which a person, scientist or layperson, can question only at severe cost to their career, livelihood and reputation is surely one worth telling.

The second restriction that Baker imposes upon his history is that he concludes it, prematurely, in 1928. He justifies closing his survey in this year on the grounds that this date supposedly:

“Marks the close of the period in which both sides in the ethnic controversy were free to put forward their views, and authors who wished to do so could give objective accounts of the evidence pointing in each direction” (p61).

Yet this cannot be entirely true, for, if it were, then Baker’s own book could never have been published – unless, of course, Baker regards his own work as something other than an “objective account of the evidence pointing in each direction”, which seems doubtful.

Certainly, the influence of what is now called political correctness is to be deplored for impact on science, university appointments, the allocation of research funds and the publishing industry. However, there has surely been no abrupt watershed but rather a gradual closing of the western mind over time.

Thus, it is notable that other writers have cited dates a little later than that quoted by Baker, often coinciding with the defeat of Nazi Germany and exposure of the Nazi genocide, or sometimes the defeat of segregation in the American South.

Indeed, not only was this process gradual, it has also proceeded apace in the years since Baker’s ‘Race’ first came off the presses, such that today such a book would surely never would have been published in the first place, certainly not by as prestigious a publisher as Oxford University Press (who, surely not uncoincidently, soon gave up the copyright).^[16]

Moreover, Baker is surely wrong to claim that it is impossible:

“To follow the general course of controversy on the ethnic problem, because, for the reason just stated [i.e. the inability of authors of both sides to publicise their views], there has been no general controversy on the subject” (p61).

On the contrary, the issue remains as incendiary as ever, with the bounds of acceptable opinion seemingly ever narrowing and each year a new face falling before the witch hunters of the contemporary racial inquisition.

Biology

Having dealt in his first section with what he calls “The Historical Background”, Baker next turns to what he calls “The Biological Background”. He begins by declaring, rightly, that:

“Racial problems cannot be understood by anyone whose interests and field of knowledge stop short at the limit of purely human affairs” (p3).

This is surely true, not just of race, but of all issues in human biology, psychology, sociology, anthropology and political science, as the recent rise of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology attests. Indeed, Baker even coins a memorable and quotable aphorism to this effect, when he declares:

“No one knows Man who knows only Man” (p65).

However, Baker sometimes takes this thinking rather too far, even for my biologically-inclined tastes.

Certainly, he is right to emphasise that differences among human populations are analogous to those found among other species. Thus, his discussion of racial differences among our primate cousins are of interest, but also somewhat out-of-date.^[17]

However, his intricate and fully illustrated nine-page description of race differences among the different subspecies of crested newt stretched the patience of this reader (p101-109).

Are Humans a Single Species?

Whereas Baker’s seventh chapter (“The Meaning of Race”) discusses the race concept, the preceding two chapters deal with the taxonomic class immediately above that of race, namely ‘species’.

For sexually-reproducing organisms, ‘species’ is usually defined as the largest group of organisms capable of breeding with one another and producing fertile offspring in the wild.

However, as Baker explains, things are not quite so simple.

For one thing, over evolutionary time, one species transforms into another gradually with no abrupt dividing line where one species suddenly becomes another (p69-72). Hence the famous paradox, ‘Which came first: the chicken or the egg?’.

Moreover, in respect of extinct species, it is often impossible to know for certain whether two ostensible ‘species’ interbred with one another (p72-3). Therefore, in practice, the fossils of extinct organisms are assigned to either the same or different species on morphological criteria alone.

This leads Baker to distinguish different species concepts. These include:

• “Species in the paleontological sense” (p72-3);
• “Species in the morphological sense” (p69-72); and
• “Species in the genetical sense”, i.e. as defined by the criterion of interfertility (p72-80).

On purely morphological criteria, Baker questions humanity’s status as a single species:

“Even typical Nordids and typical Alpinids, both regarded as subraces of a single race (subspecies), the Europid, are very much more different from one another in morphological characters—for instance in the shape of the skull—than many species of animals that never interbreed with one another in nature, though their territories overlap” (p97).

Thus, later on, Baker claims:

“Even a trained anatomist would take some time to sort out correctly a mixed collection of the skulls of Asiatic jackals (Canis aureus) and European red foxes (vulpes vulpes), unless he had made a special study of the osteology of the Canidae; whereas even a little child, without any instruction whatever, could instantly separate the skulls of Eskimids from those of Lappids” (p427).

That morphological differences between human groups do indeed often exceed those between closely-related but non-interbreeding species of non-human animal has recently been quantitatively confirmed by Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele in their book, Race the Reality of Human Differences (which I have reviewed here, here and here).

However, even if one defines ‘species’ strictly by the criterion of interfertility (i.e. in Baker’s terminology, “species in the genetical sense”) matters remain less clear than one might imagine.

For one thing, there are the phenomena of ring species, such as the herring gull and lesser black-backed gull.

These two ostensible species (or subspecies), both found in the UK, do not interbreed with one another, but each does interbreed with intermediaries that, in turn, interbreed with the other, such that there is some indirect gene-flow between them. Interestingly, the species ranges of the different intermediaries form a literal ring around the Arctic, such that genes will travel around the Artic before passing from lesser black-backed gull to herring gull or vice versa (p76-79).^[18]

Indeed, even the ability to produce fertile offspring is a matter of degree. Thus, some pairings produce fertile offspring only rarely.

For example, often, Baker reports, “sterility affects [only] the heterogametic sex [i.e. the sex with two different sex chromosomes]” (p95). Thus, in mammals, sterility is more likely to affect male offspring. Indeed, this pattern is so common that it even has its own name, being known as Haldane’s Rule, after the famous Marxist-biologist JBS Haldane who first noted this pattern.

Other times, Baker suggests, interfertility may depend on the sex of the respective parents. For example, Baker suggests that, whereas sheep may sometimes successfully reproduce with he-goats, rams may be unable to successfully reproduce with she-goats (p95).^[19]

Moreover, the fertility of offspring is itself a matter of degree. Thus, Baker reports, some hybrid offspring are not interfertile with one another, but can reproduce with one or other of the parental stocks. Elsewhere, the first generation of hybrids are interfertile but not subsequent generations (p94).

Indeed, though it was long thought impossible, it has recently been confirmed that, albeit only very rarely, even mules and hinnies can successfully reproduce, despite donkeys and horses, the two parental stocks, having, like goats and sheep, a different number of chromosomes (Rong et al 1985; Kay 2002).

Yet, as Darwin observed as far back as 1871 when himself discussing the question as to whether human races are to be regarded as belonging to entirely separate species:

“Even a slight degree of sterility between any two forms when first crossed, or in their offspring, is generally considered as a decisive test of their specific distinctness” (The Descent of Man).

Thus, Baker concludes:

“There is no proof that hybridity among human beings is invariably eugenesic, for many of the possible crosses have not been made, or if they have their outcome does not appear to have been recorded. It is probable on inductive grounds that such marraiges would not be infertile, but it is questionable whether the hybridity would necessarily be eugenesic. For instance, statistical study might reveal a preponderance of female offpsring” (p97-8).

However, any degree of infertility among human interracial couples is likely to be very slight. After all, today interracial relationships are increasingly common in Britain and America, and not noticeably less fecund than other unions. On the contrary, the number of biracial people, the products of such relationships, are themselves growing precipitously in number in both countries.

In practice, a very slight degree of reduced fertility among phenotypically distinct forms, as might conceivably occur among human interracial couples, would be unlikely to cause biologists to assign the different forms to different species, not least since, in the absense of close study, the slight degree of reduced fertility would probably never be detected in the first place.

Is there then any evidence of reduced fertility among mixed-race couples? Not a great deal.

Today interracial relationships are increasingly common, and not noticeably less fecund than other unions. On the contrary, the number of biracial people, the products of such relationships, are themselves growing precipitously in number in , at least in Britain and America.

On the other hand, possibly blood type incompatibility between mother and developing foetus might be more common in interracial unions due to racial variation in the prevalence of different blood groups.

Also, one study did find a greater prevalence of birth complications, more specifically caesarean deliveries, among Asian women birthing offspring fathered by white men (Nystrom et al 2008).

However, this is a simple reflection of the differences in physical size between whites and Asians, with smaller-framed Asian women having difficulty birthing larger half-white offspring. Thus, the same study also found that white women birthing offspring fathered by Asian men actually have lower rates of caesarean delivery than did women bearing offspring fathered by men of the same race as themselves (Stanford University Medical Center 2008).^[20]

Also, one study from Iceland rather surprisingly found that the highest pregnancy rates were found among couples who were actually quite closely related to one another, namely equivalent to third- or fourth-cousins, with less closely related spouses enjoying reduced pregnancy rates (Helgason et al 2008; see also Labouriau & Amorim 2008).

On the other hand, however, David Reich, in Who We Are and How We Got Here reports that, whereas there was evidence of selection against Neanderthal genes in the human genome (that had resulted from ancient hybridization between anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals) owing to the deleterious effects of these genes, there was no evidence of selection against European genes (or African genes) among African-Americans, a racially-mixed population:

“In African Americans, in studies of about thirty thousand people, we have found no evidence for natural selection against African or European ancestry” (Who We Are and How We Got Here: p48; Bhatia et al 2014).

This lack of selection against either European-derived (or African-derived) genes in African-Americans suggests that discordant genes did not result in reduced fitness among African-Americans.^[21] 

Humans – A Domesticated Species?

A final complication in defining species is that some species of nonhuman animal, wildly recognised as separate species because they do not interbreed in the wild, nevertheless have been known to successfully interbreed in captivity.

A famous example are lions and tigers. While they have never been known to interbreed in the wild, if only because they rarely if ever encounter one another, they have interbred in captivity, producing hybrid offspring in the form of so-called ligers and tigons.

This is, for Baker, of especial relevance to question of human races since, according to Baker, we ourselves are a domesticated species. Thus, he approvingly quotes Blumenbach’s claim that:

“Man is ‘of all living beings the most domesticated’” (p95).

Thus, with regard to the question of whether humans represent a single species, Baker reaches the following controversial conclusion:

“The facts of human hybridity do not prove that all human races are to be regarded as belonging to a single ‘species’. The whole idea of species is vague because the word is used with such different meanings, none of which is of universal application. When it is used in the genetical sense [i.e. the criterion of interfertility] some significance can be attached to it, in so far as it applies to animals existing in natural conditions… but it does not appear to be applicable to human beings, who live under the most extreme conditions of domestication” (p98).

Thus, Baker goes so far as to question whether:

“Any two kinds of animals, differing from one another so markedly in morphological characters (and in odour) as, for instance, the Europid and Sanid…, and living under natural conditions, would accept one another as sexual partners” (p97).

Certainly, in our ‘natural environment’ (what evolutionary psychologists call the environment of Evolutionary adaptedness or EEA), many human races would never have interbred, if only for the simple reason that they would never come into contact with one another.

On the contrary, they were separated from one another by the very geographic obstacles (oceans, deserts, mountain-ranges) that reproductively isolated them from one another and hence permitted their evolution into distinct races.

Thus, Northern Europeans surely never mated with sub-Saharan Africans for the simple reason that the former were confined to Northern Europe and surrounding areas while the latter were largely confined to sub-Saharan Africa, such that they are unlikely ever to have interacted.

Only with the invention of technologies facilitating long-distance travel (e.g. ocean-going ships, aeroplanes) would this change.

However, if Northern Europeans never interbred with sub-Saharan Africans, both groups surely did interbreed with their immediate neighbours, who, in turn, interbred with their intermediate neighbours who may, in turn, have interbred indirectly with the other group, since even the Sahara Desert, formerly regarded as the boundary between what were then called the Caucasiod and Negroid races, was far from a complete barrier to gene flow, even in ancient times.

Indeed, there may even have been gene flow between Eurasia and the Americas at the Bering Strait. Only perhaps Australian Aboriginals may to have been completely reproductively isolated for millennia.

There may therefore have been some indirect gene flow even between even distantly related populations as Northern Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans, even if no Nordic European ever encountered, let alone mated with, a black African. This, together with the continuous clinal nature of racial differentiation across the world that resulted from this interbreeding, was the key point emphasized by Darwin in The Descent of Man in support of his conclusion that all human races ought indeed to be considered a single species.

Moreover, Baker’s assertion that modern humans are a domesticated species, although a fashionable viewpoint today, is questionable.

Whether humans can indeed be said to be domesticated depends on how one defines ‘domesticated’. If we are domesticated, then humans are surely unique in having domesticated ourselves (or at least one another).^[22]

Defining Race

Ultimately then, the question of whether the human race is a single species is a purely semantic dispute. It depends how one defines the word ‘species’.

Likewise, whether human races can be said to exist ultimately depends on one’s definition of the word ‘race’.

Using the word ‘race’ interchangeably with that of ‘subspecies’, Baker provides no succinct definition. Instead, he simply explains:

“If two populations [within a species] are so distinct that one can generally tell from which region a specimen was obtained, it is usual to give separate names to the two races” (p99).

Neither does he provide a neat definition of any particular race. On the contrary, he is explicit in emphasizing:

“The definition of any particular race must be inductive in the sense that it gives a general impression of the distinctive characters, without professing to be applicable in detail to every individual” (p99).

Is Race Real?

At the conclusion of his chapter on “Hybridity and The Species Question”, Baker seems to reach what was, even in 1974, an incendiary conclusion – namely that, whether using morphological criteria or the criterion of interfertility, it is not possible to conclusively prove that all extant human populations belong to a single species (see above).

Nevertheless, in the remainder of the book, Baker proceeds on the assumption that differences among human groups are indeed subspecific (i.e. racial) in nature and that we do indeed form a single species.

Indeed, Baker criticises the notion that the existence persons of mixed racial ancestry, and the existence of clinal variation between races, disproves the existence of human races by observing that, if races did not interbreed with one another, then they would not be mere different races, but rather entirely separate species, according to the usual definition of this term. Thus, Baker explains:

“Subraces and even races sometimes hybridise where they meet, but this almost goes without saying: for if sexual revulsion against intersubracial or interracial marriages were complete, one set of genes would have no chance of intermingling with the other, and the ethnic taxa would be species by the commonly accepted definition. It cannot be too strongly stressed that intersubracial and interracial hybridization is so far from indicating the unreality of subraces and races, that it is actually a sine qua non of the reality of these ethnic taxa” (p12).

This, Baker argues, is because:

“It is the fact that intermediaries do occur that defines the race” (p99).

Thus, in nonhuman species among whom subspecies are recognized, there usually exist similar hybrid or intermediary populations around the boundaries of each distinct subspecies. Indeed, this phenomenon is so recurrent that there is even a biological term for it – namely ‘intergradation’.

Yet this does not cause biologists to conclude that the subspecies in question either do not exist or that their boundaries are somehow arbitrarily delineated and artificial, let alone that ‘subspecies’ is a biologically meaningless term.

Some people seem to think that, since races tend to blend into one another and hence have blurred boundaries (i.e. what biologists refer to as clinal variation), they do not really exist. Yet Baker objects:

“In other matters, no one questions the reality of categories between which intermediaries exist. There is every graduation, for instance, between green and blue, but no one denies these words should be used” (p100).

However, this is perhaps an unfortunate example, since, as psychologists and physicists agree, colours, as such, do not exist.

Instead, the spectrum of light varies continuously. Distinct colours are imposed on this continuous variation only by the human brain and visual system.^[23]

Using colour as an analogy for race is also potentially confusing because colour is already often conflated with race. Thus, races are referred to by their ostensible colours (e.g. ‘blacks’, ‘whites’, ‘browns’ etc.) and the very word ‘colour’ is sometimes even used as a synonym, or perhaps euphemism, for race, even though, as Baker is at pains to emphasize, races differ in far more than skin colour.

Using colour as an analogy for race differences is only likely to exacerbate this confusion.

Yet Baker’s other examples are similarly problematic. Thus, he writes:

“The existence of youths and human hermaphrodites does not cause anyone to disallow the use of the words, ‘boy’, ‘man’ and ‘woman’” (p100).

However, hermaphrodites, unlike racial intermediaries, are extremely rare. Meanwhile, words such as ‘boy’ and ‘youth’ are colloquial terms, not really scientific ones. As anthropologist John Relethford observes:

“We tend to use crude labels in everyday life with the realization that they are fuzzy and subjective. I doubt anyone thinks that terms such as ‘short’, ‘medium’ and ‘tall’ refer to discrete groups, or that humanity only comes in three values of height” (Relethford 2009: p21).

In short, we often resort to vague and impressionistic language in everyday conversation. However, for scientific purposes, we must surely try, wherever possible, to be more precise.

Rather than alluding to colour terms or hermaphrodites, perhaps a better counterexample, if only because it is certain to provoke annoyance, cognitive dissonance and doublethink among leftist race-denying sociologists, is that of social class. Thus, as biosocial criminologist Anthony Walsh demands:

“Is social class… a useless concept because of its cline-like tendency to merge smoothly from case to case across the distribution, or because its discrete categories are determined by researchers according to their research purposes and are definitely not ‘pure’” (Race and Crime: A Biosocial Analysis: p6).

However, the same leftist social scientists who insist the race concept is an unscientific social construction, nevertheless continue to employ the concept of social class almost as if it were entirely unproblematic.

However, the objection that races do not exist because races are not discrete categories, but rather have blurred boundaries, is not entirely fallacious.

After all, sometimes intermediaries can be so common that they can no longer be said to be intermediaries at all and all that can be said to exist is continuous clinal variation, such that wherever one chose to draw the boundary between one race and another would be entirely arbitrary.

With increased migration and intermarriage, we may fast be approaching this point.^[24]

However, just because the boundaries between racial groups are blurred, this does not mean that the differences between them, whether physiological or psychological, do not exist. To assume otherwise would represent a version of the ‘continuum fallacy’ or ‘sorties paradox’, also sometimes called the ‘fallacy of the heap’ or ‘fallacy of the beard’.

Thus, even if races do not exist, race differences still surely do – and, just as skin colour varies on a continuous, clinal basis, so might average IQ, brain-size and personality!

Anticipating Jared Diamond

Remarkably, Baker even manages to anticipate certain erroneous objections to the race concept that had not, to my knowledge, even been formulated at the time of his writing, perhaps because they are so obviously fallacious to anyone without an a priori political commitment to the denying the validity of the race concept.

In particular, Jared Diamond (1994), in an influential and much-cited paper, argues that racial categories are meaningless because, rather than being classified by skin colour, races could just as easily be grouped on the basis of traits such as the prevalence of genes for sickle-cell or lactose tolerance, which would lead us to adopting very different classifications.

Actually, Baker argues, the importance of colour for racial classification has been exaggerated.

“In the classification of animals, zoologists lay little emphasis on differences of colour… They pay far more attention to differences in grosser structure” (p159).

Indeed, he quotes no lesser authority than Darwin himself as observing:

“Colour is generally esteemed by the systematic naturalist as unimportant” (p148).

Certainly, he is at pains to emphasise that, among humans, differences between racial groups go far beyond skin colour. Indeed, he observes, one has only to look at an African albino to realize as much:

“An albino… Negrid who is fairer than any non-albino European, [yet] appears even more unlike a European than a normal… Negrid” (p160).

Likewise, some populations from the Indian subcontinent are very dark in skin tone, yet they are, according to Baker, predominantly Caucasoid (p160), as, he claims, are the Aethiopid subrace of the Horn of Africa (p225).^[25]

Thus, Baker laments how:

“An Indian, who may show close resemblance to many Europeans in every structural feature of his body, and whose ancestors established a civilization long before the inhabitants of the British Isles did so, is grouped as ‘coloured’ with persons who are very different morphologically from any European or Indian, and whose ancestors never developed a civilization” (p160).

Yet, in contrast, of the San Bushmen of Southern Africa, he remarks:

“The skin is only slightly darker than that of the Mediterranids of Southern Europe and paler than that of many Europids whose ancestral home is in Asia or Africa” (p307).

But no one would mistake them for Caucasoid.

What then of the traits, namely the prevalence of the sickle-cell gene or of lactose tolerance, that would, according to Diamond, produce very different taxonomies?

For Baker, these are what he calls “secondary characters” that cannot be used for the purposes of racial classification because they are not present among all members of any group, but differ only in their relative prevalence (p186).

Moreover, he observes, the sickle-cell gene is likely to have “arisen independently in more than one place” (p189). It is therefore evidence, not of common ancestry, but of convergent evolution, or what Baker refers to as “independent mutation” (p189).

It is therefore irrelevant from the perspective of cladistic taxonomy, whereby organisms are grouped, not on the basis of shared traits as such, but rather of shared ancestry. From the perspective of cladistic taxonomy, shared traits are relevant only to the extent they are (interpreted as) evidence of shared ancestry.

The same is true for lactose tolerance, which seems to have evolved independently in different populations in concert with the development of dairy farming, in a form of gene-culture co-evolution.

Indeed, lactose tolerance appears to have evolved through somewhat different genetic mechanisms (i.e. mutations in different genes) in different populations, seemingly a conclusive demonstration that it evolved independently in these different lineages (Tishkoff et al 2007).

As Baker warns:

“One must always be on the lookout for the possibility of independent mutation wherever two apparently unrelated taxa resemble one another by the fact that some individuals in both groups reveal the presence of the same gene” (p189).

In evolutionary biology, this is referred to as distinguishing analogy from homology.

Thus, for example, authors Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele, in their book Race: The Reality of Human Differences (which I have reviewed here, here and here) observe:

“There are two groups of people [i.e. races] with the conbination of dark skin and frizzy hair—sub-Saharan Africans and Melanesians. The latter have often been called ‘Oceanic Negroes,’ implying a special relationship with Africans. The blood-group data, however, show that they are about as different from Africans as they could be” (Race: The Reality of Human Differences: p134).

But Diamond’s proposed classification is even more preposterous than these early pre-Darwinian non-cladistic taxonomic schemes, since he proposes to classify races on the basis of a single trait in isolation, the trait in question (either lactose tolerance or the sickle-cell gene) being chosen either arbitrarily or, more likely, to illustrate the point that Diamond is attempting to make.

Yet even pre-Darwinian taxonomies proposed to classify species, not on the basis of a single trait, but rather on the basis of a whole suit of traits that intercorrelate together.

In short, Diamond proposes to classify races on the basis of a single character that has evolved independently in distantly related populations, instead of a whole suite of inter-correlated traits indicative of common ancestry.

Interestingly, a similar error may underlie an even more frequently cited paper by Marxist-geneticist Richard Lewontin, which argued the vast majority of genetic variation was within-group rather than between-group – since Lewontin, like Diamond, also relied on ‘secondary characters’ such as blood-groups to derive his estimates (Lewontin 1972).^[26]

The reason for the recurrence of this error, Baker explains, is that:

“Each of the differences that enable one to distinguish all the most typical individuals of any one taxon from those of another is due, as a general rule, to the action of polygenes, that is to say, to the action of numerous genes, having small cumulative effects” (p190).

Yet, unlike traits resulting from a few alleles, polygenes are not amenable to simple Mendelian analysis.

Therefore, this leads to the “unfortunate paradox” whereby:

“The better the evidence of relationship or distinction between ethnic taxa, the less susceptible are the facts to genetic analysis” (p190).

As a consequence, Baker laments:

“Attention is focussed today on those ‘secondary differences’… that can be studied singly and occur in most ethnic taxa, though in different proportions in different taxa… The study of these genes… has naturally led, from its very nature, to a tendency to minimise or even disregard the extent to which the ethnic taxa of man do actually differ from one another” (p534).

Finally, Baker even provides a reductio ad absurdum of Diamond’s approach, observing:

“From the perspective of taste-deficiency the Europids are much closer to the chimpanzee than to the Sinids and Paiwan people; yet no one would claim that this resemblance gives a true representation of relationship” (p188).

However, applying the logic of Diamond’s article, we would be perfectly justified and within our rights to use this similarity in taste deficiency in order to classify Caucasians as a sub-species of chimpanzee!

Subraces

The third section of Baker’s book, “Studies of Selected Human Groups”, focusses on the traditional subject-matter of physical anthropology – i.e. morphological differences between human groups.^[27]

Baker describes the physiological differences between races in painstaking technical detail. These parts of the book makes for an especially difficult read, as Baker carefully elucidates both how anthropologists measure morphological differences, and the nature and extent of the various physiological differences between the races discussed revealed by these methods.

Yet, curiously, although many of his measures are quantitative in nature, Baker rarely discusses whether differences are statistically significant.^[28] Yet without statistical analysis, all of Baker’s reports of quantitative measurements of differences in the shapes and sizes of the skulls and body parts of people of different races represent little more than subjective impressions.

This is especially problematic in his discussion of so-called ‘subraces’ (subdivisions within the major continental races, such as Nordics and the Meditaranean race, both supposed subdivisions within the Caucasiod race), where differences could easily be dismissed as, if not wholly illusory, then at least as clinal in nature and as not always breeding true.

Yet nowhere in his defence of the reality of subracial differences does Baker cite statistics. Instead, his argument is wholly subjective and qualitative in nature:

“In many parts of the world where there have not been any large movements of population over a long period, the reality of subraces is evident enough” (p211).

One suspects that, given increased geographic mobility, those parts of the world are now reduced in number.

Thus, even if subracial differences were once real, with increased migration and intermarriage, they are fast disappearing, at least within Europe.

Is ‘White’ a Social Construct?

One other interesting observation may be made with regard to Baker’s proposed racial taxonomy. Save when quoting from other earlier authors who did use these terms, Baker himself never once refers to ‘white people’ or the ‘the white race’. 

Not only does he, as we have seen, reject the use of colour for the purposes of racial classification, he also does not seem to recognize white people as constituting a useful racial category in the first place. Thus, not only do the terms ‘white people’ or ‘the white race’ receive no mention in his racial taxonomy either as a race or a subrace, neither is any synonym covering roughly the same set of people included (p624-5).

Of course, Baker’s ‘Europid race’ might appear, from its name, to cover much the same ground, since the ancestral homelands of those today classed as ‘white’ are roughly coextensive with the geographical boundaries of Europe.

In fact, however, its meaning is much broader, as Baker uses the word ‘Europid’ to refer to what earlier anthropologists more typically called the ‘Caucasian race’, and, as he is himself at pains to emphasize, the indigenous inhabitants of North Africa, the Middle East and, at least according to Baker, even South Asia are all classified as Caucasoid/Europid (p160), and Baker even argues that those he terms the Aethiopids of the Horn of Africa are also predominantly Caucasoid/Europid (p225).

While indigenous Europeans are grouped together with North Africans, South Asians and Arabs as ‘Europid’, they are also subdivided among themselves into such supposed subraces as ‘Nordid’, ‘Mediterranid’, ‘Osteuropid’, ‘Dinarid’ and ‘Alpinid’. Yet none of these terms is equivalent to what we today habitually call ‘white people’ , and the indigenous homelands of at least some of these subraces, notably the ‘Mediterranid’, extend outside of the European continent into North Africa and the Middle East, and include some peoples whom we would today hesitate to call ‘white’, who are unlikely to themselves identify as such, and who would certainly not be recognized as ‘white’ by most white racists.

This conclusion seems to have been shared by most other early-twentieth century physical anthropologists. For example, Carleton Coon, in The Races of Europe, contended that:

“The Mediterranean racial zone stretches unbroken from Spain across the Straits of Gibraltar to Morocco, and thence eastward to India. A branch of it extends far southward on both sides of the Red Sea into southern Arabia, the Ethiopian highlands, and the Horn of Africa” (The Races of Europe: p401).

Unlike Baker, Coon does indeed use the phrase ‘the white race’, and indeed regards his 1939 book as a study of this race. However, he clearly intends this phrase to carry a rather broader meaning than that with which it is usually invested today, since he regards, for example, even “the Gallas, the Somalis, the Ethiopians, and the inhabitants of Eritrea” as all being “white or near white”, a view that would hardly endear him to most contemporary white racists (The Races of Europe: p445).   

Thus, while he would certainly reject the idea that race is a mere ‘social construct’ as preposterous, I suspect that Baker, along with other early twentieth-century racial anthropologists, might actually agree with the race deniers that the concept of a ‘white race’, at least as it is defined and demarcated in the Anglosphere today, is indeed an artificial construct with little biological validity, which owes more to geographical and even religious factors (i.e. the traditional boundary between Chistendom and the Islamic world) than it does to measuable phenotypic, or, for that matter, genetic, differences.

In contrast, although the politcally correct orthodoxy holds that terms such as ‘Caucasian’ or ‘Caucasoid’ (or, to use Baker’s preferred term ‘Europid’) reflect a scientifically obsolete and discredited basis for racial classification, this racial category actually seems to have been broadly corroborated by modern studies in population genetics.

Thus, geneticist David Reich, in his 2018 book, Who We Are and How We Got Here, reports:

“Today, the peoples of West Eurasia—the vast region spanning Europe, the Near East, and much of central Asia—are genetically highly similar. The physical similarity of West Eurasian populations was recognized in the eighteenth century by scholars who classified the people of West Eurasia as ‘Caucasoids’… The whole-genome data at first seem to validate some of the old categories… Populations within West Eurasia are typically around seven times more similar to one another than West Eurasians are to East Asians. When frequencies of mutations are plotted on a map, West Eurasia appears homogeneous, from the Atlantic façade of Europe to the steppes of central Asia. There is a sharp gradient of change in central Asia before another region of homogeneity is reached in East Asia” (Who We Are and How We Got Here: p93).

This is probably because the term ‘Caucasoid’ was hardly an arbitrary invention of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century racists, but rather reflected, not only real phenotypic resemblance among populations, but also geographic factors, the indigenous homelands of the ostensible race being circumscribed by relatively impassable geographic obstacles – such as the Sahara Desert, Himalayas, Siberia and Atlantic Ocean – which represented barriers to human movement and hence gene flow throughout much of human history and prehistory.

In contrast, the ostensible boundaries of the indigenous homelands so-called ‘white race’ are, at least today, usually equated with the boundaries of the European continent. But, whereas the Sahara, Himalayas, Siberia and Atlantic were long barriers to gene-flow, at least some of the boundaries of the European continent – namely the Mediterranean Sea, Strait of Gibraltar and Turkish Straits – were long hubs of trade, migration, population movement and conquest. It is thus unsurprising that populations on either side of these boundaries, far from being racially distinct, resemble one another both phenotypically and genetically.

“Studies of Selected Human Groups”

This third section of the book focuses on certain specific selected human populations. These are presumably chosen because Baker feels that they are representative of certain important elements of human evolution, racial divergence, or are otherwise of particular interest.

Unfortunately, Baker’s choice of which groups upon which to focus seems rather arbitrary and he never explains why these groups were chosen ahead of others.

In particular, it is notable that Baker focuses primarily on populations from Europe and Africa. East Asians (i.e. ‘Mongoloids’), curiously, are entirely unrepresented.

“The Jews”

After a couple of introductory chapters, and one chapter focussing on “Europids” (i.e. Caucasians) as a whole, Baker’s next chapter discusses Jewish people.

In the opening paragraphs, he observes that:

“In any serious study of the superiority or inferiority of particular groups of people one cannot fail to take note of the altogether outstanding contributions made to intellectual and artistic life, and to the world of commerce and finance, generation after generation by persons to whom the name of Jews is attached” (p232).

However, having taken due “note” of this, and hence followed his own advice, he says almost nothing further on the matter, either in this chapter or in those later chapters that deal specifically with the question of racial superiority (see below).

Instead, Baker first focuses on justifying the inclusion of Jews in a book about race, and hence arguing against the politically-correct notion that Jews are not a race, but rather mere practitioners of a religion.^[29] Baker gives short-shrift to this notion:

“There is no close resemblance between Judaism in the religious sense and a proselytizing religion such as the Roman Catholic” (p326).

In other words, Baker seems to be saying, because Judaism is not a religion that actively seeks out converts (but rather one that, if anything, discourages conversion), Jews have retained an ethnic character distinct from the host populations alongside whom they reside, without having their racial traits diluted by the incorporation of large numbers of converts of non-Jewish ancestry.

Yet, actually, even proselytizing religions like Christianity, Catholicism and Islam that do actively seek to convert nonbelievers, often come to take on an ethnic character, since, despite the possibility of conversion, offspring usually inherit (i.e. are indoctrinated in) the faith of their parents, apostates are persecuted, conversion remains, in practice, rare, and people are admonished to marry ‘within the faith’.

Thus, in polities beset by ethnic conflict, like Northern Ireland, Lebanon or the former Yugoslavia, religions often comes to represent markers for ethnicity or even something akin to ethnicities in and of themselves – i.e. reproductively-isolated, endogamous breeding populations.

Having concluded, then, that there is a racial as well as a religious component to Jewish identity, Baker nevertheless stops short of declaring the Jews a race or even what he calls a ‘subrace’.

Dismissing the now discredited Khazar hypothesis in a sentence,^[30] Baker instead classes them bulk of the world’s Jewish population (i.e. the Ashkenazim) as merely part of “Armenid subrace” of the Europid race” with some “Orientalid” (i.e. Arab) admixture (p242).^[31]

Thus, Baker claims:

“Persons of Ashkennazic stock can generally be recognised by certain physical characters that distinguish them from other Europeans” (p238).

These include a short but wide skull and a nose that is “large in all dimensions” (p239), the characteristic shape of which Baker even purports to illustrate with a delightfully offensive diagram (p241).^[32]

Likewise, Baker claims that Sephardic Jews, the other main subgroup of European Jews, are likewise “distinguishable from the Ashkenazim by physical characters”, being slenderer in build, with straighter hair, narrower noses, and different sized skulls, approximately more to the Mediterranean racial type (p245-6).

But, if Sephardim and Ashkenazim are indeed “distinguishable” or “recognisable” by “physical characters”, either from one another or from other European Gentiles, as Baker claims, then with what degree of accuracy is he claiming such distinctions can be made? Surely far less than 100%.^[33]

Moreover, are the alleged physiological differences that Baker posits between Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and other Europeans based on recorded quantitative measurements, and, if so, are the differences in question statistically significant? On this, Baker says nothing.

“The Celts”

The next chapter concerns “The Celts”, a term surrounding which there is so much confusion and which has been used in so many different senses – racial, cultural, ethnic, territorial and linguistic (p183) – that some historians have argued that it should be abandoned altogether.

Baker, himself British, is keen to dispel the notion that the indigenous populations of the British Isles were, at the time of the Roman invasion, a primitive people, and is very much an admirer of their artwork.

Thus, Baker writes that:

“Caesar… nowhere states that any of the Britons were savage (‘immanis’), nor does he speak specifically of their ignorance (‘ignorantia’), though he does twice mention their indiscretion (‘imprudentia’) in parleying” (p263).

Of course, Caesar, though hardly unbiased in this respect, did regard the indigenous Britons as less civilized than the Romans themselves. However, I suppose that barbarism is, like civilization (see below), a matter of degree.

Regarding the racial characteristics of those inhabitants of pre-Roman Britain who are today called ‘Celts’, Baker classifies them as Nordic, writing:

“Their skulls scarcely differ from those of the Anglo-Saxons who subsequently dominated them, except in one particular character, namely, that the skull is slightly (but significantly) lower in the Iron Age man than in the Anglo-Saxon” (p257).^[34]

Thus, dismissing the politically-correct notion that the English were, in the words of another author, “a true multiracial society”, Baker claims:

“[The] Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Normans, Belgics and… Celts… were not only of one race (Europid) but of one subrace (Nordid).” (p267).

Citing remains found in an ancient cemetery in Berkshire supposedly containing the skeletons of Anglo-Saxon males but indigenous British females and hybrid offspring, he concludes that, rather than extermination, a process of intermarriage and assimilation occurred (p266). This is a conclusion largely corroborated by recent population genetic studies.

However, the indigenous pre-Celtic inhabitants of the British Isles were, Baker concludes, less Nordic than Mediterranid in phenotype.^[35]

Such influences remain, Baker claims, in the further reaches of Wales and Ireland, as evidenced by the distribution of blood groups and of hair colour.

Thus, whereas the Celtic fringe is usually associated with red, auburn or ginger hair, Baker instead emphasizes the greater prevalence of dark hair among the Irish and Welsh:

“The tendency towards the possession of dark hair was much more marked in Wales than in England, and still more marked in the western districts of Ireland” (p265).^[36]

This conclusion is based upon the observations of nineteenth century English ethnologist John Beddoe, who travelled the British Isles recording the distribution of different hair and eye colours, reporting his findings in The Races of Britain, which was first published in 1862 and remains, to my knowledge, the only large body of data on the distribution of hair and eye colour in the British Isles to this day.

On this basis, Baker therefore concludes that:

“The modern population of Great Britain probably derives mainly from the [insular] ‘Celts’… and Belgae, though a more ancient [i.e. Mediterranean] stock has left its mark rather clearly in certain parts of the country, and the Anglo-Saxons and other northerners made an additional Nordid contribution later on” (p269).

Yet recent population genetic studies suggest that even the so-called Celts, like the later Anglo-Saxons, Normans and Vikings, actually had only a quite minimal impact on the ancestry of the indigenous peoples of the British Isles.^[37]

This, of course, further falsifies the politically correct, but absurd notion that the British are ‘a nation of immigrants’ – which phrase is, of course, itself a recent immigrant from America, in respect of whose population the claim surely has more plausibility.

The Celts, moreover, likely arrived from on the British Isles from continental Europe by the same route as the later Anglo-Saxons and Normans – i.e. across the English channel (or perhaps the south-west corner of the North Sea), by way of Southern England. This is, after all, by far the easiest, most obvious and direct route.^[38]

This leads Baker to conclude that the Celts, like the Anglo-Saxons after them, imposed their language on, but had little genetic impact on, the inhabitants of those parts of the British Isles furthest from this point of initial disembarkation (i.e. Scotland, Ireland, Wales). Thus, Baker concludes:

“The Iron Age invaders transmitted the dialects of their Celtic language to the more ancient Britons whom they found in possession of the land [and] pushed back these less advanced peoples towards the west and north as they spread” (p264).

But these latter peoples, though adopting the Celtic tongue, were not themselves (primarily) descendants of the Celtic invaders. This leads Baker to conclude, following what he takes to also be the conclusion of Carleton Coon in the latter’s book The Races of Europe, that:

“It is these people, the least Celtic—in the ethnic sense—of all the inhabitants of Great Britain, that have clung most obstinately to the language that their conquerors first taught them two thousand years ago” (p269).

In other words, in a racial and genetic, if not a linguistic, sense, the English are actually more Celtic than are the self-styled ‘Celtic Nations’ of Scotland, Ireland and Wales!

Australian Aboriginals – a “Primitive” Race?

The next chapter is concerned with Australian Aboriginals, or, as Baker classes them, “Australids”.

In this chapter Baker is primarily concerned with arguing that Aboriginals are morphologically “primitive”.

Of course, the indigenous inhabitants of what is now Australia were, when Europeans first made contact with them, notoriously backward in terms of their technology and material culture.

For example, Australian Aboriginals are said the only indigenous people yet to have developed the simple bow or bow and arrow; while the neighbouring, and related, indigenous people of Tasmania, isolated from the Australian mainland by rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age but usually classed as of the same race, are said to have lacked even, arguably, the ability to make fire.

However, this is not what Baker means by referring to Aboriginals as retaining many “primitive” traits. Indeed, unlike his later chapters on black Africans, Baker says nothing regarding the technology or material culture of indigenous Australians.

Instead, he talks exclusively about their morphology. In referring to them as retaining “primitive” characters, Baker is therefore using the word in the specialist phylogenetic sense. Thus, he argues that Australian Aboriginals:

“Retain… physical characters that were possessed by remote ancestors but have been lost in the course of evolution by most members of the taxa that are related to it” (p272-3).

In other words, they retain traits characteristic of an earlier state of human evolution which have since been lost in other extant races.

Baker purports to identify twenty-eight such “primitive” characters in Australian aboriginals. These include prognathism (p281), large teeth (p289), broad noses (p282), and large brow ridges (p280).

Baker acknowledges that all extant races retain some primitive characters that have been lost in other races (p302). For example, unlike most other races (but not Aboriginals), Caucasoids retain scalp hair characteristic of early hominids and indeed other extant primates (p297).

However, Baker concludes:

“The Australids are exceptional in the number and variety of their primitive characters and in the degree to which some of them are manifested” (p302).

Relatedly, Nicholas Wade observes that, whereas there is a general trend towards lighter and less robust bones and skulls over the course of human evolution, something referred to as ‘gracialization’, two populations at “the extremities of the human diaspora” seem to have been exempt, or isolated, from this process, namely Aboriginals and the “Fuegians at the tip of the South America” (A Troublesome Inheritance: p167-8).^[39]

Of course, to be morphologically ‘primitive’ in this specialist phylogenetic sense entails no necessary pejorative imputations as are often associated with the word ‘primitive’.

However, some phylogentically ‘primitive’ traits may indeed be linked to the ‘primitive’ technology of indigenous Aboriginals at the time of first contact with Europeans.

For example, tooth size decreased over the course of human evolution as human invented technologies (e.g. cooking, tools for cutting) that made large teeth unnecessary. As science writer Marek Kohn puts it:

“As the brain expanded in the course of becoming human, the teeth became smaller. Hominids lost their built-in weapons, but developed the possibility of building their own, all the way to the Bomb” (The Race Gallery: p63).

Indeed, Darwin himself observed, in The Descent of Man, that:

“The early male forefathers of man were, as previously stated, probably furnished with great canine teeth; but as they gradually acquired the habit of using stones, clubs, or other weapons, for fighting with their enemies or rivals, they would use their jaws and teeth less and less. In this case, the jaws, together with the teeth, would become reduced in size” (The Descent of Man).

Therefore, it is possible, Kohn provocatively contends, that:

“Aborigines have a biological adaptation to compensate for the primitiveness of their material culture… Teeth get smaller, the argument runs, when technology becomes more advanced” (The Race Gallery: p72-3).

On this view, the relatively large size of Aboriginal teeth could be associated with the primitive state of their technology.

Another phylogentically ‘primitive’ Aboriginal trait that also, rather more obviously, implies lesser intelligence intelligence, is their relatively smaller brain size.

Indeed, Philippe Rushton posits a direct tradeoff between brain-size and the size of the jaw and teeth, arguing in Race, Evolution and Behavior (which I have reviewed here, here and here) that: 

“As brain tissue expanded… it did so at the expense of the temporalis muscles, which… close the jaw. Since smaller temporalis muscles cannot close as large a jaw, jaw size was reduced. Consequently, there is less room for teeth” (Race, Evolution and Behavior: Preface to Third Edition: p20-1).

Thus, leading mid-twentieth century American physical anthropologist and racialist Carleton Coon reports:

“The critical differences between [“the ancestors of our living races”] and us lie mostly in brain size versus jaw size – the balance between thinking thoughts and eating foods of various degrees of fineness” (Racial Adaptations: p113).

Thus, Aboriginals have, on average, Baker reports, not only larger jaws and teeth, but also smaller brains than those of Caucasians, weighing only about 85% as much (p292). The smaller average brain-size of Aboriginals is confirmed by more recent data (Beals et al 1984).

Baker also reviews some suggestive evidence regarding the internal structure of Aboriginal brains, as compared to that of Europeans, notably in the relative positioning of the lunate sulcus, again suggesting similarities with the brains of non-human primates.

In this sense, then, Australian Aboriginals ‘primitive’ brains may indeed be linked to the primitive state, in the more familiar sense of the word ‘primitive’, of their technology and culture.

San Bushmen and Paedomorphy

Whereas Australian Aboriginals are morphologically “primitive” (i.e. retain characters of early hominids), the San Bushmen of Southern Africa (“Sanids”), together with the related Khoi (collectively Khoisan, or, in racial terms, Capoid) are, Baker contends, “paedomorphic”.

By this, Baker means that the San people retain into adulthood traits that are, in other taxa, restricted to infants or juveniles, and is more often referred to as neoteny.^[40]

One example of this supposed paedomorphy is provided by the genitalia of the Sanid males:

“The penis, when not erect, maintains an almost horizontal position… This feature is scarcely ever omitted in the rock art of the Bushmen, in their stylized representations of their own people. The prepuce is very long; it covers the glans completely and projects forward to a point. The scrotum is drawn up close to the root of the penis, giving the appearance that only one testis has descended, and that incompletely” (p319).^[41]

Humans in general are known to be neotenous in many of our distinct characters, and we are also, of course, the most intelligent known species.

Indeed, as discussed by Desmond Morris in his 1960s human ethology classic The Naked Ape (which I have reviewed here), among the traits that have been associated with neotenty in humans are our brain size, growth patterns, hairlessness, inventiveness, upright posture, spinal curvature, smaller jaws and teeth, forward facing vaginas, lack of a penis bone, the length of our limbs and the retention of the hymen into adulthood.

However, Baker argues:

“Although mankind as a whole is paedomorphous, those ethnic taxa (the Sanids among them) that are markedly more paedomorphious than the rest have never achieved the status of civilization, or anything approaching it, by their own initiative. It would seem that, when carried beyond a certain point, paedomorphosis is antagonistic to purely intellectual advance” (p324).

As to why this might be the case, he speculates in a later chapter:

“Certain taxa have remained primitive or become paedomorphous in their general morphological characters and none of these has succeeded in developing a civilization. It is among these taxa in particular that one finds some indication of a possible cause of mental inferiority in the small size of the brain” (p428).

Yet this is a curious suggestion since neoteny is usually associated with increased brain growth in humans.^[42]

Moreover, other authorities class East Asians as a paedomorphic race, and Baker himself classes “the bulk of the population” of Japan as “somewhat paedomorphious” (p538).^[43]

However, the Japanese, along with other Northeast Asians, not least the Chinese, have undoubtedly founded great civilizations and have brains as large as, or, after controlling for body-size, even larger than those of Europeans, and are generally reported to have somewhat higher IQs (see Lynn’s Race Differences in Intelligence: which I have reviewed here).

The Big Butts of Bushmen – or just of Bushwomen?

Having discussed male genitalia, Baker also emphasizes the primary and secondary sexual characteristics of Sanid women – in particular their protruding buttocks (“steatopygia”) and alleged elongated labia.

The protruding buttocks of Sanid women are, Baker contends, qualitatively different in both shape and indeed composition from those of other populations, including the much-celebrated ‘big butts’ of contemporary African-Americans (p318).

Thus, whereas, among other populations, the shape of the buttocks, even if very large, are “rounded” in shape:

“It is particular characteristic of the Khoisanids that the shape of the projecting part is that of a right-angled triangle, the upper edge being nearly horizontal … [and] internally… consist of masses of fat incorporated between criss-crossed sheets of connective tissue said to be joined to one another in a regular manner.”

Regarding the function of these enlarged buttocks, Baker rejects any analogy with the humps of the camel, which evolved as reserves of fat upon which the animal could call in the event of famine or draught.

Unlike camels, which are, of course, adapted to a desert environment, Baker concludes:

“The Hottentots, Korana, and Bushmen are not to be regarded as people adapted by natural selection to desert life” (p318).

However, today, San Bushmen are indeed largely restricted to a desert environment, namely the Kalahari desert.

However, although he does not directly discuss this, Baker presumably regards this as a recent displacement, resulting from the Bantu expansion, in the course of which the less advanced San were displaced from their traditional hunting grounds in southern Africa by Bantu agriculturalists, and permitted to eke out an undisturbed existence only in an arid desert environment of no use to Bantu agriculturalists.

Instead of having evolved as fat reserves in the event of famine, drought or scarcity, Baker instead suggests that Khoisan buttocks evolved through sexual selection.

This seems plausible, given the sexual appeal of ‘big butts’ even among western populations. However, recent research suggest that it is actually lumbar curvature, or lordosis, an ancient mammalian mating signal, rather than fat deposits in the buttocks as such, that is primarily responsible for the perceived attractiveness of so-called ‘big butts’ (Lewis et al 2015).

This sexual selection hypothesis is, of course, also consistent with the fact that large buttocks among the San seem to be largely, if not entirely, restricted to women.

However, Carleton Coon, in Racial Adaptations: A Study of the Origins, Nature, and Significance of Racial Variations in Humans, suggests alternatively that this sexual dimorphism could instead reflect the caloric requirements of pregnancy and lactation.^[44]

The caloric demands of pregnancy and lactation are indeed the probable reason women of all races have greater fat deposits than do males.

Indeed, an analogy might be provided by female breasts, since these, unlike the mammary glands of other mammalian species, are present permanently, from puberty on, and, save during pregnancy and lactation, are composed predominantly of fatty tissues, not milk.^[45]

Elusive Elongated Labia?

In addition to their enlarged buttocks, Baker also discusses the alleged elongated labia of Sanid women, sometimes referred to, rather inaccurately in Baker’s view, as the “the Hottentot apron”.

Some writers have discounted this notion as a sort of nineteenth-century anthropological myth. However, Baker himself insists that the elongated labia of the San are indeed real.

His evidence, however, is less than compelling, the illustrations included in the text being limited to a full-body photograph in which the characteristic is barely visible (p311) and what seems to be a surely rather fanciful sketch (p315).

Likewise, although a Google image search produces abundant photographic evidence of Khoisan buttocks, their elongated labia prove altogether more elusive.

Perhaps the modesty of Khoisan women, or the prudery and puritanism of Victorian anthropologists and explorers, prevented the latter from recording photographic evidence for this characteristic.

However, it is perhaps telling that, even in this age of “Rule 34 of the Internet” (“If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions”), I have been unable to find photographic evidence for this trait.

Racial Superiority

The fourth and final section of ‘Race’ turns to the most controversial topic addressed by Baker in this most controversial of books, namely whether any racial group can be said to be superior or inferior to another, a question that Baker christens “the Ethnic Question”.

He begins by critiquing the very nature of the notion of superiority and inferiority, observing in a memorable and quotable aphorism:

“Anyone who accepts it as a self-evident truth, in accordance with the American Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal may properly be asked whether the meaning of the word ‘equal’ is self-evident” (p421).

Thus, if one is “concerned simply with the question whether the taxa are similar or different”, then, Baker concludes, “there can be no doubt as to the answer” (p421).

Indeed, this much is clear, not simply from the huge amount of data assembled by Baker himself in previous chapters, but also from simple observation.^[46]

However, Baker continues:

“The words ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ are not generally used unless value judgements are concerned” (p421).

Any value judgement is, of course, necessarily subjective.

On objective criteria, each race can only be said to be, on average, superior in a specific endeavour (e.g. IQ tests, basketball, mugging, pimping, drug-dealing, tanning, making music, building civilizations). The value to be ascribed to these endeavours is, however, wholly subjective.

On these grounds, contemporary self-styled ‘race realists’ typically disclaim any association between their theories and any notions of racial superiority.

Yet these race realists are often the very same individuals who emphasise the predictive power of IQ tests in determining many social outcomes (income, criminality, illegitimacy, welfare dependency) which are generally viewed in anything but value-neutral terms (see The Bell Curve: which I have reviewed here).

From a biological perspective, no species (or subspecies) is superior to any other. Each is adapted to its own ecological niche and hence presumably superior at surviving and reproducing within the specific environment in which it evolved.

Thus, sociobiologist Robert Trivers quotes his mentor Bill Druryf as observing during a discussion between the two regarding a possible biological basis for race prejudice:

“Bob, once you’ve learnt to think of a herring gull as equal, the rest is easy” (Natural Selection and Social Theory: p57).

However, taken to its logical conclusion, or reductio ad absurdum, this suggests a dung beetle is equal to Beethoven!

From Physiology to Psychology

Although he alludes in passing to race differences in athletic ability, Baker, in discussing superiority, is concerned primarily with intellectual and moral achievement. Therefore, in this final section of the book, he turns from physiological differences to psychological ones.

Of course, the two are not entirely unconnected. All behaviour must have an ultimate basis in the brain, which is itself a part of an organism’s physiology. Thus:

“Cranial capacity is, of course, directly relevant to the ethnic problem since it sets a limit to the size of the brain in different taxa; but all morphological differences are also relevant in an indirect way, since it is scarcely possible that any taxa could be exactly the same as one another in all the genes that control the development and function of the nervous and sensory systems, yet so different from one another in structural characters in other parts of the body” (p533-4).

Indeed, Baker observes:

“Identity in habits is unusual even in pairs of taxa that are morphologically much more similar to one another than [some human races]. The subspecies of gorilla, for instance, are not nearly so different from one another as Sanids are from Europids, but they differ markedly in their modes of life” (426).

In other words, since human races differ significantly in their physiology, it is probable that they will also differ, to a roughly equivalent degree, in psychological traits, such as intelligence, temperament and personality.

Measuring Superiority?

In discussing the question of the intellectual and moral superiority of different racial groups, Baker focusses on two lines of evidence in particular:

1. Different races’ performance in ability and attainment tests;
2. Different races’ historical track record in founding civilizations.

Baker’s discussion of the former topic is now rather dated.

Recent findings unavailable to Baker include the discovery that East Asians score somewhat higher on IQ tests than do white Europeans (see Race Differences in Intelligence: reviewed here), and also that Ashkenazi Jews score higher still (see The Chosen People: review forthcoming).^[47]

Evidence has also accumulated regarding the question of the relative contributions of heredity to racial differences in IQ, including the Minnesota transracial study (Scarr & Weinberg 1976; Weinberg et al 1992) and studies of the effects of racial admixture on IQ using blood-group data (Loehlin et al 1973; Scarr et al 1977), and, most recently, genome analysis (Lasker et al 2019). See also my review of Richard Lynn’s ‘Race Difference in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Perspective’, posted here.

Readers interested in more recent research on this issue should consult Jensen and Rushton (2005) and Nisbett (2005); or Nicholas Mackintosh’s summary in Chapter Thirteen of his textbook, IQ and Human Intelligence (2nd Ed) (pp324-359); or indeed my own recent review of Richard Lynn’s ‘Race Difference in Intelligence: An Evolutionary Perspective’, posted here.^[48]

Criteria for Civilization and Moral Relativism

While his data on race differences in IQ is therefore now dated, Baker’s discussion of the track-record of different races in founding civilizations remains of interest today, if only because this is a topic studiously avoided by most contemporary authors, historians and anthropologists on account of its politically-incorrect nature – though Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs and Steel, represents an important recent exception to this trend.^[49]

The first question, of course, is precisely how one is to define ‘civilizations’ in the first place, itself a highly contentious issue.^[50]

Thus, Baker identifies twenty-one criteria for recognising civilizations (p507-8).^[51]

In general, these can be divided into two types:

1. Scientific/technological criteria;
2. Moral criteria.^[52]

However, the latter are inherently problematic. What constitutes moral superiority itself involves a moral judgement that is necessarily subjective.

In other words, whereas technological and scientific superiority can be demonstrated objectively, moral superiority is a mere matter of opinion.

Thus, the ancient Romans, transported to our times, would surely accept the superiority of our technology – and, if they did not, we would, as a consequence of the superiority of our technology, outcompete them both economically and militarily and hence prove it ourselves.

However, they would view our social, moral and political values as decadent and we would have no way of proving them wrong.

Take, for example, Baker’s first requirement for civilization, namely that:

“In the ordinary circumstances of life in public places they [i.e. members of the society under consideration] cover the external genitalia and greater part of the trunk with clothes” (p507).

This criterium is not only curiously puritanical, but also blatantly biased against tropical cultures. Whereas in temperate and arctic zones clothing is essential for survival, in the tropics the decision to wear clothing represents little more than an arbitrary fashion choice.

Meanwhile, the requirement that the people in question “do not practice severe mutilation or deformation of the body”, another moral criterion, could arguably exclude contemporary westerners from the ranks of the ranks of the ‘civilized’, given the increasing prevalence of tattooing, flesh tunnel ear plugs and other forms of extreme bodily modification (not to mention gender reassignment surgery and other non-consensual forms of  genital mutilation) – or perhaps it is merely those among us who succumb to such fads who are not truly civilized.

The requirement that a civilization’s religious beliefs not be “purely or grossly superstitious” (p507) is also problematic. As a confirmed atheist, I suspect that all religions are, by very definition, superstitious. If some forms of Buddhism and Confucianism are perhaps exceptions, then they are perhaps simply not religions at all in the western sense.

At any rate, Christian beliefs  regarding miracles, resurrection, the afterlife, the Holy Spirit and so on surely rival those of any other religion when it comes to “gross superstition”.

As for his complaint that the religion of the Mayans “did not enter into the fields of ethics” (p526), a complaint he also raises in respect of indigenous black African religions (p384), contemporary moral philosophers generally see this as a good thing, believing that religion is best kept of moral debates.^[53]

In conclusion, any person seeking to rank cultures on moral criteria will, almost inevitably, rank his own society as morally superior to all others – simply because he is judging these societies by the moral standards of his own society that he has internalized and adopted as his own.

Thus, Baker himself views Western civilization as superior to such pre-Columbian mesoamerican civilizations as the Aztecs due to the latter’s practice of mass ritual human sacrifice and cannibalism (p524-5).

However, in doing so, he is judging the cultures in question by distinctly Western moral standards. The Aztecs, in contrast, may have viewed human sacrifice as a moral imperative and may therefore have viewed European cultures as morally deficient precisely because they did not butcher enough of their people in order to propitiate the gods.

Likewise, whereas Baker views cannibalism as incompatible with civilization (p507), I personally view cannibalism as, of itself, a victimless crime. A dead person, being dead, is incapable of suffering by virtue of being eaten. Indeed, in this secular age of environmental consciousness, one might even praise cannibalism as a highly ‘sustainable’ form of recycling.

For this reason, in my own discussion of the different cultures and civilizations founded by members of different races, I will confine my discussion exclusively to scientific and technological criteria for civilization.

Sub-Saharan African Cultures

Baker’s discussion of different groups’ capacity for civilization actually begins before his final section on “Criteria for Superiority and Inferiority” in his four chapters on the race whom Baker terms “Negrids” – namely, black Africans from south of the Sahara, excluding Khoisan and Pygmies (p325-417).

Whereas his previous chapters discussing specific selected human populations focussed primarily, or sometimes exclusively, on their morphological peculiarities, in the last four of these chapters, focussing on African blacks, his focus shifts from morphology to culture.

Thus, Baker writes:

“The physical characters of the Negrids are mentioned only briefly. Members of this race are studied in Chapters 18-21 mainly from the point of view of the social anthropologist interested in their progress towards civilization at a time when they were still scarcely influenced over a large part of their territory, by direct contact with members of more advanced ethnic taxa” (p184).

Unlike some racialist authors,^[54] Baker acknowledges the widespread adoption of advanced technologies throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa prior to modern times. However, he attributes the adoption of these technologies to contact with, and borrowings from, outside non-Negroid civilizations (e.g. Arabs, Egyptians, Moors, Berbers, Europeans).

Therefore, in order to distinguish the indigenous, homegrown capacity of black Africans to develop advanced civilization, Baker relies on the reports of seven nineteenth century explorers of what he terms “the secluded area” of Africa, by which term Baker seems to mean the bulk of inland Southern, Eastern and Central Africa, excluding the Horn of Africa, the coast of West Africa and the Gulf of Guinea (p334-5).^[55]

In these parts of Africa, at the time these early European explorers visited the continent, the influence of outside civilizations was, Baker reports, “non-existent or very slight” (p335). The cultural practices observed by these explorers therefore, for Baker, provide a measure of black Africans’ indigenous capacity for social, cultural and technological advancement.

On this perhaps dubious basis, Baker thus concludes that there is no evidence black Africans in this area ever:

• Fully domesticated any plants (354-6) or animals (p373-7); or
• Invented, or adopted, the wheel (p373); or other ‘mechanical’ devices with interacting parts (p354).^[56]

Also largely absent throughout ‘the secluded area’, according to Baker, were:

• Two-storey (or more) dwellings (p368); and
• A written language (p349).

In respect of these last two indices of civilization, however, Baker admits a couple of partial, arguable exceptions, which he discusses in the next chapter (Chapter 21). These include the ruins of Great Zimbabwe (p401-9) and a script invented in the nineteenth century (p409-11).^[57]

Domesticated Plants and Animals in Africa

Let’s review these claims in turn. First, it certainly seems to be true that few if any species of either animals or plants were domesticated in what Baker calls the “the secluded area” of sub-Saharan Africa.^[58]

However, with respect to plants, there may be a reason for this. Many important, early domesticates were annuals. These are plants that complete their life-cycle within a single year, taking advantage of predictable seasonal variations in the weather.

As explained by Jared Diamond, annual plants are ideal for human consumption, and for domestication, because:

“Within their mere one year of life, annual plants inevitably remain small herbs. Many of them instead put their energy into producing big seeds, which remain dormant during the dry season and are then ready to sprout when the rains come. Annual plants therefore waste little energy on making inedible wood or fibrous stems, like the body of trees and bushes. But many of the big seeds… are edible by humans. They constitute 6 of the modern world’s 12 major crops” (Guns, Germs and Steel: p136).

Yet sub-Saharan Africa, being located closer to the equator, experiences less seasonal variation in climate. As a result, relatively fewer plants are annuals.

However, it is far less easy to explain why sub-Saharan Africans failed to domesticate any wild species of animal, with the possible exception of guineafowl.^[59]

After all, Africa is popular as a tourist destination today in part precisely because it has a relative abundance of large wild mammals of the sort seemingly well suited for domestication.^[60]

Jared Diamond argues that the African zebra, a close relative of other wild equids that were domesticated, was undomesticable because of its aggression and what Diamond terms its “nasty disposition” (Guns, Germs and Steel: p171-2).^[61]

However, this is unconvincing when one considers that Eurasians succeeded in domesticating such formidably powerful and aggressive wild species as wolves and aurochs.^[62]

Thus, even domesticated bulls remain a physically-formidable and aggressive animal. Indeed, they were favoured adversaries in blood sports such as bullfighting and bull-baiting for precisely this reason.

However, the wild auroch, from whom modern cattle derive, was undoubtedly even more formidable, being, not only larger, more muscled and with bigger horns, but also surely even more aggressive than modern bulls. After all, one of the key functions of domestication is to produce more docile animals that are more amenable to control by human agriculturalists.^[63]

Compared to the domestication of aurochs, the domestication of the zebra would seem almost straight forward. Indeed, the successful domestication of aurochs in ancient times might even cause us to reserve our judgement regarding the domesticability of such formidable African mammals as hippos and African buffalo, the possibility of whose domestication Diamond dismisses a priori as preposterous.

Certainly, the domestication of the auroch surely stands as one of the great achievements of ancient Man.

Reinventing the Wheel?

Baker also seems to be correct in his claim that black Africans never invented the wheel.

However, it must be borne in mind that the same is also probably true of white Europeans, who, rather than independently inventing the wheel for themselves, had the easier option of simply copying the design of the wheel from other civilizations and peoples, namely those from the Middle East, probably Mesopotamia, where the wheel seems to be have first been developed. 

Indeed, most cultures with access to the wheel never actually invented it themselves, for the simple reason that it is far easier to copy the invention of a third-party through simple reverse engineering than to independently invent afresh an already existing technology all by oneself.

This then explains why the wheel has actually been independently invented, at most, only a few times in history.

The real question, then, is not why the wheel was never invented in sub-Saharan Africa, but rather why it failed to spread throughout that continent in the same way it did throughout Eurasia.

Thus, if the wheel was known, as Baker readily acknowledges it was, in those parts of sub-Saharan Africa that were in contact with outside civilizations (notably in the Horn of Africa), then this raises the question as to why it failed to spread elsewhere in Africa prior to the arrival of Europeans. This indeed is acknowledged to remain a major enigma within the field of African history and archaeology (Law 2011; Chavez et al 2012).

After all, there are no obvious insurmountable geographical barriers preventing the spread of technologies across Africa other than the Sahara itself, and, as Baker himself acknowledges, black Africans in the ‘penetrated’ area had proven amply capable of imitating technological advances introduced from outside.

Why then did the wheel not spread across Africa in the same way it did across Eurasia? Is it possible that African people’s alleged cognitive deficiencies were responsible for the failure of this technology to spread and be copied, since the ability to copy technologies through reverse engineering itself requires some degree of intellectual ability, albeit surely less than that required for original innovation?

One might argue instead that the African terrain was unsuitable for wheeled transport. However, one of the markers of a civilization is surely its very ability to alter the terrain by large, cooperative public works engineering projects, such as the building of roads.

Thus, most of Eurasia is now suitable for wheeled transport in large part only because we, or more specifically our ancestors, have made it so.

Another explanation sometimes offered for the failure of African to develop wheeled transportation is that they lacked a suitable draft animal, horses in sub-Saharan Africa nbeing afflicted with sleeping sickness spread by the tsetse fly.

However, as we have seen above, Baker argues a race’s track record in successfully domesticating wild animals is itself indicative of the intellectual ability and character of that race. For Baker, then, the failure of sub-Saharan African to successfully domesticate any suitable species of potential draft animal (e.g. the zebra: see above) is itself indicative of, and a factor in, their inability to successfully develop advanced civilization.

At any rate, even in the absence of a suitable draft animal, wheels are still useful.

On the one hand, they can be used for non-transport-related purposes (e.g. the spinning wheel, the potter’s wheel, even water wheels). Indeed, in Eurasia the invention of the potter’s wheel is actually thought to have preceded the use of wheels for the purposes of transportation.

Moreover, even in the absence of a suitable draft animal, wheels remain very useful for transportation purposes – e.g. wheelbarrows, pulled rickshaws. 

In other words, humans can themselves be employed as a draft animal, whether by choice or by force, and, if there is one arguable marker for civilization for which Africa did not lack, and which did not await introduction by Europeans, Moors and Arabs, it was, of course, the institution of slavery.

African Writing Systems?

What then of the alleged failure of sub-Saharan Africans to develop a system of writing? Baker refers to only a single writing system indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa, namely the Vai syllabary, invented in what is today Liberia in the nineteenth century in imitation of foreign scripts. Was this indeed the only writing system indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa?

Of course, writing has long been known in North Africa, and ancient Egypt even lays claim to have invented the first written script, namely hieroglyphs, although most archaeologists believe that they were beaten to the gun, once again, by Mesopotamia, with its cuneiform script.

However, this is obviously irrelevant to the question of black African civilization, since the populations of North Africa, including the ancient Egyptians, were largely Caucasoid.^[64]

Thus, the Sahara Desert, as a relatively impassable obstacle to human movement throughout most of human history and prehistory (a “geographic filter”, according to Sarich and Miele) that hence impeded gene flow, has long represented, and to some extent still represents, the boundary between the Caucasoid and Negroid races (Race: The Reality of Human Differences: p210).

What then of writing systems indigenous to sub-Saharan Africa? The wikipedia entry on writing systems of Africa lists several indigenous African writing systems of sub-Saharan Africa.

However, save for those of recent origin, almost all of these writing systems seem, from the descriptions on their respective wikipedia pages, to have been restricted to areas outside of ‘the secluded area’ of Africa as defined by Baker (p334-5).

Thus, excluding the writing systems of North Africa (i.e. Meroitic, Tifinagh and  ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs), Ge’ze seems to have been restricted to the area around the Horn of Africa; Nsibidi to the area around the Gulf of Guinea in modern Nigeria; Adrinka to the coast of West Africa, while the other scripts mentioned in the entry are, like the Vai syllabary, of recent origin.

The only ancient writing system mentioned on this wikipedia page that was found in what Baker calls ‘the secluded area’ of Africa is Lusona. This seems to have been developed deep in the interior of sub-Saharan Africa, in parts of what is today eastern Angola, north-western Zambia and adjacent areas of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Thus, it is almost certainly of entirely indigenous origin.

However, Lusona is described by its wikipedia article as only “an ideographic tradition”, that “function[s] as mnemonic devices to help remember proverbs, fables, games, riddles and animals, and to transmit knowledge”.

It therefore appears to fall far short of a fully developed script in the modern sense.

Indeed, the same seems to be true, albeit to a lesser extent, of most of the indigenous writing systems of sub-Saharan Africa listed on the wikipedia page, namely Nsibidi and Adrinka, which each seem to represent only a form of proto-writing.

Only Ge’ze seems to have been a fully-developed script, and this was used only in the Horn of Africa, which not only lies outside ‘the secluded area’ as defined by Baker, but whose population is, again according to Baker, predominantly Caucasoid (p225).

Also, Ge’ze seems to have developed from an earlier Middle Eastern script. It is therefore not of entirely indigenous African origin.

It therefore seems to indeed be true that sub-Saharan Africans never produced a fully-developed script in those parts of Africa where they developed beyond the influence of foreign empires.

However, it must here be emphasized that the same is again probably also true of indigenous Europeans.

Thus, as with the wheel, Europeans themselves probably never independently invented a writing system, the Latin alphabet being derived from Greek script, which was itself developed from the Phoenician alphabet, which, like the wheel, first originated in the Middle East.^[65]

Indeed, most writing systems were developed, if not directly from, then at least in imitation of, pre-existing scripts. Like the wheel, writing has only been independently reinvented afresh a few times in history.^[66]

The question, then, as with the wheel, is, not so much why much of sub-Saharan Africa failed to invent a written script, but rather why those written scripts that were in use in certain parts of the continent south of the Sahara,  nevertheless failed to spread or be imitated over the remainder of that continent.

African Culture: Concluding Thoughts

In conclusion, it certainly seems clear that much of sub-Saharan Africa was indeed backward in those aspects of technology, social structure and culture which Baker identifies as the key components of civilization. This much is true and demands an explanation.

However, blanket statements regarding the failure of sub-Saharan Africans to develop a writing system or two-storey buildings seem, at best, a misleading simplification.

Indeed, Baker’s very notion of what he calls ‘the secluded area’ of Africa is vague and ill-defined, and he never provides a clear definition, or, better still, a map precisely delineating what he means by the term (p334-5).

Indeed, the very notion of a ‘secluded area’ is arguably misconceived, since even relatively remote and isolated areas of the continent that did not have any direct contact with non-Negroid peoples, will presumably have had some indirect influence from outside of sub-Saharan Africa, if only by contact with peoples from those regions of the continent south of the Sahara which had been influenced by foreign peoples and civilizations.

After all, as we have seen, Europeans also failed to independently develop either the wheel and writing system for themselves, instead simply copying these innovations from the neighbouring civilizations of the Middle East.

Why then were black Africans south of the Sahara, who were indeed exposed to these technologies in certain parts of their territory, nevertheless unable to do the same?

Perhaps one factor impeding the movement of technologies such as the wheel and writing across sub-Saharan Africa in pre-modern times is the relative lack of navigable waterways (e.g. rivers) in the region.

As emphasized by Tim Marshall in his book Prisoners of Geography, rivers in sub-Saharan African tended to be non-navigable, mainly because of the prevalence of large waterfalls that made transport by river a dangerous venture.

Since, in ancient and premodern times, transport by river was, at least in Eurasia, generally easier, safer and quicker than by land, Africa’s generally non-navigable river system may have ironically impeded the spread throughout Africa even of technologies that were themselves of use primarily for transportation, such as the wheel.

Pre-Columbian Native American Cultures

Baker’s discussion of status of the pre-Columbian civilizations, or putative civilizations, of America is especially interesting. Of these, the Mayans definitely stand out, in Baker’s telling, as the most impressive in terms of their scientific and technological achievements.

Baker ultimately concludes, however, that even the Maya do not qualify as a true civilization, largely on moral grounds – namely, their practice of mass sacrifices and cannibalism.

Yet, as we have seen, this is to judge the Mayans by distinctly western moral standards. 

No doubt if western cultures were to be judged by the moral values of the Mayans, we too would be judged just as harshly. Perhaps they would condemn us precisely for not massacring enough of our citizens in order to propitiate the gods.

However, even seeking to rank the Mayans based solely on their technological and scientific achievements, they still represent something of a paradox.

On the one hand, their achievements in mathematics and astronomy seem impressive.

Indeed, Baker educates us that it is was Mayans, not the Hindus or Arabs more often credited with the innovation, who first invented the concept of zero – or rather, to put the matter more precisely, “invent[ed] a ‘local value’ (or ‘place notational’) system of numeration that involved zero: that is to say, a system in which the value of each numberical symbol depended on its position in a series of such symbols, and the zero, if required, took its place in this series ” (p552).

Thus, Baker writes:

“The Maya had invented the idea [of zero] and applied it to their vegisimal system [i.e. using a base of twenty] before the Indian mathematicians had thought of it and used it in denary [i.e. decimal] notation” (p522).^[67]

Thus, Baker concludes:

“The mathematics, astronomy, and calendar of the Middle Americans suggest unqualified acceptance into the ranks of the civilized” (p525).

However, on the other hand, according to Baker’s account:

“They had no weights… no metal-bladed hoes or spades and no wheels (unless a few toys were actually provided with wheels and really formed part of the Mayan culture)” (p524).

Yet, as Baker alludes to in his rather disparaging reference to “a few toys”, it now appears the these toys were indeed part of the Maya culture.

Thus, far from failing to invent the wheel, Native Americans are one of the few peoples in the world with an unambiguous claim to have indeed invented the wheel entirely independently, since the possibility of wheels being introduced through contact with Eurasian civilizations is exceedingly remote.

Thus, the key question is, not why Native American civilizations failed to invent the wheel, for they did indeed invent the wheel, but rather why they failed to make full use of this remarkably useful invention, seemingly only employing it for seemingly frivolous items resembling toys (but whose real purpose is unknown) rather than for transport, or indeed the production of ceramics, textiles or energy.

Terrain may have been a factor. As mentioned above, one of the markers of a true civilization is arguably its very ability to alter its terrain by large-scale engineering projects such as the building of roads. However, obviously some terrains pose greater difficulties in this respect, and the geography of much of Mesoamerica is particularly uninviting.

As in respect of sub-Saharan Africa, another factor sometimes cited is the absence of a suitable draft animal.

The Inca, but not the Aztecs and Maya, did have the llama. However, llama are not strong enough to carry humans, or to pull large carts.

Of course, for Baker, as we have seen above, a race’s track record in domesticating non-human animals, including for use as draft animals, is itself indicative of that race’s ability and capacity to build and maintain advanced civilization.

However, in the Americas, most large wild mammals of the sort possibly suited for domestication as a draft animal were wiped out by the first humans to arrive on the continent, the former having evolved in complete isolation from humans, and hence being completely evolutionarily unprepared for the sudden influx of humans with their formidable hunting skills.^[68]

Thus, Jared Diamond in Guns Germs and Steel observes:

“Ancient Native Mexicans invented wheeled vehicles with axles for use as toys, but not for transport. This seems incredible to us until we reflect that ancient Mexicans lacked domestic animals to hitch to their wheeled vehicles, which therefore offered no advantage over human porters” (Guns Germs and Steel: p248).

However, it is simply not true that, in the absence of a draft animal, wheels vehicles “offered no advantage over human porters”, as claimed by Diamond. On the contrary, as dicussed above, humans themselves can be employed as draft animals (e.g. the wheelbarrow and pulled rickshaw), and, as Diamond himself observes in a later chapter:

“Human-powered wheelbarrows… enabled one or more people, still using just human muscle power, to transport much greater weights than they could have otherwise” (Guns Germs and Steel: p359).

Moreover, as again discussed above, the wheel also has other uses besides transport, one of which, the potter’s wheel, actually seems to have been adopted before the use of wheels for transportation purposes in Europe. Yet there is no evidence for the use of the potter’s wheel in the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans. 

As for the Mayan script, this was also, according to Baker, quite limited. Thus, Baker reports:

“There was no way of writing verbs, and abstract ideas (apart from number) could not be inscribed. It would not appear that the technique even of the Maya lent itself to a narrative form, except in a very limited sense. Most of the Middle Americans conveyed non-calendrical information only by speech or by the display of a series of paintings” (p524).

Indeed, he reports that “nearly all their inscriptions were concerned with numbers and the calendar” (p524).

“The Middle Americans had nothing that could properly be called a narrative script” (p523-4).

Baker vs Diamond: The Rematch

However, departing from Baker’s conclusions, I regard the achievements of the Mesoamerican civilizations as, overall, quite impressive.

This is especially so, not only when one takes into account, not only their complete isolation from the Old World civilizations of Eurasia, but also of other factors identified by Jared Diamond in his rightly-acclaimed Guns, Germs and Steel.

Thus, whereas the Eurasian cultural zone is oriented largely on an east-to-west axis, spreading from China and Japan in the East, to western Europe and North Africa in the West, America is a tall, narrow continent that spreads instead from north-to-south, quite narrow in places, especially at the Isthmus of Panama, where the North American continent meets South America, which, at the narrowest point, is less than fifty miles across. 

As Diamond emphasizes, because climate varies with latitude (i.e. distance from the equator), this means that different parts of the Americas have very different climates, making the movement and transfer of crops, domesticated animals and people much more difficult.

This, together with the difficulty of the terrain, might explain why even the Incas and Aztecs, though contemporaneous, seem to have been largely if not wholly unaware of one another’s existence, and certainly had no direct contact.

As a result, Native American cultures developed, not only in complete isolation from Old World civilizations, but even largely in isolation even from one another.

Moreover, the Americas had few large domesticable mammals, almost certainly because the first settlers of the continent, on arriving, hunted them to extinction on first arrival, and the mammals, having evolved in complete isolation from humans, were entirely unprepared for the arrival of humans, with their formidable hunting skills, to whom they were wholly unadapted.

In these conditions, the achievements of the Mesoamerican civilizations, especially the Mayans, seem to me quite impressive, all things considered – certainly far more impressive than the achievements of, say, sub-Saharan Africans or Australian Aboriginals.

This is especially so in comparison to sub-Saharan Africa when one takes into consideration the fact that the latter region was neither completely isolated from Eurasian civilizations nor as narrowly oriented on a north-west as are the Americas.

Thus, as has been emphasized by astrophysicist Michael Hart in his book, Understanding Human History, Diamond’s theory is a rather more successful explanation for the technological backwardness and underdevelopment of the pre-Columbian Americas than it is for the even greater technological backwardness and underdevelopment of sub-Saharan Africa.

Thus, if these black Africans and Australian Aboriginals can then indeed be determined to possess lesser innate intellectual capacity as compared to, say, Europeans or East Asians, then I feel it is nevertheless premature to say the same of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Artistic Achievement

In addition to ranking cultures on scientific, technological and moral criteria, Baker also assesses the quality of their artwork (p378-81; p411-17; p545-549). However, judgements of artistic quality, like moral judgements, are necessarily subjective.

Thus, Baker disparages black African art as non-naturalistic (p381) yet also extols the decorative art of the Celtics, which is mostly non-figurative and abstract (p261-2).

However, interestingly, with regard to styles of music, Baker recognises the possibility of cultural bias, suggesting that European explorers, looking for European-style melody and harmony, failed to recognise the rhythmical qualities of African music which are, Baker remarks, “perhaps unequalled in the music of any other race of mankind” (p379).^[69]

“A Reminder of What Was Possible”?

The fact that ‘Race’ remains a rewarding some read forty years after first publication, is an indictment of the hold of politically-correctness over both science and the publishing industry.

In the intervening years, despite all the advances of molecular genetics, the scientific understanding of race seems to have progressed but little, impeded by political considerations.

Meanwhile, the study of morphological differences between races seems to have almost entirely ceased, and a worthy successor to Baker’s ‘Race’, incorporating the latest genetic data, has, to my knowledge, yet to be published.

At the conclusion of the first section of his book, dealing with what Baker calls “The Historical Background”, Baker, bemoaning the impact of censorship and what would today be called political correctness and cancel culture on both science and the publishing industry, recommends the chapter on race from a textbook published in 1928 (namely, Contemporary Sociological Theories by Pitirim Sorokin) as “well worth reading”, even then, over forty years later, if only “as a reminder of what was still possible before the curtain went down” (p61).

Today, some forty years after Baker penned these very words and as the boundaries of acceptable opinion have narrowed yet further, I recommend Baker’s ‘Race’ in much the same spirit – as both an historical document and “a reminder of what was possible”.

__________________________

Endnotes

[1] For example, anthopologist-geneticist Vincent Sarich and science writer Frank Miele, in their book Race: The Reality of Human Differences (which I have reviewed here and here), provide a good example from the history of race science of where the convergent evolution of similar traits among different human lineages was once mistaken for evidence of homology and hence of shared ancestry, when they write:

“There are two groups of people with the combination of dark skin and frizzy hair—sub-Saharan Africans and Melanesians. The latter have often been called ‘Oceanic Negroes,’ implying a special relationship with Africans. The blood group data, however, showed that they are about as different from Africans as they could be” (Race: The Reality of Human Differences: p134)

Genetic studies often allow us distinguish homology from analogy, because the same or similar traits in different populations often evolve through different genetic mutations. For example, Europeans and East Asians evolved lighter complexions after leaving Africa, in part, by mutations in different genes (Norton et al 2007). Similarly, lactase persistence has evolved through mutations in different genes in Europeans than among some sub-Saharan Africans (Tishkoff et al 2009). Of course, at least in theory, the same mutation in the same gene could occur in different populations, thus providing an example of convergent evolution and homoplasy even at the genetic level. However, this is unlikely, and, with the analysis of a large number of genetic loci, especially in non-coding DNA, where mutations are unlikely to be selected for or against and hence are lost or retained at random in different populations, is unlikely to lead to errors in determining the relatedness of populations. 

[2] In his defence, the Ainu are not one of the groups upon whom Baker focuses in his discussion, and are only mentioned briefly in passing (p158; p173; p424) and at the very end of the book, in his “Table of Races and Subraces”, where he attempts to list, and classify by race, all the groups mentioned in the book, howsoever briefly (p624-5).

[3] Although we no longer need to rely on morphological criteria in order to determine the relatedness between populations, differences between racial groups in morphology and bodily structure remain an interesting, and certainly a legitimate, subject for scientific study in their own right. Unfortunately, however, the study and measurement of such differences seems to have all but ceased among anthropologists. One result is that much of the data on these topics is quite old. Thus, HBDers, Baker included, are sometimes criticized for citing studies published in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century. In principle, there is, however, nothing wrong with citing data from the nineteenth or early-twentieth century, unless critics can show that the methodology adopted have subsequently been shown to be flawed. However, it must be acknowledged that the findings of such studies with respect to morphology may no longer apply to modern populations, as a result of recent population movements and improvements in health and nutrition, among other factors. At any rate, the reason for the paucity of recent data is the taboo associated with such research.

[4] This is a style of formatting I have not encountered elsewhere. It makes it difficult to bring oneself to skip over the material rendered in smaller typeface since it is right there in the main body of the text, and indeed Baker himself claims that this material is “more technical and more detailed than the rest (but not necessarily less interesting)” (pix).

[5] Yet another source of potential terminological confusion results from the fact that, as will be apparent from many passages from the book quoted in this review, Baker uses the word “ethnic” to refer to differences that would better to termed “racial” – i.e. when referring to biologically-inherited physical and morphological differences between populations. Thus, for example, he uses the term “ethnic taxon” as “a comprehensive term that can be used without distinction for any of the taxa that are minor to species: that is to say, races, subraces and local forms” (p4). Similarly, he uses the phrase “the ethnic problem” to refer to the “whole subject of equality and inequality among the ethnic taxa of man” (p6). However, as Baker acknowledges, “English words derived from the Greek ἔθνος (ethnic, ethnology, ethnography, and others) are used by some authors in reference to groups of mankind distinguished by cultural or national features, rather than descent from common ancestors” (p4). However, in defending his adoption of this term, he notes “this usage is not universal” (p4). This usage has, I suspect, become even more prevalent in the years since the publication of Baker’s book. However, in my experience, the term ‘ethnic’ is sometimes also used as politically correct euphemism for the word ‘race’, both colloquially and in academia.

[6] In both cases, the source of potential confusion is the same, since both terms, though referring to a race, are derived from geographic terms (Europe and the Caucasus region, respectively), yet the indigenous homelands of the races in question are far from identical to the geographic region referred to by the term. The term ‘Asian’, when used as an ethnic or racial descriptor, is similarly misleading. For example, in British-English, ‘Asian’, as an ethnic term, usually refers to South Asians, since South Asians form a larger and more visible minority ethnic group in the UK than do East Asians. However, in the USA, the term ‘Asian’ is usually restricted to East Asians and Southeast Asians – i.e. those formerly termed ‘Mongoloid’. The British-English usage is more geographically correct, but racially misleading, since populations of the Indian subcontinent, like those from the Middle East (also part of the Asian continent) are actually genetically closer to southern Europeans than to East Asians and were generally classed as Caucasian by nineteenth and early-twentieth century anthropologists, and are similarly classed by Baker himself. This is one reason that the term ‘Mongoloid’, despite pejorative connotations, remains useful.

[7] Moreover, the term ‘Mongoloid’ is especially confusing given that it has also been employed to refer to people suffering from a developmental disability and chromosomal abnormality (Down Syndrome), and, while both usages are dated, and the racial meaning is actually the earlier one from which the later medical usage is derived, it is the latter usage which seems, in my experience, to retain greater currency, the word ‘Mongoloid’ being sometimes employed as a rather politically-incorrect insult, implying a mental handicap. Therefore, while I find annoying the ‘euphemism treadmill’ whereby terms once quite acceptable terms (e.g. ‘negro’, ‘coloured people’) are suddenly and quite arbitrarily deemed offensive, the term ‘Mongoloid’ is, unlike these other etymologically-speaking, quite innocent terms, understandably offensive to people of East Asian descent given this dual meaning.

[8] For example, another ethnonym, ‘Asian’, is also etymologically problematic. Thus, the word ‘Asia’, the source of the ethnonym, ‘Asian’, derives from the Greek Ἀσία, which originally referred only to Anatolia, at the far western edge of what would now be called Asia, the inhabitants of which region are not now, nor have ever likely been, ‘Asian’ in the current American sense. Indeed, the very term Asia is a Eurocentric concept, grouping together many diverse peoples, fauna, flora and geographic zones, and whose border with Europe is quite arbitrary. Another even more etymologically suspect ethonym is, of course, the term ‘Indian’ (and its derivatives ‘Amerindian’, ‘Red Indian’ and ‘American Indian’) when applied to the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

[9] The main substantive differences between the rival taxonomies of different racial theorists reflect the perennial divide between lumpers and splitters. There is also the question of precisely where the line is to be drawn between one race and another in clinal variation between groups, and whether a hybrid or clinal population sometimes constitutes a separate race in and of itself.

[10] For example, in Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance, this history of the misuse of the race concept comes in Chapter Two, titled ‘Perversions of Science’; in Philippe Rushton’s Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (which I have reviewed here, here and here), this historical account is postponed until Chapter Five, titled ‘Race and Racism in History’; in Jon Entine’s Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About it, it is delayed until Chapter Nine, titled ‘The Origins of Race Science’; whereas, in Sarich and Miele’s Race: The Reality of Human Differences (which I have reviewed here, here and here), these opening chapters discussing the history of racial science expand to fill almost half the entire book.

[11] Indeed, somewhat disconcertingly, even Hitler’s Mein Kampf is taken seriously by Baker, the latter acknowledging that “the early part of [Hitler’s] chapter dealing with the ethnic problem is quite well-written and not uninteresting” (p59) – or perhaps this is only to damn with faint praise.

[12] Thus, at the time Stoddard authored The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy in 1920, with a large proportion of the world under the control of European colonial empires, a contemporary observer might be forgiven for assuming that what Stoddard called ‘White World-Supremacy’, was a stable, long-term, if not permanent arrangement. However, Stoddard accurately predicted the demographic transformation of the West, what some have termed ‘The Great Replacement’ or ‘A Third Demographic Transition’, almost a century before this began to become a reality.

[13] The exact connotations of this passage may depend on the translation. Thus, other translators translate the passage that Manheim translates as “The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is represented by the Jew” instead as “The Jew offers the most striking contrast to the Aryan”, which alternative translation has rather different, and less flattering, connotations, given that Hitler famously extols the Aryan as the master race. The rest of the passage quoted remains, when taken in isolation, broadly flattering, however.

[14] To clarify, both Boas and Montagu are briefly mentioned in later chapters. For example, Boas’s now largely discredited work on cranial plasticity is discussed by Baker at the end of his chapter on ‘Physical Differences Between the Ethnic Taxa of Man: Introductory Remarks’ (p201-2). However, this is outside of Baker’s chapters on “The Historical Background”, and therefore Boas’s role in (allegedly) shaping the contemporary consensus of ‘race denial’ is entirely unexplored by Baker. For discussion on this topic, see Carl Degler’s In Search of Human Nature; see also Chapter Two of Kevin Macdonald’s The Culture of Critique (which I have reviewed here) and Chapter Three of Sarich and Miele’s Race: The Reality of Human Differences (which I have reviewed here, here and here).

[15] Thus, there was no new scientific discovery that presaged or justified the abandonment of biological race as an important causal factor in the social and behavioural sciences. Later scientific developments, notably in genetics, were certainly later co-opted in support of this view. However, there is no coincidence in time between these two developments. Therefore, whatever the true origins of the theory of racial egalitarianism, whether one attributes it to horror at the misuse of race science by the Nazi regime, or the activism of certain influential social scientists such as Boas and Montagu, one thing is certain – namely, the abandonment, or at least increasing deemphasis, of the race category in the social and behavioural sciences was originally motivated by political rather than scientific considerations. See Carl Degler’s In Search of Human Nature; see also Chapter 2 of Kevin Macdonald’s Culture of Critique (which I have reviewed here) and Chapter Three of Sarich and Miele’s Race: The Reality of Human Differences (which I have reviewed here, here and here).

[16] That OUP gave up the copyright is, of course, to be welcomed, since it means, rather than gathering dust on the shelves of university libraries, while the few remaining copies still in circulation from the first printing rise in value, it has enabled certain dissident publishing houses to release new editions of this now classic work.

[17] Baker suggests that, at the time he wrote, behavioural differences between pygmy chimpanzees and other chimpanzees had yet to be demonstrated (p113-4). Today, however, pygmy chimpanzees are known to differ behaviourally from other chimps, being, among other differences, less prone to intra-specific aggression and more highly sexed. However, they are now usually referred to as bonobos rather than ‘pygmy chimpanzees’, and are recognized as a separate species from other chimpanzees, rather than a mere subspecies.

[18] This is, at least, how Baker describes this ‘species complex’ and how it was traditionally understood. Researching the matter on the internet, however, suggests whether this species complex represents a true ring species is a matter of some dispute (e.g. Liebers et al 2006).

[19] In cases of matings between sheep and goats that result in offspring, the resulting offspring themselves are usually, if not always, infertile. Moreover, actually, according to the wikipedia page on the topic, the question of when sheep and goats can ever successfully interbreed is more complex than suggested by Baker.

[20] I have found no evidence to support the assertion in some of the older nineteenth-century literature that women of ‘lower races’ have difficulty birthing offspring fathered by European men, owing to the greater brain- and head-size of European infants. Summarizing this view, contemporary Russian racialist Vladimir Avdeyev, in his impressively encyclopaedic, if extremely racist and occassionally slightly bonkers book, Raciology: The Science of the Hereditary Traits of Peoples, claims:

“The form of the skull of a child is directly connected with the characteristics of the structure of the mother’s pelvis—they should correspond to each other in the goal of eliminating death in childbirth. The mixing of the races unavoidably leads to this, because the structure of the pelvis of a mother of a different race does not correspond to the shape of the head of [the] mixed infant; that leads to complications during childbirth” (Raciology: p157).

Thus, Avdeyev claims, owing to race differences in brain size:

“Women on lower races [sic] endure births very easily, sometimes even without any pain, and only in highly rare cases do they die from childbirth. But this can never be said of women of lower races [sic] who birth children of white fathers” (Raciology: p157).

Thus, he quotes an early-twentieth century Russian race theorist as claiming:

“American Indian women… often die in childbirth from pregnancies with a child of mixed blood from a white father, whereas pure-blooded children within them are easily born. Many Indian women know well the dangers [associated with] a pregnancy from a white man, and therefore, they prefer a timely elimination of the consequence of cross-breeding by means of fetal expulsion, in avoidance of it” (Raciology: p157-8).

This, interestingly, accords with the claim of infamous late-twentieth century race theorist J Philippe Rushton, in the ‘Preface to the Third Edition’ of his book Race, Evolution and Behavior (which I have reviewed here, here and here), that, as compared to whites and Asians, blacks have “narrower hips”, giving them “a more efficient stride”, which provides an advantage in many athletic events, and that:

“The reason Whites and East Asians have wider hips than Blacks, and so make poorer runners, is because they give birth to larger brained babies” (Race, Evolution and Behavior: p11-12).

Thus, Rushton explains elsewhere:

“Increasing brain size [over the course of hominid evolution] was associated with a broadening of the pelvis. The broader pelvis provides a wider birth canal, which in turn allows for delivery of larger-brained offspring” (Odyssey: My Life as a Controversial Evolutionary Psychologist: p284-5).

However, contrary to the claim of Avdeyev, I find no support from contemporary delivery room data for the claim that women from so-called ‘lower-races’ experience greater birth complications, and mortality rates, when birthing offspring fathered by European males.
On the contrary, it is only differences in overall body-size, not brain-size, that seem to be the key factor, with East Asian women having greater difficulties birthing offspring fathered by European males because of the smaller frames of East Asian women, even though East Asians have brains as large as or larger than those of Europeans (Nystrom et al 2008).
Neither is it true that, where inter-racial mating has not occurred, then, on account of the small brain-size of their babies:

“Women on lower races [sic] endure births very easily, sometimes even without any pain, and only in highly rare cases do they die from childbirth” (Raciology: p157).

On the contrary, data from the USA actually seems to indicate a somewhat higher rate of caesarean delivery among African-American women as compared to white American women (Braveman et al 1995; Edmonds et al 2013; Getahun et al 2009; Valdes 2020).

[21] Any selection would presumably be against the European-derived component of the African-American genome, since African-Americans are of predominantly black African ancestry. It is therefore possible that selection against the (possibly) deleterous European component of their genome was offset by other advantages possibly accruing to African-Americans with increased European ancestry (e.g. the increased intelligence supposedly associated with increased levels of European ancestry, or the social benefits formerly associated with lighter skin tone or a more Caucasoid phsyiognomy).
Examining the effects of interracial hybridization on other traits besides fertility, there are mixed results. Thus, one study reported what the authors interpreted as a hybrid vigour effect on g-factor of general intelligence among the offspring of white-Asian unions in Hawaii, as compared to the offspring of same-race couples matched for educational and occupational levels (Nagoshi & Johnson 1986). Similarly, Lewis (2010) attributed the higher attractiveness ratings accorded to the faces of mixed-race people to heterosis. Meanwhile, another study found that height was positively correlated with the distance between the birthplaces of one’s parents, itself presumably a correlate of their relatedness (Koziel et al 2011).
On the other hand, however, behavioural geneticist Glayde Whitney suggests that hybrid incompatibility may explain the worse health outcomes, and shorter average life-spans, of African Americans as compared to whites in the contemporary USA, owing to the former’s mixed African and European ancestry (Whitney 1999). One specific negative health outcome for some African-Americans resulting from a history racial admixture is also suggested by Helgadottir et al (2006). On the other hand, the disproportionate success of African-Americans in professional athletics hardly seems indicative of impaired health.
It is notable that, whereas recent studies tend to emphasize the (supposed) positive genetic effects resulting from interracial unions, the older literature tends to focus on (supposed) negative effects of interracial hybridization (see Frost 2020). No doubt this reflects the differing zeitgeister of the two ages (Provine 1976; Khan 2011c).
At any rate, even assuming that it can be shown that mixed-race people either enjoy improved health outcomes as compared to monoracial people as a consequence of hybrid vigour, or impaired health outcomes due to outbreeding depression, this is not generally regarded as directly relevant to the question of whether the different human races are to be regarded as separate species. As Darwin wrote:

“The inferior vitality of mulattoes is spoken of in a trustworthy work as a well-known phenomenon; but this is a different consideration from their lessened fertility; and can hardly be advanced as a proof of the specific distinctness of the parent races… The common mule, so notorious for long life and vigour, and yet so sterile, shews how little necessary connection there is in hybrids between lessened fertility and vitality” (The Descent of Man).

[22] To clarify, some other domestic species have also been described as having ‘self-domesticated’. In particular, a currently popular theory of dog domestication holds that, rather than humans adopting and domesticating wolves, wolves effectively domesticated themselves, by scavenging around human campfires to feed themselves, the tamer, less aggressive and less fearful wolves enjoying greater success in this endeavour, and hence coming to predominate.
However, although, in a sense, a form of self-domestication, this process would still have involved wolves habituating themselves to, and becoming tolerated by, and tolerant to, a different species to themselves, namely humans. In contrast, theories of human self-domestication involve humans interacting only with members of the same species, namely other humans. 

[23] Interestingly, while languages and cultures vary in the number of colours that they recognise and have words for, both the ordering of the colours recognised, and the approximate boundaries between different colours, seems to be cross-culturally universal. Thus, some languages have only two colour terms, which are always equivalent to ‘light’ and ‘dark’. Then, if a third colour terms is used, it is always equivalent to ‘red’. Next come either ‘green’ or ‘yellow’. Experimental attempts to teach colour terms not matching the familiar colours show that individuals learn these terms much less quickly than they do the colour familiar terms recognised in other languages. This, of course, suggests that our colour perception is both innately programmed into the mind and cross-culturally universal (see Berlin & Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution). 

[24] Indeed, as I discuss later, with respect to what Baker calls ‘subraces’, we may already have long previously passed this point, at least in Europe and North America. While morphological differences certainly continue to exist, at the aggregate, statistical level, between populations from different regions of Europe, there is such overlap, such a great degree of variation even within families, and the differences are so fluid, gradual and continuous, that I suspect such terms as the Nordic race, Alpine race, Mediterranid race and Dinaric race have likely outlived whatever usefulness they may once have had and are best retired. The differences are now best viewed as continuous and clinal.

[25] While Ethiopians and other populations from the Horn of Africa are indeed a hybrid or clinal population, representing an intermediate position between Caucasians and other black Africans, Baker perhaps goes too far in claiming:

“Aethiopids (‘Eastern Hamites’ or ‘Erythriotes’) of Ethiopia and Somaliland are an essentially Europid subrace with some Negrid admixture” (p225).

Thus, summarizing the findings of one study from the late-1990s, Jon Entine reports:

“Ethiopians [represent] a genetic mixture of about 60 percent African and 40 percent Caucasian” (Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports And Why We’re Afraid To Talk About It: p115)

The study upon which Entine based this conclusion looked only at mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome data. More recent studies have incorporated autosomal DNA as well. However, while eschewing terms such as ‘Caucasian’, such studies broadly confirm that there exist substantial genetic affinities between populations from the Horn of Africa and the Middle East (e.g. Ali et al 2020; Khan 2011a; Khan 2011b; Hodgson 2014).

[26] Thus, Lewontin famously showed that, when looking at individual genetic loci, most variation is within a single population, rather than between populations, or between races (Lewontin 1972). However, when looking at phenotypic traits that are caused by polygenes, it is easy to see that there are many such traits in which the variation within the group does not dwarf that between groups – for exampe, differences in skin colour as between Negroes and Nordics, or differences in stature between as Pygmies and even neighbouring tribes of Bantu. This is a point emphasized by Sarich and Miele in Race: The Reality of Human Differences (which I have reviewed here).

[27] In addition to discussing morphological differences between races, Baker also discusses differences in scent (170-7). This is a particularly emotive issue, given the negative connotations associated with smelling ‘bad‘. However, given the biochemical differences between races, and the fact that even individuals of the same race, even the same family, are distinguishable by scent, it is inevitable that persons of different races will indeed differ in scent, and unsurprising that people would generally prefer the scent of their own group. There is substantial anecdotal evidence that this is indeed the case. In general, Baker reports that East Asians have less body odour, whereas both Caucasoids and blacks have greater body odour. Partly this is explained by the relative prevalence of dry and wet ear wax, which is associated with body odour, varies by population and is one of the few easily detectable phenotypic traits in humans that is determined by simply Mendelian inheritance (see McDonald, Myths of Human Genetics). Intriguingly, Nicholas Wade speculates that dry earwax, which is associated with less strong body-odour, may have evolved through sexual selection in colder climates where, due to the cold, more time is spent indoors, in enclosed spaces, where body odour is hence more readily detectable, and producing less scent may have conferred a reproductive advantage (A Troublesome Inheritance: p91). This may explain some of the variation in the prevalence of dry and wet ear wax respectively, with dry earwax predominating only in East Asia, but also being found, albeit to a lesser degree, among Northern Europeans. On the other hand, however, although populations inhabiting colder climates may spend more time indoors, populations inhabiting tropical climates might be expect to sweat more due to the greater heat and hence build up greater bodily odour.

[28] A few exceptions include where Baker discusses the small but apparently statistically significant differences between the skulls of ‘Celts’ and Anglo-Saxons (p257), and where he mentions statistically significant differences between ancient Egypian skulls and those of Negroes (p518).

[29] Baker does, however, acknowledge that:

“Some Jewish communities scattered over the world are Jews simply in the sense that they adhere to a particular religion (in various forms); they are not definable on an ethnic basis” (p246).

Here, Baker has in mind various communities that are not either Ashkenazi or Sephardic (or Mizrahi), such as the Beta Israel of Ethiopia, the Lemba of Southern Africa and the Kaifeng Jews resident in China. Although Baker speaks of “communities”, the same is obviously true of recent converts to Judaism. 

[30] Thus, of the infamous Khazar hypothesis, now almost wholly discredited by genetic data, but still popular among some anti-Zionists, because it denies the historical connection between (most) contemporary Jews and the land of Israel, and among Christian anti-Semites, because it denies that the Ashkenazim are indeed ‘chosen people’ of the Old Testament, Baker writes:

“It is clear they [the Khazars] were not related, except by religion, to any modern group of Jews” (p34).

[31] Baker thus puts the intellectual achievements of the Ashkenazim in the broader context of other groups within this same subrace, including the Assyrians, Hittites and indeed Armenians themselves. Thus, he concludes:

“The contribution of the Armenid subrace to civilization will bear comparison with that of any other” (p246-7).

Some recent genetic studies have indeed suggested affinities between Ashkenazim and Armenian populations (Nebel et al 2001; Elhaik 2013).

[32] In Baker’s defence, the illustration in question is actually taken from the work of a Jewish anthropologist, Joseph Jacobs (Jacobs 1886). Jacobs’ findings this topic are summarized in this entry in the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, entitled ‘Nose’, authored by Jacobs and Maurice Fishberg, another Jewish anthropologist, which reports that the ‘hook nose’ stereotypically associated with Jewish people is actually found in only a minority of European Jews (Jacobs & Fishberg 1906).
However, such noses do seem to be more common among Jews than among at least some of the host populations among whom they reside. The wikipedia article on Jewish noses cites this same entry from the Jewish Encyclopaedia as suggesting that the prevalence of this shape of nose is actually no greater among Jews than among populations from the Mediterranean region (hence the supposed similar shape of so-called ‘Roman noses’). However, the Jewish Encyclopaedia entry itself does not actually seem to say any such thing. Instead, it reports only that:

“[As compared with] non-Jews in Russia and Galicia… aquiline and hook-noses are somewhat more frequently met with among the Jews” (Jacobs & Fishberg 1906). 

The entry also reports that, measured in terms of their ‘nasal index’, “Jewish noses… are mostly leptorhine, or narrow-nosed” (Jacobs & Fishberg 1906). Similarly, Joseph Jacobs reports in ‘On the Racial Characteristics of Modern Jews’:

“Weisbach‘s nineteen Jews vied with the Patagonians in possessing the longest nose (71 mm.) of all the nineteen races examined by him … while they had at the same time the narrowest noses (34 mim)” (Jacobs 1886).

This data, suggesting that Jewish noses are indeed long but are also very narrow, contradicts Baker’s claim that the characteristic Ashkenazi nose is “large in all dimensions [emphasis added]” (p239). However, such a nose shape is consistent Jews having evolved in an arid desert environment, such as the Nagev or other nearby deserts, or in the Judean mountains, where the earliest distinctively Jewish settlements are thought to have developed. Thus, anthropologist Stephen Molnar writes:

“Among desert and mountain peoples the narrow nose is the predominant form” (Human Variation: Races, Types and Ethnic Groups: p196).

As Baker himself observes, the nose width characteristic of a population correlates with both the temperature and humidity of the environment in which they evolved (p310-311). This is known as Thomson’s nose rule and is thought to reflect the need to warm and moisturize air before it enters the lungs in cold and dry conditions respectively.
However, interestingly, Baker reports that the correlations are much weaker among the indigenous populations of the American continent (p311). Presumably this is because humans only relatively recently populated that continent, and therefore have yet had sufficient time to become wholly adapted to the different environments in which they find themselves.
A further factor affecting nose width is jaw size. This might explain why Australian Aboriginals have extremely wide noses despite much of the Australian landmass being dry and arid, since Aboriginals also have very large jaws (Human Variation: Races, Types and Ethnic Groups: p196).
However, it is fallacious to believe that most Australian Aborigines lived in the arid outback prior to the arrival of Europeans and their resulting displacement. In fact, prior to the arrival of Europeans, Aboriginals were probably concentrated in the same more fertile (and much less arid) areas where most white European settlers are today today themselves concentrated, since the same areas which are conducive for agriculture and settlement today also tended to provide more game and vegetation for foragering groups.

[33] Hans Eysenck refers in his autobiography to a study supposedly conducted by one of his PhD students that he claims demonstrated statistically that people, both Jewish and Gentile, actually perform at no better than chance when attempting to distinguish Jews from non-Jews, even after extended interaction with one another (Rebel with a Cause: p35). However, since he does not cite a source or reference for this study, it was presumably unpublished, and must be interpreted with caution.
Eysenck himself, incidentally, was of closeted half-Jewish ancestry, practising what anti–Semite Kevin Macdonald calls ‘crypsis’, which may be taken to suggest he was not entirely disinterested with regard to to question of the extent to which Jews can be recognized by sight. 
The only other study I have found addressing the quite easily researchable, if politically incorrect, question of whether some people can or cannot identify Jews from non-Jews on the basis of phenotypic differences is Andrzejewski et al (2009).

[34] This is one of the few occasions in the book where I recall Baker actually mentioning whether the morphological differences between racial groupings that he describes are statistically significant.

[35] Interestingly, Stephen Oppenheimer, in his book Origins of the British, posits a link between the so-called ‘Celtic’ regions of the British Isles and populations from one particular area of the Mediterranean, namely the Iberian peninsula, especially the Basques, themselves probably the descendants of the original pre-Indo-European inhabitants of the Iberian peninsula (see Oppenheimer 2006; see also Blood of the Isles).
This seemingly corroborates the otherwise implausible mythological account of the peopling of Ireland provided in Lebor Gabála Érenn, which claims that the last major migration to, and invasion of, Ireland, from which movement of people the modern Irish primarily descend, arrived from Spain in the form of the Milesians. This mythological account may derive from the similarity between the Greek and Latin words for the two regions, namely ‘Iberia’ and ‘Hibernia’ respectively, and between the words ‘Gael’ and ‘Galicia’, and the belief of some ancient Roman writers, notably Orosius and Tacitus, that Ireland lay midway between Britain and Spain (Carey 2001).
However, while some early population genetic studies were indeed interpreted to suggest a connection between populations from Iberia and the British Isles, this interpretation seems to have been largely been discredited by more recent research.

[36] Actually, the position with regard to hair and eye colour is rather more complicated. On the one hand, hair colour does appear to be darkest in the ostensibly ‘Celtic’ regions of the British Isles. Thus, Carleton Coon in his 1939 book, The Races of Europe, reports that, with regard to hair colour:

“England emerges as the lightest haired of the four major divisions of the British Isles, and Wales as the darkest” (The Races of Europe: p385).

Likewise, Coon reports, that in Scotland:

“Jet black hair is commoner in the western highlands than elsewhere, and is statistically correlated with the greatest survival of Gaelic speech” (The Races of Europe: p387).

However, patterns of eye colour diverge from and complicate this picture. Thus, Coon reports:

“Whereas the British are on the whole lighter-haired than the Irish, they are at the same time darker-eyed” (The Races of Europe: p388).

Indeed, contrary to the notion of the Irish as a people with substantial Mediterranean racial affinities, Coon claims:

“There is probably no population of equal size in the world which is lighter eyed, and bluer eyed, than the Irish” (The Races of Europe: p381).

On the other hand, the Welsh, in addition to being darker-haired than the English, are also darker-eyed, with a particularly high prevalence of dark eyes being found in certain more isolated regions of Wales (The Races of Europe: p389).
Interestingly, as far back as the time of the Roman Empire, the Silures, a Brittonic tribe occupying most of South-East Wales and known for their fierce resistance to the Roman conquest, were described by Roman writers Tacitus and Jordanes (the Romans themselves being, of course, a Mediterranean people) as “swarthy” in appearance and as possessing black curly hair.
The same is true of the, also until recently Celtic-speaking, Cornish people, who are, Coon reports, “the darkest eyed of the English” (The Races of Europe: p389). Dark hair is also more common in Cornwall (The Races of Europe: p386). Cornwall is, Coon therefore reports, “the darkest county in England” (The Races of Europe: p396). (However, with the historically unprecedented mass migration of non-whites into the UK in the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond, this is, of course, no doubt no longer true.)
Yet another complicating factor is the prevalence of red hair, which is also associated with the ‘Celtic’ regions of the British Isles, but is hardly a Mediterranean character, and which, like dark hair, reaches its highest prevalence in Wales (The Races of Europe: p385). Baker, for his part, does not dwell on this point, but does acknowledge, “there is rather a high proportion of people with red hair in Wales”, something for which, he claims “no satisfactory explanation… has been provided” (p265).
However, Baker is skeptical regarding the supposed association of the ancient Celts with ginger or auburn hair. He traces this belief to a single casual remark of Tacitus. However, he suggests that the Latin word used ‘rutilai’ is actually better translated as “red (inclining to golden yellow)”, and was, he observes, also used to refer to the Golden Fleece and to gold coinage (p257). 

[37] The genetic continuity of the British people is, for example, a major theme of Stephen Oppenheimer’s The Origins of the British (see also Oppenheimer 2006). It is also a major conclusion of Bryan Sykes’s Blood of the Isles, which concludes:

“We are an ancient people, and though the [British] Isles has been the target of invasion and opposed settlement from abroad ever since Julius Caesar first stepped onto the shingle shores of Kent, these have barely scratched the topsoil of our deep rooted ancestry” (Blood of the Isles: p338).

However, population genetics is an extremely fast moving science, and recent research has revised this conclusion, suggesting a replacement of around 90% of the population of the British Isles, albeit in very ancient times (around 2000BCE) associated with the spread of the Bell Beaker culture and Steppe-related ancestry, presumably deriving from the Indo-European expansion (Olalde et al 2018). Also, recent population genetic studies suggest that the Anglo-Saxons actually made a greater genetic contribution to the ancestry of the English, especially those from Eastern England, than formerly thought (e.g. Martiniano et al 2016; Schiffels et al 2016).

[38] However, in The Origins of the British, Stephen Oppenheimer proposes an alternative route of entry and point of initial disembarkation, suggesting that the people whom we today habitually refer to as ‘Celts’ arrived, not from Central Europe as traditionally thought, but rather up the Atlantic seaboard from the west coasts of France and Iberia. This is consistent with some archaeological evidence (e.g. the distribution of passage graves) suggesting longstanding trade and cultural links up the Atlantic seaboard from the Mediterranean region, through the Basque country, into Brittany, Cornwall, Wales and Ireland. This would also provide an explanation for what Baker claims is a ‘Mediterranid’ component in the ancestry of the Welsh and Irish, as supposedly evidenced in distribution of blood groups and the prevalence dark hair and eye colours as recorded by Beddoe.

[39] Interestingly, in addition to ‘gracialization’ having occurred least, if at all, in Fuegians and Aboriginals, Wade also reports that:

“Gracialization of the skull is most pronounced in sub-Saharan Africans and East Asians, with Europeans retaining considerable robustness” (A Troublesome Inheritance: p167).

This is an exception to what Steve Sailer calls ‘Rushton’s Rule of Three’ (see here) and, given that Wade associates ‘gracialization’ with domestication and pacification (as well as with neoteny), suggests that, at least by this criteria, Europeans evince less evidence of pacification and domestication than do black Africans. This is perhaps a surprising finding given that domestication and pacification among humans are usually associated with the rise of civilization, yet, according to Baker himself, civilization was largely absent from sub-Saharan Africa prior to the arrival of Europeans (see discussion above).

[40] Actually, the meaning of the two terms is subtly different. ‘Paedomorphy’ refers to the retention of juvenile or infantile traits into adulthood. ‘Neoteny’ refers to one particular process whereby this end-result is achieved, namely slowing some aspects of physiological development. However, ‘paedomorphy’ can also result from another process, namely ‘progenesis’, where, instead, some aspects of development are actually sped up, such that the developing organism reaches sexual maturity earlier, before reaching full maturity in other respects. In humans, most examples of paedomorphy result from the former process, namely ‘neoteny’.

[41] These genitalia, of course, contrast with those of neighbouring Negroids, at least according to popular stereotype. For his part, Baker accepts the stereotype that black males have large penes. However, he cites no quantitative data, remarking only:

“That Negrids have large penes is somtimes questioned, but those who doubt it are likely to change their minds if they will look at photographs 8, 9, 20, 23, 29, and 37 in Bernatzig’s excellently illustrated book ‘Zwischen Weissem Nil und Belgisch-Kongo’. They represent naked male Nilotids and appear convincing” (p331).

But five photos, presumably representing just five males, hardly represents a convincing sample size. (I found several of the numbered pictures online by searching for the book’s title, and each showed only a single male.) Interestingly, Baker is rightly skeptical regarding claims of differences in the genitalia between European subraces, given the intimate nature of the measurements required, writing:

“It is difficult to obtain measurements of theses parts of the body and statements about subracial differences in them must not be accepted without confirmation” (p219).

[42] Interestingly, in their book Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence, neuroscientists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger devote considerable discussion to a supposedly extinct species of hominid, termed Boskop Man or alternatively the ‘Boskopoid race’, who, they claim, possessed, as compared to other hominid species (ourselves included), extremely large brains, paedomorphic traits and some physical resemblence to living San Bushmen. However, anthropologist-blogger John Hawks has critiqued this claim in a blog post where he argues that the Boskops are no longer recognized as a distinct species (or subspecies) of hominid and also that the cranial capacity of those remains formerly identified as ‘Boskop’, though certainly large, has nevertheless been exaggerated. In this, Hawks cites Singer (1958), who argues that those skulls identified as ‘Boskops’ should instead be classified as Khoisan, from whom they were formerly distinguished solely on the basis of their brain size. However, as Baker suggests, living San Bushmen have very small brains as compared to other extant human races, at least according to data cited by Richard Lynn in his book, Race Differences in Intelligence (reviewed here).

[43] Indeed, the claim that East Asians are especially paedomorphic or neotenized as compared to other races is not restricted to researchers in the racialist or hereditarian tradition. On the contrary, anthropologist  Ashley Montagu, though an early pioneer in ‘race denial’, nevertheless conceded one racial difference, namely:

“The Mongoloid skull generally, whether Chinese or Japanese, has been rather more neotenized than the Caucasoid or European” (Growing Young: p18).

Similarly, no lesser leftist champion of racial egalitarianism than infamous scientific fraud and charlatan Stephen Jay Gould conceded:

“It is hard to deny that Mongoloids… are the most paedomorphic of human groups” (Ontogeny and Phylogeny: p134).

Interestingly, Gould made this concession in the context of arguing against the notion that the greater paedomorphosis of Caucasoids as compared to Negroids was indicative of the intellectual superiority of the former. Yet, since there is now widespread agreement among hereditarians that East Asians (but curiously not South-East Asians) score rather higher in IQ tests than do Caucasoids, his observations are actually supportive of both the link between paedomorphosis and encephalization and the hereditarian hypothesis with respect to to race differences in intelligence.
Perhaps recognizing this, in a later book Gould, while still acknowledging that “Orientals, not whites, are clearly the most neotenous of human races”, rather contradicted himself just a couple of sentences later by also asserting:

“The whole enterprise of ranking groups by degree of neoteny is fundamentally unjustified” (Mismeasure of Man: p121).

[44] Thus, anthropologist Carleton Coon, in Racial Adaptations: A Study of the Origins, Nature, and Significance of Racial Variations in Humans, does not even consider sexual selection as an explanation for the evolution of Khoisan steatopygia, despite their obviously dimorphic presentation. Instead, he proposes:

“[Bushman’s] famous steatopygia (fat deposits that contain mostly fibrous tissue) may be a hedge against scarce nutrients and draught during pregnancy and lactation” (Racial Adaptations: p105). 

[45] Others, however, notably Desmond Morris in The Naked Ape (which I have reviewed here and here), have implicated sexual selection in the evolution of the human female’s permanent breasts. The two hypotheses are not, however, mutually exclusive. Indeed, they may be complementary. Thus, Nancy Etcoff in Survival of the Prettiest (which I have reviewed here and here) proposes that breasts may be perceived as attractive by men precisely because they “honestly advertise the presence of the fat reserves needed to sustain a pregnancy” (Survival of the Prettiest: p187). By analogy, the same could, of course, also be true of fatty buttocks.

[46] Thus, Baker demands rhetorically:

“Who could conceivably fail to distinguish between a Sanid and a Europid, or between an Eskimid [Eskimo] and a Negritid [Negrito], or between a Bambutid (African Pygmy) or an Australid [Australian Aboriginal]?”

[47] Baker does discuss the performance of East Asians on IQ tests, but his conclusions are ambivalent (p490-492). He concludes, for example, “the IQs of Mongolid [i.e. East Asian] children in North America are generally found to be about the same as those of Europids” (p490). Yet recent studies have revealed a slight advantage for East Asians in general intelligence. Baker also mentions the relatively higher scores of East Asians on tests of spatio-visual ability, as compared to verbal ability. However, he attributes this to their lack of proficiency in the language of their host culture, as he relied mostly on American studies of first and second-generation immigrants, or the descendants of immigrants, who were often raised in non-English-speaking homes, and hence only learnt English as a second-language (p490). However, recent studies suggest that East Asians score relatively lower on verbal ability, as compared to their scores on spatio-visual ability, even when tested in a language in which they are wholly proficient (see Race Differences in Intelligence: reviewed here).

[48] Rushton and Jensen (2005) favour the hereditarian hypothesis vis a vis race differences in intelligence, and their presentation of the evidence is biased somewhat in this direction. Nisbett’s rejoinder therefore provides a good balance, being very much biased in the opposite direction. Macintosh’s chapter is perhaps more balanced, but he still clearly favours an environmental explanation with regard to population differences in intelligence, if not with regard to individual differences. My own post on the topic is, of course, naturally enough, the most thorough and balanced treatment of this topic.

[49] Indeed, in proposing tenable environmental-geographical explanations for the rise and fall of civilizations in different parts of the world, Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel represents a substantial challenge to Baker’s conclusions in this chapter and the two books are well worth reading together. Another recent work addressing the question of why civilizations rise and fall among different races and peoples, but reaching less politically-correct conclusions, is Michael Hart’s Understanding Human History, which seems to have been conceived of as a rejoinder to Diamond, drawing heavily upon, but also criticizing the former work.

[50] Interestingly, Baker quotes Toynbee as suggesting that:

“An ‘identifying mark’ (but not a definition) [of] civilization might be equated with ‘a state of society in which there is a minority of the population, however small, that is free from the task, nor merely of producing food, but of engaging in any other form of economic activities-e.g. industry or trade” (p508).

Yet a Marxist would view this, not as a marker of civilization, but rather of exploitation. Those free from engaging in economic activity are, from a Marxist perspective, clearly extracting surplus value, and hence exploiting the labour of others. Toynbee presumably had in mind the ‘idle rich’ or ‘leisure class’, as well perhaps as those whom the latter patronize, e.g. artists, though the latter, if paid for their work, are surely engaging in a form of economic activity, as indeed are the patrons who subsidize them. (Indeed, even the ‘idle rich’ or ‘leisure class’ engage in economic activity, if only as consumers.) However, this criterion, at least as described by Baker, is at least as capable of applying to the opposite end of the social spectrum – i.e. the welfare-dependent underclass. Did Toynbee really intend to suggest that the existence of the long-term unemployed is a distinctive marker of civilization? If so, is Baker really agreeing with him?

[51] The full list of criteria for civilization provided by Baker is as follows:

1. “In the ordinary circumstances of life in public places they cover the external genitalia and greater part of the trunk with clothes” (p507);
2. “They keep the body clean and take care to dispose of its waste elements” (p507);
3. “They do not practice severe mutilation or deformation of the body” (p507);
4. “They have knowledge of building in brick or stone, if the necessary materials are available in their territory” (p507);
5. “Many of them live in towns or cities, which are linked by roads” (p507);
6. “They cultivate food plants” (p507);
7. “They domesticate animals and use some of the larger ones for transport… if suitable species are available” (p507);
8. “They have knowledge of the use of metals, if these are available” (p507);
9. “They use wheels” (p507);
10. “They exchange property by the use of money” (p507);
11. “They order their society by a system of laws, which are enforced in such a way that they ordinarily go about their various concerns in times of peace without danger of attack or arbitrary arrest” (p507);
12. “They permit accused people to defend themselves and call witnesses” (p507);
13. “They do not use torture to extract information or punishment” (p507);
14. “They do practice cannibalism” (p507);
15. “The religious systems include ethical elements and are not purely or grossly superstitious” (p507);
16. “They use a script… to communicate ideas” (p507);
17. “There is some facility in the abstract use of numbers, without consideration of actual objects” (p507);
18. “A calendar is in use” (p508);
19. “[There are] arrangements for the instruction of the young in intellectual matters” (p508);
20. “There is some appreciation of the fine arts” (p508);
21. “Knowledge and understanding are valued as ends in themselves” (p508).