Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele, Race: The Reality of Human Differences (Cambridge, MA: Westport Press 2004)

First published in 2004, ‘Race: The Reality of Human Differences’ by anthropologist and biochemist Vincent Sarich and science writer Frank Miele is that rarest of things in this age of political correctness – namely, a work of popular science presenting a hereditarian perspective on that most incendiary of topics, namely the biology of race and of racial differences.

It is refreshing that, even in this age of political correctness, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, a mainstream publisher still had the courage to publish such a work.

On first embarking on reading ‘Race: The Reality of Human Differences’ I therefore had high expectations, hoping for something approaching an updated, and more accessible, equivalent to John R Baker’s seminal ‘Race’ (which I have reviewed here).

Unfortunately, however, ‘Race: The Reality of Human Differences’, while it contains much interesting material, is nevertheless, in my view, a disappointment and something of a missed opportunity.

Race and the Law

Despite their subtitle, Sarich and Miele’s primary objective in authoring ‘Race: The Reality of Human Differences’ is, it seems, not to document, or to explain the evolution of, the specific racial differences that exist between populations, but rather to defend the race concept itself.

The latter has been under attack at least since Ashley Montagu’s Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, first published in 1942, perhaps the first written exposition of race denial.

Thus, Sarich and Miele frame their book as a response to the then-recent PBS documentary ‘Race: The Power of an Illusion’, which, like Montagu, also espoused the by-then familiar line that human races do not exist, save as a mere illusion or ‘social construct’.

As evidence that, on the contrary, race is indeed a legitimate biological and taxonomic category, Sarich and Miele begin by discussing, not the field of biology, but rather that of law, discussing the recognition accorded the race concept under the American legal system.

They report that, in the USA:

“There is still no legal definition of race; nor… does it appear that the legal system feels the need for one” (p14).

Thus, citing various US legal cases where race of the plaintiff was at issue, Sarich and Miele conclude:

“The most adversarial part of our complex society [i.e. the legal system], not only continues to accept the existence of race, but also relies on the ability of the average individual to sort people into races” (p14).

Moreover, Sarich and Miele argue, not only do the courts recognise the existence of race, they also recognise its ultimate basis in biology.

Thus, in response to the claim that race is a mere ‘social construct’, Sarich and Miele cite the recognition the criminal courts accord to the evidence of forensic scientists, who can reliably determine the racial background of a criminal from microscopic DNA fragments (p19-23).

“If race were a mere social construction based upon a few highly visible features, it would have no statistical correlation with the DNA markers that indicate relatedness” (p23).^[1]

Indeed, in criminal investigations, Sarich and Miele observe in a later chapter, racial identification can be a literal matter of life and death.

Thus, they refer to the Baton Rouge serial killer investigation, where, in accordance with the popular, but wholly false, notion that serial killers are almost invariably white males, the police initially focussed solely on white suspects, but, after DNA analysis showed that the offender was of predominantly African descent, shifted the focus of their investigation and eventually successfully apprehended the killer, preventing further killings (p238).^[2]

Another area where they observe that racial profiling can be literally a matter of life and death is the diagnosis of disease and prescribing of appropriate and effective treatment – since, not only do races differ in the prevalence, and presentation, of different medical conditions, but they also differ in their responsiveness and reactions to different forms of medication. 

However, while folk-taxonomic racial categories do indeed have a basis in real biological differences, they are surely also partly socially-constructed as well.

For example, in the USA, black racial identity, including eligibility for affirmative action programmes, is still largely determined by the same so-called ‘one-drop-rule’ that also determined racial categorization during the era of segregation and Jim Crow.

This is the rule whereby a person with any detectable degree of black African ancestry, howsoever small (e.g. Barack Obama, Colin Powell), is classed as ‘African-American’ right alongside a recent immigrant from Africa of unadulterated sub-Saharan African ancestry.

This obviously has far more to do with social and political factors, and with America’s unique racial history, than it does with biology and hence shows that folk-taxonomic racial categories are indeed part ‘socially-constructed’.^[3]

Similarly, the racial category ‘Hispanic’ or ‘Latino’ obviously has only a distant and indirect relationship to race in the biological sense, including as it does persons of varying degrees of European, Native American and also black African ancestry.^[4]

It is also unfortunate that, in their discussion of the recognition accorded the race concept by the legal system, Sarich and Miele restrict their discussion entirely to the contemporary US legal system.

In particular, it would be interesting to know how the race of citizens was determined under overtly racialist regimes, such as under the Apartheid regime in South Africa,^[5] under the Nuremberg laws in National Socialist Germany,^[6] or indeed under Jim Crow laws in the South in the USA itself in the early twentieth century,^[7] where the stakes were, of course, so much higher.

Also, given that Sarich and Miele rely extensively in later chapters on an analogy between human races and dog breeds (what he calls the “canine comparison”: p198-203; see discussion below), a discussion of the problems encountered in drafting and interpreting so-called breed-specific legislation to control so-called ‘dangerous dog breeds’ would also have been relevant and of interest.^[8]

Such legislation, in force in many jurisdictions, restricts the breeding, sale and import of certain breeds (e.g. Pit Bulls, Tosas) and orders their registration, neutering and sometimes even their destruction. It represents, then, the rough canine equivalent of the Nuremberg laws.

A Race Recognition Module?

According to Sarich and Miele, the cross-cultural universality of racial classifications suggests that humans are innately predisposed to sort humans into races.

As evidence, they cite Lawrence Hirschfeld’s finding that, at age three, children already classify people by race, and recognise both the immutable and hereditary nature of racial characteristics, giving priority to race over characteristics such as clothing, uniform or body-type (p25-7; Hirschfeld 1996).^[9]

Sarich and Miele go on to also claim:

“The emerging discipline of evolutionary psychology provides further evidence that there is a species-wide module in the human brain that predisposes us to sort the members of our species into groups based on appearance, and to distinguish between ‘us’ and ‘them’” (p31).

However, they cite no source for this claim, either in the main body of the text or in the associated notes for this chapter (p263-4).^[10]

Certainly, Pierre van den Berghe and some other sociobiologists have argued that ethnocentrism is innate (see The Ethnic Phenomenon: reviewed here). However, van den Berghe is also emphatic and persuasive in arguing that the same is not true of racism, as such.

Indeed, since the different human races were, until recent technological advances in transportation (e.g. ships, aeroplanes), largely separated from one another by the very oceans, deserts and mountain-ranges that reproductively isolated them from one another and hence permitted their evolution into distinguishable races, it is doubtful human races have been in contact for sufficient time to have evolved a race-classification module.^[11]

Moreover, if race differences are indeed real and obvious as Sarich and Miele contend, then there is no need to invoke – or indeed to evolve – a domain-specific module for the purposes of racial classification. Instead, people’s tendency to categorise others into racial groups could simply reflect domain-general mechanisms (i.e. general intelligence) responding to real and obvious differences.^[12]

History of the Race Concept

After their opening chapter on ‘Race and the Law’, the authors move on to discussing the history of the race concept and of racial thought in their second chapter, which is titled ‘Race and History’.

Today, it is often claimed by race deniers that the race concept is a recent European invention, devised to provide a justification for such nefarious, but by no means uniquely European, practices as slavery, segregation and colonialism.^[13]

In contrast, Sarich and Miele argue that humans have sorted themselves into racial categories ever since physically distinguishable people encountered one another, and that ancient peoples used roughly the same racial categories as nineteenth-century anthropologists and twenty-first century bigots.

Thus, Sarich and Miele assert in the title of one of their subheadings:

“[The concept of] race is as old as history or even prehistory” (p57).

Indeed, according to Sarich and Miele, even ancient African rock paintings distinguish between Pygmies and Capoid Bushmen (p56).

Similarly, they report, the ancient Egyptians showed a keen awareness of racial differences in their artwork.

This is perhaps unsurprising since the ancient Egyptians’ core territory was located in a region where Caucasoid North Africans came into contact with black Africans from South of the Sahara through the Nile Valley, unlike in most other parts of North Africa, where the Sahara Desert represented a largely insurmountable barrier to population movement.

While not directly addressing the controversial question of the racial affinities of the ancient Egyptians, Sarich and Miele report that, in their own artwork:

“The Egyptians were painted red; the Asiatics or Semites yellow; the Southerns or Negroes, black; and the Libyans, Westerners or Northerners, white, with blue eyes and fair beards” (p33).^[14]

Indeed, rather than being purely artistic in intent, Sarich and Miele go further, even suggesting that at least some Egyptian artwork had an explicit taxonomic function:

“[Ancient] Egyptian monuments are not mere ‘portraits but an attempt at classification’” (p33).

They even refer to what they call “history’s first [recorded] colour bar, forbidding blacks from entering Pharaoh’s domain”, namely an an Egyptian stele (i.e. stone slab functioning as a notice), which other sources describe as having been erected during the reign of Pharaoh Sesostris III (1887-1849 BCE) at Semna near the Second Cataract of the Nile, part of the inscription of which reads, in part:

“No Negro shall cross this boundary by water or by land, by ship or with his flocks, save for the purpose of trade or to make purchases in some post” (p35).^[15]

Sarich and Miele also interpret the famous caste system of India as based ultimately in racial difference, the lighter complexioned invading Indo-Aryans establishing the system to maintain their dominant social position and their racial integrity vis à vis the darker-complexioned indigenous Dravidian populations whom they conquered and subjugated.

Thus, Sarich and Miele claim:

“The Hindi word for caste is varna. It means color (that is, skin color), and it is as old as Indian history itself” (p37).^[16]

There is indeed evidence of racial prejudice and notions of racial supremacy in the earliest Hindu texts. For example, in the Rigveda, thought to be the earliest of ancient Hindu texts:

“The god of the Aryas, Indra, is described as ‘blowing away with supernatural might from earth and from the heavens the black skin which Indra hates.’ The dark people are called ‘Anasahs’—noseless people—and the account proceeds to tell how Indra ‘slew the flat-nosed barbarians.’ Having conquered the land for the Aryas, Indra decreed that the foe was to be ‘flayed of his black skin’” (Race: The History of an Idea in America: p3-4).^[17]

Indeed, higher caste groups have relatively lighter complexions than lower caste groups residing in the same region of India even today (Jazwal 1979; Mishra 2017).

However, most modern Indologists reject the notion that the term ‘varna’ was originally coined in reference to differences in skin colour and instead argue that colour was simply used as a method of classification, or perhaps in reference to clothing.^[18]

According to Sarich and Miele, ancient peoples also believed races differed, not only in morphology, but also in psychology and behaviour.

In general, ancient civilizations regarded their own race’s characteristics more favourably than those of other groups. This, Sarich and Miele suggest, reflected, not only ethnocentrism, which is, in all probability, a universal human trait, but also the fact that great civilizations of the sort that leave behind artwork and literature sophisticated enough to permit moderns to ascertain their views on race did indeed tend to be surrounded by less advanced neighbours (p56).

“In the vast majority of cases, their opinions of other peoples, including the ancestors of the Western Europeans who supposedly ‘invented’ the idea of race, are far from flattering, at times matching modern society’s most derogatory stereotypes” (p31).

Thus, Thomas F Gossett, in his book Race: The History of an Idea in America, reports that:

“Historians of the Han Dynasty in the third century B.C. speak of a yellow-haired and green-eyed barbarian people in a distant province ‘who greatly resemble monkeys from whom they are descended’” (Race: The History of an Idea in America: p4).

Indeed, the views expressed by the ancients regarding racial differences, or at least those examples quoted by Sarich and Miele, are also often disturbingly redolent of modern racial stereotypes.

Thus, in ancient Roman and Greek art, Sarich and Miele report:

“Black males are depicted with penises larger than those of white figures” (p41).

Likewise, during the Islamic Golden Age, Sarich and Miele report that:

“Islamic writers… disparaged black Africans as being hypersexual yet also filled with simple piety, and with a natural sense of rhythm” (p53).

Similarly, the Arab polymath Al Masudi is reported to have quoted the Roman physician-philosopher Galen, as claiming blacks possess, among other attributes:

“A long penis and great merriment… [which] dominates the black man because of his defective brain whence also the weakness of his intelligence” (p50).

From these and similar observations, Sarich and Miele conclude:

“European colonizers did not construct race as a justification for slavery but picked up an earlier construction of Islam, which took it from the classical world, which in turn took it from ancient Egypt” (p50).

The only alternative, they suggest, is the obviously implausible suggestion that:

“Each of these civilisations independently ‘constructed’ the same worldview, and that the civilisations of China and India independently ‘constructed’ similar worldviews, even though they were looking at different groups of people” (p50).

There is, of course, another possibility the authors never directly raise, but only hint at – namely, perhaps racial stereotypes remained relatively constant because they reflect actual behavioural differences between races that themselves remained constant simply because they reflect innate biological dispositions that have not changed significantly over historical time.

Race, Religion, Science and Slavery

Sarich and Miele’s next chapter, ‘Anthropology as the Science of Race’, continues their history of racial thought from biblical times into the age of science – and of pseudo-science.

They begin, however, not with science, or even with pseudo-science, but rather with the Christian Bible, which long dominated western thinking on the subject of race, as on so many other subjects.

At the beginning of the chapter, they quote from John Hartung’s controversial essay, Love Thy Neighbour: The Evolution of In-Group Morality, which was first published in the science magazine, Skeptic (p60; Hartung 1995).

However, although the relevant passages appear in quotation marks, neither Hartung himself, nor his essay is directly cited, and, where I not already familiar with this essay, I would be none the wiser as to where this series of quotations had actually been taken from.^[19]

In the passage quoted, Hartung, who, in addition to being an anaesthesiologist, anthropologist and human sociobiologist, known for his pioneering cross-cultural studies of human inheritance patterns, is also something of an amateur (atheist) biblical scholar, argues that Adam, in the Biblical account of creation, is properly to be interpreted, not as the first human, but rather only as the first Jew, the implication being that, and the confusion arising because, in the genocidal weltanschauung of the Old Testament, non-Jews are, at least according to Hartung, not really to be considered human at all.^[20]

This idea seems to have originated, or at least received its first full exposition, with theologian Isaac La Peyrère, whom Sarich and Miele describe only as a “Calvinist”, but who, perhaps not uncoincidentally, is also widely rumoured to be of Sephardi converso or even crypto-Jewish marrano ancestry.

Thus, Sarich and Miele conclude:

“The door has always been open—and often entered—by any individual or group wanting to confine ‘adam’ to ‘us’ and to exclude ‘them’” (p60).

This leads to the heretical notion of the pre-Adamites, which has also been taken up by such delightfully bonkers racialist religious groups as the Christian Identity movement.^[21]

However, mainstream western Christianity always rejected this notion.

Thus, whereas today many leftists associate atheism, the Enlightenment and secularism with anti-racist views, historically there was no such association.

On the contrary, Sarich and Miele emphasize, it was actually polygenism – namely, the belief that the different human races had separate origins, a view that naturally lent itself to racialism – that was associated with religious heresy, free-thinking and the Enlightenment.

In contrast, mainstream Christianity, of virtually all denominations, has always favoured monogenism – namely, the belief that, for all their perceived differences, the various human races nevertheless shared a common origin – as this was perceived as congruent with (the orthodox interpretation of) the Old Testament of the Bible.

Thus, for example, both Voltaire and David Hume identified as polygenists – and, although their experience with and knowledge of black people was surely minimal and almost entirely second-hand, each also both expressed distinctly racist views regarding the intellectual capacities of black Africans.

Moreover, although the emerging race science, and cranial measurements, of the nineteenth century ‘American School’ of anthropology is sometimes credited with lending ideological support to the institution of slavery in the American South, or even as being cynically formulated precisely in order to defend this institution, in fact Southern slaveholders had little if any use for such ideas.

After all, the American South, as well as being a stronghold of slavery, racialism and white supremacist ideology, was also, then as now, the ‘Bible Belt’ – i.e. a bastion of intense evangelical Protestant Christian fundamentalism.

But the leading American School anthropologists, such as Samuel Morton and Josiah Nott, were all heretical polygenists.

Thus, rather than challenge the orthodox interpretation of the Bible, Southern slaveholders, and their apologists, preferred to defend slavery by invoking, not the emerging secular science of anthropology, but rather Biblical doctrine.

In particular, they sought to justify slavery by reference to the so-called ‘curse of Ham’, an idea which derives from Genesis 9:22-25, a very odd passage of the Old Testament (odd even by the standards of the Old Testament), which was almost certainly not originally intended as a reference to black people.^[22]

Thus, the authors quote historian William Stanton, who, in his book The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in America 1815-59 concludes that, by rejecting polygenism and the craniology of the early American physical anthropologists:

“The South turned its back on [what was by the scientific standards of the time] the only intellectually respectable defense of slavery it could have taken up” (p77)

As for Darwinism, which some creationists also claim was used to buttress slavery, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was only published in 1959, just a couple of years before the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 and final abolition of slavery in North America and the English-speaking world.^[23]

Thus, if Darwinian theory was ever used to justify the institution of slavery, it clearly wasn’t very effective in achieving this end.

Into the ‘Age of Science’ – and of Pseudo-Science

The authors continue their history of racial thinking by tracing the history of the discipline of anthropology, from its beginnings as ‘the science of race’, to its current incarnation as the study of ‘culture’ (and, to a lesser extent, of human evolution), most of whose practitioners vehemently deny the very biological reality of race, and some of whom deny even the possibility of anthropology being a science.

Giving a personal, human-interest focus to their history, Sarich and Miele in particular focus on three scientific controversies, and personal rivalries, each of which were, they report, at the same time scientific, personal and political (p59-60). These were the disputes between, respectively:

1) Ernst Haeckel and Rudolf Virchow;

2) Franz Boas and Madison Grant; and

3) Ashley Montagu and Carleton Coon.

The first of these rivalries, occurring as it did in Germany in the nineteenth century, is perhaps of least interest to contemporary North American audiences, being the most remote in both time and place.

However, the outcomes of the latter two disputes, occurring as they did in twentieth century America, are of much greater importance, and their outcome gave rise to, and arguably continues to shape, the current political and scientific consensus on racial matters in America, and indeed the western world, to this day.

Interestingly, these two disputes were not only about race, they were also arguably themselves racial, or at least ethnic, in character.

Thus, perhaps not uncoincidentally, whereas both Grant and Coon were Old Stock American patrician WASPs, the latter proud to trace his ancestry back among the earliest British settlers of the Thirteen Colonies, both Boas and Montagu were recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.^[24]

Therefore, in addition to being personal, political and scientific, these two conflicts were also arguably racial, and ultimately indirectly concerned with the very definition of what it meant to be an ‘American’.

The victory of the Boasians was therefore both coincident with, and arguably both heralded and reflected (and perhaps even contributed towards, or, at least, was retrospectively adopted as a justification for), the displacement of Anglo-Americans as the culturally, socially, economically and politically dominant ethnic group in the USA, the increasing opening up of the USA to immigrants of other races and ethnicities, and the emergence of a new elite, no longer composed exclusively, or even predominantly, of people of any single specific ethnic background, but increasingly overwhelmingly disproportionately Jewish.

Sarich and Miele, to their credit, do not entirely avoid addressing the ethnic dimension to these disputes. Thus, they suggest that Boas and Montagu’s perception of themselves as ethnic outsiders in Anglo-America may have shaped their theories (p89-90).^[25]

However, this is topic is explored more extensively by Kevin Macdonald in the second chapter of his controversial, anti-Semitic and theoretically flawed, The Culture of Critique (which I have reviewed here).

Boas, and his student Montagu, were ultimately to emerge victorious, not so much on account of the strength of their arguments, as on the success of their academic politicking, in particular Boas’s success in training students, including Montagu himself, who would go on to take over the social science departments of universities across America.

Among these students were many figures who were to become even more famous, and arguably more directly influential, than Boas himself, including, not only Montagu, but also Ruth Benedict and, most famous of all, the anthropologically inept Margaret Mead.^[26]

Nevertheless, Sarich and Miele trace the current consensus, and sacrosanct dogma, of ‘race-denial’ ultimately to Boas, whom they credit with effectively inventing anew the modern discipline of anthropology as it exists in America:

“It is no exaggeration to say that Franz Boas (1858-1942) remade American anthropology in his own image. Through the influence of his students, Margaret Mead (Coming of Age in Samoa and Sex and Temperament in Three [Primitive] Societies[sic]), Ruth Benedict (Patterns of Culture) and Ashley Montagu (innumerable titles, especially the countless editions of Man’s Most Dangerous Myth) Boas would have more influence on American intellectual thought than Darwin did. For generations hardly anyone graduated an American college without having read at least one of these books” (p86).

Thus, today, Boas is regarded as ‘the father of American anthropology’, whereas both Grant and Coon are mostly dismissed (in Coon’s case, unfairly) as pseudo-scientists and racists.

The Legacy of Boas

As to whether the impact of Boas and his disciples was, on balance, a net positive or a net negative, Sarich and Miele are ambivalent:

“The cultural determinism of the Boasians served as a useful corrective to the genetic determinism of racial anthropology, emphasizing the variation within races, the overlap between them and the plasticity of human behavior. The price, however, was the divorcing of the science of man from the science of life in general. The evolutionary perspective was abandoned, and anthropology began its slide into the abyss of deconstructionism” (p91).

My own view is more controversial: I have come to believe that the influence of Boas on American anthropology has been almost entirely negative.

Admittedly, the ‘Nodicism’ of his rival, Grant, was indeed a complete non-starter. After all, civilization actually came quite late to Northern Europe, originating in North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, arriving in Northern Europe much later, by way the Mediterranean region.

However, this view is arguably no less preposterous than the racial egalitarianism that currently prevails as a sacrosanct contemporary dogma, and which holds that all races are exactly equal in all abilities, which, quite apart from being contradicted by the evidence, represents a manifestly improbable outcome of human evolution.

Moreover, Nordicism may have been bad science, but it was at least science – or at least purported to be science – and hence was susceptible to falsification, and was indeed soon to be decisively falsified by pre-war and post-war rise of Japan among other events and indeed scientific findings.

In contrast, as persuasively argued by Kevin Macdonald in The Culture of Critique (which I have reviewed here), Boasian anthropology was not so much a science as an anti-science (not theory but an “anti-theory” according to Macdonald: Culture of Critique: p24), because, in its radical cultural determinism and cultural relativism, it rejected any attempt to develop a general theory of societal evolution, or societal differences, as premature, if not inherently misguided.

Instead, the Boasians endlessly emphasized, and celebrated (and indeed  sometimes exaggerated and fabricated), “the vast diversity and chaotic minutiae of human behavior”, arguing that such diversity precluded any general theory of social evolution as had formerly been favoured, let alone any purported ranking of societies and cultures (let alone races) as superior or inferior in relation to one another.

“The Boasians argued that general theories of cultural evolution must await a detailed cataloguing of cultural diversity, but in fact no general theories emerged from this body of research in the ensuing half century of its dominance of the profession… Because of its rejection of fundamental scientific activities such as generalization and classification, Boasian anthropology may thus be characterized more as an anti-theory than a theory of human culture” (Culture of Critique: p24).

The result was that behavioural variation between groups, to the extent there was any attempt to explain it at all, was attributed to ‘culture’. Yet, as evolutionary psychologist David Buss, writes:

“[P]atterns of local within-group similarity and between-group differences are best regarded as phenomena that require explanation. Transforming these differences into an autonomous causal entity called ‘culture’ confuses the phenomena that require explanation with a proper explanation of those phenomena. Attributing such phenomena to culture provides no more explanatory power than attributing them to God, consciousness, learning, socialization, or even evolution, unless the causal processes that are subsumed by these labels are properly described. Labels for phenomena are not proper causal explanations for them” (Evolutionary Psychology: p411).

To attribute all cultural differences simply to ‘culture’ and conclude that that is an adequate explanation is to imply that all cultural variation is simply random in nature. This amounts to effectively accepting the null hypothesis as true and ruling out a priori any attempt to generate a causal framework for explaining, or making predictions regarding, cultural differences. It therefore amounts, not to science, but to an outright rejection of science, or at least of applying science to human cultural differences, in favour of obscurantism.

Meanwhile, under the influence of postmodernism (i.e. “the abyss of deconstructionism” to which Sarich and Miele refer) much of cultural anthropology has ceased even pretending to be a science, dismissing all knowledge, science included, as mere disguised ‘ideology’, no more or less valid than the religious cosmologies, eschatologies and creation myths of the scientific and technologically primitive peoples whom anthropologists have traditionally studied, and hence precluding the falsification of post-modernist claims, or indeed any other claims, a priori.

Moreover, contrary to popular opinion, the Nordicism of figures such as Grant seems to have been rather less dogmatically held to, both in the scientific community and society at large, than is the contemporary dogma of racial egalitarianism.

Indeed, quite apart from the fact that it was not without eminent critics even in its ostensible late-nineteenth, early-twentieth century heyday (not least Boas himself), the best evidence for this is the speed with which this belief system was abandoned, and subsequently demonized, in the coming decades.

In contrast, even with the findings of population genetics increasing apace, the dogmas of both race denial and racial egalitarianism, while increasingly scientifically indefensible, seemingly remain ever more entrenched in the universities.

Digressions: ‘Molecular Clocks’, Language and Human Evolution

Sarich and Miele’s next chapter, ‘Resolving the Primate Tree’, recounts how the ‘molecular clock’ method of determining when species (and races) diverged was discovered.

To summarize: Geneticists discovered they could estimate the time when two species separated from one another by measuring the extent to which the two species differ in selectively-neutral genetic variation – in other words, those parts of the genome that do not affect an organism’s phenotype in such a way as to affect its fitness, are therefore not subject to selection pressures and hence mutate at a uniform rate, hence serving as a ‘clock’ by which to measure when the species separated from one another.

The following chapter, ‘Homo Sapiens and Its Races’, charts the application of the ‘molecular clock’ method to human evolution, and in particular to the evolution of human races.

The molecular clock method of dating the divergence of species from one another is certainly relevant to the race question, since it allows us to estimate, not only when our ancestors split from those of the chimpanzee, but also when different human races separated from one another – though this latter question is somewhat more difficult to determine using this method, since it is complicated by the fact that races can continue to interbreed with one another even after their initial split, whereas species, once they have become separate species, by definition no longer interbreed, though there may be some interbreeding during the process of speciation itself (i.e. when the separate lineages were still only races or populations of the same species).

However, devoting a whole chapter to a narrative describing how the molecular clock methodology was developed seems excessive in a book ostensibly about human race differences, and is surely an unnecessary digression.

Thus, one suspects the attention devoted to this topic by the authors reflects the central role played by one of the book’s co-authors (Vincent Sarich) in the development of this scientific method. This chapter therefore permits Sarich to showcase his scientific credentials and hence lends authority to his later more controversial pronouncements in subsequent chapters.

The following chapter, ‘The Two Miracles that Made Mankind’, is also somewhat off-topic. Here, Sarich and Miele address the question of why it was that our own African ancestors who ultimately outcompeted and ultimately displaced rival species of hominid.^[27]

In answer, they propose, plausibly but not especially originally, that our descendants outcompeted rival hominids on account of one key evolutionary development in particular – namely, our evolution of a capacity for spoken language.

Defining ‘Race’

At last, in Chapters Seven and Eight, after a hundred and sixty pages and over half of the entire book, the authors address the topic which the book’s title suggested would be its primary focus – namely, the biology of race differences.

The first of these is titled ‘Race and Physical Differences’, while the next is titled ‘Race and Behavior’.

Actually, however, both chapters begin by defending the race concept itself.

Whether the human race is divisible into races ultimately depends on how one defines ‘races’. Arguments are to whether human races exist therefore often degenerate into purely semantic disputes regarding the meaning of the word ‘race’.

For their purposes, Sarich and Miele themselves define ‘races’ as:

“Populations, or groups of populations, within a species, that are separated geographically from other such populations or groups of populations and distinguishable from them on the basis of heritable features” (p207).^[28]

There is, of course, an obvious problem with this definition, at least when applied to contemporary human populations – namely, members of different human races are often no longer “separated geographically” from one another, largely due to recent migrations and population movements.

Thus, today, people of many different racial groups can be found in a single city, like, say, London.

However, the key factor is surely, not whether racial groups remain “separated geographically” today, but rather whether they were “separated geographically” during the period during which they evolved into separate races.

To answer this objection, Sarich and Miele’s definition of ‘races’ should be altered accordingly.

Races as ‘Fuzzy Sets’

Sarich and Miele protest that other authors have, in effect, defined races out of existence by semantic sophistry, namely by defining the word ‘race’ in such a way as to rule out the possibility of races a priori.

Thus, some proposed definitions demand that, in order to qualify as true ‘races’, populations must have discrete, non-overlapping boundaries, with no racially-mixed, clinal or hybrid populations to blur the boundaries.

However, Sarich and Miele point out, any populations satisfying this criterium would not be ‘races’ at all, but rather entirely separate species, since, as I have discussed previously, it is the question of interfertility and reproductive isolation that defines a ‘species’ (p209).^[29]

In short, as biologist John Baker, in his excellent Race (reviewed here), also pointed out, since ‘race’ is, by very definition, a sub-specific classification, it is inevitable that members of different races will sometimes interbreed with one another and produce mixed, hybrid or clinal populations at their borders, because, if they did not interbreed with one another, then they would not be members of different races but rather of entirely separate species.

Thus, the boundaries between subspecies are invariably blurred or clinal in nature, the phenomenon being so universal that there is even a biological term for it, namely ‘intergradation’.

Of course, this means that the dividing line where one race is deemed to begin and another to end will inevitably be blurred. However, Sarich and Miele reject the notion that this means races are purely artificial or a social construction.

“The simple answer to the objection that races are not discrete, blending into one another as they do is this: They’re supposed to blend into one another and categories need not be discrete. It is not for us to impose our cognitive difficulties upon the Nature.” (p211)

Thus, they characterize races as “fuzzy sets” – which they describe as a recently developed mathematical concept that has nevertheless been “revolutionarily productive” (p209).

By analogy, they discuss our colour perception when observing rainbows, observing:

“Red… shade[s] imperceptibly into orange and orange into yellow but we have no difficulties in agreeing as to where red becomes orange, and orange yellow” (p208-9).

However, this is perhaps an unfortunate analogy. After all, physicists and psychologists are in agreement that different colours, as such, don’t really exist – at least not outside of the human minds that perceive and recognise them.^[30]

Instead, the electromagnetic spectrum varies continuously. Colours are imposed on only by human visual system as a way of interpreting this continuous variation.^[31]

If racial differences were similarly continuous, then surely it would be inappropriate to divide peoples into racial groups, because wherever one drew the boundary would be entirely arbitrary.^[32]

Yet a key point about human races is that, as Sarich and Miele put it:

“[Although] races necessarily grade into one another, but they clearly do not do so evenly” (p209).

In other words, although racial differences are indeed clinal and continuous in nature, the differentiation does not occur at a constant and uniform rate. Instead, there is some clustering and definite if fuzzy boundaries are nevertheless discernible.

As an illustration of such a fuzzy but discernible boundary, Sarich and Miele give the example of the Sahara Desert, which formerly represented, and to some extent still does represent, a relatively impassable obstacle (a “a geographic filter”, in Sarich and Miele’s words: p210) that impeded population movement and hence gene flow for millennia.

“The human population densities north and south of the Sahara have long been, and still are, orders of magnitude greater than in the Sahara proper, causing the northern and southern units to have evolved in substantial genetic independence from one another” (p210).

The Sahara hence represented the “ancient boundary” between the racial groups once referred to by anthropologists as the ‘Caucasoid’ and ‘Negroid’ races, politically incorrect terms which, according to Sarich and Miele, although unfashionable, nevertheless remain useful (p209-10).

Analogously, anthropologist Stanley Garn reports:

“The high and uninviting mountains that mark the Tibetan-Indian border… have long restricted population exchange to a slow trickle” (Human Races: p15).

Thus, these mountains (the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau), have traditionally marked the boundary between the ‘Caucasoid’ and what was once termed the ‘Mongoloid’ race.^[33]

Meanwhile, other geographic barriers were probably even more impassable. For example, oceans almost completely prevented gene-flow between the Americas and the Old World, save across the Berring strait between sparsely populated Siberia and Alaska, for millennia, such that Amerindians remained almost completely reproductively isolated from Eurasians and Africans.

Similarly, genetic studies suggest that Australian Aboriginals were genetically isolated from other populations, including neighbouring South-East Asians and Polynesians, for literally thousands of years.

Thus, anthropologist Stanley Garn concludes:

“The facts of geography, the mountain ranges, the deserts and the oceans, have made geographical races by fencing them in” (Human Races: p15).

However, with improved technologies of transportation – planes, ocean-going vessels, other vehicles – such geographic boundaries are becoming increasingly irrelevant.

Thus, increased geographic mobility, migration, miscegenation and intermarriage mean that the ‘fuzzy’ boundaries of these ‘fuzzy sets’ are fast becoming even ‘fuzzier’.

Thus, if meaningful boundaries could once be drawn between races, and even if they still can, this may not be the case for very much longer.

However, it is important to emphasize that, even if races didn’t exist, race differences still would. They would just vary on a continuum (or a ‘cline’, to use the preferred biological term).

To argue that races differences do not exist simply because they are continuous and clinal in nature would, of course, be to commit a version of the ‘continuum fallacy’ or ‘sorties paradox’, also sometimes called the ‘fallacy of the heap’ or ‘fallacy of the beard’.

Moreover, just as populations differ in, for example, skin colour on a clinal basis, so they could also differ in psychological traits (such as average intelligence and personality) in just the same way.

Thus, paradoxically, the non-existence of human races, even if conceded for the sake of argument, is hardly a definitive, knock-down argument against the existence of innate race differences in intelligence, or indeed other racial differences, even though it is usually presented as such by those who espouse this view.

Whether ‘races’ exist is debatable and depends on precisely how one defines ‘races’—whether race differences exist, however, is surely beyond dispute.

Debunking Diamond

The brilliant and rightly celebrated scientific polymath and popular science writer Jared Diamond, in an influential article published in Discovery magazine, formulated another even less persuasive objection to the race concept as applied to humans (Diamond 1994).

Here, Diamond insisted that racial classifications among humans are entirely arbitrary, because different populations can be grouped into different ways if one uses different characteristics by which to group them.

Thus, if we classified races, not by skin colour, but rather by the prevalence of the sickle cell gene or of lactase persistence, then we would, he argues, arrive at very different classifications. For example, he explains:

“Depending on whether we classified ourselves by antimalarial genes, lactase, fingerprints or skin color, we could place Swedes in the same race as (respectively) either Xhosas, Fulani, the Ainu of Japan or Italians” (p164).

Each of these classifications, Diamond insists, would be “equally reasonable and arbitrary” (p164).

To these claims, Sarich and Miele respond:

“Most of us, upon reading these passages, would immediately sense that something was very wrong with it, even though one might have difficulty specifying just what” (p164).

Unfortunately, however, Sarich and Miele are, in my view, not themselves very clear in explaining precisely what is wrong with Diamond’s argument.

Thus, one of Sarich and Miele’s grounds for rejecting this argument is that:

“The proportion of individuals carrying the sickle-cell allele can never go above about 40 percent in any population, nor does the proportion of lactose-competent adults in any population ever approach 100 percent. Thus, on the basis of the sickle-cell gene, there are two groups… of Fulani, one without the allele, the other with it. So those Fulani with the allele would group not with other Fulani, but with Italians with the allele” (p165).

Here their point seems to be that it is not very helpful to classify races by reference to a trait that is not shared by all members of any race, but rather differs only in relative prevalence.

Thus, they conclude:

“The concordance issue… applies within groups as well as between them. Diamond is dismissive of the reality of the Fulani–Xhosas African racial unit because there are characters discordant with it [e.g. lactase persistence]… Well then, one asks in response, what about the Fulani unit itself? After all, exactly the same argument could be made to cast the reality of the category ‘Fulani’ into doubt” (p165).

However, this conclusion seems to represent exactly what many race deniers do indeed argue – namely that all racial and ethnic groups are indeed pure social constructs with no basis in biology, including terms such as ‘Fulani’ and ‘Italian’, which are, they would argue, as biologically meaningless and socially constructed as terms such as ‘Negroid’ and ‘Caucasoid’.^[34]

After all, if a legitimate system of racial classification indeed demands that some Fulani tribesmen be grouped in the same race as Italians while others are grouped in an entirely different racial taxa, then this does indeed seem to suggest racial classifications are arbitrary and unhelpful.

Moreover, the fact that there is much within-population variation in genes such as those coding for sickle-cell or lactase persistence surely only confirms Richard Lewontin’s famous argument (see below) that there is far more genetic variation within groups than between them.

Sarich and Miele’s other rejoinder to Diamond is, in my view, more apposite. Unfortunately, however, they do not, in my opinion, explain themselves very well.

They argue that:

“[The absence of the sickle-cell gene] is a meaningless association because the character involved (the lack of the sickle-cell allele) is an ancestral human condition. Associating Swedes and Xhosas thus says only that they are both human, not a particularly profound statement” (p165).

What I think Sarich and Miele are getting at here is that, whereas Diamond proposes to classify groups on the basis of a single characteristic, in this case the sickle-cell gene, most biologists favour a so-called cladistic taxonomy, where organisms are grouped together not on the basis of shared characteristics as such at all, but rather on the basis of shared ancestry.

In other words, orgasms are grouped together because they are more closely related to one another (or shared a common ancestor more recently) than are other organisms that are put into a different group.

From this perspective, shared characteristics are relevant only to the extent they are (interpreted as) homologous and hence as evidence of shared ancestry. Traits that evolved independently through convergent or parallel evolution (i.e. in response to analogous selection pressures in separate lineages) are irrelevant.

Yet the genes responsible for lactase persistence, one of the traits used by Diamond to classify populations, evolved independently in different populations through gene-culture co-evolution in concert with the independent development of dairy farming in different parts of the world, an example of convergent evolution that does not suggest relatedness. Indeed, not only did lactase continuance evolve independently in different races, it also seems to have evolved quite different mutations in different genes (Tishkoff et al 2007).^[35]

However, Diamond’s proposed classification is especially preposterous. Even pre-Darwinian systems of taxonomy, which did indeed classify species (and subspecies) on the basis of shared characteristics rather than shared ancestry, nevertheless did so on the basis of a whole suite of traits that were clustered together.

In contrast, Diamond proposes to classify races on the basis of a single trait, apparently chosen arbitrarily – or, more likely, to illustrate the point he is attempting to make.

Genetic Differences

In an even more influential and widely-cited paper, Marxist biologist Richard Lewontin claimed that 85% of genetic variation occurred within populations and only 6% accounted for the differences between races (Lewontin 1972).^[36]

The most familiar rejoinder to Lewontin’s argument is that of Edwards who pointed out that, while Lewontin’s figures are correct when one looks at individual genetic loci, if one looks at multiple loci, then one can identify an individual’s race with precision that approaches 100% the more loci that are used (Edwards 2003).

However, Edwards’ paper was only published in 2003, just a year before ‘Race: The Reality of Human Differences’ itself came off the presses, so Sarich and Miele may not have been aware of Edwards’ critique at the time they actually wrote the book.^[37]

Perhaps for this reason, then, Sarich and Miele respond rather differently to Lewontin’s arguments.

First, they point out:

“[Lewontin’s] analysis omits a third level of variability–the within-individual one. The point is that we are diploid, getting one set of chromosomes from one parent and a second from the other” (p168-9).

Thus Sarich and Miele conclude:

“The… 85 percent will then split half and half (42.5%) between the intra- and inter-individual within-population comparisons. The increase in variability in between-population comparisons is thus 15 percent against the 42.5 percent that is between individual within-population. Thus, 15/4.5 = 32.5 percent, a much more impressive and, more important, more legitimate value than 15 percent.” (p169).

However, this seems to me to be just playing around with numbers in order to confuse and obfuscate.

After all, if as Lewontin claims, most variation is within-group rather than between group, then, even if individuals mate endogamously (i.e. with members of the same group as themselves), offspring will show substantial variation between the portion of genes they inherit from each parent.

But, even if some of the variation is therefore within-individual, this doesn’t change the fact that it is also within-group.

Thus, the claim of Lewontin that 85% of genetic variation is within-group remains valid.

Morphological Differences

Sarich and Miele then make what seems to me to be a more valid and important objection to Lewontin’s figures, or at least to the implication he and others have drawn from them, namely that racial differences are insignificant. Again, however, they do not express themselves very clearly.

Their argument seems to be that, if we are concerned with the extent of physiological and psychological differentiation between races, then it actually makes more sense to look directly at morphological differences, rather than genetic differences.

After all, a large proportion of our DNA may be of the nonfunctional non-coding or ‘junk’ variety, some of which may have little or no effect an organism’s phenotype.

Thus, in their chapter ‘Resolving the Primate Tree’, Sarich and Miele themselves claim that:

“Most variation and change at the level of DNA and proteins have no functional consequences” (p121; p126).

They conclude:

“Not only is the amount of between-population genetic variation very small by the standards of what we observe in other species… but also… most variation that does exist has no functional, adaptive significance” (p126).

Thus, humans and chimpanzees may share around 98% of each other’s DNA, but this does not necessarily mean that we are 98% identical to chimpanzees in either our morphology, or our psychology and behaviour. The important thing is what the genes in question do, and small numbers of genes can have great effects while others (e.g. non-coding DNA) may do little or nothing.^[38]

Indeed, one theory has it that such otherwise nonfunctional biochemical variation may be retained within a population by negative frequency dependent selection because different variants, especially when recombined in each new generation by sexual reproduction, confer some degree of protection against infectious pathogens.

This is sometimes referred to as ‘rare allele advantage’, in the context of the ‘Red Queen theory’ of host-parasite co-evolutionary arms race.

Thus, evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides explain:

“The more alternative alleles exist at more loci—i.e., the more genetic polymorphism there is—the more sexual recombination produces genetically differentiated offspring, thereby complexifying the series of habitats faced by pathogens Most pathogens will be adapted to proteins and protein combinations that are common in a population, making individuals with rare alleles less susceptible to parasitism, thereby promoting their fitness. If parasitism is a major selection pressure, then such frequency-dependent selection will be extremely widespread across loci, with incremental advantages accruing to each additional polymorphic locus that varies the host phenotype for a pathogen. This process will build up in populations immense reservoirs of genetic diversity coding for biochemical diversity” (Tooby & Cosmides 1990: p33).

Yet, other than conferring some resistance to fast-evolving pathogens, such “immense reservoirs of genetic diversity coding for biochemical diversity” may have little adaptive or functional significance and have little or no effect on other aspects of an organism’s phenotype.

Lewontin’s figures, though true, are therefore potentially misleading. To see why, behavioural geneticist Glayde Whitney suggested that we “might consider the extent to which humans and macaque monkeys share genes and alleles”. On this basis, he reported:

“If the total genetic diversity of humans plus macaques is given an index of 100 percent, more than half of that diversity will be found in a troop of macaques or in the [then quite racially homogenous] population of Belfast. This does not mean Irishmen differ more from their neighbors than they do from macaques — which is what the Lewontin approach slyly implies” (Whitney 1997).

Anthropologist Peter Frost, in an article for Aporia Magazine critiquing Lewontin’s analysis, or at least the conclusions he and others have drawn from them, cites several other examples where:

“Wild animals… show the same pattern of genes varying much more within than between populations, even when the populations are related species and, sometimes, related genera (a taxonomic category that ranks above species and below family)“ (Frost 2023).

However, despite the minimal genetic differentiation between races, different human races do differ from one another morphologically to a significant degree. This much is evident simply from looking at the facial morphology, or bodily statures, of people of different races – and indirectly apparent by observing which races predominate in different athletic events at the Olympics.

Thus, Sarich and Miele point out, when one looks at morphological differences, it is clear that, at least for some traits, such as “skin color… hair form… stature… body build”, within-group variation does not always dwarf between-group variation (p167).

On the contrary, Sarich and Miele observe:

“Group differences can be much greater than the individual differences within them; in, for example, hair from Kenya and Japan, or body shape for the Nuer and Inuit” (p218).

Indeed, in respect of some traits, there may be almost no overlap between groups. For example, excepting suffers of rare, abnormal and pathological conditions like albinism, even the lightest complexioned Nigerian is still darker in complexion and skin colour than is the darkest indigenous Swede.

If humans differ enough genetically to cause the obvious (and not so obvious) morphological differences between races, differences which are equally obviously genetic in origin, then it necessarily follows that they also differ enough genetically to allow for a similar degree of biological variation in psychological traits, such as personality and intelligence.

That human populations are genetically quite similar to one another indicates, Sarich and Miele concede, that the different races separated and became reproductively isolated from one another only quite recently, such that random variation in selectively-neutral DNA has not had sufficient time to accumulate through random mutation and genetic drift.

However, the fact that, within this short period, quite large morphological differences have nevertheless evolved suggests the presence of strong selective pressures selecting for such morphological differentiation.

They cite archaeologist Glynn Isaac as arguing:

“It is the Garden-of-Eden model [i.e. ‘out of Africa theory’], not the regional continuity model [i.e. multiregionalism], that makes racial differences more significant functionally… because the amount of time involved in the raciation process is much smaller, but the degree of racial differentiation is the same and, for human morphology, large. The shorter the period of time required to produce a given amount of morphological difference, the more selectively/adaptively/functionally important those differences become” (p212).

Thus, Sarich and Miele conclude:

“So much variation developing in so short a period of time implies, indeed almost requires, functionality; there is no good reason to think that behavior should somehow be exempt from this pattern of functional variability” (p173).

In other words, if different races have been subjected to divergent selection pressures that have led them to diverge morphologically, then these same selection pressures will almost certainly also have led them to psychologically diverge from one another.

Indeed, at least one well-established morphological difference seems to directly imply a corresponding psychological difference – namely, differences in brain size as between races would seem to suggest differences in intelligence, as I have discussed in greater detail both previously and below.

Measuring Morphological Differences

Continuing this theme, Sarich and Miele argue that human racial groups actually differ more from one another morphologically than do many non-human mammals that are regarded as entirely separate species.

Thus, Sarich quotes himself as claiming:

“Racial morphological distances within our species are, on the average, about equal to the distances among species within other genera of mammals. I am not aware of another mammalian species whose constituent races are as strongly marked as they are in ours… except, of course, for dogs” (p170).

I was initially somewhat skeptical of this claim. Certainly, it seems to us that, say, a black African looks very different from an East Asian or a white European. However, this may simply be because, being human, and in close day-to-day contact with humans, we are far more readily attuned to differences between humans than differences between, say, chimpanzees, or wolves, or sheep.^[39]

Indeed, there is even evidence that we possess an innate domain-specific ‘face recognition module’ that evolved to help us to distinguish between different individuals, and which seems to be localized in certain areas of the brain, including the so-called ‘fusiform facial area’, which is located in the fusiform gyrus.

Indeed, as I have already noted in an earlier endnote, a commenter on an earlier version of this book review plausibly suggested that our tendency to group individuals by race could represent a by-product of our facial recognition faculty.

However, the claim that the morphological differences between human races are comparable in magnitude to those between some different species or nonhuman organism is by no means original to Sarich and Miele.

For example, John R Baker makes a similar claim in his excellent book, Race (which I have reviewed here), where he asserts:

“Even typical Nordids and typical Alpinids, both regarded as subraces of a single race (subspecies), the Europid [i.e. Caucasoid), 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” (Race: p97).

Thus, 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” (Race: p427).

Indeed, Darwin himself made a not dissimilar claim in The Descent of Man, where he observed:

“If a naturalist, who had never before seen a Negro, Hottentot, Australian, or Mongolian, were to compare them, he would at once perceive that they differed in a multitude of characters, some of slight and some of considerable importance. On enquiry he would find that they were adapted to live under widely different climates, and that they differed somewhat in bodily constitution and mental disposition. If he were then told that hundreds of similar specimens could be brought from the same countries, he would assuredly declare that they were as good species as many to which he had been in the habit of affixing specific names” (The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex).

However, Sarich and Miele attempt to go one better than both Baker and Darwin – namely, by not merely claiming that human races differ morphologically from one another to a similar or greater extent than many separate species of non-human animal, but also purporting to prove this claim statistically as well.

Thus, relying on “cranial/facial measurements on 29 human populations, 2,500 individuals 28 measurements… 17 measurements on 347 chimpanzees… and 25 measures on 590 gorillas” (p170), Sarich and Miele’s conclusion is dramatic: reporting the “percent increases in distance going from within-group to between-group comparisons of individuals”, measured in terms of “the percent difference per size corrected measurement (expressed as standard deviation units)”, a greater percentage of the total variation among humans is found between different human groups than is found between some separate species of non-human primate.

Thus, Sarich and Miele somewhat remarkably conclude:

“Racial morphological distances in our species [are] much greater than any seen among chimpanzees or gorillas, or, on the average, some tenfold greater than those between the sexes” (p172-3).

Interestingly, and consistent with the general rule that Steve Sailer has termed ‘Rushton’s Rule of Three’, whereby blacks and Asians respectively cluster at opposite ends of a racial spectrum for various traits, Sarich and Miele report:

“The largest differences in Howells’s sample are found when comparing [black sub-Saharan] Africans with either Asians or Asian-derived (Amerindian) populations” (p172).

Thus, for example, measured in this way, the proportion of the total variation that separates East Asians from African blacks is more than twice that separating chimpanzees from bonobos.

This, however, is perhaps a misleading comparison, since chimpanzees and bonobos are known to be morphologically very similar to one another, to such an extent that, although now recognized as separate species, they were, until quite recently, considered as merely different subspecies of a single species.

Another problem with Sarich and Miele’s conclusion is that, as they themselves report, it relies entirely on “cranial/facial measurements” and thus it is unclear whether the extent of these differences generalize to other parts of the body.

Yet, despite this limitation, Sarich and Miele report their results as applying to “racial morphological distances” in general, not just facial and cranial differences.

Finally, Sarich and Miele’s analysis in this part of their book is rather technical.

I feel that the more appropriate place to publish such an important and provocative finding would have been a specialist journal in biological anthropology, which would, of course, include a full methodolgy section and also be subject to full peer review before publication.

Domestic Dog Breeds and Human Races

Sarich and Miele argue that the only mammalian species with greater levels of morphological variation between subspecies than humans are domestic dogs.

Thus, psychologist Daniel Freedman, writing in 1979, claimed:

“A breed of dog is a construct zoologically and genetically equivalent to a race of man” (Human Sociobiology: p144).

Of course, morphologically, dog breeds differ enormously, far more than human races.

However, the logistical problems of a Chihuahua mounting a mastiff notwithstanding, all are thought to be capable of interbreeding with one another, and also with wild wolves, and are hence all dog breeds, together with wild wolves, are generally considered by biologists to represent a single species.

Moreover, Sarich and Miele report that genetic differences between dog breeds, and between dogs and wolves, were so slight that, at the time Sarich and Miele were writing, researchers had only just begun to be able to genetically distinguish some dog breeds from others (p185).

Of course, this was written in 2003, and genetic data in the years since then has accumulated at a rapid pace.

Moreover, even then, one suspects that the supposed inability of geneticists to distinguish one dog breed from another reflected, not so much the limited genetic differentiation between breeds, as the fact that, understandably, far fewer resources had been devoted to decoding the canine genome that were devoted to decoding that of humans ourselves.

Thus, today, far more data is available on the genetic differences between breeds and these differences have proven, unsurprisingly given the much greater morphological differences between dog breeds as compared to human races, to be much greater than those between human populations.

For example, as I have discussed above, Marxist-biologist Richard Lewontin famously showed that, for humans, there is far greater genetic variation within races than between races (Lewontin 1972).

It is sometimes claimed that the same is true for dog breeds. For example, self-styled ‘race realist’ and ‘white advocate’, and contemporary America’s leading white nationalist public intellectual (or at least the closest thing contemporary America has to a white nationalist public intellectual), Jared Taylor claims, in a review of Edward Dutton’s Making Sense of Race, that:

“People who deny race point out that there is more genetic variation within members of the same race than between races — but that’s true for dog breeds, and not many people think the difference between a terrier and a pug is all in our minds” (Taylor 2021).

Actually, however, Taylor appears to be mistaken.

Admittedly, some early mitochondrial DNA studies did seemingly support this conclusion. Thus, Coppinger and Schneider reported in 1994 that:

“Greater mtDNA differences appeared within the single breeds of Doberman pinscher or poodle than between dogs and wolves… To keep the results in perspective, it should be pointed out that there is less mtDNA difference between dogs, wolves and coyotes than there is between the various ethnic groups of human beings, which are recognized as belonging to a single species” (Coppinger & Schneider 1994).

However, while this may be true for mitochondrial DNA, it does not appear to generalize to the canine genome as a whole. Thus, in her article ‘Genetics and the Shape of Dogs’ geneticist Elaine Ostrander, an expert on the genetics of domestic dogs, reports:

“Genetic variation between dog breeds is much greater than the variation within breeds. Between-breed variation is estimated at 27.5 percent. By comparison, genetic variation between human populations is only 5.4 percent” (Ostrander 2007).^[40]

However, the fact that both morphological and genetic differentiation between dog breeds far exceeds that between human races does not necessarily mean that an analogy between dog breeds and human races is entirely misplaced.

All analogies are imperfect, otherwise they would not be analogies, but rather identities (i.e. exactly the same thing).

Indeed, one might argue that dog breeds provide a useful analogy for human races precisely because the differences between dog breeds are so much greater, since this allows us to see the same principles operating but on a much more magnified scale and hence brings them into sharper focus.

Breed and Behaviour

As well as differing morphologically, dog breeds are also thought to differ behaviourally as well.

Anecdotally, some breeds are said to be affectionate and ‘good with children’, others standoffish, independent, territorial and prone to aggression, either with strangers or with other dogs.

For example, psychologist Daniel Freedman, whose study of average differences in behaviour among both dog breeds, conducted as part of his PhD, and his later analogous studies of differences in behaviour of neonates of different races, are discussed by Sarich and Miele in their book (p203-7), observed:

“I had worked with different breeds of dogs and I had been struck by how predictable was the behavior of each breed” (Human Sociobiology: p144).

Freedman’s scientifically rigorous studies of breed differences in behaviour confirmed that at least some such differences are indeed real and seem to have an innate basis.

Thus, studying the behaviours of newborn puppies to minimize the possibility of environmental effects affecting behaviour differences, just as he later studied differences in the behaviour of human neonates, Freedman reports:

“The breeds already differed in behavior. Little beagles were irrepressibly friendly from the moment they could detect me, whereas Shetland sheepdogs were most sensitive to a loud voice or the slightest punishment; wire-haired terriers were so tough and aggressive, even as clumsy three-week olds, that I had to wear gloves in playing with them; and, finally, basenjis, barkless dogs originating in central Africa, were aloof and independent” (Human Sociobiology: p145).

Similarly, Hans Eysenck reports the results of a study of differences in behaviour between different dog breeds raised under different conditions then left alone in a room with food they had been instructed not to eat. He reports:

“Basenjis, who are natural psychopaths, ate as soon as the trainer had left, regardless of whether they had been brought up in the disciplined or the indulgent manner. Both groups of Shetland sheep dogs, loyal and true to death, refused the food, over the whole period of testing, i.e. eight days! Beagles and fox terriers responded differentially, according to the way they had been brought up; indulged animals were more easily conditioned, and refrained longer from eating. Thus, conditioning has no effect on one group, regardless of upbringing—has a strong effect on another group, regardless of upbringing—and affects two groups differentially, depending on their upbringing” (The IQ Argument: p170).

These differences often reflect the purpose for which the dogs were bred. For example, breeds historically bred for dog fighting (e.g. Staffordshire bull berriers) tend to be aggressive with other dogs, but not necessarily with people; those bred as guard dogs (e.g. mastiffs, Dobermanns) tend to be highly territorial; those bred as companions sociable and affectionate; while others have been bred to specialize in certain highly specific behaviours at which they excel (e.g. pointers, sheep dogs).

For example, the author of one recent study of behavioural differences among dog breeds interpreted her results thus:

“Inhibitory control may be a valued trait in herding dogs, which are required to inhibit their predatory responses. The Border Collie and Australian Shepherd were among the highest-scoring breeds in the cylinder test, indicating high inhibitory control. In contrast, the Malinois and German Shepherd were some of the lowest-scoring breeds. These breeds are often used in working roles requiring high responsiveness, which is often associated with low inhibitory control and high impulsivity. Human-directed behaviour and socio-cognitive abilities may be highly valued in pet dogs and breeds required to work closely with people, such as herding dogs and retrievers. In line with this, the Kelpie, Golden Retriever, Australian Shepherd, and Border Collie spent the largest proportion of their time on human-directed behaviour during the unsolvable task. In contrast, the ability to work independently may be important for various working dogs, such as detection dogs. In our study, the two breeds which were most likely to be completely independent during the unsolvable task (spending 0% of their time on human-directed behaviour) were the German Shepherd and Malinois” (Juntilla et al 2022).

Indeed, recognition of the different behaviours of dog breeds even has statutory recognition, with controversial breed-specific legislation restricting the breeding, sale and import of certain so-called dangerous dog breeds and ordering their registration, neutering and in some cases destruction.

Of course, similar legislation restricting the import and breeding, let alone ordering the neutering or destruction, of ‘dangerous human races’ (perhaps defined by reference to differences in crime rates) is currently politically unthinkable.

Therefore, as noted above, breed-specific legislation is the rough canine equivalent of the Nuremberg Laws.

Breed Differences in Intelligence

In addition, just as there are differences between human races in average IQ (see below; see also here, here and especially here) so some studies have suggested that, on average, dog breeds differ in average intelligence.

However, there are some difficulties, for these purposes, in measuring, and defining, what constitutes intelligence among domestic dogs.^[41]

Since the subject of race differences in intelligence almost always lurks in the background of any discussion of the biology of race, and, since this topic is indeed discussed at some length by Sarich and Miele in a later chapter (and indeed in a later part of this review), it is perhaps worth discussing some of these difficulties and the extent to which they mirror similar controversies regarding how to define and measure human intelligence, especially differences between races.

Thus, research by Stanley Coren, reported in his book, The Intelligence of Dogs, and also widely reported upon in the popular press, purported to rank dog breeds by their intelligence.

However, the research in question, or at least the part reported upon in the media, actually seems to have relied exclusively on measurements of the ability of the different dogs to learn, and obey, new commands from their masters/owners with the minimum of instruction.^[42]

Moreover, this ability also seems, in Coren’s own account, to have been assessed on the basis of the anecdotal impression of dog contest judges, rather then direct quantitative measurement of behaviour.

Thus, the purportedly most intelligent dogs were those able to “learn a new command in less than five exposures and obey at least 95 percent of the time”, while the purportedly least intelligent were those who required “more than 100 repetitions and obey around 30 percent of the time”.

An ability to obey commands consistently with a minimum of instruction does indeed require a form and degree of social intelligence – namely the capacity to learn and understand the commands in question.

However, such a means of measurement not only measures only a single quite specific type of intelligence, it also measures another aspect of canine psychology that is not obviously related to intelligence – namely, obedience, submissiveness and rebelliousness.

This is because complying with commands requires not only the capacity to understand commands, but also the willingness to actually obey them.

Some dogs might conceivably understand the commands of an owner, or at least have the capacity to understand if they put their mind to it, but nevertheless refuse to comply, or even refuse to learn, out of sheer rebelliousness and independent spirit. Most obviously, this might be true of wild wolves which have not been domesticated or even tamed, though it may also be true of dog breeds.^[43]

Analogously, when a person engages in a criminal act, we do not generally assume that this is because s/he failed to understand that the conduct complained of was indeed a transgression of the law. Instead, we usually assume that s/he knew that the behaviour complained of was criminal, but, for whatever reason, decided to engage in the behaviour anyway.^[44]

Thus, a person who habitually refuses to comply with rules of behaviour set down by those in authority (e.g. school authorities, law enforcement) is more likely to be diagnosed with, say, oppositional defiant personality disorder or psychopathy than with low intelligence as such. Much the same might be true of some dog breeds, and indeed some individual dogs (and indeed wild or tame wolves).^[45]

Sarich and Miele, in their discussion of Daniel Freedman’s research on behavioural differences among breeds, provide a good illustration of these problems. Thus, they describe how, one of the tests conducted by Freedman involved measuring how well the different breeds navigated “a series of increasingly difficult mazes”. This would appear to be a form of intelligence test measuring spatial intelligence. However, in fact, they report, perhaps surprisingly:

“The major breed differences were not in the ability to master the mazes (a rough measure of canine IQ) but in what they would do when they were placed in a maze they couldn’t master. The beagles would howl, hoping perhaps that another member of their pack would howl back and lead them to the goal. The inhibited Shelties would simply lie down on the ground and wait. Pugnacious terriers would try to tear down the walls of the maze, but the basenjis saw no reason they had to play by a human’s rules and tried to jump over the walls of the maze” (p202).

Far from demonstrating low intelligence, the behaviour of the terriers, and especially the basenjis might even be characterized as an impressive form of lateral thinking, inventiveness and creativity – devising a different way to escape the maze than that intended by the experimenter.

However, it more likely reflects the independent and rebellious personality of basenjis, a breed which is, according to Sarich and Miele, more recently domesticated than other most breeds, related to semi-domesticated pariah dogs, and who, they report, “dislike taking orders and are born canine scofflaws” (p201-2).

You may also recall that psychologist Hans Eysenck, in a passage quoted in greater length in the preceding section of this review, described this same breed, perhaps only semi-jocularly, as “natural psychopaths” (The IQ Argument: p170).

Consistent with this, Stanley Coren reports that they are the second least trainable dog, behind only Afghan Hounds.

Natural, Artificial and Sexual Selection

Of course, domestic dog breeds are a product, not of natural selection, of rather of artificial selection, i.e. selective breeding by human breeders, often to deliberately produce strains with different traits, both morphological and behavioural.

This, one might argue, makes dog breeds quite different to human races, since, although many have argued that humans are ourselves, in some sense, a domesticated species, albeit a self-domesticated one (i.e. we have domesticated ourselves, or perhaps one another), nevertheless most traits that differentiate human races seems to be a product of natural selection, in particular adaptation to different geographic regions and their climates.^[46]

However, the processes of natural and artificial selection are directly analogous to each other. Indeed, they are so similar that it was the selective breeding of domestic animals by agriculturalists that helped inspire Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and was also used by Darwin to explain and illustrate this theory in The Origin of Species.

Moreover, many eminent biologists have argued that at least some racial differences are the product, not of natural selection (in the narrow sense), but rather of sexual selection, in particular mate choice.

Yet mate choice is arguably even more analogous to artificial selection than is natural selection, since both mate choice and artificial selection involve deliberate choice as to which individual with whom to breed by a third-party, namely, in the case of artificial selection, the human breeder, or, in respect of mate choice, the prospective mate.

As Sarich and Miele themselves observe:

“Unlike for dog breeds, no one has deliberately exercised that level of selection on humans, unless we exercised it on ourselves, a thought that has led evolutionary thinkers from Charles Darwin to Jared Diamond to attribute human racial variation to a process termed ‘sexual’ rather than ‘natural’ selection” (p236).

Thus, Darwin himself went as far as to claim in The Descent of Man that “as far as we are enabled to judge… none of the differences between the races of man are of any direct or special service to him”, and instead proposes:

“The differences between the races of man, as in colour, hairiness, form of features, etc., are of a kind which might have been expected to come under the influence of sexual selection” (The Descent of Man: p189-90).

Darwin’s claim that none of the physical differences between races have any survival value is now clearly untenable, as anthropologists and biologists have demonstrated that many observed race differences, for example, in skin colour, nose shape, and bodily dimensions, represent, at least in part, climatic adaptations.^[47]

However, the view that sexual selection has also played some role in human racial differentiation remains plausible, and has been championed in recent years by scientific polymath and populariser Jared Diamond in chapter six of his book The Third Chimpanzee, which he titles ‘Sexual Selection and the Origin of Human Races’ (The Third Chimpanzee: pp95-105), and especially by anthropologist Peter Frost in a series of papers and blog posts (e.g. Frost 2008).

For example, as emphasized by Frost, differences in hair colour, eye colour and hair texture, having no obvious survival benefits, yet often being associated with perceptions of beauty, might well be attributed, at least in part, to sexual selection (Frost 2006; Frost 2014; Frost 2015).

The same may be true of racial and sexual differentiation levels of muscularity and in the distribution of body fat, as discussed later in this review.

For example, John R Baker, in his monumental magnus opus, Race (reviewed here), argues that the large protruding buttocks evinced among some San women likely reflect sexual selection (Race: p318).^[48]

Meanwhile, both Frost and Diamond argue that even differences in skin colour, although partly reflecting the level of exposure to ultraviolet radiation from the sun in different regions of the globe and at different latitudes, and affecting vitamin D synthesis and susceptibility to sunburn and melanoma, all of which were subject to natural selection to some degree, likely also reflects mate choice and sexual selection as well, given that skin tone does not perfectly correlate with levels of exposure to UV rays in different regions, yet a lighter than average complexion seems to be cross-culturally associated with female beauty (van den Berghe and Frost 1986; Frost 1994; Frost 2014).

Similarly, in his recent book A Troublesome Inheritance, science writer Nicholas Wade, citing a study suggesting that an allele carried by East Asian people is associated with both thicker hair and smaller breasts in mice, suggests that this gene may have spread among East Asians as a consequence of sexual selection, with males preferring females as mates who possess one or both of these traits (A Troublesome Inheritance: p89-90).

Similarly, Wade also proposes that the greater prevalence of dry earwax among Northeast Asians, and, to a lesser degree, among Southeast Asians, Native Americans and Northern Europeans may reflect sexual selection and mate choice, because this form of earwax is also associated with a less strong body odour, and, in colder regions, where people spend more of their time indoors, Wade surmises that this is likely to be more noticeable, as well as unpleasant in a sexual partner (A Troublesome Inheritance: p90-91).^[49]

Finally, celebrated Italian geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza proposes, in his book Genes Peoples and Languages that, although the “fatty folds of skin” around the eyes characteristic of East Asian peoples likely evolved to protect against “the cold Siberian air” and represent “adaptions to the bitter cold of Siberia”, nevertheless, since “these eyes are often considered beautiful” they “probably diffused by sexual selection from northeastern Asia into Southeast Asia where it is not at all cold” (Genes Peoples and Languages: p11).

Curiously, in this context, however, Sarich and Miele, save for the passing mention of Darwin and Diamond quoted above, not only make no mention of sexual selection as a possible factor in human racial differentiation, but also make the odd claim in relation to sexual selection that:

“There has been no convincing evidence of it [i.e. sexual selection] yet in humans” (p186).^[50]

As noted, this is a rather odd, if not outright biologically ignorant, claim.

It is true that some of the more outlandish claims of evolutionary psychologists for sexual selection – for example, Geoffrey Miller’s intriguing theory that human intelligence evolved through sexual selection – remain unproven, as indeed does the claim that sexual selection played an important role in human racial differentiation.

However, there is surely little doubt, for example, human body-size dimorphism is a product of sexual selection (more specifically intra-sexual selection), since levels of body-size dimorphism is consistently correlated with levels of polygyny across many mammalian species.

A strong claim can also be made that the permanant breasts that are unique to human females evolved as a product of intersexual selection. (see discussion here).

Sexual selection has also surely acted on human psychology, resulting in, among other traits, the greater levels of violent aggression among males.

On the other hand, Sarich and Miele may be on firmer ground when, in a later chapter, while not denying that sexual selection may have played a role in other aspects of human evolution, they nevertheless insist:

“No one has yet provided any hard evidence showing that process [i.e. sexual selection] has produced racial differences in our species” (p236).

However, while this may be true, the idea that sexual selection has played a key role in human racial differentiation certainly remains a plausible hypothesis.

Physical Differences and Athletic Performance

Although they emphasize that morphological differences between human races are greater than those among some separate species of nonhuman animal, and also that such morphological differences provide, for many purposes, a more useful measure of group differences than genetic differences, nevertheless, in the remainder of the chapter on ‘Physical Race Differences’, Sarich and Miele actually have surprisingly little to say about the actual physical differences that exist as between races, nor how and why such differences evolved.

There is no discussion of, for example, Thomson’s nose rule, which seems to explain much of the variation in nose shape among races, nor of Bergmann’s rule and Allen’s rule, which seem to explain much of the variation among humans in body-size and relative bodily proportions.

Instead, Sarich and Miele focus on what is presumably an indirect effect of physiological race differences – namely, differences in athletic performance as between races.

Even this topic is not treated thoroughly. Indeed, the authors talk of “such African dominance as exists in the sporting world” (p182) almost as if this applied to all sports equally.

Yet, just as people of black African descent are conspicuously dominant in certain athletic events (basketball, the 100m sprint), so they are noticeably absent among elite athletes in certain other sports, not least swimming – and, just as the overrepresentation of people of West African descent among elite sprinters, and East Africans among elite distance runners, has been attributed to biological differences, so has their relative absence among elite swimmers, which is most often attributed to differences in bone density and fat distribution, each of which affect buoyancy.

Yet, not only does Sarich and Miele’s chapter on ‘Physical Race Differences’ focus almost exclusively on differences in athletic ability, but a large part of the chapter is devoted to differences in performance in one particular sport, namely the performance of East Africans, especially Kenyans (and especially members a single tribe, the Kelenjin), in long-distance running.

Yet, even here, their analysis is almost exclusively statistical, demonstrating the improbability that this single tribe, who represent, of course, only a tiny proportion of the world’s population, would achieve such success by chance alone if they did not have some underlying innate biological advantage.

They say little of the actual physiological factors that actually make East Africans such as the Kelenjin such great distance runners, nor of the evolutionary factors that selected for these physiological differences.

Others have attributed this advantage to their having evolved to survive at a relatively high altitude, in a mountainous region on the borders of Kenya and Uganda, to which region they are indigenous, as well as their so-called ‘elongate’ body-type, which seems to have evolved as an adaptation to climate.

Amusingly, however, behavioural geneticist Glayde Whitney proposes yet another factor that might explain why the Kelenjin are such excellent runners – namely, according to him, they long had a notorious reputation among their East African neighbours as cattle thieves.

However, unlike cattle thieves in the Old West, they lacked access to horses (which, in sub-Saharan Africa are afflicted with sleeping sickness spread by the tsetse fly) and having failed to domesticate any equivalent indigenous African animal such as the zebra, had instead to escape with their plunder on foot. The result, Whitney posits, was strong selection pressure for running ability in order to outrun and escape any pursuers:

“Why are the Kalenjin such exceptional runners? There is some speculation that it may be because the tribe specialized in cattle thievery. Anyone who can run a great distance and get away with the stolen cattle will have enough wealth to meet the high bride price of a good spouse. Because the Kalenjin were polygamous, a really successful cattle thief could afford to buy many wives and make many little runners. This is a good story, anyway, and it might even be true” (Whitney 1999).

The closest Sarich and Miele themselves come to providing a physiological explanation for black sporting success is a single sentence where they write:

“Body-fat levels seem to be at a minimum among African populations; the levels do not increase with age in them, and Africans in training can apparently achieve lower body-fat levels more readily than is the case for Europeans and Asians” (p182).

This claim seems anecdotally plausible, at least in respect of young African-American males, many of whom appear able to retain lean, muscular physiques, despite seemingly subsisting on a diet composed primarily of fried chicken with a regrettable lack of healthy alternatives such as watermelon.

However, as was widely discussed in relation to the higher mortality rates experienced among black people (and among fat people) during the recent coronavirus pandemic, there is also some evidence of higher rates of obesity among African-Americans.

Actually, however, this problem seems to be restricted to black women, who evince much higher rates of obesity than do women of most other races in the USA.^[51]

African-American males, on the other hand, seem to have similar rates of obesity to white American males.

Thus, according to data cited by the US Department of Health and Human Services and Office of Minority Health, more than 80% African American women are obese or overweight, as compared to only 65% of white women. However, among males the pattern is reversed, with a somewhat higher proportion of white men being overweight or obese than black men (75% of white men versus only about 71% of black men) (US Department of Health and Human Services and Office of Minority Health 2020).

This pattern is replicated in the UK, where black women have higher rates of obesity than white women, but, again, black men have rather lower rates of obesity than white men, with East Asians consistently having the lowest rates of obesity among both sexes.

That similar patterns are observed in both the UK and the USA suggests that the differences reflect an innate race difference – or rather an innate race difference in the magnitude of an innate sex difference, namely in body fat levels, which are higher among women than among men in all racial groups.^[52]

This may perhaps be a product of sexual selection and mate choice.

Thus, if black men do indeed, as popular stereotype suggests, like big butts, then black women may well have evolved to have bigger butts through sexual selection.^[53]

At least in the US, there is indeed some evidence that mating preferences differ between black and white men with regard to preferred body-types, with black men preferring somewhat heavier body-types (Allison et al 1993; Thompson et al 1996; Freedman et al 2004), though other research suggest little or no significant differences in preferences for body-weight as between black and white men (Singh 1994; Freedman et al 2006).^[54]

Sexual selection or, more specifically, mate choice may similarly explain the evolution of fatty breasts among women of all races and the evolution of fatty protruding buttocks among Khoisan women of Southern Africa (which I have written about previously and alluded to above).

Conversely, if the greater fat levels observed among black women is a product of sexual selection and, in particular, of mate choice, then perhaps the greater levels of muscularity and athleticism apparently observed among black men may also be a product of intrasexual selection or male-male competition (e.g. fighting).

Thus, it is possible that levels of intrasexual selection operating on males may have been elevated in sub-Saharan Africa because of the greater prevalence of polygyny in this region, since polygyny intensifies reproductive competition by increasing the reproductive stakes (see Sanderson, Race and Evolution: p92-3; Draper 1989; Frost 2008).

At any rate, other physical differences between the races besides differences in body fat levels also surely play a role in explaining the success of African-descended athletes in many sports.

For example, African populations tend to have somewhat longer legs and arms relative to their torsos than do Europeans and Asians. This reflects Allen’s rule of thermal regulation, whereby organisms that evolved in colder climates evolve to have relatively shorter limbs and other appendages, both to minimize the ratio of surface area to volume, and hence proportion of the body is directly exposed to the elements, and also because it is the extremities that are especially vulnerable to frostbite.

Thus, blacks, having evolved in the tropics, have relatively longer legs and arms than do Europeans and Asians.^[55]

Greater relative leg length, sometimes measured by the ratio of sitting to standing height, is surely an advantage in running events, which might partially explain black success in track events and indeed many other sports that also involve running It may also explain African-American performance in sports that involve jumping as well (e.g. basketball, the high jump and long jump), since leg length also confers an advantage here.

Meanwhile, greater relative arm length, sometimes measured by armspan to height ratio, is likely an advantage in sports such as basketball, boxing and racquet sports, since it confers greater reach.

Yet, at least some of the factors that benefit East Africans in distance events are opposite to those that favour West Africans in sprinting (e.g. the relative proportions of fast- versus slow-twitch muscle fibres; a mesomorphic versus an ectomorphic body-build). This suggests that it is, at best, a simplification to talk about a generalized African advantage in running, let alone in athletics as a whole.

Neither do the authors discuss the apparent anomaly whereby racially-mixed African-Americans and West Indians outcompete indigenous West Africans, who, being unmixed, surely possess whatever qualities benefit African-Americans in even greater abundance than do their transatlantic cousins.^[56]

Sarich and Miele also advance another explanation for the superior performance of blacks in running events, which stikes me as a very odd argument and not at all persuasive. Here, they argue that, since anatomically modern humans first evolved in Africa:

“Our basic adaptations are African. Given that, it would seem that we would have had to make adaptive compromises, such as to cold weather, when populating other areas of the world, thus taking the edge off our ‘African-ness’” (p182)

As a result of our distinctive adaptations having first evolved in Africa, Sarich and Miele argue:

“Africans are better than the rest of us at some of those things that most make us human, and they are better because their separate African histories have given them, in effect, better genes for recently developed tests of some basic human adaptations. The rest of us (or, more fairly, our ancestors) have had to compromise some of those African specializations in adapting to more temperate climates and more varied environments. Contemporary Africans, through their ancestors, are advantaged in not having had to make such adaptations, and their bodies, along with their resulting performances, show it” (p183).

Primary among these “basic adaptations”, “African specializations” and “things that most make us human” are, they argue, bipedalism (i.e. walking on two legs). This then, they seem to be arguing, explains African dominance in running events, which represent, if you like, the ultimate measure of bipedal ability.

This argument strikes me as completely unpersuasive, if not wholly nonsensical.

After all, another of our “basic adaptations”, even more integral to what “makes us human” than bipedalism is surely our high levels of intelligence and large brains (see discussion below) as compared to other primates.

Yet Africans notoriously do not appear to have “better genes” for this trait, at least as measured in yet another of those “recently developed tests of some basic human adaptations”, namely IQ tests.

Athletic and Cognitive Ability

This, of course, leads us directly to another race difference that is the subject of even greater controversy – namely race differences in intellectual ability.

The real reason we are reluctant to discuss athletic superiority is, Sarich and Miele contend, because it is perceived as also raising the spectre of intellectual inferiority.

In short, if races differ sufficiently genetically to cause differences in athletic performance, then it is surely possible they also differ sufficiently genetically to cause differences in academic performance and performance on IQ tests.

However, American high school movie stereotypes of ‘dumb jocks’ and ‘brainy nerds’ notwithstanding, there is no necessary inverse correlation between intellectual ability and ability at sports.

Indeed, Sarich and Miele argue that athletic ability is actually positively correlated with intellectual ability.

“I can see no necessary, or even likely, negative correlation between the physical and the mental. On the contrary, the data show an obvious, strong, positive correlation among class, physical condition, and participation in regular exercise in the United States” (p182).

Thus, they report:

“Professional football teams have, in recent years, been known to use the results of IQ tests as one indicator of potential in rookies. And a monumental study of intellectually gifted California schoolchildren begun by Lewis Terman in the 1920s that followed them through their lives showed clearly that they were also more gifted physically than the average” (p183).^[57]

It is likely true that intelligence and athletic ability are positively correlated – if only because many of the same things that cause physical disabilities (e.g. physical trauma, developmental disorders) also often cause mental disability. Down syndrome, for example, causes both mental and physical disability; and, if you are crippled in a car crash, you may also suffer brain damage.

Admittedly, there may be some degree of trade-off between performance in different spheres, if only because the more time one devotes to playing sports, then, all else being equal, the less time one has left to devote to one’s studies, and, in both sports and academics, performance usually improves with practice.

On the other hand, however, it may be that doing regular exercise and working hard at one’s studies are positively correlated because both reflect the same underlying personality trait of conscientiousness.

On this view, the real trade-off may be, not so much between spending time, on the one hand, playing sports and exercising and, on the other, studying, as it is between, on the one hand, engaging in any or all of these productive endeavours and, on the other hand, engaging in wasteful and unproductive endeavours such as watching television, playing computer games and shooting up heroin.

As for the American high school movie stereotype of the ‘dumb jock’, this, I suspect, may partly reflect the peculiar American institution of athletic scholarships, whereby athletically gifted students are admitted to elite universities despite being academically underqualified.

On the other hand, I suspect that the ‘brainy nerd’ stereotype may have something to do with a mild subclinical presentation of the symptoms of high-functioning autism.

This is not to say that ‘nerdishness’ and autism are the same thing, but rather that ‘nerdishness’ represents a milder subclinical presentation of autism symptoms not sufficient to justify a full-blown diagnosis of autism. Autistic traits are, after all, a matter of degree.

Thus, it is notable that the symptoms of autism include many traits that are also popularly associated with the nerd stereotype, such as social awkwardness, obsessive ‘nerdy’ special interests and perhaps even with that other popular stereotype of ‘nerds’, namely having to wear glasses.

More relevant for our purposes, high functioning autism is also associated with poor physical coordination and motor skills, which might explain the stereotype of ‘nerds’ performing poorly at sports.

On the other hand, however, contrary to popular stereotype, autism is not associated with above average intelligence.^[58]

In fact, although autistic people can present the whole range of intelligence, from highly gifted to intellectually disabled, autism is overall said to be associated with somewhat lower average intelligence than is observed in the general population.

This is consistent with the fact that autism is indeed, contrary to the claims of some ‘neurodiversity’ advocates, a developmental disorder and disability.

However, I suspect autism may be underdiagnosed among those of higher intelligence, precisely because they are able to use their higher general intelligence to compensate for and hence ‘mask’ their social impairments such that they go undetected and often undiagnosed.

Moreover, autism has a complex and interesting relationship with intelligence, and autism seems to be associated with special abilities in specific areas (Crespi 2016).

There is also some evidence, albeit mixed, that autistic people score relatively higher in performance IQ and spatio-visual ability than in verbal IQ. Given there is some evidence of a link between spatio-visual intelligence and mathematical ability, this might plausibly explain the stereotype of nerds being especially proficient in mathematics (i.e. ‘maths nerds’).

Overall, then, there is little evidence of, or any theoretical reason to anticipate, any trade-off or inverse correlation between intellectual and athletic ability. On the contrary, there is probably some positive correlation between the intelligence and athletic ability, if only because the same factors that cause intellectual disabilities – physical trauma, brain damage, birth defects, chromosomal abnormalities – also often cause physical disabilities.

On the other hand, however, Philippe Rushton, in the ‘Preface to the Third Edition’ of his book, Race Evolution and Behavior (which I have reviewed here), contends that some of the same physiological factors that cause blacks to excel in some athletic events are also indirectly associated with other racial differences that perhaps portray blacks in a less flattering light.

Thus, Rushton reports that the reason blacks tend, on average, to be faster runners is because:

“Blacks have narrower hips [than whites and East Asians] which gives them a more efficient stride” (Race Evolution and Behavior: p11).

But, he continues, the reason why blacks are able to have narrower hips, and hence more efficient stride, is that they give birth to smaller-brained, and hence smaller headed, infants:

“The reason why 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: p12).^[59]

Yet, as discussed below, brain size is itself correlated with intelligence, both as between species, and as between individual humans.

Similarly, Rushton argues:

“Blacks have from 3 to 19% more of the sex hormone testosterone than Whites or East Asians. These testosterone differences translate into more explosive energy, which gives Blacks the edge in sports like boxing, basketball, football, and sprinting” (Race Evolution and Behavior: p11).

However, higher levels of testosterone also has a downside, not least since:

“The hormones that give Blacks an edge at sports makes them more masculine in general — physically active in school, and more likely to get into trouble” (Race Evolution and Behavior: p12).

In other words, if higher levels of testosterone gives blacks an advantage in some sports, they perhaps also result in the much higher levels of violent crime and conduct disorders reported among people of black African descent (see Ellis 2017).^[60]

Intelligence

Whereas their chapter on ‘Race and Physical Differences’ focussed mostly on differences in athletic ability, Sarich and Miele’s chapter on ‘Race and Behavior’, focuses, perhaps inevitably, almost exclusively on race differences in intelligence.

However, though it certainly has behavioural correlates, intelligence is not, strictly speaking, an element of behaviour as such. The chapter would therefore arguably be more accurately titled ‘Race and Psychology’ – or indeed ‘Race and Intelligence’, since this is the psychologial difference upon which they focus almost to the exclusion of all others.^[61]

Moreover Sarich and Miele do not even provide a general, let alone comprehensive, review of all the evidence on the subject of race differences in intelligence, their causes and consequences. Instead, they focus on two very specific issues and controversies:

1. Race differences in brain size; and
2. The average IQ of blacks in sub-Saharan Africa.

Yet, despite the title of the Chapter, neither of the these reflect a difference in behaviour as such.

Indeed, race differences in brain-size are actually a physical difference – albeit a physical difference presumed, not unreasonably, to be associated with a psychological difference – and therefore should, strictly speaking, have gone in their previous chapter on ‘Race and Physical Differences’.

Brain Size

Brain-size and its relation to both intelligence and race is a topic I have written about previously. As between individuals, there exists a well-established correlation between brain-size and IQ (Pietschnig et al 2015; Rushton and Ankney 2009).

Nicholas Mackintosh, himself by no means a doctrinaire hereditarian and a critic of hereditarian theories with respect to race differences in intelligence, nevertheless reports in the second edition of his undergraduate textbook on IQ and Human Intelligence, published in 2011:

“Although the overall correlation between brain size and intelligence is not very high, there can be no doubt of its reliability” (IQ and Human Intelligence: p132).

Indeed, Sarich and Miele go further. In a critique of the work of infamous scientific charlatan Stephen Jay Gould, to whom they attribute the view that “brain size and intellectual performance have nothing to do with one another”, they retort:

“Those large brains of ours could not have evolved unless having large brains increased fitness through what those large brains made possible-that is, through minds that could do more” (p213).

This is especially so given the metabolic expense of brain tissue and other costs of increased brain size, such that, to have evolved during the course of human evolution, our large brains must have conferred some compensating advantage.

Thus, dismissing Gould as a “behavioral creationist”, given his apparent belief that the general principles of natural selection somehow do not apply to behaviour, or at least not to human behaviour, the authors forthrightly conclude:

“The evolutionary perspective demands that there be a relationship-in the form of a positive correlation-between brain size and intelligence… Indeed, it seems to me that a demonstration of no correlation between brain size and cognitive performance would be about the best possible refutation of the fact of human evolution” (p214).

Here, the authors go a little too far. Although, given the the metabolic expense of brain tissue and other costs associated with increased brain size, larger brains must have conferred some selective advantage to offset these costs, it need not necessarily have been an advantage in intelligence, certainly not in general intelligence. Instead, increased brain-size could, at least in theory, have evolved in relation to some specific ability, or cognitive or neural process, other than intellectual ability.

Yet, despite this forthright claim, Sarich and Miele then go on to observe that one study conducted by one of Sarich’s graduate students, in collaboration with Sarich himself, actually found no association between brain size and IQ as between siblings from the same family (Schoenemann et al 2000).

This, Sarich and Miele explain, suggests the relationship between brain-size and IQ is not causal, but rather that some factor that differs as between families is responsible for causing both larger brains and the higher IQs. However, they explain, “the obvious candidates” (e.g. socioeconomic status, nutrition) do not have nearly a big enough effect to account for this (p222).

However, they fail to note that other studies have found a correlation between brain size and IQ scores even within families, suggesting that brain size does indeed cause higher intelligence (e.g. Jensen & Johnson 1994; Lee et al 2019).

Indeed, according to Rushton and Ankney (2009: 695), even prior to the Lee et al study, four studies had already established a correlation between brain-size and IQ even within families, a couple of them published before Sarich and Miele’s book.

Of course, Sarich and Miele can hardly be faulted for failing to cite Lee et al (2019), since that study had not been published at the time their book was written. However, other studies (e.g. Jensen & Johnson 1994) had already been published at the time Sarich and Miele authored their book.

Brain-size is also thought to correlate with intelligence as between species, at least after controlling for body-size (see encephalization quotient).

However, comparing the intelligence of different species obviously represents a difficult endeavour.

Quite apart from the practical challenges (e.g. building a maze for a mouse to navigate in the laboratory is simple enough, building a comparable maze for elephants presents more difficulties), there is the fact that, whereas most variation in human intelligence, both between individuals and between groups, is captured by a single g factor, different species no doubt have many different specialist abilities.^[62]

For example, migratory birds surely have special abilities in respect of navigation. However, these are not necessarily reflective of their overall general intelligence.

In other words, if you think a ‘culture-fair’ IQ test is an impossibility, then try designing a ‘species-fair’ test!

If brain-size correlates with intelligence both as between species and as between individual humans, it seems probable that race differences in brain-size also reflect differences in intelligence.

However, larger brains do not automatically, or directly, confer, or cause, higher levels of intelligence.

For example, most dwarves have IQs similar to those of non-dwarves, despite having smaller brains, but, save in the case of ‘proportionate dwarves’, larger brains relative to their body-size. Neither is macrocephaly (i.e. abnormally and pathologically large head-size) associated with exceptional intelligence.

The reason that disproportionate dwarves and people afflicted with macrocephaly do not have especially high intelligence, despite larger brains relative to their body size, is probably because these are abnormal pathological conditions. The increased brain-size did not evolve through natural selection, but rather represents some kind of malfunction in development.

Therefore, whereas increases in brain size that evolved through natural selection must have conferred some advantage to offset the metabolic expense of brain tissue and other costs associated with increased brain size, these sort of pathological increases in brain-size need not have any compensating advantages, since they did not evolve through natural selection at all, and the increased relative brain size may indeed be wasted.

Likewise, although sex differences in brain-size are greater than those between races, at least before controlling for body-size, sex differences in IQ are either small or non-existent.^[63]

Meanwhile, Neanderthals had larger brains than modern humans, despite a shorter, albeit more robust, stocky and more muscular frame, and with somewhat heavy overall body weight.

As with so much discussion of the topic of race differences in intelligence, Sarich and Miele focus almost exclusively on the topic of differences between whites and blacks, the authors reporting:

“With respect to the difference between American whites and blacks, the one good brain-size study that has been done indicates a difference between them of about 0.8 SD [i.e. 0.80 of a standard deviation]; this could correspond to an IQ difference of about 5 points, or about one-third of the actual differential [actually] found [between whites and blacks in America]” (p217)

The remainder of the differential presumably relates to internal differences in brain-structure as between the races in question, whether these differences are environmental or innate in origin.

Yet Sarich and Miele say little if anything to my recollection about the brain-size of other groups, for example Australian Aboriginals or East Asians.

Neither, most tellingly, do they discuss the brain-size of the race of mankind gifted with the largest average brain size – namely, Eskimos.

Yet the latter are not renowned for their contributions to science, the arts or civilization.

Moreover, according to Richard Lynn, their average IQ is only 91, as compared to an average IQ of 100 for white Europeans – high for a people who, until recently, subsisted as largely hunter-gatherers (other such groups – Australian Aborigines, San Bushmen, Native Americans – have low average IQs), but well below whites, East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews, each of whom possess, on average, smaller brains than Eskimos  (see Race Differences in Intelligence: reviewed here).

In general, a clear pattern emerges in respect of the relative brain-size of different human populations. In general, the greater the latitude of the region in which a given population evolved, the greater their brain-size. Hence the large brains of Eskimos (Beals et al 1984).

This then seems to be a climatic adaptation. Some racialists like Richard Lynn and Philippe Rushton have argued that this reflects the greater cognitive demands of surviving in a cold climate (e.g. building shelter, making fire, clothes, obtaining sufficient foods in regions where plant foods are rare throughout the winter).

In contrast, to the extent that race and population differences in average brain size are even acknowledged by mainstream anthropologists, they are usually attributed to the Bergmann’s rule of temperature regulation. Thus, the authors of one recent undergraduate level anthropology textbook on biological anthropology contend:

“Larger and relatively broader skulls lose less heat and are adaptive in cold climates; small and relatively narrower skulls lose more heat and are adaptive in hot climates” (Human Biological Variation: p285).^[64]

As noted, this seems to be an extrapolation of Bergmann’s rule of temperature regulation. Put simply, in a cold climate, it is adaptive to minimize the proportion of the body that is directly exposed to the elements, or, in other words, to minimize the ratio of surface-area-to-volume.

As the authors of another undergraduate level textbook on physical anthropology explain:

“The closer a structure approaches a spherical shape, the lower will be the surface-to-volume ratio. The reverse is true as elongation occurs—a greater surface area to volume is formed, which results in more surface to dissipate heat generated within a given volume. Since up to 80 percent of our body heat may be lost through our heads on cold days, one can appreciate the significance of shape” (Human Variation: Races, Types and Ethnic Groups, 5th Ed: p188).

However, it seems implausible that an increase in metabolically expensive brain tissue would have evolved solely for regulating temperature, when the same result could have been achieved at less metabolic cost by modifying only the external shape of the skull.

Moreover, perhaps tellingly, it seems that brain size correlates more strongly with latitude than do other measures of body-size. Thus, in their review of the data on population differences in cranial capacity, Beals et al report:

“Braincase volume is more highly correlated with climate than any of the summative measures of body size. This suggests that cranial morphology may be more influenced by the thermodynamic environment than is the body as a whole” (Beals et al 1984: p305).

Given that, contrary to popular opinion, we do not in fact lose an especially large proportion of our body heat from our heads, certainly not the eighty percent claimed by Molnar in the anthropology textbook quoted above, this is not easy to explain interms of temperature regulation alone.

At any rate, even if differences in brain size did indeed evolve solely for the purposes of temperature regulation, then it is still surely possible that differences in average intelligence evolved as a byproduct of such increases in brain-size.

Measured IQs in Sub-Saharan Africa

With regard to the second controversial topic upon which Sarich and Miele focus their discussion in their chapter on ‘Race and Behavior’, namely that of the average IQ in sub-Saharan Africa, the authors write:

“Perhaps the most enigmatic and controversial results in the IQ realm pertain to sub-Saharan Africans and their descendants around the world. The most puzzling single finding is the apparent mean IQ of the former of about 70” (p225).

This figure applies, it ought to be emphasized, only to black Africans still resident within sub-Saharan Africa. Blacks resident in western economies (except Israel, oddly), whether due to racial admixture or environmental factors, or a combination of the two, generally score much higher, though still substantially below whites and Asians, with average IQs of about 85, compared, of course, to a white average of 100 (see discussion here).

The figure seems to come originally from the work of Richard Lynn on national IQs (reviewed here, for discussion of black IQs in particular: see here, here and here), and has inevitably provoked much criticism and controversy.^[65]

While the precise figure has been questioned, it is nevertheless agreed that the average IQ of blacks in sub-Saharan Africa is indeed very low, and considerably lower than that of blacks resident in western economies, unsurprisingly given the much higher living standards of the latter.^[66]

For their part, Sarich and Miele seem to accept Lynn’s conclusion, albeit somewhat ambiguously. Thus, they conclude:

“One can perhaps accept this [figure] as a well-documented fact” (p225).

Yet including both the word “perhaps” and the phrase “well-documented” in a single sentence and in respect of the same ostensible “fact” strikes me as evidence of evasive fence-sitting.

An IQ of below 70 is, in Western countries, regarded as indicative of, and inconclusive evidence for, mental retardation, though mental disability is not, in practice, diagnosed by IQ alone.^[67]

However, Sarich and Miele report:

“Interacting with [Africans] belies any thought that one is dealing with an IQ 70 people” (p226).^[68]

Thus, Sarich and Miele point out that, unlike black Africans:

“Whites with 70 IQ are obviously substantially handicapped over and above their IQ scores” (p225).

In this context, an important distinction must be recognised between, on the one hand, what celebrated educational psychologist Arthur Jensen calls “biologically normal mental retardation” (i.e. individuals who are simply at the tail-end of the normal distribution), and, on the other, victims of conditions such as chromosomal abnormalities like Down Syndrome or of brain damage, who tend to be impaired in other ways, both physical and psychological, besides intelligence (Straight Talk About Mental Tests: p9).

Thus, as he explains in his more recent and technical book, The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability:

“There are two distinguishable types of mental retardation, usually referred to as ‘endogenous’ and ‘exogenous’ or, more commonly, as ‘familial’ and ‘organic’… In familial retardation there are no detectable causes of retardation other than the normal polygenic and microenvironmental sources of IQ variation that account for IQ differences throughout the entire range of IQ… Organic retardation, on the other hand, comprises over 350 identified etiologies, including specific chromosomal and genetic anomalies and environmental prenatal, perinatal, and postnatal brain damage due to disease or trauma that affects brain development. Nearly all of these conditions, when severe enough to cause mental retardation, also have other, more general, neurological and physical manifestations of varying degree… The IQ of organically retarded children is scarcely correlated with the IQ of their first-order relatives, and they typically stand out as deviant in other ways as well” (The g Factor: p368-9).

Clearly, given that the entire normal distribution of IQ among blacks is shifted downwards, a proportionally greater number of blacks with IQs below any given threshold will simply be at the tail-end of the normal distribution for their race rather than suffering from, say, chromosomal abnormalities, as compared to whites or East Asians with the same low IQs.

Thus, as Sarich and Miele themselves observe:

“Given the nature of the bell curve for intelligence and the difference in group means, there are proportionately fewer whites with IQs below 75, but most of these are the result of chromosomal or single-gene problems and are recognizable as such by their appearance as much as by their behavior” (p230).

This, then, is why low-IQ blacks appear relatively more competent and less stereotypically ‘retarded’ than whites or East Asians with comparably low IQs, since the latter are more likely to have deficits in other areas, both physical and psychological.

Thus, leading intelligence researcher Nicholas Mackintosh reports that low-IQ blacks perform much better than whites of similarly low IQ in respect of so-called adaptive behaviours – i.e. the ability to cope with day-to-day life (e.g. feed, dress, clean, interact with others in an apparently ‘normal’ manner).

Indeed, Mackintosh reports that, according to one sociological study first published in 1973:

“If IQ alone was used as a criterion of disability, ten times as many blacks as whites would have been classified as disabled; if adaptive behaviour measures were added to IQ, this difference completely vanished” (IQ and Human Intelligence: p356-7).

This is indeed among the reasons that IQ alone is now no longer deemed a sufficient ground in and of itself for diagnosing a person as suffering from a mental disability.

Similarly, Jensen himself reports:

“In social and outdoor play activities… black children with IQ below seventy seldom appeared as other than quite normal youngsters— energetic, sociable, active, motorically well coordinated, and generally indistinguishable from their age-mates in regular classes. But… many of the white children with IQ below seventy… appeared less competent in social interactions with their classmates and were motorically clumsy or awkward, or walked with a flatfooted gait” (The g Factor: p367).^[69]

Indeed, in terms of physical abilities, some black people with what are, at least by white western standards, very low IQs, can even be talented athletes, a case-in-point being celebrated world heavyweight boxing champion, Muhammad Ali, who tested so low in an IQ test that was used by the armed services for recruitment purposes that he was initially rejected as unfit for military service.^[70]

In contrast, I am unaware of any successful white or indeed Asian athletes with comparably low IQs.

In short, according to this view, most sub-Saharan Africans with an IQs less than or equal to 70 are not really mentally handicapped at all. On the contrary, they are within the normal range for the subspecies to which they belong.

Indeed, to adopt an admittedly provocative analogy or reductio ad absurdum, it would be no more meaningful to say that the average chimpanzee is mentally handicapped simply because they are much less intelligent than the average human.

Sarich and Miele adopt another, less provocative analogy, suggesting that, instead of comparing sub-Saharan Africans with mentally handicapped Westerners, we do better to compare them to Western eleven-year-old children, since 70 is also the average score for children around this age (p229-30).

Thus, they cite Lynn himself as observing:

“Since the average white 12-year-old can do all manner of things, including driving cars and even fixing them, estimates of African IQ should not be taken to mean half the population is mentally retarded” (p230).

However, this analogy is, I suspect, just as misleading.

After all, just as people suffering from brain damage or chromosomal abnormalities such as Down Syndrome tend to differ from normal people in various ways besides intelligence, so children differ from adults in many ways other than intelligence.

Thus, even highly intelligent children often lack emotional maturity and worldly knowledge.^[71]

Khoisan Intelligence

Interestingly, however, the authors suggest that one specific morphologically very distinct subgroup of sub-Saharan Africans, often recognised as a separate race (‘Capoid’ as opposed to ‘Congoid’, in Carleton Coon’s terminology and taxonomy) by many early twentieth century anthropologists, may be an exception when it comes to sub-Saharan African IQs – namely San Bushmen.

Thus, citing anecdotal evidence of a single individual Bushman who proved himself very technically adept and innovative in repairing a car motor, the authors quote population geneticist Henry Harpending, who has done fieldwork in Africa, as observing:

“All of us have the impression that Bushmen are really quick and clever and are quite different from their neighbours” (p227).

They also quote Harpending as anticipating:

“There will soon be real data available about the relative performance of Bushmen, Hottentot, and Bantu kids – or more likely, they will supress it” (p227).

Some two decades or so later, the only data I am aware of is that reported by Richard Lynn.

Relying on just two very limited studies of Khoisan intelligence, Lynn nevertheless does not hesitate to estimate Bushmen’s average IQ at just 54 – the lowest that he reports for any ethnic group anywhere in the world (Race Differences in Intelligence: p76).

However, we should be reluctant to accept these conclusions prematurely. Not only does Lynn rely on only two studies of Khoisan intelligence, but both these studies were very limited, neither remotely resembling a full modern IQ test.

Agriculture, Foraging and Intelligence

As to why higher intelligence might have been selected for among San Bushmen than among neighbouring tribes of Black Bantu, they consider the possibility that there was “lessened selection for intelligence (or at least cleverness) with the coming of agriculture, versus hunting-gathering”, since, whereas Bantu are agriculturalists, the San still subsist through hunting-gathering (p227).

On this view, hunting-gatherers must employ intelligence to track and capture prey and otherwise procure food, whereas farming, save for the occasional invention of a new agricultural technique, is little more than tedious, repetitious and mindless drudgery.

I am reminded of Jared Diamond’s provocative claim, in his celebrated book, Guns, Germs and Steel, that “in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners”, since the former must survive on their wits, avoid being murdered and procure prey to survive, whereas in densely populated agricultural and industrial societies most mortality comes from disease, which tends to strike randomly (Guns, Germs and Steel: p20-1).

Yet, how ever intuitively plausible this theory might appear, especially, perhaps, for those of us who have, throughout our entire lives, never either hunted or farmed, certainly not in the manner of the Bantu or San, it is not supported by the evidence.

According to data collected by Richard Lynn in his book, Race Differences in Intelligence (reviewed here), albeit on the basis of quite limited data, both New Guineans and San Bushmen have very low average IQs, lower even than other sub-Saharan Africans.^[72]

Thus, they again quote Henry Harpending as concluding:

“Almost any hypothesis about all this can be falsified with one sentence. For example:

1. Hunting-gathering selects for cleverness. But then why do Australian Aborigines do so badly in school and on tests?
2. Dense labor-intensive agriculture selects for cleverness, explaining the high IQ scores in the Far East and in South India. But then why is there not a high~IQ pocket in the Nile Valley?

And so on. I don’t have any viable theory about it all.”^[73]

Indeed, if we rely on Lynn’s data in his book, Race Differences in Intelligence (which I have reviewed here), then it would seem that groups that have, until recently, subsisted primarily through a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, tend to have low IQs.

Thus, Lynn attributes exceptionally low average IQs not only to San Bushmen, but also to African Pygmies and Australian Aboriginals, and, while his data for the Bushmen and Pygmies is very limited, his data on Australian Aboriginals from the Australian school system is actually surprisingly abundant, revealing an average IQ of just 62.

Interestingly, other groups who had already partly, but not wholly, transitioned to agriculture by the time of European contact, such as Pacific Islanders and Native Americans, tend to score rather higher, each with average IQs of around 85, rather higher indeed than the average IQs of black Bantu agriculturalists in Africa.

Indeed, even cold-adapted Eskimos, also, until recently hunter-gatherers, but with the largest brain-size of any human population, score only around 90 in average IQ according to Lynn.

Interestingly, one study that I am aware of did find evidence that a genetic variant associated with intelligence, executive function and working memory was more prevalent among populations that had transitioned to agriculture than among hunter-gatherers (Piffer 2013).

‘Race Bombs’?

In their final chapter, ‘Learning to Live With Race’, Sarich and Miele turn to the vexed subject of the social and political implications of what they have reported and concluded regarding the biology of race and of race differences in previous chapters.

One interesting if somewhat sensationalist subject that they discuss is the prospect of what they call “ethnically targeted weapons” or “race bombs”. These are:

“The ultimate in biological weapons… ethnically targeted weapons-biological weapons that selectively attack members of a certain race or races but, like the Death Angel in the Book of Exodus, ignore members of the attacker’s race” (p250).

This might sound more like dystopian science fiction than it does science, but Sarich and Miele cite evidence that some regimes have indeed attempted to develop such weapons.

Perhaps predicably, the regimes in question are the ‘usual suspects’, those perennial pariah states of liberal democratic western modernity, each of whom were/are, nevertheless, very much western states, which is, of course, the very reason for their pariah status, since, for this reason, they are held to relatively higher standards than are other African and Middle Eastern polities – namely apartheid-era South Africa and Israel.

The evidence the authors cite goes beyond mere sensationalist rumours and media reports.

Thus, they report that one scientist who been had employed in a chemical and biological warfare plant in South Africa testified before the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission that he had indeed led a research team tasked with developing a “a ‘pigmentation weapon’ that would ‘target only black people’ and that could be spread through beer, maize, or even vaccinations’” (p252).

Meanwhile, according to media reports and government leaks cited by the authors, Israel has taken up the gauntlet of developing a ‘race bomb’, building on the research begun by its former ally South Africa (p252).

Unfortunately, however, (or perhaps fortunately, especially for the Palestinians) Sarich and Miele report that, as compared to developing a ‘race bomb’ for use in apartheid-era South Africa:

“Developing a weapon that would target Arabs but spare Jews would be much harder because the two groups are exceedingly alike genetically” (p253).^[74]

Indeed, this problem is not restricted to the Middle East. On the contrary, Sarich and Miele report, listing almost every ethnic conflict that had recently been in the headlines at the time they authored their book:

“The same would hold for the Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians in the former Yugoslavia; the Irish Catholics and Ulster Protestants in Northern Ireland; North and South Korea; and Pakistan and India” (p254)

This is, of course, because warring ethnic groups tend to be neighbours, often with competing claims to the same territory; yet, for the same reason, they also often share common origins, as well as the inevitable history of mating, miscegenation and intermarriage that invariably occurs wherever different groups come into contact with one another, howsoever discouraged and illicit such relationships may be.

Thus, paradoxically, warring ethnic groups are almost always genetically quite closely related to one another.

The only exceptions to this general rule are in places there has been recent large-scale movements of populations from distant regions of the globe, but the various populations have yet to interbreed with one another for a sufficient period as to dilute their genetic differences (e.g. blacks and whites in the USA or South Africa).

Thus, Sarich and Miele identify only Sudan in Northeast Africa as, at the time they were writing, a “likely prospect for this risk” (namely, the development of a ‘race bomb’), as at this time war was then raging between what they describe as “racially mixed Islamic north and the black African Christian and traditional-religion south” (p255).

Yet, here, even assuming that the genetic differences between the two then-warring groups were indeed sufficiently substantial as to make such a weapon a theoretical possibility, it is highly doubtful that either side would have the technological wherewithal, capacity, resources and expertise to develop such a weapon.

After all, Israel is a wealthy country with a highly developed high-tech economy with an advanced armaments industry and is a world leader in scientific and technology research, not to mention receiving billions of dollars in military aid annually from the USA alone.

South Africa was also regarded as a developed economy during the heyday of apartheid when this research was supposedly conducted, though it is today usually classed as ‘developing’^[75]

Sudan, on the other hand, is a technologically backward Third World economy. The prospect of either side in the conflict developing a novel form of biological weapon is therefore exceedingly remote.

A similar objection applies to the authors’ suggestion that, even in multiracial America, supposedly comparatively “immune to attack from race bombs from an outside source” on account of its “large racially diverse population”, there may still be a degree of threat from “terrorist groups within our country” (p255).

Thus, it is true that there may well be terrorist groups in the USA that do indeed harbour genocidal intent. Indeed, black nationalist groups like the Nation of Islam and black Israelites have indeed engaged in openly genocidal mass murders of white Americans, while white nationalist groups, though poitically very marginal, have also been linked to terror attacks and racially motivated murders, albeit isolated, sporadic and on a very small scale, at least in recent decades.

However, it is extremely unlikely that these marginal extremists, whose membership is largely drawn from most uneducated and deprived strata of society, would have the technical knowledge and resources to build a ‘race bomb’ of the sort envisaged by Sarich and Miele, especially since such weapons remain only a theoretical possibility and are not known to have been successfully developed anywhere in the world, even in South Africa and Israel.

At any rate, even among relatively genetically distinct and unmixed populations, any ‘race bomb’ would, Sarich and Miele rightly report, inevitably lack “pinpoint accuracy” given the only very minimal genetic differentiation observed among human races, a key point that they discussed at length earlier in their book (p253).

Therefore, Sarich and Miele conclude:

“[The only] extremists crazy enough to attempt to use such weapons would be [those extremists] crazy enough to view large numbers of dead among their own nation, race or ethnic group as ‘acceptable losses’ in some unholy holy war to save their own group would risk employing such a device” (p353-4).

Unfortunately, some “extremists” are indeed just that “crazy” and extreme, and these “extremists” include not only terrorist groups, but also sometimes governments as well.

Indeed, every major war in recent history has, by very definition, involved the main combatant regimes being all too willing to accept “large numbers of dead among their own nation, race, or ethnic group as ‘acceptable losses’” – otherwise, of course, they would be unlikely to qualify as ‘major’ wars.

Thus, Sarich and Miele conclude:

“Even if race bombs do not have the pinpoint accuracy desired, they have the potential to do great harm to people of all races and ethnic groups” (p253).

Political Implications?

Aside from their somewhat sensationalist discussion of the prospect for ‘race bombs’, Sarich and Miele, in their final chapter, also discuss perhaps more realistic scenarios of how an understanding (or failure to understand) the nature and biology of race differences might affect the future of race relations in America, the west and beyond.

In particular, they identify three possible future ‘scenarios’, namely:

1. Meritocracy;
2. ‘Affirmative Action, Race Norming and Quotas’; and
3. Resegregation.

A fourth possibility that they do not discuss is ‘freedom of association’, as championed by libertarians.

Under this principle, which largely prevailed in the USA prior to the 1964 Civil Rights Act (and in the UK prior to the 1968 Race Relations Act), any private individual or corporation (but not the government) would be free to discriminate against any person or group he or she wished on any grounds whatsoever, howsoever racist or downright irrational.

Arguably, such a system would, in practice, result in something very close to meritocracy, since any employer that discriminated irrationally against a certain demographic would be outcompeted and hence driven to out of business by competing employers that instead chose the best candidates for the job, or even preferentially employed members of the group disfavoured by other employers precisely because, since some other employers refused to hire them, the latter would be willing to work for lower wages, hence cutting costs and thereby enabling them to undercut and thereby outcompete their more prejudiced competitors.

In practice, however, some degree of discrimination would likely remain, especially in the service industry, not least because, not just employers, but consumers themselves might discriminate against service providers of certain demographics.^[76]

The authors, for their part, deplore the effects of affirmative action in higher education.

Relying on Sarich’s own direct personal experience as a professor at the University of California at Berkley, where affirmative action was openly practiced from 1984 until 1996, at which time it was, at least in theory,^[77] discontinued after an amendment to the California state constitution prohibiting the practice in public education, government employment and contracting, they report that it resulted in:

“An Apartheid-like situation – two student bodies separated by race/ethnicity and performance who wound up, in the main, in different courses, pursued different majors, and had minimal social interactions but maximum resentment” (p245)

Thus, they conclude:

“It is, frankly, difficult to imagine policies that could have been more deliberately crafted or better calculated to exacerbate racial and ethnic tensions, discourage individual performance among all groups, and contribute to the decay of a magnificent educational institution” (p245)

The tone adopted here suggests that the authors also very much disapprove of the third possible scenario that they discuss, namely resegregation.

However, they also very much acknowledge that this process is already occurring in modern America, and also seem pessimistic regarding the chances of halting or reversing it.

“Despite or perhaps because of government-imposed quotas, society becomes increasingly polarized along racial lines… America increasingly resegregates itself. This trend can already be seen in housing, enrollment in private schools, racial composition of public schools, and political affiliation” (p246).

On the other hand, their own preference seems to be very much for what they call ‘meritocracy’.^[78]

After all, they report:

“Society… cannot level up-only down-and any such leveling is necessarily at the expense of individual freedom and, ultimately, the total level of accomplishment” (p246).

However, they acknowledge that a return to meritocracy, or at least the abolition of race preferences, would not be without its problems, not least of which is the inevitable degree of resentment of the part of those groups which perceive themselves as losing out in competition with other better performing groups.

Thus, they conclude:

“When we assess group representations with respect to the high-visibility pluses (e.g., high-paying jobs) and minuses (e.g., criminality) in any society, it is virtually guaranteed that they are not going to be equal-and that the differences will not be trivial” (p246)

On the other hand, race relations were not especially benign even in modern ‘affirmative action’-era America, or what we might aptly term the ‘post-post-racial America’ era, when the utopian promises of the early Obama-era went up in flames, along with much of America’s urban landscape, in the ‘mostly peaceful’ BLM riots which claimed at least nineteen lives and caused property damage estimated in the billions of dollars in 2020 alone.

Could things really get any worse were racial preferences abolished altogether? Are the urban ghetto black underclass really likely to riot because fewer upper-middle-class blacks are given places at Harvard that they didn’t really deserve?

In mitigation of any resentments that arise as a consequence of disparities in achievement between groups, Sarich and Miele envisage that, in the future:

“Increasing societal complexity, by definition, means increasing the number of groups in that society to which a given individual can belong. This process tends to mitigate exclusive group identification and the associated resentment toward other groups” (p242).

In other words, Sarich and Miele seem to be saying that, instead of identifying only with their race or ethnicity, individuals might come identify with another other aspects of their identity, in respect of which aspects of their identity their ‘own’ group would presumably perform rather better in competition with other groups.^[79]

What aspects of their identity they have in mind, they do not say.

The problem with this is that, while individuals do indeed evince an in-group preference even in respect of quite trivial (or indeed wholly imaginary) differences, both historically and cross-culturally in the world today, ethnic identity has always been an especially important part of people’s identity, probably for basic biological reasons, rooted as it is in a perception of shared kinship.

In contrast, other aspects of a person’s identity (e.g. their occupation, which football team they support, their sex) tend to carry rather less emotional weight.^[80]

In my view, a better approach to mitigating the resentments associated with the different average performance of different groups is instead to emphasize performance in different spheres of attainment.

After all, if it is indeed, as Sarich and Miele contend in the passage quoted above, “virtually guaranteed” that different groups have different levels of achievement in different activities, it is also “virtually guaranteed” that no group will perform either well or poorly at all these different endeavours.

Thus, blacks may indeed, on average, perform relatively poorly in academic and intellectual pursuits, at least as compared to whites and Asians. However, blacks seemingly perform much better in other spheres, not least in popular music and, as discussed above, in many athletic events.

Indeed, as discussed by blogger and journalist Steve Sailer in his fascinating essay for National Review, Great Black Hopes, African Americans actually consistently outperform whites in any number of spheres (Sailer 1996).

As amply demonstrated by Herrnstein and Murray in The Bell Curve (reviewed here), intellectual ability, as measured by IQ, indeed seems to be of particular importance in determining socioeconomic status and income in modern economically developed technologically advanced societies, such as the USA, and, in this respect, blacks perform relatively poorly.

However, popular entertainers and elite athletes, while not necessarily possessing high IQs, nevertheless enjoy enormous social and cultural prestige in modern western society, far beyond that enjoyed by lawyers, doctors, or even leading scientists, playwrights, artists and authors.

More children grow up wanting to be professional footballers or pop stars than grow up wanting to be college professors or research scientists, and, whereas everyone, howsoever estranged from popular culture like myself, could nevertheless name any number of famous pop stars, actors and athletes, many of them black, the vast majority of leading intellectuals and scientists are all but unknown to the vast majority of the general public.

Indeed, even those working in other ostensibly high-IQ fields, like law and medicine, and perhaps science and academia too, are much more likely to follow sports, and watch popular movies and TV than they are to, say, recreationally read scientific journals or even popular science books and magazines.

In other words, although it is the only example the authors give in the passage quoted above, “high-paying jobs” are far from the only example of “high-visibility pluses” in which different ethnic groups perform differently, and nor are they the most “high-visibility” of such “pluses”.

Indeed, the sort of “high-paying jobs” that Sarich and Miele likely have in mind are not even the only type of “high-paying jobs”, though they may be the most numerous such jobs, since elite athletes and entertainers, in addition to enjoying enormously high social and cultural prestige, also tend to be very well-paid.

In short, the idea that intellectual ability is the sole, or even the most important, determinant of social worth and prestige, is an affection largely restricted to those who, like Sarich and Miele, and also many of their most vocal critics like Gould, happen to work in science, academia and other spheres where intellectual ability is indeed at a premium.

Most women, in my experience, would rather be thought beautiful (or at least pretty) than intelligent; most men would rather be considered athletic, tough, strong, charismatic and ‘manly’ than they would a ‘brainy nerd’ – and, when it comes to being considered tough, athletic, ‘manly’ and charismatic, black males arguably perform rather better than do whites or Asians!

Mating, Miscegenation, Race Riots and Rape

Finally, it is perhaps worth noting that Sarich and Miele also discuss, and, perhaps surprisingly, caution against, another widely touted supposed panacea to racial problems, namely mass miscegenation and intermarriage.

On this view, all racial animosities will disappear in just a few generations if we all just literally fornicate them out of existence by indiscriminately reproducing with one another and hence ensuring all future generations are of mixed race and hence indistinguishable from one another.

If this were the case then, in the distant future, race problems would not exist simply because distinguishable races would not exist, and there would only be one race – the human race – and we would all presumably live happily ever after in a benign and quite literally ‘post-racial’ utopia.

In other words, racial conflict would disappear in the future because the claim of the racial egalitarians and race deniers – namely that there are no human races, but rather only one race, the human race – the very claim that Sarich and Miele have devoted their enitre book to rejecting – would ultimately come to be true.

Of course, one might question whether this outcome, even if achievable, would indeed be desirable, not least since it would presumably result in the loss, or at least dilution, of the many unique traits, and abilities of different races, including those that Sarich and Miele have discussed in previous chapters.

At any rate, given the human tendency towards assortative mating, especially with respect to traits such as race and ethnicity, any such post-racial alleged utopia would certainly be long in coming. A more likely medium-term outcome would be something akin to a ‘pigmentocracy’ of the sort endemic throughout much of Latin America, where race categories are indeed more fluid and continuous, but racial differences are certainly still apparent, and still very much associated with income and status, and race problems arguably not noticeably ameliorated.

Yet Sarich and Miele themselves raise a different, and perhaps less obvious, objection to racial miscegenation as a potential cure-all and panacea for racial animosity and conflict.

Far from being the panacea to end racial animosity and conflict, Sarich and Miele contend that, at least in the short-term, miscegenation may actually exacerbate racial conflict:

“Paradoxically, intermarriage, particularly of females of the majority group with males of a minority group, is the factor most likely to cause some extremist terrorist group to feel the need to launch such an attack” (p255).

Thus, they observe that:

“All around the world, downwardly mobile males who perceive themselves as being deprived of wealth, status, and especially females by up-and-coming members of a different race are ticking time bombs” (p248).

Indeed, it is not just intermarriage that ignites racial animosity. Other forms of interracial sexual contact may be even more likely to provoke a violent response, especially where it is alleged, often falsely, that the sexual contact in question was coercive.

Thus, in the USA, allegations of interracial rape seem to have been the most frequent precursor to full-blown race riots. Thus, early twentieth century riots in Springfield, Illinois in 1908, in Omaha, Nebraska in 1919, in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 and in Rosewood, Florida in 1923 all seem to have been ignited by rumours or allegations that a white woman had been the victim of rape at the hands of a black man.

Meanwhile, Britain’s first major modern race riot, the 1958 Notting Hill riot, began with a public argument between an interracial couple, when white passers-by joined in on the side of the white woman against her black Jamaican husband (and pimp) before then turning on them both.

More recently, the 2005 Birmingham riot, which, in a dramatic reflection of the demographic transformation of Britian, did not involve white people at all, was ignited by the allegation that a black girl had been gang-raped by South Asian males.

Meanwhile, in a dramatic proof that even ‘civilized’ white western Anglo-Celts (or at least semi-civilized Scousers and Aussies) are still not above taking to the streets when they perceive their womenfolk (and their reproductive interests) as under threat, both the 2005 Cronulla riots in Sydney, Australia, and the 2023 attack on a 4-star hotel housing refugees in Kirby, Merseyside were ignited by the allegation that Middle Eastern men had been sexually harassing, or at least propositioning, local white girls.

Likewise, in Britain and beyond, the spectre of ‘Muslim grooming gangs’ sexually exploiting and pimping underage white girls in cities throughout the North of England has ignited anti-Muslim sentiment seemingly to a far greater degree than has an ongoing wave of terrorist attacks in the same country in which multiple people have been killed.

Likewise, the spectre of interracial rape also loomed large in the justifications offered on behalf of the reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan for their various atrocities, which were supposedly motivated by the perceived need to protect the ostensible virtue and honour of white women in the face of black predation.

More recently, in 2015, Dylann Roof allegedly shouted “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country” before opening fire on the predominantly black congregation at a church in South Carolina, killing nine people.

Why then is the spectre of interracial sexual contact, especially rape, so likely to provoke racist attacks?

For Sarich and Miele, the answer is obvious:

“Viewed from the racial solidarist perspective, intermarriage is an act of race war. Every ovum that is impregnated by the sperm of a member of a different race is one less of that precious commodity to be impregnated by a member of its own race and thereby ensure its survival” (p256).

This so-called “racial solidarist perspective” also represents, of course, a crudely group-selectionist understanding of male reproductive competition – but one that, though biologically questionable at best, is, in simplified form, all but pervasive among racialists.

What applies, according to van den Berghe, to intermarriage surely applies to an even greater degree to other forms of miscegenation, such as casual sex and rape, where the father does not take responsibilty for raising any mixed-race offspring that result, and this is instead left in the hands of the mother’s own ethnic community.

Thus, as sociologist-turned-sociobiologist Pierre van den Berghe, puts it in his excellent The Ethnic Phenomenon (reviewed here), observes:

“It is no accident that the most explosive aspect of interethnic relations is sexual contact across ethnic (or racial) lines” (The Ethnic Phenomenon: p75). 

Competition over reproductive access to fertile females is, after all, Darwinian conflict in its most direct and primordial form.

One is thus reminded of the claim of ‘Robert’, a character from Platform, a novel by controversial but celebrated contemporary French author Michel Houellebecq, when he asserts that: 

“What is really at stake in racial struggles… is neither economic nor cultural, it is brutal and biological: It is competition for the cunts of young women” (Platform: p82). 

_____________________

Endnotes

[1] Of course, even if race differences were restricted to “a few highly visible features” (e.g. skin colour, nose shape, body size), it may still be possible for forensic scientists to identify the race of a subject from his DNA. They would simply have to look at those portions of the genome that code for these “few highly visible features”. However, there would then be no correlation with other segments of the genome, and genetic differences between races would be restricted to the few genes coding for these “few highly visible features”.
In fact, however, there is no reason to believe that races differ to a greater degree in externally visible traits (skin colour, nose shape, hair texture, stature etc.) than they do in any other traits, be they physiological or indeed psychological. It is just the externally visible traits with which we are most familiar and which are most difficult to dismiss as illusory, or explain away as purely cultural in origin, because we see them before us everyday whenever we are confronted with a person of a different race. In contrast, other traits are less obvious and apparent, and hence easier for race deniers to deny, or, in the case of behavioural differences, dismiss as purely cultural in origin.

[2] Here, the popular notion that serial killers are almost invariably white males was probably a factor in why the police were initially searching for a white suspect in this case. This stereotype was likely also a factor in the delay in apprehending another serial killer, the so-called ‘DC sniper’, whose crimes occurred around the same time, and who was also profiled as likely being a white man.
In fact, however, unlike many other stereotypes regarding race differences in crime rates, this particular stereotype is wholly false. While it is, of course, true that serial killers are disproportionately male, they are not disproportionately white. On the contrary, in the USA, blacks are actually overrepresented by a factor of two among convicted serial killers, as they are also overrepresented among perpetrators of other forms of violent crime (Walsh 2005).
Implicated in both cases were innacurate offender profiles, which, among other errors, had labelled the likely offender as a white male. Yet psychological profiling of this type is largely, if not wholly, a pseudoscience.
Thus, one meta-analysis found that criminal profilers often did not perform better, or performed only marginally better, at predicting the characteristics of offenders than did control groups composed of non-expert laypeople (Snook et al 2007).
As Steve Sailer has pointed out, offender profiling is, ironically, most unreliable where it is also most fashionable – psychological profiles of serial killers etc., which regularly feature in movies, TV and crime literature – but very unfashionable where is it most reliable – e.g. a young black male hanging around a certain area is very likely up to no good (Sailer 2019).
The latter, of course, in involves so-called racial profiling, which is very politically unfashionable, though also represents a much more efficient and effective use of police resources than ignoring factors such as race, age and sex. Of course, it also involves, if you like, ‘age profiling’ and ‘sex profiling’ as well, but these are much less controversial, though they rely on the exact same sort of statistical generalizations, which are again indeed accurate at the aggregate statistical level, though often unfair on individuals to whom the generalizations do not apply.

[3] The ‘one-drop rule’ seems to have originated as a means of maintaining the ‘racial purity’ of the white race. Thus, people of only slight African ancestry were classed as black (or, in those days, as ‘Negro’) precisely in order to prevent them ‘passing’ and thereby infiltrating and adulterating the white gene pool, with interracial marriage, cohabitation and sexual relations, not only socially anathema, but also often explicitly prohibited by law.
Despite this white racialist origin, today the ‘one-drop rule’ continues to operate in North America. It seems to be primarily maintained by the support of two interest groups, namely, first, mixed-race Americans, especially those of middle-class background, who want to benefit from discriminatory affirmative action programmes in college admissions and employment; and, second, self-styled ‘anti-racists’, who want to maintain the largest possible coalition of non-whites against the hated and resented white oppressor group.
Of course, some white racists may also still support the ‘one-drop rule’, albeit for very different reasons, and there are endless debates on some white nationalist websites as to who precisely qualifies as ‘white’ (e.g. Armenians, Southern Italians, people from the Balkans and Caucascus, but certainly not Jews). However, white racists are, today, of marginal political importance, save as bogeymen and folkdevils, and hence have minimal influence on mainstream conceptions of race.

[4] An even more problematic term is the currently fashionable but detestable term ‘people of colour’, which (like its synonymous but now politically-incorrect precursor, ‘coloured people’) manages to arbitrarily group together every race except white Europeans – an obviously highly Eurocentric conception of racial identity, but one which ironically remains popular with leftists because of its perceived usefulness in fermenting a coalition of all non-white races against the demonized white ‘oppressor group’.
The term also actually makes very little sense, save in this social, political and historical context. After all, in reality, white people are just as much ‘people of colour’ as people of other races. They are just a different colour, and indeed, since many hair and eye colors are largely, if not wholly, restricted to people of white European descent, arguably whites arguably have a stronger claim to being ‘people of colour’ than do people of most other races.

[5] Famously, and rather bizarrely, race in South Africa was said to be determined, at least on a practical day-to-day basis, by the so-called ‘pencil test’, whereby a pencil was placed in a person’s hair, and, if it fell to the ground, they were deemed white, whereas if it remained in their hair, held by the kinky hair characterisitic of sub-Saharan Africans, then they were classed as black or coloured.

[6] Defining race under the Nuremberg Laws was especially problematic, since Jewish people, unlike, say, black Africans, are not obviously phenotypically distinguishable from other white Europeans, at least not in every case. Thus, the Nuremberg laws relied on paper evidence of ancestry rather than mere physical appearance, and distinguished degrees of ancestry, with mischlings of the first and second degrees having differing circumscribed political rights.

[7] Racial identity in the American South during the Jim Crow era, like in America as a whole today, was determined by the so-called ‘one-drop rule’. However, the incorporation of other ethnicities into this uniquely American biracial system was potentially problematic. Thus, in the famous case of US v Bhagat Singh Thind, Bhagat Singh Thind, an Indian Sikh, arguing that he was both Caucasian, according to the anthropological claification of the time, and, being of North Indian high caste origin, Aryan too, argued that he ought to eligible for naturalization as an American citizen under the overtly racially discriminatory naturalization laws then in force. He was unsuccessful. Similarly, in Ozawa v United States, a person of Japanese ancestry was deemed not to be ‘white’ under the same law.
Although I am not aware of any caselaw on the topic, presumably people of Middle Eastern ancestry, or partially of Middle Eastern ancestry, or North African ancestry, would have qualified as ‘white’. For example, I am not aware of any Jewish people, surely the largest such group in America at the time (albeit, in the vast majority of cases, of mixed European and Middle Eastern ancestry), being denied naturalization as citizens.
Indeed, today, such groups are still classed as ‘white’ in the US census, much to their apparent chagrin, but a new MENA category is scheduled to be added to the US census in 2030. This new category has been added at the behest of MENA people themselves, aghast at having had to identify as ‘white’ in earlier censuses, and strangely all too ready to abandon their ostensible ‘white privilege’.
This earlier categorization of Middle-Eastern and North African people as ‘white’ suggests a rather more inclusive definition of ‘white’ than is applied today, with more and more groups rushing to repudiate their ‘whiteness’, possibly in order to qualify as an ‘oppressed group’ and hence benefit from affirmative action and other forms of racial preference, and certainly in order to avoid the stigma of ‘whiteness’. White privilege, it seems, is not all it’s cracked up to be.

[8] One of the main criticisms of the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991, rushed through Parliament in the UK amid a media-led moral panic over canine attacks on children, was the difficulty of distinguishing, or drawing the line between one breed and another. Obviously, similar problems emerge in determining the race of humans.
Indeed, the problems may even be greater, since the morphological differences (and also seemingly the genetic differences: see above) between human races are much smaller in magnitude than those between some dog breeds.
On the other hand, however, the problems may be even greater for identifying dog breeds, because, except for a few pedigreed ‘purebreds’, most domestic dogs are mixed-breed ‘mongrels’ to some degree. In contrast, excepting a few recently formed hybrid populations (such as African-Americans and Cape Coloureds), and clinal populations at the boundaries of the continental races (such as populations from the Horn of Africa), most people around the world are of monoracial ancestry, largely because, until recent migrations facilitated by advances in transport technology (ships, aeroplanes etc.), people of different races rarely came into contact with one another, and, where they did, interracial relationships often tended to be stigmatized, if not strictly prohibited (though this certainly completely didn’t stop them happening).
In addition, whereas human races were formed deep in prehistory, most dog breeds (excepting a few so-called ‘basal breeds’) seem to be of surprisingly recent origin.

[9] For example, when asked to identify the parent of a child from a range of pictures, children match the pictured children with a parent of the same race, rather than those of the same body-size/body-type or wearing similar clothing. Similarly, when asked to match pictures of children with the pictures of the adults whom they will grow up to become, children again match the pictures by race, not clothing or body-build (Hirschfeld 1996).

[10] In the notes for the previous chapter, they do, as I have already discussed, cite the work of Lawrence Hirschfeld as authority for the claim that even young children recognize the hereditary and immutable nature of race differences. It may be that Sarich and Miele have his studies in mind when they write of  evidence for “a species-wide module in the human brain that predisposes us to sort the members of our species into groups based on appearance”.
However, as I understand it, Hirschfeld doesn’t actually argue that his postulated group classification necessarily sorts individuals into groups “based on appearance [emphasis added]” as such. Rather, he sees is as a module designed to classify people into ‘human kinds’, but not necessarily by race. It could also, as I understand it, apply to kinship groups and ethnicities.
Somewhat analogously, anthropologist Francisco Gil-White argues that we have a tendency to group individuals into different ethnicities as a by-product of a postulated ‘species-recognition module’. In other words, we mistakenly classify members of different ethnicities as members of different species (i.e. what some social scientists have referred to as ‘pseudo-speciation’) because different ethnicities resemble different species in so far as, just as species breed true, so membership of a given ethnicity is passed down in families, and, just as members of different species cannot interbreed, so individuals are generally encouraged to mate endogamously, i.e., within their own group (Gil-White 2001).
Although Gil-White’s argument is applied to ethnic groups in general, it is perhaps especially applicable to racial groups, since the latter have a further feature in common with different species, namely individuals of different races actually look different in terms of inherited physiological characters (e.g. skin colour, facial morphology, hair texture, stature), as, of course, do different species.
Races are indeed ‘incipient species’, and, until as recently as the early twentieth century, biologists and anthropologists seriously debated the question as to whether the different human races did indeed constitute different species.
For example, Darwin himself gave serious and respectful consideration to this matter in his chapter ‘On the Races of Men’ in The Descent of Man before ultimately concluding that the different races were better described as ‘subspecies’.
More recently, John R Baker also gave a fascinating and balanced account of the evidence bearing on this question in his excellent book Race, which I have reviewed here (see this section of my review in particular).

[11] On the other hand, in his paper, ‘An integrated evolutionary perspective on ethnicity’, controversial evolutionary psychologist Kevin Macdonald disagrees with this conclusion, citing personal communication from geneticist and anthropologist Henry Harpending for the argument that:

“Long distance migrations have easily occurred on foot and over several generations, bringing people who look different for genetic reasons into contact with each other. Examples include the Bantu in South Africa living close to the Khoisans, or the pygmies living close to non-pygmies. The various groups in Rwanda and Burundi look quite different and came into contact with each other on foot. Harpending notes that it is ‘very likely’ that such encounters between peoples who look different for genetic reasons have been common for the last 40,000 years of human history; the view that humans were mostly sessile and living at a static carrying capacity is contradicted by history and by archaeology. Harpending points instead to ‘starbursts of population expansion.’ For example, the Inuits settled in the arctic and exterminated the Dorsets within a few hundred years; the Bantu expansion into central and southern Africa happened in a millennium or less, prior to which Africa was mostly the yellow (i.e., Khoisan) continent, not the black continent. Other examples include the Han expansion in China, the Numic expansion in northern Africa [correction: actually in the Great Basin region of North America], the Zulu expansion in southern Africa during the last few centuries, and the present day expansion of the Yanomamo in South America. There has also been a long history of invasions of Europe from the east. ‘In the starburst world people would have had plenty of contact with very different looking people’” (Macdonald 2001: p70).

[12] A commenter on an earlier version of this article, ‘Daniel’, suggested that that our tendency to group individuals by race could represent a by-product of a postulated facial recognition faculty, which some evidence suggests is a domain-specific module or adaptation, localized in a specific area of the brain, the fusiform gyrus or fusiform facial area, injury or damage to which area sometimes results in an inability or recognize faces (or prosopagnosia). Thus, he writes:

“Any two human faces are about as similar in appearance as any two bricks. But humans are far more sensitive to differences in human faces than we are to differences in bricks. The evolutionary psychologist would infer that being very good at distinguishing faces mattered more to our ancestors’ survival than being very good at distinguishing bricks. Therefore we probably have a face-recognition module in our brains.”

On this view, race differences, while they may be real, are not so obvious, or rather would not be so obvious were we not so highly attuned to recognizing minor differences in facial morphology in order to identify individuals.
This idea strikes me as very plausible. Certainly, when we think of racial differences in physical appearance, we tend to think of facial characteristics (e.g. differences in the shapes of noses, lips, eyes etc.).
However, this probably also reflects, in part, the fact that, at least in western societies, in ordinary day-to-day life, other parts of our bodies are usually hidden from view by clothing. Thus, at least according to physiologist John Baker in his excellent book, Race (which I have reviewed here) racial groups, especially the Khoisan of Southern Africa, also differ considerably in their external genitalia, but these differences would generally be hidden from view by clothing.
Baker also claims that races differ substantially in the shape of their skulls, claiming:

“Even a little child, without any instruction whatever, could instantly separate the skulls of [Eskimos] from those of [Lapps]” (Race: p427).

Of course, facial differences may partly be a reflection of differences in skull shape, but I doubt an ability to distinguish skulls would reflect a byproduct of a facial recognition module.
Likewise, Pygmies differ from other Africans primarily, not in facial morphology, but in stature.
Further evidence that we tend to focus on differences in facial morphology only because we are especially attuned to such differences, whether by practice or innate biology, is provided by the finding that artificial intelligence systems are able to identify the race of a subject through internal x-rays of their bodily organs, even where humans, including trained medical specialists, are incapable of detecting any difference (Gichoya et al 2022).
This also, incidentally, contradicts the popular notion that race differences are largely restricted to a few superficial external characteristics, such as skin-colour, hair texture and facial morphology. In reality, there is no reason in principal to expect that race differences in internal bodily traits (e.g. brain-size) would be of any lesser magnitude than those in external traits. It is simply that the latter are more readily observable on a day-to-day basis, and hence more difficult to deny.

[13] If racism was not a European invention, racism may nevertheless have become particularly virulent and extreme among Europeans in the nineteenth century. One interesting argument is that it was, paradoxically, Europeans’ very commitment to such notions as universal rights and human equality that led them to develop and embrace an ideology of racial supremacism and inequality. This is because, whereas other people’s and civilizations simply took such institutions as slavery for granted, seeing them as entirely unproblematic, Europeans, due to their ostensible commitment to such lofty notions as universal rights and equality, felt a constant need to justify slavery to themselves. Thus, theories of racial supremacy were invented as just such a justification. As sociologist-turned-sociobiologist Pierre van den Berghe explains in his excellent The Ethnic Phenomenon: (which I have reviewed here):

“In hundreds of societies where slavery existed over several thousand years, slavery was taken for granted and required no apology… The virulent form of racism that developed in much of the European colonial and slave world was in significant part born[e] out of a desire to justify slavery. If it was immoral to enslave people, but at the same time it was vastly profitable to do so, then a simple solution to the dilemma presented itself: slavery became acceptable if slaves could somehow be defined as somewhat less than fully human” (The Ethnic Phenomenon: reviewed here: p115).

[14] Although the differences portrayed undoubtedly reflected real racial differences between populations, the stereotyped depictions also suggest that they were also used as a means of identifying and distinguishing between different peoples and ethnicities and hence may have been exaggerated as a kind of marker for race or nationality. Thus, classicist Mary Lefkowitz writes:

“Wall paintings are not photographs, and to some extent the different colors may have been chosen as a means of marking nationality, like uniforms in a football game. The Egyptians depicted themselves with a russet color, Asiatics in a paler yellow. Southern peoples were darker, either chocolate brown or black” (History Lesson: A Race Odyssey: p39).

In reality, since North African Caucasoids and sub-Saharan Africans were in continual contact down the Nile Valley, this also almost certainly means that they interbred with one another, diluting and blurring the phenotypic differences between them. In short, if the Egyptians weren’t wholly Caucasoid, so also the Nubians weren’t entirely black.

[15] Other historical works referring to what seems to be the same stele translate the word that Sarich and Miele render as ‘Negro’ instead as ‘Nubian’, and this is probably the more accurate translation. The specific Egyptian word used seems to have been a variant of ‘nHsy’ or ‘Nehesy’, the precise meaning and connotations of which word is apparently a matter of some controversy.
Incidentally, whether the Nubians are indeed accurately to be described as ‘Negro’ is perhaps debatable. Although certainly depicted by the Egyptians as dark in complexion and also sometimes as having other Negroid features, as indeed they surely did in comparison to the Egyptians themselves, they were also in long and continued contact with the Egyptians themselves, with whom they surely interbred. It is therefore likely that they represented, like contemporary populations from the Horn of Africa, a clinal population, as did the Egyptians themselves, since, just as Nubians were in continual contact with Egyptians, so Egyptians were also in continual contact with the Nubians, which would inevitably have resulted in some gene flow between their respective populations.
Whereas the vast Sahara Desert represented, as Sarich and Miele themselves discuss, a formidable barrier to population movement and gene flow and hence a clear boundary between what were once called the ‘Negroid’ and ‘Caucasoid’ races, population movement, and hence gene flow, up and down the Nile valley in Northeast Africa was much more fluid and continuous.

[16] Actually, the English word ‘caste’, deriving from the Portuguese ‘casta’, conflates two distinct but related concepts in India, namely, on the one hand, ‘Varna’ and, on the other, ‘Jāti’. Whereas the former term, ‘Varna’, refers to the four hierarchically organized classes (plus the ‘untouchables’ or ‘dalits’, who strictly are considered so degraded and inferior that they do not qualify as a caste and exist outside the caste system), and may even be of ancient origin among the proto-Indo-Europeans, the latter term, ‘Jāti’, refers to the many thousands of theoretically strictly endogamous occupational groups within the separate Varna.
As for Sarich and Miele’s claim that Varna are “as old as Indian history itself”, history is usually distinguished from prehistory by the invention of writing. By this criterion, Indian history might be argued to begin with the ancient Indus Valley Civilization. However, their script has yet to be deciphered, and it is not clear whether it qualifies as a fully developed writing system.
By this measure, the Indian caste system is not “as old as Indian history itself”, since the caste system is thought to have been imposed by Aryan invaders, who arrived in the subcontinent only after the Indus Valley Civilization had fallen into decline, and may indeed have been instrumental in bringing to an end the remnants of this civilization. However, arguably, at this time, India was not really ‘India’, since the word ‘India’ is of Sanskrit origin and therefore arrived only with the Aryan invaders themselves.

[17] There is also some suggestion that the vanarāḥ, who feature in the Ramayana and are usually depicted as monkey-like creatures, may originally have been conceived as a racist depiction of relatively the darker-complexioned and wider-nosed, Southern and indigenous Indians whom the Aryan invaders encountered in the course of their conquests, as may also be true of the demonic rākṣasāḥ and asurāḥ, including the demon king Ravana, who is described as ruling from his island fortress of Laṅkā, which is generally equated with the island of Sri Lanka, located about 35 miles off the coast of South India.
These ideas are, it almost goes without saying, extremely politically incorrect and unpopular in modern India, especially in South India, since South Indians today, despite different religious traditions, are not noticeably less devout Hindus than North Indians, and hence rever the Ramayana as a sacred text to a similar degree.

[18] One is tempted to reject this claim – namely that the use of the Sanskrit word for ‘colour’ to designate ‘caste’ has no connection to differences in skin colour as between the Indo-Aryan conquerors and the Dravidian populations whom they most likely subjugated – as mere politically correct apologetics. Indeed, despite its overwhelming support in linguistics, archaeology, genetics, and even in the histories provided in the ancient Hindu texts themselves, the very concept of an Indo-European conquest is very politically incorrect in modern India. The notion is perceived as redolent of the very worst excesses of both caste snobbery and the sort of notions of white racial superiority that were popular among Europeans during the colonial period. Moreover, as we have seen, to this day, castes differ not only genetically, and in a manner consistent with the Aryan invasion theory, but also in skin tone (Jazwal 1979; Mishra 2017).
On the other hand, however, some evidence suggests that the association of caste with colour actually predates the Indo-Aryan conquest of the Indian subcontinent and originates with the original proto-Indo-Europeans. Thus, in his recent book The Horse, the Wheel and Language, David W Anthony, discussing Georges Dumézil’s trifunctional hypothesis, reports that: 

“The most famous definition of the basic divisions within Indo-European society was the tripartite scheme of Georges Dumézil, who suggested there was a fundamental three-part division between the ritual specialist or priest, the warrior and the ordinary herder/cultivator. Colors may have been associated with these three roles: white for the priest, red for the warrior and black or blue for the herder/cultivator” (The Horse, the Wheel and Language: p92).

It is from this three-fold social hierarchy that the four-varna Indian caste system may have derived. Similarly, leading Indo-Europeanist JP Mallory observes that “both ancient India and Iran expressed the concept of caste with the word for colour” and that:

“Indo-Iranian, Hittite, Celtic and Latin ritual all assign white to priests and red to the warrior. The third function would appear to have been marked by a darker colour such as black or blue” (In Search of the Indo-Europeans: p133).

This would all tend to suggest that the association of caste (or at least occupation) with colour long predates the Indo-Aryan conquest of the subcontinent and hence cannot be a reference to differences in skin colour as between the Aryan invaders and indigenous Dravidians.
On the other hand, however, it is not at all clear that the Indian caste system has anything to do with, let alone derives from, the three social groups that supposedly existed among the ancient proto-Indo-Europeans. On the contrary, the Indian caste system is usually considered as originating much later, after the Indo-European arrival in South Asia, and then only in embryonic form. Certainly, there is little evidence that the proto-Indo-European social struture was anything like as rigid as the later Indian caste system.
However, it is interesting to note that that, even under the trifunctional hypothesis, a relatively lighter colour (white) is considered as having been assigned to the priestly group, and a darker colour to the lower-status agricultural workers, paralleling the probable differences in skin tone as between Aryan conquerors and the indigenous Dravidians whom they encountered and likely subjugated.  

[19] Neither is Hartung nor his essay mentioned in the rather cursory endnote accompanying this chapter (p265-6). This reflects a recurrent problem throughout the enitre book. Thus, in the preceding chapter, ‘Race and History’, many passages appear in quotation marks, but it is not always entirely clear where the quotations are taken from, as the book’s endnotes are rudimentary, just giving a list of sources for each chapter as a whole, without always linking these sources to the specific passages quoted in the text. Unfortunately, this sort of thing is a recurrent problem in popular science books, and, in Sarich and Miele‘s defence, I suspect that it is the publishers and editors, rather than the authors, who are usually to blame.

[20] Thus, Hartung writes:

“The [Jewish] Sages were quite explicit about their view that non-Jews were not to be considered fully human. Whether referring to ‘gentiles’, ‘idolaters’, or ‘heathens’, the biblical passage which reads ‘And ye my flock, the flock of my pasture, are men, and I am your God’ (Ezekiel 34:31; KJV) is augmented to read… ‘And ye my flock, the flock of my pastures, are men; only ye are designated ‘men’ (Baba Mezia 114b)” (Hartung 1995).

Similarly, Hartung quotes the Talmud as teaching:

“In the case of heathens; are they not in the category of adam? – No, it is written: And ye my sheep, the sheep of my pasture, are adam (man). Ye are called adam but heathens are not called adam. [Footnote reads:]… The term adam does not denote ‘man’ but Israelite. The term adam is used to denote man made in the image of God and heathens by their idolatry and idolatrous conduct mar this divine image and forfeit the designation adam” (Kerithoth 6b)

However, as Sarich and Miele, and indeed Hartung, are at pains to emphasize, lest they otherwise be attacked as antisemitic, the tendency to view one’s own ethnic group as the only ‘true’ humans on earth, is by no means exclusive to the ancient Hebrews, but rather is a recurrent view among many cultures across the world. As I have written previously:

“Ethnocentrism is a pan-human universal. Thus, a tendency to prefer one’s own ethnic group over and above other ethnic groups is, ironically, one thing that all ethnic groups share in common”

Thus, as Hartung himself writes in the very essay from which Sarich and Miele themselves quote, himself citing the work of anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon:

“The Yanomamo Indians, who inhabit the headwaters of the Amazon, traditionally believe that… that they are the only fully qualified people on earth. The word Yanomamo, in fact, means man, and non-Yanomamo are viewed as a form of degenerated Yanomamo.”

Similarly, Sarich and Miele themselves write of the San Bushmen of Southern Africa:

“Bushmen… sort all mammals into three mutually exclusive groups: ‘!c’ (the exclamation point represents the ‘clicking’ sound for which their language is well known) denotes edible animals such as warthogs and giraffes; ‘!ioma’ designates an inedible animal such as a jackal, a hyena, a black African, or a European white; the term ‘zhu’ is reserved for humans, that is, the Bushmen themselves” (p57).

[21] According to John Hartung’s analysis, Adam in the Genesis account of creation is best understood as, not the first human, but rather only the first Jew – hence the first true human (Hartung 1995). However, Christian Identity theology turns this logic on its head: Adam was not the first Jew, but rather the first white man.
As evidence, they cite the fact that the Hebrew word ‘Adam’ (אדם) seems to derive from the word for the colour red, which they, rather doubtfully, interpret as evidence for his light skin, and hence ability to blush. (A more likely interpretation for this etymology is that the colour was a reference to the red clay, or “dust of the ground”, from which man was, in the creation narrative of Genesis, originally fashioned: Genesis 2:7. Thus, the Hebrew word ‘Adam’, אדם, is also seemingly cognate with ‘Adamah’, אדמה, translated as ‘ground’ or ‘earth’, and the creation of Man from clay is a recurrent motif Near Eastern creation narratives and mythology.)
Christian Identity is itself a development from British Israelism, which claims, rather implausibly, that indigenous Britons are themselves (among the) true Israelites, representing the surviving descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel. Other races, then, are equated with the pre-Adamites, with Jews themselves, or at least Ashkenazim, classed as either Khazar-descended imposters, or sometimes more imaginatively equated with the so-called ‘serpent seedline’, descended from the biblical Cain, himself ostensibly the progeny of Eve when she (supposedly) mated with the Serpent in the Garden of Eden.
Christian identity theology is, as you may have noticed, completely bonkers – rather like, well… theology in general, and Christian theology in particular.

[22] The Old Testament passage in question, Genesis 9:22-25, recounts how Ham sees his drunken father Noah naked, and so, as a consequence, Ham’s own son Canaan is cursed by Noah. Since seeing one’s father naked hardly seems a sufficient transgression to justify the curse imposed, some biblical scholars have suggested that the original version was censored by puritanical biblical scribes offended by or attempting to cover up its original content, which, it has been suggested, may have included a castration scene or possibly a description of incestuous male rape (or even the rape of his own mother, which, it has been suggested, might explain the curse upon his son Canaan, who is, on this view, the product of this incestuous union).
In some interpretations, the curse of Ham was combined, or perhaps simply confused, with the ‘mark of Cain’, which was itself interpreted as a reference to black skin. In fact, these are entirely separate parts of the Old Testament with no obvious connection to one another, or indeed to black people.
The link between the curse of Ham and black people is, however, itself quite ancient, long predating the Atlantic slave trade, and seems to have originated in the Talmud, whose authorship, or at least compilation, is usually dated to the sixth century CE, historian Thomas Gossett reporting:

“In the Talmud there are several contradictory legends concerning Ham—one that God forbade anyone to have sexual relations while on the Ark and Ham disobeyed this command. Another story is that Ham was cursed with blackness because he resented the fact that his father desired to have a fourth son. To prevent the birth of a rival heir, Ham is said to have castrated his father” (Race: The History of an Idea in America: p5).

This association may have originated because Cush, another of the sons of Ham (and an entirely different person to Canaan, his brother) was said to be the progenitor of, and to have given his name to, the Kingdom of Kush, located on the Nile valley, south of Ancient Egypt, whose inhabitants, the Kushites, who were indeed known for their dark skin colour (though were, by modern standards, probably best classified as mixed-race, or as a clinal or hybrid population, being in long standing contact with predominantly Caucasoid population of Egypt).
Alternatively, the association of Ham with black people may reflect the fact that the Hebrew word ‘ham’ (‘חָם’) has the meaning of ‘hot’, which was taken as a reference to the heat of Africa.
As you have probably gathered, none of this makes much sense. But, then again, neither does much Christian theology, or indeed much of the Old Testament (or indeed the New Testament) or theology in general, let alone most attempts to provide a moral justification for slavery consistent with Christian slave morality.
In fact, it is thought most likely that the curse of Ham was originally intended in reference to, not black people, but rather the Canaanites, since it was Canaan, not his brother Cush, against whom the curse was originally issued. This interpretation also makes much more sense in terms of the political situation in Palestine at the time this part of the Old Testament was likely authored, with the Canaanites featuring as recurrent villains and adversaries of the Israelites throughout much of the Old Testament. On this view, the so-called curse of Ham was indeed intended as a justification for oppression, but not of black people. Rather, it sought to justify the conquest of Canaan and subjugation of her people, not the later enslavement of blacks.

[23] Slavery had already been abolished throughout the British Empire even earlier in 1833, long before Darwin published ‘The Origin of Species’, so the idea of Darwinism being used to justify slavery in the British empire is a complete non-starter. (Darwin himself, to what it’s worth, was also opposed to slavery.)
Admittedly, slavery continued to be practised, however, in other, non-English speaking parts of the world, especially the non-western world, for some time thereafter. However, it is not likely that Darwin’s theory of evolution was a significant factor in the continued practice of slavery in, say, the Muslim world, since most of the Muslim world has never accepted the theory of evolution. In short, slavery was longest maintained in precisely those regions (Africa, the Middle East) where Darwinian theory, and indeed a modern scientific worldview, was least widely accepted.

[24] Montagu, who seems to have been something of a charlatan and is known to have lied in correspondence regarding his academic qualifications, had been born with the very Jewish-sounding, non-Anglo name of Israel Ehrenberg, but had adopted the hilariously pompous, faux-aristocratic name ‘Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu’ in early adulthood.

[25] Less persuasively, Sarich and Miele also suggest that the alleged lesbianism, or bisexuality, of both Margeret Mead and Ruth Benedict may similarly have influenced their similar culturally-determinist theories. This seems, to me, to be clutching at straws.
Neither Mead nor Benedict were Jewish, or in any way ethnically alien, yet arguably each had an even greater direct influence on American thinking about cultural differences than did Boas himself. Boas’s influence, in contrast, was largely indirect – namely through his students such as Montagu, Mead and Benedict. Therefore, Sarich and Miele have to point to some other respect in which Mead and Benedict were outsiders. Interestingly, Kevin Macdonald makes the same argument in Culture of Critique (endnote 61: reviewed here), and is similarly unpersuasive.
In fact, the actual evidence regarding Benedict and especially Mead’s sexuality is less than conclusive. It amounts to little more than salacious speculation. After all, in those days, if a person was homosexual, then, given prevailing attitudes and laws, they probably had every incentive to keep their private lives very much private.
Indeed, even today, speculation about people’s private lives tend to be unproductive, simply because people’s private lives tend, by their very nature, to be private.

[26] Curiously, though he is indeed widely credited as ‘the father of American anthropology’, Boas’s own influence on the field seems to have been largely indirect. His students, Mead, Benedict and Montagu, all seem to have gone on to become more famous than he was, at least among the general public, and each certainly published works that became more famous, and more widely cited, than anything authored by Boas himself.
Indeed, Boas’s own work seems to relatively little known, and little cited, even by those whom we could regard as his contemporary disciples. His success was in training students/disciples and in academic politicking rather than research.
Perhaps the only work of his that remains widely cited and known today is his work on cranial plasticity among American immigrants and their descendants, which has now been largely discredited.

[27] In the years that have passed since the publication of Sarich and Miele’s ‘Race: The Reality of Human Differences’, this conclusion, namely the ‘out of Africa theory’ of human evolution, has been modified somewhat by the discovery that our early African ancestors interbred with other species (or perhaps subspecies?) of hominid, including those inhabiting Eurasia, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, such that, today, all non-sub-Saharan African populations have some Neanderthal DNA.

[28] I think another key criterion in any definition of ‘race’, but which is omitted from most definitions, is whether the differences in “heritable features” breed true. In other words, whether two parents both bearing the trait in question will transmit it to their offspring. For example, among ethnically British people, since two parents, both with dark hair, may nevertheless produce a blond-haired offspring, hair colour is a trait which does not breed true. Whether a certain phenotype breeds true is, at least in part, a measure of the frequency of interbreeding with people of a different phenotype in previous generations. It may therefore change over time, with increasing levels of miscegenation and intermarriage. Therefore, this criterion may be implied by Sarich and Miele’s requirement that, in order to qualify as ‘races’, populations must be “separated geographically from other… populations”.

[29] Actually, the definition of ‘species’ is rather more complex – and less rather precise: see discussion during my review of John Baker’s Race, which discusses the matter in this section.

[30] Using colour differences as an analogy for race differences is also problematic, and potentially confusing, for another reason – namely colour is already often conflated with race. Thus, races are often referred to by their (ostensible) colours (e.g. sub-Saharan Africans as ‘black’, Europeans as ‘white’, East Asians as ‘yellow’, Hispanics and Middle-Eastern populations as ‘brown’, and Native Americans as ‘red’) and ‘colour’ is sometimes even used as a synonym (or perhaps a euphemism) for race. Perhaps as a consequence, it is often asserted, falsely, that races differ only in skin colour. Using the electromagnetic spectrum as an analogy for race differences is likely to only exacerbate this already considerable confusion.

[31] Interestingly, however, different languages in widely differing cultures tend to put the boundaries between their different colour terms in roughly the same place, suggesting an innate disposition to this effect. Attempts to teach alternative colour terms, which divide the electromagnetic spectrum in different places, to those peoples whose languages lack certain colour terms, has shown that humans learn such classifications less readily than the familiar ones recognized in other languages. Also, although different cultures and languages have different numbers of colour-terms, the colours recognized follow a distinct order, beginning with just ‘light’ and ‘dark’, followed by ‘red’ (see Berlin & Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution).

[32] As I have commented previously, perhaps a better analogy to illustrate the clinal nature of race differences is, not colour, but rather social class – if only because it is certain to cause cognitive dissonance and doublethink among leftist sociologists. As pioneering 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).

But the same sociologists and leftist social scientists who, though typically very ignorant of biology, insist race is a ‘social construct’ with no basis in biology, nevertheless continue to employ the concept of social class, or socioeconomic status, as if it were entirely unproblematic.

[33] In addition to the mountains that mark the Tibetan-Indian border, the vast, but sparsely populated tundra and Steppe of Siberia also provides a part of the boundary between what were formerly called the Caucasoid and Mongoloid races. As Steve Sailer has observed, one can get a good idea of the boundaries between races by looking at maps of population density. Those regions that are sparsely populated today (e.g. mountain ranges, deserts, tundra and, of course, oceans) were also generally incapable of supporting large population densities in ancient times, and hence represented barriers to gene flow and racial admixture.

[34] Indeed, even some race realists might agree that terms like ‘Italian’ are indeed largely social constructions and not biologically meaningful, because Italians are not obviously physically distinguishable from the populations in neighbouring countries on the basis of biologically inherited traits, such as skin colour, nose shape or hair texture – though they do surely differ in gene frequencies, and, at the aggregate statistical level, surely in phenotypic traits too. Thus, John R Baker in his excellent ‘Race’ (reviewed here) warns against what he terms “political taxonomy”, which equates the international borders between states with meaningful divisions between racial groups (Race: p119). Thus, Baker declares:

“In the study of race, no attention should be paid to the political subdivisions of the surface of the earth” (Race: p111).

Baker even offers a reductio ad absrudum of this approach, writing:

“No one studying blood-groups in Australia ‘lumps’ the aborigines… with persons of European origin; clearly one would only confuse the results by so doing” (Race: p121).

Yet, actually, the international borders between states do indeed often coincide with genetic differences between populations. This is because the same geographic obstacles (e.g. mountain ranges, rivers and oceans) that are relatively impassable and hence have long represented barriers to gene flow also represent both:

1. Language borders, and hence self-identified ‘nations’; and
2. Militarily defensible borders.

Indeed, Italians, one of the groups cited by Diamond, and discussed by Sarich and Miele, provide a good illustration of this, because Italy has obvious natural borders, that are defensible against invaders, that represent language borders, and that long represented a barrier to gene flow, being a peninsula, surrounded on three sides by the Mediterranean Sea, and on the fourth, its only land border, by the Alps, which represent the border between Italian-speakers and speakers of French and German.

[35] Likewise, in the example cited by Sarich and Miele themselves, the absence of the sickle-cell gene was, as Sarich and Miele observe, the “ancestral human condition” shared by all early humans before some groups subsequently went on to evolve the sickle-cell gene. Therefore, that any two groups do not possess the sickle-cell gene does not show that they are any more related to one another than to any other human group, including those that have evolved sickle-cell, since all early humans initially lacked this gene.
Moreover, Diamond himself refers not to the sickle-cell gene specifically, but rather to “antimalarial genes” in general and there are several different genetic variants that likely evolved because they provide some degree of resistence to malaria, for example the alleles causing conditions thalassemia, Glucose-6-Phosphate Dehydrogenase (G6PD) Deficiency, and certain hemoglobin variants. These quite different adaptations evolved independently in different populations where malaria was common, and indeed have different levels of prevalence in different populations to this day.

[36] Writing in the early seventies, long before the sequencing of the human genome, Lewontin actually relied, not on the direct measurement of genetic differences between, and within, human populations, but rather indirect markers for genetic differences, such as blood group data. However, his findings have been broadly borne out by more recent research.

[37] However, in fact, similar points had been made soon after Lewontin’s original paper had been published (Mitton 1977; 1978).

[38] Actually, while many people profess to be surprised that, depending on precisely how measurements are made, we share about 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees, this has always struck me as, if anything, a surprisingly low figure. After all, if one takes into account all the possible ways an organism could be built, including those ways in which it could be built but never would be built, simply because, if it were, the organism in question would never survive and reproduce and hence evolve in the first place, then we are surely remarkably similar in morphology.
Just looking at our external, visible physiology, we and chimpanzees (and many other organisms besides) share four limbs, ten digits on each, two eyes, two nostrils, a mouth, all similarly positioned in relation to one another, to mention just a few of the more obvious similarities. Our internal anatomy is also very similar, as are many aspects of our basic cellular structure.

[39] This is analogous to the so-called ‘other-race effect’ in face recognition, whereby people prove much less proficient at distinguishing individuals of races other than their own than they are at distinguishing members of their own race, especially if they have had little previous contact with members of other races. This effect, of course, is the basis for the familiar stereotype whereby it is said ‘they [i.e. members of another race] all look alike to me’.

[40] If any skeptical readers doubt this claim, it might be worth observing that Ostrander is not only a leading researcher in canine genetics, but also seemingly has no especial ideological or politically-correct axe to grind in relation to this topic. Although she is obviously alluding to Lewontin’s famous finding in the passage quoted, she does not mention race at all, referring only to variation among “human populations”, not human races. Indeed, human races are not mentioned at all in the article. Rather, it is exclusively concerned with genetic differences among dog breeds and their relationship to morphological differences (Ostrander 2007).

[41] In addition to problems with defining and measuring the intelligence of different dogs, and dog breeds, there are also, as already discussed above, difficulties in defining, and identifying different dog breeds, problems that, despite the greater morphological and genetic differentiation among dog breeds as compared to human races, are probably greater than for human races, since, except for a few pedigreed ‘purebreds’, most dogs are mixed-breed ‘mongrels’ . These problems, in turn, create problems when it comes to measuing the intelligence of different breeds, since one can hardly assess the intelligence of a given breed without first defining and identifying which dogs qualify as members of that breed.

[42] In fact, however, whereas the research reported upon in the mass media does indeed seems to have relied exclusively on the reported ability of different breds to learn and obey new commands with minimal instruction, Stanley Coren himself, in the the original work upon which this ranking of dog breeds by intelligence was based, namely his book, The Intelligence of Dogs, seems to have employed a broader, more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of canine intelligence, Thus, Coren is reported as distinguishing three types of canine intelligence, namely:

1. ‘Instinctive intelligence’, namely the dog’s ability to perform the task it was bred for (e.g, herding in the case of a herding dog);
2. ‘Adaptive intelligence’, namely the ability and speed with which a dog can learn new skills, and solve novel problems, for itself; and
3. ‘Obedience intelligence’, namely the ability and speed with which a dog can be trained and learn to follow commands from a human master.

[43] There is no obvious reason to believe that domestic animals are, on average, any more intelligent than their wild ancestors. On the contrary, the process of domestication is actually generally associated with a reduction in brain volume, itself a correlate of intelligence, perhaps are part of a process of becoming more neotenized that tends to accompany domestication.
It is, of course, true that domestic animals, and domestic dogs in particular, evince impressive abilities to communicate with humans (e.g. understanding commands such as pointing, and even intonation of voice) (see The Genius of Dogs). However, this reflects only a specific form of social intelligence rather than general intelligence.
In contrast, in respect of the forms of intelligence required among wild animals, domestic animals would surely fare much worse than their wild ancestors. Indeed, many domestic animals have been so modified by human selection that they are quite incapable of surviving in the wild without humans.

[44] Actually, criminality, or at least criminal convictions, is indeed inversely correlated with intelligence, with incarcerated offenders, having average IQs of around 90 – i.e. considerably below the average within the population at large, but not so low in ability as to qualify as having a general learning disabiltiy. In other words, incarerated offenders tend to be smart enough to have the wherewithal to commit a criminal act in the first place, but not smart enough to realize it probably isn’t a good idea in the long-term.
However, with data mostly comes from incarcerated offenders, who are usually given a battery of psychological tests on admission into the prison system, including a test of cognitive ability. It is possible, indeed perhaps probable, that those criminals who evade detection, and hence never come to the attention of the authorities, have relatively higher IQs, since it may be their higher inteligence that enables them to evade detection.
At any rate, the association between crime and low IQ is not generally thought to result from a failure to understand the nature of the law in the first place. Rather, it probably reflects that intelligent people are more likely to recognise that, in the long-term, regularly committing serious crimes is probably a bad idea, because, sooner or later, you are likely to be caught, with attendant punishment and damage to your reputation and future earning capacity.
Indeed, the association between IQ and crime might partially explain the high crime rates observed among African-Americans, since the average IQ of incarcerated offenders is similar to that found among African Americans as a whole.

[45] One is reminded here of Eysenck’s description of the basenji breed as “natural psychopaths” quoted above (The IQ Argument: p170).

[46] For example, differences in skin colour reflect, at least in part, differences in exposure to the sun at different latitudes; while differences in bodily size and stature, and relative bodily proportions, also seem to reflect adaptation to different climates, as do differences in nose shape. Just as lighter complexion facilitates the synthesis of vitamin D in latitudes where exposure to the sun is at a minimum, and dark skin protects from the potentially harmful effects of excessive exposure to the sun’s rays in tropical climates, so a long, thin nose is thought to allow the warming and moisturizing of air before it enters the lungs in cold and dry climates, and body-size and proportions affect the proportion of the body that is directly exposed to the elements (i.e. the ratio of surface-area to volume), a potentially critical factor in temperature regulation, with tall, thin bodies favoured in warm climates, and short stocky frames, with flat faces and shorter arms and legs favoured in colder regions.

[47] For example, as explained in the preceding endnote, the Bergmann and Allen rules neatly explain many observed differences in bodily stature and body form between different races as an adaptation to climate, while Thomson’s nose rule similarly explains differences in nose shape. Likewise, while researchers such as Peter Frost and  Jared Diamond have argued that differences in skin tone cannot entirely be accounted for by climatic factors, nevertheless such factors have clearly played some role in the evolution of differences in skin tone.
This, of course, explains why, although the correlation is far from perfect, there is indeed an association between latitude and skin colour. This also explains why Australia, with a generally much warmer climate than, and situated at a lower latitude than, the British Isles, but in recent times, at least until very recently, populated primarily by people of predominantly Anglo-Celtic ancestry, has the highest levels of melanoma in the world; and also why, conversely, dark-skinned Afro-Caribbeans and South Asians resident in the UK, experience higher rates of rickets, due to lacking sufficient sunlight for vitamin D synthesis.

[48] Alternatively, Carleton Coon attributed the large protruding buttocks of many Khoisan women to maintaining a storehouse of nutrients that can be drawn upon to meet the caloric demands of pregnancy (Racial Adaptations: p105). This is probably why women of all races have naturally greater fat deposits than do men. However, in the arid desert environment to which San people are today largely confined, namely the Kalahari Desert, where food is often hard to come by, maintaining sufficient calories to successfully gestate an offspring may be especially challenging, which might be posited as the ultimate evolutionary factor that led to the evolution of steatopygia among female Khoisan.
Of course, these two competing hypotheses for the evolution of the large buttocks of Khoisan women – namely, on the one hand, sexual selection or mate choice and, on the other, the caloric demands of pregnancy in a desert environment – are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, if large fat reserves are indeed necessary to successfully gestate an offspring, then it would pay for males to be maximally attracted to females with sufficiently large fat reserves to do just this, so as to maximize their own reproductive success.

[49] This argument, I might note, does not strike me as entirely convincing. After all, it could be argued that strong body odour would actually be more noticeable in hot climates, simply because, in hot climates, people tend to sweat more, and therefore that dry earwax, which is associated with reduced body odour, should actually be more prevalent among people whose ancestors evolved in hot climates, the precise opposite of what is found.
On the other hand, Edward Dutton, discussing population differences in earwax type, suggests that “pungent ear wax (and scent in general) is a means of sexual advertisement” (J Philippe Rushton: A Life History Perspective: p86). This would suggest that a relatively stronger body odour (and hence the wet earwax with which strong body odour is associated) would have been positively selected for (rather than against) by mate choice and sexual selection, the precise opposite of what Wade assumes.

[50] In their defence, I suspect Sarich and Miele are guilty, not so much of biological ignorance, as of sloppy writing. After all, Vincent Sarich was an eminent and pioneering biological anthropolgist, geneticist and biochemist, hardly likely to be guilty of such an error. What I suspect they really meant to say was, not that there was no evidence of sexual selection operating in humans, but rather that there was no conclusive evidence that sexual selection was responsible for racial differences among humans, as also conclude later in their book (p236).

[51] Of all racial groups in the USA, only among Pacific Islanders display even higher rates of obesity that that observed among black women, though here it is both sexes who are prone to obesity.

[52] Just to clarify and prevent any confusion, higher proportions of white men than white women are indeed overweight or obese, in both the USA and UK. However, this does not mean that men are fatter than women. Women of all races, including white people, have higher body-fat levels than men, whereas men have higher levels of musculature.
Obesity is measured by body mass index (BMI), which is calculated by reference to a person’s weight and height, not their body fat percentage. Thus, some professional bodybuilders, for example, have quite high BMIs, and hence qualify as overweight by this criteria, despite having very low body fat levels. This is one limitation to using BMI to assess whether a person is overweight.
Indeed, criteria for qualifying as ‘obese’ or ‘overweight’ is different for men and women, partly to take account of this natural difference in body-fat percentages, as well as other natural sex differences in body size, shape and composition.

[53] Women of all races have, on average, higher levels of body fat than do men of the same race. This, it is suggested, is to provide the necessary storehouse of nutrients to successfully gestate a foetus for nine months. Possibly men may be attracted to women with fat deposits because this shows that they have sufficient excess energy stored so as to successfully carry a pregnancy to term and nurse the resulting offspring. This may also explain the evolution of breasts among human females, since other mammals develop breasts only during pregnancy and, save during pregnancy and lactation, human breasts are, unlike those of other mammals, composed predominantly of fat, not milk.

[54] Interestingly, in a further case agreeing with what Steve Sailer calls ‘Rushton’s Rule of Three’, whereby blacks and Asians respectively cluster at opposite ends of a racial spectrum for various traits, there is some evidence that, if black males prefer a somewhat heavier body-build in prospective mates than do white males, then Asian males prefer a somewhat thinner body-build (e.g. Swami et al 2006).

[55] Whereas most black Africans have long arms and legs, African Pygmies may represent an exception. In addition, of course, to a much smaller body-size overall, one undergraduate textbook in biological anthropology reports that they “have long torsos but relatively small appendages” relative to their overall body-size (Human Variation (Fifth Edition): p185). However, leading mid-twentieth century American phsysical anthropologist Carleton Coon reports that, being “they have relatively short legs, particularly short in the thigh, and long arms, particularly long in the forearm” (The Living Races of Man: p106).

[56] Probably this is to be attributed to better superior health, nutrition and living-standards in North America, and even in the Caribbean, as compared to sub-Saharan Africa. Better training facilities, which only richer countries (and people) have sufficient resources to invest in, is also likely a factor. However, one interesting paper by William Aiken proposes that high rates of mortality during the ‘Middle Passage’ (i.e. the transport of slaves across the Atlantic) during the slave trade selected for increased levels of androgens (e.g. testosterone) among the survivors, which he suggests may explain both the superior athletic performance and the much higher rates of prostate cancer among both African-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans as compared to whites (Aitken 2011). Of course, high androgen levels might also plasusibly explain the high rates of violent crime among African-Americans and Afro-Caribbean populations.

[57] Of course, the degree of relationship, if any, between athletic and sporting ability and intellectual ability probably depends on the sport being performed. Most obviously, if chess is to be classified as a ‘sport’, then one would obviously expect chess ability to have a greater correlation with intelligence than, say, arm-wrestling. Intelligence is likely of particular importance in sports where strategy and tactics assume great importance.
Relatedly, in team sports, there are likely differences in the importance of intelligence among players playing in different positions. For example, in the sport discussed by Sarich and Miele themselves, namely American football, it is suggested that the position of quarterback requires greater intelligence than other positions, because the quarterback is responsible for making tactical decisions on the field. This, it is controversially suggested, is why African-Americans, though overrepresented in the NFL as a whole, are relatively less likely to play as quarterbacks.
Similarly, being a successful coach or manager also likely requires greater intelligence.
Interestingly with regard to the question of sports and IQ, though regarded as one of the greatest ever heavyweights, Muhammad Ali scored as low as 78 on an IQ test (i.e. in the low normal range) when tested in an army entrance exam, and was initially turned down for military service in Vietnam as a consequence, though it is sometimes claimed this was because of dyslexia rather than low general intelligence, meaning that the written test he was given underestimated his true intelligence level. Interestingly, another celebrated heavyweight, Mike Tyson, is also said to have scored similarly in the low normal range when tested as a child.
Another reason that IQ might be predictive of ability in some sports is that IQ is known to correlate to reaction times when it comes to performing elementary cognitive tasks. This seems analogous to the need to react quickly and accurately to, say, the speed and trajectory of a ball in order to strike or catch it, as is required in many sports. I have discussed the paradox of African-Americans being overrepresented in elite sports, but having slower average reaction times, here.

[58] People diagnosed with high functioning autism, and Asperger’s syndrome in particular, do indeed have a higher average IQ than the population at large. However, this is only because among the very criteria for diagnosing these conditions is that the person in question must have an IQ which is not so low as to indicate a mental disability. Otherwise, they would not qualify as ‘high functioning’. This removes those with especially low IQs and hence leaves the remaining sample with an above average IQ compared to the population at large.

[59] Rushton’s implication is that this advantage, namely narrower hips, applies to both sexes, and certainly blacks seem to predominate among medal winners in track events in international athletics at least as much in men’s as in women’s athletic events. This suggests, presumably, that, although it is obviously only women who give birth and hence were required to have wider hips in order to birth larger brained infants, nevertheless male hip width was also increased among larger-brained races as a byproduct of selection for increased hip size among females.
If black women do indeed have narrower hips than white women, and black babies smaller brains, then one might predict that black women might have difficulty birthing offspring fathered by white males, as the mixed-race infants would have brains somewhat larger than that of infants of wholly Negroid ancestry. Thus, Russian racialist Vladimir Avdeyev asserts:

“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).

More specifically, Avdeyev claims:

“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).

However, I find little evidence to support this claim from delivery room data. Rather, it seems to be racial differences in overall body size that are associated with birth complications.
Thus, East Asian women have relatively greater difficulties birthing offspring fathered by white males (specifically, a greater rate of c-sections or caesarean births) as compared to those fathered by Asian males (Nystrom et al 2008). However, according to Rushton himself, East Asians have brain sizes as large or larger than those of Europeans.
However, East Asians also have substantially smaller average body-size as compared to Europeans. It seems, then, that Asian women, with their own smaller frames, simply have greater difficulty birthing relatively larger framed mixed-race, half-white offspring.
Avdeyev also claims that, save in the case of mixed-race offspring fathered by larger-brained races, birth is a generally less physically traumatic experience among women from racial groups with smaller average brain-size, just as it is among nonhuman species, who also, of course, have smaller brains than humans. Thus, he writes:

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

Again, delivery room data provides little support for his claim. In fact, data from the USA actually seems to indicate a somewhat higher rate of caesarean delivery among African-American women as compared to American whites (Braveman et al 1995; Edmonds et al 2013; Getahun et al 2009; Valdes 2020; Okwandu et al 2021).

[60] Another disadvantage that may result from higher levels of testosterone in black men is the much higher incidence of prostate cancer observed among black men resident in the west, since prostate cancer seems to be to be associated with testosterone levels. In addition, the higher apparent susceptibility of blacks to prostate cancer, and perhaps to violent crime and certain forms of athletic ability, may reflect, not just levels of testosterone, but how susceptible different races are to androgens such as testosterone, which, in turn, reflects their level and type of androgen receptors (see Nelson and Witte 2002).

[61] In writing about politically incorrect and controversial topic, the authors are guilty of some rather sloppy errors, which, given the importance of the subject to their book and its political sensitivity, is difficult to excuse. For example they claim that:

“Asians have a slightly higher average IQ than do whites” (p196).

Actually, however, this advantage is restricted to East Asians. It doesn’t extend even to Southeast Asians (e.g. Thais, Filipinos, Indonesians), who are also classed as ‘Mongoloid’ in traditional racial taxonomies, let alone to South Asians and West Asians, who, though usually classed as ‘Caucasoid’ in early twentieth century racial taxonomies, also qualify as ‘Asian’ in the sense that they trace their ancestry to the Asian continent, and are considered ‘Asian’ in British-English usage, if not American-English.

[62] Issues like this are not really a problem in assessing the intelligence of different human populations. It is true that some groups do perform relatively better on certain types of test item. For example, East Asians score relatively higher in spatio-visual intelligence than in verbal ability, whereas Ashkenazi Jews show the opposite pattern. Meanwhile, African Americans score relatively higher in rote memory than general intelligence and Australian Aboriginals score relatively higher in spatial memory. However, this is not a major factor when assessing the relative intelligence of different human races because most differences in intelligence between humans, whether between individuals or between groups, is captured by the g factor.

[63] Actually, whether the difference in brain size between the sexes disappears after controlling for differences in body-size depends on how one controls for body-size. Simply dividing brain-size by brain size, or vice versa, makes the difference virtually entirely disappear. In fact, it actually gives a slight advantage in brain size to women.
However, Ankney convincingly argues that this is an inappropriate way to control for differences in body-size between the sexes because, among both males and females, as individuals increase in body-size, the brain comes to take up a relatively smaller portion of overall body-size. Yet despite this, individuals of greater stature have, on average, somewhat higher IQs. Ankney therefore proposes that, the correct way to control for body-size, is to compare the average brain size of men and women of the same body-size. Doing so, reveals that men have larger brains relative to bodies even after controlling for body-size in this way (Ankney 1992).
However, zoologist Dolph Schluter points out that, if you do the opposite – i.e. instead of comparing the brain-sizes of men and women of equivalent body-size, compare the body-size of men and women with the same brain-size – then one finds a difference in the opposite direction. In other words, among men and women with the same brain-size as one another, women tend to have smaller bodies (Schluter 1992).
Thus, Schluter reports:

“White men are more than 10 cm taller on average than white women with the same brain weight” (Schluter 1992).

This paradoxical finding is, he argues, a consequence of a statistical effect known as regression to the mean, whereby extreme outliers tend to regress to the mean in subsequent measurements, and the more extreme the outlier, the greater the degree of regression. Thus, an extremely tall woman, as tall as the average man, will not usually have a brain quite as unusually large as her exceptionally large body-size; whereas a very short man, as short as the average women, will not usually have a brain quite as unusually small as his unusually small body-size.
Ultimately, I am led to agree with infamous fraud, charlatan and bully Stephen Jay Gould that, given the differences in both body-shape and composition as between males and females (e.g. men have much greater muscle mass; women greater levels of fat), it is simply impossible to know how to adequately control for body-size as between the sexes.
Thus, Gould writes:

“[Even] men and women of the same height do not share the same body build. Weight is even worse than height, because most of its variation reflects nutrition rather than intrinsic size—and fat vs. skinny exerts little influence upon the brain” (The Mismeasure of Man: p106).

The only conclusion that can be reached definitively is that, after controlling for body-size, any remaining differences in brain-size as between the sexes are small in magniude.

[64] Another less widely supported, but similarly politically correct explanation for the correlation between latitude and brain is that these differences reflect a visual adaptation to differing levels of ambient light in different regions of the globe. On this view, popularions further from the equator, where there is less ambient light evolved both larger eyes, so as to see better, and also larger brains, to better process this visual input (Pearce & Dunbar 2011).

[65] Lynn himself has altered his figure slightly in accordance with the availability of new datasets. In the original 2006 edition of his book, Race Differences in Intelligence he gives a slightly lower figure of 67, before changing this back up to 71 in the 2015 edition of the same book, while, in The Intelligence of Nations, published in 2019, Lynn and his co-author report the average IQ in sub-Saharan Africans as 69.

[66] Thus, other researchers have, predictably, considered Lynn’s estimates as altogether too low and provided what they claim are more realistic figures. The disagreement focuses primarily on which samples are to be regarded as representative, with Lynn disregarding studies using what he regards as elite and unrepresentative.
For example, Wicherts et al, in their systematic review of the available literature, give an average IQ of 82 for sub-Saharan Africans as a whole (Wicherts et al 2010). However, even this much higher figure is very low compared to IQs in Europe and North America, with an IQ of 100, and also considerably lower than the average IQ of blacks in the US, which are around 85.
This difference has been attributed both to environmental factors, and to the fact that African-Americans, and Afro-Caribbeans, have substantial white European admixture (though this latter explanation fails to explain why African-Americans are outcompeted academically and economically by recent unmixed immigrants from Africa).
At any rate, even assuming that the differences are purely environmental in origin, an average IQ of 80 for sub-Saharan Africans, as reported by Wicherts et al (2010), seems oddly high when it is compared to the average IQ of 85 reported for African Americans and 100 for whites, since the difference in environmental conditions as between blacks and whites in America is surely far less substantial than that between African Americans and black Africans resident in sub-Saharan Africa.
As Noah Carl writes:

“It really doesn’t make sense for them to argue that the average IQ in Sub-Saharan Africa is as high as 80. We already have abundant evidence that black Americans score about 85 on IQ tests, as compared to 100 for whites. If the average IQ in Sub-Saharan Africa is 80, this would mean the massive difference in environment between Sub-Saharan Africa and the US reduces IQ by only 5 points, yet the comparatively small difference in environment between black and white Americans somehow reduces it by 15 points” (Carl 2025)

[67] In diagnosing mental disability, other factors besides raw IQ will also be looked at, such as adaptive behaviour (i.e. the ability to perform simple day-to-day activities, such as basic hygiene). Thus, Mackintosh reports:

“In practice, for a long time now an IQ score alone has not been a sufficient criterion [for the diagnosis of mental disability]… Many years ago the American Association on Mental Deficiency defined mental retardation as ‘significantly sub-average general intellectual functioning existing concurrently with deficits in adaptive behavior’” (IQ and Human Intelligence: p356).

[68] Of course, merely interacting with someone is not an especially accurate way of estimating their level of intelligence, unless perhaps one is discussing especially intellectually demanding subjects, which tends to be rare in everyday conversation. Moreover, Philippe Rushton proposes that we are led to overestimate the intelligence of black people when interacting with them because their low intelligence is often masked by a characteristic personality profile – “outgoing, talkative, sociable, warm, and friendly”, with high levels of social competence and extraversion – which personality profile itself likely reflects an innate racial endowment (Rushton 2004).

[69] Ironically, although he was later to have a reptutation among some leftist sociologists as an incorrigible racist who used science (or rather what they invariably refer to as ‘pseudo-science’) to justify the existing racial order, Jensen was in fact first moved to study differences in IQ between races, and the issue of test bias, precisely because he initially assumed that, due to the different behaviours of low-IQ blacks and whites, IQ tests might indeed be underestimating the intelligence of black Americans and somehow biased against them (The g Factor: p367). However, his careful, systematic and quantitative research ultimately showed this assumption to be false (see Jensen, Bias in Mental Testing).

[70] Mike Tyson, another celebrated African American world heavyweight champion, was also recorded as having a similarly low IQ when tested in school. With regard to Ali’s test results, the conditions for admittance to the military were later lowered to increase recruitment levels, in a programme which became popularly known as ‘Macnamara’s morons’, after the US Defense Secretary responsible for implementing it. This is why Muhammad Ali, despite initially failing the IQ test that was a prerequisite for enlistment, was indeed later called up, and famously refused to serve.
Incidentally, the project to lower standards in order to increase recruitment levels is generally regarded as having been an unmitigated disaster and was later abandoned. Today, the US military no longer uses IQ testing to screen recruits, instead employing the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, though this, like virtually all tests of mental ability and aptitude, nevertheless taps into the general factor of intelligence, and hence is, in part, an indirect measure of IQ.

[71] My own analogy, in the text above, is between race and species. Thus, I write that it would be no more meaningful to describe a sub-Saharan with an IQ below 70 as mentally handicapped than it would be to describe a chimpanzee as mentally handicapped simply because they are much less intelligent than the average human. This analogy – between race/subspecies and species – is, in some respects more apposite, since races or subspecies do indeed represent ‘incipient species’ and the first stage of speciation (i.e. the evolution of populations into distinct species). On the other hand, however, it is not only very provocative, but also very misleading in a very different way, simply because the differences between chimpanzees and humans in intelligence and many other traits are obviously far greater than those between the different races of mankind, who all represent, of course, a single species.

[72] Richard Lynn, in Race Differences in Intelligence (which I have reviewed here), attributes a very low IQ of just 62 to New Guineans, and an even lower IQ, supposedly just 52 to San Bushmen. However, he draws this conclusion on the basis of very limited evidence, especially in respect of the San (see discussion here). However, in relation to New Guineans, it is worth noting that Lynn provides much more data (mostly from the Australian school system) in respect of the IQs of the Aboriginal population of Australia, to whom New Guineans are closely related, and to whom he ascribes a similarly low average IQ (as discussed here).

[73] I am not sure what evidence Harpending relies on to infer a high average IQ in South India. Richard Lynn, in his book, Race Differences in Intelligence (which I have reviewed here) reports a quite low IQ of 84 for Indians in general, whom he groups, perhaps problematically, with Middle Eastern and North African peoples as, supposedly, a single race.
However, a more recent study, also authored by Lynn in collaboration with an Indian researcher, does indeed report higher average intelligence in South India than in North India, and also in regions with a coastline (Lynn & Yadav 2015).
This, of course, rather contradicts Lynn’s own ‘cold winters theory’, which posits that the demands of surviving in a relatively colder climate during winter selects for higher intelligence, as North India is situated at a higher latitude than South India, and, especially in some mountainous regions of the North East, has relatively colder winters.
Incidentally, it also seemingly contradicts any theory of what we might term ‘Aryan supremacy’, since it is the lighter complexioned North Indians who have greater levels of Indo-European ancestry and speak Indo-Aryan languages, whereas the darker complexioned South Indians speak Dravidian languages and have much less Indo-European ancestry, and hence North Indians, together with related groups such as Iranians, not German Nazis, who have the strongest claim to being ‘Aryans’.
South India also today enjoys much higher levels of economic development than does North India.

[74] Ashkenazi Jews, of course, have substantial European ancestry, as a consequence of long sojourn as diaspora minority in Europe. The same is true to some extent of Sephardi Jews, who trace their ancestry to the Jewish populations formerly resident in and then expelled from Spain and Portugal. However, although these are the groups whom westerners usually have in mind when thinking of Jews, the majority of Jews in Israel today are actually the Mizrahim, who remained resident in the Middle East, if not in Palestine, and hence have little or no European admixture. 

[75] The fact that apartheid-era South Africa, despite international sanctions, was nevertheless a ‘developed economy’, but South Africa today is classed as a ‘developed economy’, of course, ironically suggests that, if South Africa is indeed ‘developing’, it is doing so in altogether the wrong direction.

[76] For example, to take one obvious example, customers at strip clubs and brothels generally have a preference for younger, more physically attractive, service providers of a particular sex, and also often show a racial preference too.
The topic of the economics of discrimination was famously analysed by pioneering Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker.

[77] Some degree of discrimination in favour of black and perhaps other underrerpresented demographics likely continued under the guise of a newly-adopted ‘holistic’ approach to university admission. This involved deemphasizing quantifiable factors such as grades and SAT scores, which meant that any discrimination against certain demographics (i.e. whites, Asians and males) is less easily measured and hence proven in a court of law.

[78] It also ought to be noted in this context that the very term ‘meritocracy’ is itself problematic, raising, as it does, the question of how we define ‘merit’, let alone how we objectively measure and quantify it for the purposes of determining, for example, how is appointed to a particular job or has his application for a particular university accepted or rejected. Determining the ‘merit’ of a given person is necessarily a ‘value judgement’ and hence inherently a subjective assessment.
Of course, in practice, when people talk of meritocracy in this sense, they usually mean that employers should select the ‘best person for the job’, not ‘merit’ in some abstract cosmic moral sense. In this sense, it is not really ‘merit’ that determines whether a person obtains a given job, but rather their market value in the job market (i.e. the extent to which they possess the marketable skills etc.).
Yet this is not the same thing as ‘merit’. After all, a Premiership footballer may command a far higher salary in the marketplace than, say, a construction worker. However, this is not to say that they are necessarily more meritorious outside the football pitch. It is the players merits as a footballer that are in issue not their merits as people or moral agents. Construction workers surely contribute more to a functioning society.
Market value, unlike merit, is something that can be measured and quantified, and indeed the market itself, left to its own devices, automatically arrives at just such a valuation.
However, although a free market system may approximate meritocracy, albeit only in this narrow sense, a perfect meritocracy is unattainable, even in this narrow sense. After all, employers sometimes make the wrong decision. Moreover, humans have a natural tendency towards nepotism (i.e. promoting their own close kin at the expense of non-kin) and perhaps to ethnocentrism and racism too.
Thus, as I have written about previously, equal opportunity is, in practice, almost as utopian and unachievable as equality of outcome (i.e. communism).

[79] Sarich and Miele even cite models of where the salience of racial group identity is supposedly overcome, or at least mitigated:

“The examples of basic military training, sports teams, music groups, and successful businesses show that [animosities between racial, religious and ethnic groups] can indeed be overcome. But doing so requires in a sense creating a new identity by to some extent stripping away the old. Eventually, the individual is able to identify with several different groups” (p242).

Yet, even under these conditions, racial animosities are not entirely absent. For example, despite basic training, racial incidents are hardly unknown in the US military.
Moreover, the cooperation between ethnicities often ends with the cessation of the group activity in question. In other words, as soon as they finish playing for their multiracial sports team, the team members will go back to being racist again, to everyone other than their teammates. After all, racists are not known for their intellectual consistency and racism and hypocrisy tend to go together.
For example, members of different races may work, and fight, together in relative harmony and cohesion in the military. However, military veterans are not noticeably any less racist than non-veterans. If anything, in my limited experience, the pattern seems to be quite the opposite. Indeed, many leaders in the ‘white power’ movement in the USA (e.g. Louis Beam, Glenn Miller) were military veterans, and a recent book, Bring the War Home by Kethleen Belew, even argues that it was the experience of defeat in Vietnam, and, in particular, the return of many patriotic but disillusioned veterans, that birthed the modern ‘white power’ movement.
Similarly, John Allen Muhammad, the ‘DC sniper’, a serial killer and member of the black supremacist Nation of Islam cult, who was responsible for killing ten people, all of them white, and whose accomplice admitted that his killings were motivated by a desire to kill white people, was likewise a military veteran.

[80] Despite the efforts of successive generations of feminists to stir up animosity between the sexes, even sex is not an especially salient aspect of a person’s identity, at least when it comes to group competition. After all, unlike in respect of race and ethnicity, almost everyone has relatives and loved ones of both biological sexes, usually in roughly equal number, and the two sexes are driven into one another’s arms by the biological imperative of the sex drive. As Henry Kissinger is, perhaps apocryphally, quoted as observing:

“No one will win the battle of the sexes. There is too much fraternizing with the enemy”.

Indeed, the very notion of a ‘battle of the sexes’ is a misleading metaphor, since people compete, in reproductive terms, primarily against people of the same sex as themselves in competition for mates.

References

Aiken (2011) Historical determinants of contemporary attributes of African descendants in the Americas: The androgen receptor holds the key, Medical Hypotheses 77(6): 1121-1124.
Allison et al (1993) Can ethnic differences in men’s preferences for women’s body shapes contribute to ethnic differences in female adiposity? Obesity Research 1(6):425-32.
Ankney (1992) Sex differenes in relative brain size: The mismeasure of woman, too? Intelligence 16(3–4): 329-336.
Beals et al (1984) Brain Size, Cranial Morphology, Climate, and Time Machines. Current Anthropology 25(3), 301–330.
Braveman et al (1995) Racial/ethnic differences in the likelihood of cesarean delivery, California. American Journal of Public Health 85(5): 625–630.
Carl (2025) Are Richard Lynn’s national IQ estimates flawed? Aporia, January 1.
Coppinger & Schneider (1995) Evolution of working dogs.In: Serpell (ed.). The Domestic Dog. Its Evolution, Behaviour and Interactions with People (pp. 22-47). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Crespi (2016) Autism As a Disorder of High Intelligence, Frontiers of Neuroscience 10:300.
Draper (1989) African Marriage Systems: Perspectives from Evolutionary Ecology, Ethology and Sociobiology 10(1-3):145-169.
Edwards (2003). Human genetic diversity: Lewontin’s fallacy. BioEssays 25 (8): 798–801.
Edmonds et al (2013) Racial and ethnic differences in primary, unscheduled cesarean deliveries among low-risk primiparous women at an academic medical center: a retrospective cohort study. BMC Pregnancy Childbirth 13, 168.
Ellis (2017) Race/ethnicity and criminal behavior: Neurohormonal influences, Journal of Criminal Justice 51: 34-58.
Getahun et al (2009) Racial and ethnic disparities in the trends in primary cesarean delivery based on indications. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 201(4):422.e1-7.
Freedman et al (2006) Ethnic differences in preferences for female weight and waist-to-hip ratio: a comparison of African-American and White American college and community samples, Eating Behaviors 5(3):191-8.
Frost (1994) Geographic distribution of human skin colour: A selective compromise between natural selection and sexual selection? Human Evolution 9(2):141-153.
Frost (2006) European hair and eye color: A case of frequency-dependent sexual selection? Evolution and Human Behavior 27:85-103.
Frost (2008) Sexual selection and human geographic variation, Journal of Social Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology 2(4):169-191.
Frost (2014) The Puzzle of European Hair, Eye, and Skin Color, Advances in Anthropology 4(02):78-88.
Frost (2015) Evolution of Long Head Hair in Humans. Advances in Anthropology 05(04):274-281.
Frost (2023) Do human races exist? Aporia Magazine July 11.
Gichoya et al (2022) AI recognition of patient race in medical imaging: a modelling study, Lancet 4(6): E406-E414.
Greenberg & LaPorte (1996) Racial differences in body type preferences of men for women International Journal of Eating Disorders 19:275–8.
Hartung (1995) Love Thy Neighbor: The Evolution of In-Group Morality. Skeptic 3(4):86–98.
Hirschfeld (1996) Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child’s Construction of Human Kinds. Contemporary Sociology 26(6).
Jensen & Johnson (1994) Race and sex differences in head size and IQ, Intelligence 18(3): 309-333.
Jazwal (1979) Skin colour in north Indian populations. Journal of Human Evolution 8(3): 361-366.
Juntilla et al (2022) Breed differences in social cognition, inhibitory control, and spatial problem-solving ability in the domestic dog (Canis familiaris), Scientific Reports 12:1.
Lee et al (2019) The causal influence of brain size on human intelligence: Evidence from within-family phenotypic associations and GWAS modeling, Intelligence 75: 48-58.
Lewontin (1972). The Apportionment of Human Diversity.  In: Dobzhansky, T., Hecht, M.K., Steere, W.C. (eds) Evolutionary Biology (New York: Springer).
Lynn & Yadav (2015) Differences in cognitive ability, per capita income, infant mortality, fertility and latitude across the states of India, Intelligence 49: 179-185
Mishra (2017) Genotype-Phenotype Study of the Middle Gangetic Plain in India Shows Association of rs2470102 with Skin Pigmentation. Journal of Investigative Dermatology 137(3):670-677.
Mitton (1977). Genetic Differentiation of Races of Man as Judged by Single-Locus and Multilocus Analyses. The American Naturalist 111 (978): 203–212.
Mitton (1978). Measurement of Differentiation: Reply to Lewontin, Powell, and Taylor. The American Naturalist 112 (988): 1142–1144. 
Macdonald 2001 An integrative evolutionary perspective on ethnicity. Politics & the Life Sciences 20(1):67-8.
Nelson & Witte (2002) Androgen receptor CAG repeats and prostate cancer, American Journal of Epidemiology 15;155(10):883-90.
Norton et al (2019) Human races are not like dog breeds: refuting a racist analogy. Evolution: Education and Outreach 12: 17.
Nystrom et al (2008) Perinatal outcomes among Asian–white interracial couples. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 199(4), p382.e1-382.e6.
Okwandu et al (2021) Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Cesarean Delivery and Indications Among Nulliparous, Term, Singleton, Vertex Women. Journal of Racial & Ethnic Health Disparities. 12;9(4):1161–1171.
Ostrander (2007) Genetics and the Shape of Dogs, American Scientist 95(5): 406.
Pearce & Dunbar (2011) Latitudinal variation in light levels drives human visual system size, Biology Letters 8(1): 90–93.
Piffer (2013) Correlation of the COMT Val158Met polymorphism with latitude and a hunter-gather lifestyle suggests culture–gene coevolution and selective pressure on cognition genes due to climate, Anthropological Science 121(3):161-171.
Pietschnig et al (2015) Meta-analysis of associations between human brain volume and intelligence differences: How strong are they and what do they mean? Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 57: 411-432.
Rushton (2004) Solving The African IQ Conundrum : “Winning Personality” Masks Low Scores, Vdare.com August 12.
Rushton, J.P. & Ankney, C.D. (2009) Whole Brain Size and General Mental Ability: A Review. International Journal of Neuroscience, 119(5):692-732.
Sailer (1996) Great Black Hopes. National Review, August 12.
Sailer (2019) ‘Richard Jewell’: The Problem With Profiling, Takimag, December 18.
Schluter (1992) Brain size differences, Nature 359:181.
Schoenemann et al (2000) Brain-size does not predict general cognitive ability within families. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 97:4932–4937.
Singh (1994) Body fat distribution and perception of desirable female body shape by young black men and women, Eating Disorders 16(3): 289-294.
Snook et al (2007) Taking Stock of Criminal Profiling: A Narrative Review and Meta-Analysis, Criminal Justice and Behavior 34(4):437-453.
Swami et al (2006) Female physical attractiveness in Britain and Japan: a cross-cultural study, European Journal of Personality 20(1): 69-81.
Taylor (2021) Making sense of race, American Renaissance, May 14.
Tishkoff et al (2007) Convergent adaptation of human lactase persistence in Africa and Europe. Nature Genetics (1): 31-40.
Thompson et al (1996) Black and white adolescent males’ perceptions of ideal body size, Sex Roles 34(5-6): 391–406.
Tooby & Cosmides (1990) On the Universality of Human Nature and the Uniqueness of the Individual: The Role of Genetics and Adaptation, Journal of Personality 58(1):17-67.
Valdes (2020) Examining Cesarean Delivery Rates by Race: a Population-Based Analysis Using the Robson Ten-Group Classification System Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities.
Van den Berghe & Frost (1986) Skin color preference, sexual dimorphism, and sexual selection: A case of gene-culture co-evolution? Ethnic and Racial Studies, 9: 87-113.
Whitney (1997) Diversity in the Human Genome, American Renaissance 8(3), March 1997
Whitney (1999) The Biological Reality of Race, American Renaissance, 10(10) October 1999.
Wicherts et al (2010) A systematic literature review of the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans, Intelligence 38(1):1-20