Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The author seems to have neither a good grasp of genetics, biology, nor the history of the discourse on race in context to nature history. To give a sense of her level of scholarship, she makes statements such as the following: "Lewontin’s findings have been reinforced over time. An influential 2002 study published in Science by a team of scientists led by geneticist Noah Rosenberg, then at the University of Southern California, took genetic data from just over a thousand people around the world and showed that indeed as much as 95 percent of the variation is within major population groups. Statistically this means that although I look nothing like the white British woman who lives next door to me in my apartment building, it’s perfectly possible for me to have more in common genetically with her than with my Indian-born neighbor who lives downstairs. Being of the same “race” doesn’t necessarily mean are genetically more similar. " The above is an example of the well-known "Lewontin Fallacy" which even has its own Wikipedia page (and which Lewontin himself arguably did not make). Beyond the obvious fallacy -- as Lewontin himself granted, the chance that one is more genetically similar to a member of another descent group than to one's own falls to zero as the number of markers under consideration increase -- no context is provided regarding the figures. For example, Rosenberg et al. (cited) used high mutation microsatellites, which inevitably shows low differentiation, and which makes perfect sense for the purposes of their analysis. However, conservation biologists advise to use low mutation alleles like SNPS when making phenotype to genotype comparisons, which the author is concerned with. But I bought this book because I am interested in the historiography of the concept of race. There are some really good works out there, but this is not one. To give an example of the problems, take the following passage: “The notion that race was a hard and fixed feature that people couldn’t choose, an essence, passed down to their children, came slowly, in large part from Enlightenment Science. The eighteenth-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, famous for classifying the natural world from the tiniest insects to the biggest beasts, turned his eye on humans….But once defined, these “races” rapidly became slotted into hierarchies based on the politics of the time, character being conflated with appearance, and political circumstance becoming a biological fact. For example, Linnaeus described indigenous Americans, his “red” race, as having straight black hair and wide nostrils, but also as being “subjugated,” as though subjugated were in their nature.” Linnaeus is, perhaps, the worst possible example one could use to make the case that “race” once implied “hard and fixed features” “and essence” or differences in “their nature”. In his popular-at-the-time systematics there were either species or varieties. “Race” had no place in it. (Linnaean wrote in Latin, so he didn’t even use the French term “race” which meant “lineage.” And unlike, for example, Blumenbach, the latin equivalent, “gens”, did not play an explanatory role in his systematics.) Worse, still, it was his species which were fixed. His varieties, human and otherwise, were conceptualized as environmentally induced forms within a species. This is why there were called varieties -- they varied across environments and were, by definition, not fixed. I appreciate that the scholarship on race is generally poor. But this chapter was pretty bad even by comparison. Even seemingly reasonable passages are riddled with logical problems. We are told, for example: “In 1871 the naturalist and biologist Charles Darwin published The descent of Man, sweeping away these religious creation myths and framing the human species as having one common ancestor … We are too alike in our basic responses, our smiles and tears, our blushes, to have different origins. On this point Darwin might have settled the race debate. He demonstrated that we could only have evolved from shared origins, that human races didn’t emerge separately. ” First of all, it was well recognized in the 18th century that the term “race” suggested common origins. I would refer readers to Claude-Olivier Doron’s excelled “The Birth of ’Race’” on this point. Second, Darwin settled the “species question,” that of whether human lineages (aka “races”) were different variety-lineages or species-lineages. The solution was: “But this is a matter of very little importance. So again, it is almost a matter of indifference whether the so-called races of man are thus designated, or are ranked as species or sub-species; but the latter term appears the more appropriate." Generally, there was no “race” debate until the middle of the 20th century, after WWII, when some people deemed that the term, along with descent-based classifications, was “dangerous”. So what is the “race debate” he could have settled? “[E]ven though he made such a bold and contribution to the idea of racial unity,” we are told, Darwin’s work represents a “Bonfire of flawed thinking” because, for example, we know “that the brains of hunter gathers are no different from anyone else”. First, we know that many major and minor human lineages (i.e., “races”) differ in brain size. How this possibly represents “no” differences is unclear. Rather, what is unclear is what these known differences mean in relation to possible ones in mental abilities e.g., spatial ability. Second, the dominant enlightenment idea was that human races ("lineages") were mere varieties of a species-realist species. This was the dominant position because, in part, the view that human race (“lineages”) were different species in the Linnaean sense of different creations was heretical. From this dominant pre-evolutionary perspective, all human were essentially the same. So what did Darwin actually contribute? While Darwin and Wallace’s theory of evolution precluded the already marginal (heretical polygenist) view that human lineages were different species-realist species, this radical or "dangerous idea" (to use Dennett's term), in making (hereditary) varieties incipient species, undermined the foundation of the system which enforced the view of essential similarity, and allowed for a generally accepted "thick racialism". This is, in part, why race research, and racialist ideologies, became more pervasive after the acceptance of evolutionary theory. Instead of exploring these curious, fascinating turns in history, the author twists history onto itself to fit her preconceived narrative. Of course, some of the many blunders she makes come from the people she interviews. This crowd is a veritable who’s who list of critics of “race” research past and present. Of course, many of these people are fine with modern population genetics, which instead researches “population-lineages” (e.g., Reich), despite these being little different from “races,” with the terms even translating to mean the same (i.e., a glace at a 18th century French dictionary will show that “race” meant, simply, “lineage” or “stock” or “breed”). The author is at her best when she is playing the role of a journalist, interviewing this group. Yet even here she fails at the job. Simply, she doesn’t report the situation objectively, but tries to prosecute her case. As such, she excludes proponents of the contrary perspective, except when to malign them. For example, on the topic of race and IQ (chapter 9), we hear from experts Plomin, Flynn, Turkheimer, and Colman on how a hereditarian hypothesis for racial difference in IQ, particularly the Black-White American gap, is either empirically unsupported or unsupportable. Yet, in a recent survey of intelligence experts, over 85% judged, based on the evidence, that some of the Black-White IQ gap in the US had a genetic basis. And on average, the experts attributed half of the difference to genes. This may be incorrect, of course. But the point is that the author is clearly presented a very selective set of options so to bolster a case she is determined to make. The same holds for her discussion of race and medicine. There is a tremendous amount of literature on the relation between racial ancestry and medical outcomes using very sophisticated methods (e.g., admixture mapping). The author selectively presents this, discussing only results, and interviewing researchers, that question a hereditary basis for medical outcome differences. So, the book is not a good piece of scholarly research or of journalism. What is it? I guess time will tell if it is a good piece of rhetoric. I doubt that. I think it is most interesting from an anthropological or, perhaps, sociology of knowledge perspective. The author is engaged in the social deconstruction of a biological reality (much like how some now deem "sex" to be a fluid social construct) for the purpose of myth making – of advancing the woke “race was invented” (to exploit) narrative. What is ironic is that, as Claude-Olivier Doron documents, “race” indeed was often originally employed for moralistic reasons : to defend the commonality of humanity -- to allow for an alternative to the conclusion that various human lineages were different Linnaean species. It is now being erased for a more radical version of the same ends. That would be a genuinely interesting story for a writer to explore; yet, in this book, we merely experience the process unfolding.