Abstract
A few years ago, the historian of anthropology, George W. Stocking, Jr., as he surveyed the history of his discipline, asked: ‘What happened to race?’1 For more than a hundred years the division of the human species into biological races had seemed of cardinal significance to scientists. Race explained individual character and temperament, the structure of social communities, and the fate of human societies. In fact the commitment to typological races often appeared to have been deeper, because psychologically more necessary or satisfying, than the commitment to revolutionary changes in science itself. At times this commitment to race subtly modified the reception and interpretation put upon new biological theories. At the very least, belief in the fixity, reality and hierarchy of human races — in the chain of superior and inferior human types — had shaped the activities of scientists for decades.
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Notes and References
George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1968) p. vii. The question had first been asked, according to Stocking, by Oscar Handlin more than a decade before.
The word comes from Thomas Kuhn’s now classic book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
See, for example, J. B. Birdsell, Human Evolution: An Introduction to the New Physical Anthropology (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1972); and
L. L. Cavalli-Sforza and W. F. Bodmer, The Genetics of Human Populations (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1971).
The leader of the movement to rid science of the term ‘race’ and to replace it with a more neutral term, ‘ethnic group’, is the British-born anthropologist, Ashley Montagu, whose career has taken place primarily in the United States. See Ashley Montagu, ‘The Concept of Race’, American Anthropologist, 64 (1962) 917–28.
Lionel Penrose, in a review in Annals of Eugenics, 17 (1952) 252, called the word ‘race’ obsolete; Hans Kalmus, one of Britain’s leading geneticists, also repudiated the word in his Genetics (London: Penguin, 1948) p. 48.
Stanley M. Garn, ed., Readings on Race (Springfield, Ill: Charles C. Thomas, 1968) p. 4. In many third world countries, racial anthropology is still practised. After writing this chapter, I read an unpublished paper by John Rhoads, ‘Human Biology as Anthropology’, paper prepared for the Fall Colloquium Series, Yale University Anthropology Department, Tuesday, 15 November 1977. Its account of the recent history of anthropology is very similar to mine.
See Ashley Montagu, ed., Statement on Race, 3rd edn (Oxford University Press, 1972) for a reprint of all four UNESCO statements on race.
William C. Boyd, Genetics and the Races of Man: An Introduction to Modern Physical Anthropology (Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1950) pp. ix-xvi.
Joseph B. Birdsell, ‘On Methods of Evolutionary Biology and Anthropology. Part II. Anthropology’, American Scientist, 45 (1957) 395.
S. L. Washburn, ‘The Strategy of Physical Anthropology’, in A. L. Kroeber, ed., Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953) pp. 714–27;
J. S. Weiner, ‘Physical Anthropology … An Appraisal’, American Scientist, 45 (1957) 79–87.
Washburn referred to the ‘new’ physical anthropology in 1953 (see ‘The Strategy of Physical Anthropology’). See also Montagu’s use of the phrase ‘the new physical anthropology’ in his Frontiers of Anthropology (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974) p. 566, and J. B. Birdsell’s in Human Evolution, 2nd ed. (1975) p. xiii. See also the Symposium, ‘Physical Anthropology is Dead’, Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, 19(1975) 132–53;
S. Washburn, ‘The New Physical Anthropology’, Ann. New York Acad. Sci., 85 (1951) 298–304;
G. W. Lasker, ‘The “New” Physical Anthropology Seen in Retrospect and Prospect’, The Centennial Review, 9 (1965) 348–86; and
W. W. Howells, ‘Recent Physical Anthropology’, Ann. Amer. Acad. Pol. and Soc. Science, 389 (1970) 111–26.
William B. Provine, The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971) pp. 108–.
Julian Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (London: Allen & Unwin, 1942).
Theodosius Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving: The Evolution of the Human Species (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962);
René Dubos, Man Adapting (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975).
For these definitions, see Stephen Molmar, Races, Types, and Ethnic Groups: the Problem of Human Variation (Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall, 1975) p. 13.
See C. Loring Brace, ‘A Nonracial Approach Towards the Understanding of Human Diversity’, in C. Loring Brace and James Metress, ed., Man in Evolutionary Perspective (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1973) pp. 314–63, and
F. B. Livingstone, ‘On the Non-Existence of Human Races’, Current Anthropology, 3 (1962) 279–381. These articles are somewhat controversial. Many biologists still consider the term ‘race’ useful and necessary.
William C. Boyd, ‘Critique of the Methods of Classifying Mankind’, Amer. Jour, of Phys. Anthr., 27 (1940) 333–64, and Boyd, Genetics. For Boyd’s classification, see S. Molmar, Races, Types and Ethnic Groups.
A. C. Allison, ‘Protection Afforded by Sickle Cell Trait Against Subtertian Malarial Infection’, British Medical Journal, i (1954) 290–4, and ‘Notes on Sickle Cell Polymorphism’, Annals of Human Genetics, 19 (1954) 39–57. See also Frank S. Livingstone, A bnormal Hemoglobins in Human Populations: A Summary and Interpretation (Chicago: The Aldine Press, 1967).
Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving, pp. 153–5. Against an adaptationist interpretation, see Marshall T. Newman, ‘Nutritional Adaptation in Man’, in Albert Damon, ed., Physiological Anthropology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975) pp. 210–59. In recent years, the adaptationist programme of neo-Darwinism in general has been questioned. See
S. J. Gould and R. C. Lewontin, ‘The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme’, Proc. R. Soc. Lond., B 205 (1975) 581–98.
Dobzhansky, Mankind Evolving, pp. 269–83. See also Frederick S. Hulse, ‘Race as an Evolutionary Episode’, American Anthropologist, 64 (1962) 929–45.
Edward E. Hunt, Jr., ‘Anthropometry, Genetics and Racial History’, American Anthropologist, 61 (1959) 64–87, and
Marshall T. Newman, ‘The Application of Ecological Rules to the Racial Anthropology of the Aboriginal New World’, American Anthropologist, 55, n.s. (1953) 311–27.
Hans Kalmus, ‘Progress in Human Genetics’, in George S. Avery, Jr., Survey of Biological Progress, vol. ii (New York: Academic Press, 1952) pp. 53–77.
For the fortunes of mental tests in America between 1900 and 1941, see the chapter, ‘Mental Testing’ by Hamilton Cravens, The Triumph of Evolution: American Scientists and the Heredity-Environment Controversy, 1900–1941 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978) pp. 224–65. See also the first chapter in
Leon J. Kamin’s The Science and Politics of I.Q. (Potomac, Md: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1974).
A. R.Jensen, ‘How Much Can we Boost I.Q. and Scholastic Achievement?’, Harvard Educational Review 39 (1969) 1–123.
Some idea of the history of the controversy and the arguments involved can be gathered from N.J. Block and Gerald Dworkin, The I. Q. Controversy: Critical Readings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976);
C. L. Brace et al., eds., Race and Intelligence (Washington: American Anthropological Association, 1971);
James M. Lawler, I.Q. Heritability and Racism (New York: International Publishers, 1978);
Theodosius Dobzhansky, Genetic Diversity and Human Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1973); and
Ashley Montagu, ed., Race and I.Q. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). On Jensen’s side, see
Arthur Jensen, ‘Race and Mental Ability’, in F. J. Ebling, ed., Racial Variation in Man (London: Institute of Biology, 1975) pp. 71–108; and various chapters in
R. Travis Osborne et al., eds, Human Variation: The Biopsychology of Age, Race, and Sex (London and New York: Academic press, 1978).
Gillian Sutherland, ‘The Magic of Measurement: Mental Testing and English Education’, Transactions of The Royal Historical Society 27 (1977) 135–53.
These and other details of Burt’s career are found in the biography by L. S. Hearnshaw, Cyril Burt, Psychologist (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979).
John Rex, ‘Racialism and the Urban Crisis’, in Leo Kuper, ed., Race, Science and Society (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1975) pp. 273–9.
Gordon K. Lewis, Slavery, Imperialism and Freedom: Studies in English Radical Thought (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1978) p. 80.
Stephen J. Gould, ‘Norton’s Ranking of Races by Cranial Capacity’, Science 200 (1978) 503–9.
Jensen’s most recent book is Bias in Mental Testing (New York: The Free Press, 1980). For a critical review, see Stephen Jay Gould, ‘Jensen’s Last Stand’, New York Review of Books, xxvii, no. 7 (1 May 1980) 38–44.
Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975).
For a review of the controversy in the public press, and a critique of sociobiology, see Marshall Sahlins, The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology (Ann Arbor, Mich: The University of Michigan Press, 1976).
John R. Baker, Race (London: Oxford University Press, 1974). Baker’s earlier role in anti-communist, eugenist and racialist polemics is described in
Gary Wersky, The Visible College (London: Allen Lane, 1978) pp. 281–4, 298.
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© 1982 Nancy Stepan
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Stepan, N. (1982). After the War: A New Science and Old Controversies. In: The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960. St Antony’s/Macmillan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05452-7_7
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