Essay: RACE & ABILITY

OF all animals, man is the most unpredictable. Toynbee notwithstanding, history makes an uncertain prophet: the same circumstances, involving different times and different men, can lead to war or peace, love or hate, fraternity or murder. The same hereditary material, pooled by the same man and woman in the act of reproduction, can produce children who do not much resemble either their parents or one another. Even identical twins, issuing from the same egg, can vary; for instance, they never possess identical fingerprints or dispositions.

Classifications may not exist in nature, but order does. And the observable differences among men, as broadly varied as the species, have long challenged the orderly human mind to catalogue them—to find a way, in short, to subdivide the fascinating and unruly diversity of humankind. Within the diversity may lurk patterns, and the patterns may aid man’s understanding of himself and his differences.

This prospect has endlessly occupied—and eluded—the inquiring human mind. If the species could be sensibly subdivided into races, then the races could be measured one against another, could be assigned proper places in the hierarchy of mankind. Cultural and geographical isolation, occurring over numberless millennia, could conceivably have bred peoples of widely differing physical and intellectual capacity. And taking Western technological man as the norm, it could be possible, given the right tools, to compare his performance against those of all the other human varieties.

What Eyes Can See

The problem is far more complicated than that, as any scientist who has tried merely to determine the biological races has discovered. Among the first to try was the German zoologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1775. On the basis of physical characteristics, he saw five human subspecies or races—a term possibly deriving from the Arabic rds (beginning). Blumenbach divided humans into races that he called Caucasian (white), Mongolian (yellow), Ethiopian (black), American (copper) and Malay (brown).

In Blumenbach’s century, other naturalists and philosophers disputed his arbitrary racial census; with equal arbitrariness, it has been reduced and expanded many times in the 192 years since. Sorting men into groups according to their differences may seem a simple task. But even now, anthropologists argue heatedly on how to do it. They have partitioned the human species into anywhere from two to 200 races; some anthropologists maintain that humanity cannot or should not be subdivided into races at all. The debate does not particularly concern the great majority of nonexperts. Man’s eyes tell him that the species comes in three predominant skin shades, which are chromatically though imperfectly described as white, yellow and black. From much the same evidence, three major divisions are frequently deduced: Caucasian, Mongolian and Negroid.

Not every human being fits neatly into one of those three categories, but most of them do. The system is at least workable, all the more so because the physical disparities in man are not limited to the color of his skin. The so-called Mongolian race, for example, can also be distinguished by the epicanthic fold that gives some Asian peoples, among them the Japanese and the Chinese, a slant-eyed look. Evolutionary hypothesis has traced this feature to its probable source. The predominant theory is that it developed from a mutation—a random change in the elaborate chemistry of human chromosomes, which govern man’s biological evolution. For arctic and desert-dwelling people, subjected to blinding blizzards of snow or sand, the eye fold had definite survival value: it increased the eyes’ protection against such hazards. Thus the trait endured.

The dark skin that usually, though not invariably, characterizes members of the Negroid race may also be a protective device. If man was first born in tropical Africa, as some anthropologists now suggest, then it is possible that his skin, whatever color it may have been to begin with, took on added pigment—again, starting with chance mutation—as a screen against harmful radiation from the sun. It is a fact that Negroes seldom have skin cancer, though its incidence is rising noticeably in the white population of the U.S. The same pigment, by filtering solar radiation, impedes synthesis of vitamin D, which prevents rickets and is manufactured from the sun’s rays by the body. As early man migrated out of the tropical sun—into the green jungle, north to less torrid zones—light skin thereupon conferred an advantage by admitting more vitamin D-produc-ing sunlight. And the lottery of evolution, patiently awaiting the appropriate mutation, then fixed this advantage into place. Thus, over the centuries, environmental factors were producing genetic changes.

Man’s extended tropical sojourn appears to have generated other useful or once useful adaptations more frequently found in dark-skinned peoples. A hereditary blood condition known as the sickle-cell trait, which grants resistance to certain types of malaria, is only now beginning to wane among U.S. Negroes, who no longer have any need of it. The Negro’s woolly black hair once provided insulation against the heat of the blazing tropical sun; his thick lips, by exposing more mucous membrane, may have increased the body’s evaporative cooling powers in torrid climates; his characteristically long legs and lean frame were once distinctly helpful to some prehistoric race of hunters.

The list of apparently Negroid characteristics can be extended, since dark-skinned persons come in so many shapes and sizes, from the storklike Watutsi, to the Pygmies of Central Africa. Generally, Negro skull capacity—affecting the size of the brain—runs about 50 cc. below that of whites.

However, before any large conclusions are drawn from that, another fact must be considered: on the average, the skull capacity of modern whites is some 150 cc. smaller than that of Neanderthal man, who lived 50,000 years ago. Some anthropologists go so far as to say that the Negro’s attributes, coupled with the ordeal of slavery, have produced in him a physically superior race—a theory that gains strength from the Negro’s extraordinary ability in athletics. The strongest African blacks were selected as the best slave material; only the hardiest of these survived ocean transport in slave ships; only the sturdiest of back and spirit endured slavery’s arduous, degrading yoke.

Bitter Division

It is on the issue of racial superiority, physical and mental, that all of mankind bitterly divides. Such value judgments are largely subjective and lack any solid scientific foundation, but that has never stopped men from making them. The Negro, who reached the U.S. in bonds, has ever since been classified in some quarters as a member of an intellectually inferior race. The attitude is not without historical precedent. Segregationists of the U.S. South often quote the Book of Genesis 9:25, which relates that Canaan, the son of Ham—whose skin was believed to be black—is ac cursed throughout time: “A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.” The 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume suspected “Negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites.” Several U.S. Presidents, among them Jefferson and Lincoln, shared the same opinion, at least for a while. As long as the two races lived together, said Lincoln in 1858, “there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.” Washington unreflectively accepted slavery as an institution simply because it was there, but before dying he drew up a will emancipating his slaves. The late Albert Schweitzer, who devoted his life and medical skill to African Negroes, went to his grave believing that “the Negro is a child, and with children nothing can be done without the use of authority.”

The theory of racial inferiority lurks at the edges of current anthropological thought. In his book The Origin of Races, Anthropologist Carleton S. Coon suggests that Homo sapiens—modern man—evolved not once but five times, in five different places. The last to attain the fully human estate, says Coon, was the Negro—a conjecture that, if accepted, explains why Negro cultures in Africa lag behind the West’s and why the Negro is not yet the white man’s intellectual peer. According to Coon, he simply has not had enough time. Approaching the subject from closer range, University of Chicago Physiologist Dwight Ingle writes: “America is trying to build the Great Society by applying only palliative methods for the correction of cultural handicaps and ignoring possible biological bases of incompetence, indolence and irresponsibilty.”

Open Possibility

Few members of the scientific community agree with these points of view, preferring instead merely to keep open the possibility that the races of man can be intellectually ranked. To Curt Stern, a geneticist at the University of California at Berkeley, it seems unreasonable to conclude that “because there is no evidence of inherent inequalities, the situation couldn’t exist.” Says University of Colorado Anthropologist John Greenway: “I would not want to say that an Australian Aborigine is dumber than I am, because there is no way to tell. In their noncompetitive society there is no way to make any tests and hence no way to make comparisons. We don’t know what the differences are between different racial groups and there is a strong prejudice against finding out. Suppose you made a study to determine if there are differences between the brains of whites and Negroes and proved it?” Nobel Laureate William Shockley, a solid-state physicist, drew outraged reaction from the scientific community when he charged that “inverted liberalism” raises taboos against research into man’s genetic intellectual differences and “paralyzes the ability to doubt.”

A scientist who is closer to the pertinent field put it in less provocative terms. “The idea that human races differ in adaptively significant traits is emotionally repugnant to some people,” wrote Geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky in Mankind Evolving. “Any inquiry into this matter is felt to be dangerous, lest it vindicate race prejudice.” Undeniably, racial prejudice is social or cultural in origin rather than biological, and it is understandable that anthropologists, who hesitate to make value judgments on the basis of biological fact, would hesitate also to enter what is fundamentally a sociological—and highly emotional—controversy. Anthropologist Morton Fried says that “participation in a ‘debate’ over racial differences in intelligence, ability or achievement potential is not participation in a scientific debate at all. It means lifting in the public eye the status of studies otherwise disqualified and rejected by science.” Interpreted one way, such studies apparently suggest that the U.S. Negro is inferior to the U.S. white. On IQ tests, he generally averages 15 to 20 points lower. The results of World War I alpha intelligence tests have frequently been cited as evidence of the Negro’s mental inferiority, since the Negro soldier invariably ranked below the white soldier on a state-by-state basis. But the same test results can be used in another way to demonstrate that Negroes are smarter than whites. On the alpha tests, for instance, Negro soldiers from the Northern state of Ohio outscored whites from eleven Southern states. Beyond this, it could be inferred from the tests that Northern whites are superior to Southern whites, because they almost always did better.

Most psychologists have now abandoned the notion that intelligence can be accurately tested; it is difficult even to define the terms. Einstein once confessed to Anthropologist Ashley Montagu that in the Australian Aborigine’s society, he would rightfully be regarded as an intellectual idiot who could neither track a wallaby nor throw a boomerang. As Anthropologist Stanley Garn has dryly noted, if the Aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would presumably flunk it. “It is possible that some of the behavioral differences between human groups may be genetically determined,” says University of Michigan Anthropologist Ernst Goldschmidt. “These may include differences in intelligence, but such differences may equally be due to cultural determinants. The question simply remains open.” Harvard Psychologist Thomas Pettigrew points out that “while the intelligence test means of the two races are still divergent, the range of performance—from the most retarded idiot to the most brilliant genius—is much the same in the two groups. Some Negro children achieve IQs into the gifted range (130 or over) and right up to the testable limit of 200.” For three years running, the highest scholastic achievement among Australian state schools was registered by one composed exclusively of Aboriginal children.

Those who resist making value comparisons among groups do so on two grounds. The first is that science as yet lacks valid tools to sort mankind into biological races. The second is that even if science possessed such tools, the racial divisions could not conceivably be used to grade human worth. So meager is man’s understanding of the complicated biochemistry of evolution and of the nonhereditary influences of cultural environment that no one can confidently assign that portion of intelligence with which man was born and that part he acquired. If heredity bestows his capacity to learn, culture decides what he will learn—in some cases, how much he will be permitted to learn. The handicaps under which the U.S. Negro has existed since he arrived in chains are cruelly reflected in his group achievement.

Environment & Culture

Physical differences are variations on the universal human theme. All men are different. But all men are also alike; the similarities outnumber the differences, says Morton Fried, on the order of 95 to 5. During man’s nomadic residence on earth, a continuum reaching back 2,000,000 years, he has indiscriminately mingled with his own kind, thoroughly scrambling his genes. It may be possible one day to unscramble the human genetic omelet. Until then, group distinctions decreeing one race’s superiority over another must necessarily be made on nonbiological lines. With only a few dissenting votes, the world of anthropology has swung in this direction. “The peoples of the world today,” concluded delegates to a world meeting of ethnologists and anthropologists in 1964, “appear to possess equal biological potentialities for attaining any civilizational level. Differences in the achievements of different peoples must be attributed solely to their cultural history.”

It seems probable that before society solves the thorny problem of race prejudice, advancing science—or even the continuing evolution of the human species—will beat society to it. The world’s population is already three-fifths colored—that is, other than white. Geneticists Bentley Glass and Ching Chun Li predict that within ten centuries or so, at the present rate of exchange, the U.S. Negro will be genetically indistinguishable from the U.S. white. In far less time than that, says Stanford University Geneticist Joshua Lederberg, science will have learned enough about the genetic code to tamper with it—to insert into the human chromosomes artificial chemical commands capable of determining anything from skin color to musical aptitude.

Until the world accepts the proposition that the universality of mankind outweighs the differences, speculation about the meaning of the diversity will continue. The human physical variety is self-evident, so is the wide spectrum of human achievement. It is well-established that the controlling factors are cultural and environmental. Nothing that man has discovered about himself so far provides any sound scientific foundation for the conclusion that one race is innately superior to any other. No one knows. And the men of tomorrow, looking back, may wonder why anyone was ever concerned with such comparisons.