Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #63289 in Books
• Published on: 2005-08-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Sarich, a Berkeley emeritus anthropologist, and Miele, an editor of Skeptic magazine, cannot resist calling the current view that "race does not exist" a "PC dogma." They make cogent, if not convincing, arguments of their case in three areas. Race as a concept, they argue, considerably antedates colonial Europe, presenting such examples as an "Egyptian tomb with four races" (as one caption calls a tomb painting) that may point up "awareness" of difference, but whether that awareness correlates to concepts of "race" as currently defined remains unproven. Several chapters are heavy going on DNA-based research into the origin and differentiation of Homo sapiens, here interpreted as branching off from the other hominids recently enough to make differences among people very minor but, in the authors' view, significant. They move from the Human Genome Project into their final section, in which differences in intelligence are said to correlate to a concept of race (but are not said to be a justification for discrimination). This last argument is predicated on what will seem to many readers an excessive faith in IQ tests. Nevertheless, the book lacks vitriol, other than that needed to fuel the skeptic's attempt to debunk.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Sarich and Miele, both respected academicians, challenge the much-hyped, popular notion of race as an illusion, or mere social construct. Instead, they contend that significant human racial differences exist. Those differences are being increasingly identified and quantified via medical research and law-enforcement techniques, most notably in DNA testing, which has led to convictions and acquittals. Inquiries into the genetic influences behind racial differences in educational achievement and intelligence, despite inflammatory resistance, are justified by cost-benefit analyses, the authors contend. Assessing the future of racial politics in the U.S and internationally, Sarich and Miele offer three scenarios: meritocracy with race-sensitive safety valves (which they prefer), affirmative action or quotas, and rising resegregation and ethnopolitics. This is an important work, despite its conservative inferences, that challenges both the existence and the value of America's obsession with color blindness. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Customer Reviews

Long overdue
I agree with Dr. Ralph L. Holloway, Professor of Anthropology, at Columbia University. He states that "Miele is exactly that antidote to the pernicious loss of respect for our own evolutionarily-derived biological diversity, and it will hopefully reach all who are ready and willing to think more clearly and empirically about our diversity and celebrate it. This reader has been very favorably struck by the careful and non-sarcastic exposure of some of our most common chestnuts regarding racial diversity, and in particular some of the sillier pronouncements regarding within- and between-group differences in genetic frequencies that have abounded in all of the media, academic and non.

As more genetic research, particularly at the molecular level comes to our attention, it seems clear to this writer that this book will represent an important milestone in reducing the millstone of the myths that have accumulated denigrating and/or ignoring our genetic diversity. This book will certainly be a must for my students, and it is surely long overdue!"

Excellent, but goes on too long...
This book should be must reading for everyone, especially for those who have been telling us (for many years) that "there is no such thing as race."

Well, some salient facts to consider, as Sarich presents them: first, race is a real concept directly related to DNA. You can send a DNA sample to the lab and the lab can tell you that the DNA came from a person who is 85 percent African-American and 15% Native American. Really! This sort of information can be invaluable to police trying to find a dangerous murderer.

Next up is the fact that collies cannot be given heartworm vaccine. So what? Well, reactions to medicine vary with the genes, and we are now learning that the different races sometimes tolerate various medicines differently. Life and death decisions may hinge on your race, and your doctor's awareness of such issues. It is hard to imagine how a medicial instuction such as "Xaprofill is poorly tolerated by some Japanese and Chinese" could be regarded as racism.

I won't go any further than that. Sarich upset the whole world of paleontology with his discovery of the molecular clock, and now he's doing his very best to upset the whole world of chat-show "intellectuals," and their silly idea that race is just a figment of our imagination.

By the way, there is one other very startling number in this book! Sarich estimates that modern man (homo sap sap) arose just 50,000 years ago -- not 150,000 or 250,000!! When this man talks about prehistoric dates, it's probably a good idea to listen!

Honesty about race
After years of non-stop media and academia misrepresentations, suppressions, and outright lies about race, it is wonderful to have another famous scientist break free of Politically Correct (PC) conformity and tell the public the truth.

This book was written to refute the highly PC Public Broadcast System (PBS) television program, "Race: The Power of an Illusion." That program laid out 10 points about race, of which the authors say 8 are "facts" that they refute and the remaining two they reject "for economic and ethical reasons." The book carefully and convincingly shows that evolution requires variation and that variation carries across racial groups, even, or especially, in the highly-charged area of IQ. There is even a frank discussion of the most politically incorrect fact anywhere - that the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans is only 70.

I have only two quibbles about this excellent book. First, they make this fascinating statement, "As we have shown, the morphological differences between human races can exceed those found between subspecies [i.e., races] or even species of our nearest relatives, the chimps and gorillas, and other nondomesticated animals." In particular, the racial distance between the common chimpanzee and the bonobo chimpanzee is 14.6%, which exceeds the racial distance between some human races. An explanation of why the two chimpanzees groups are different species but the human groups are only different races seems to be needed here, but is not supplied.

My second quibble is that the authors accept the Out-of-Africa theory of human origins based on DNA, mtDNA, and Y chromosome data. While they do show how that data supports Out-of-Africa, I don't think the debate is quite over yet. As an example of another view see: www.rafonda.com.