Racial realities or bombast?

摘要

This is a disturbing book, especially given the stature of its primary author, Vincent ] Sarich, as one of the founding pioneers of molecular anthropology. In 1967, in a paper with Allan Wilson, Sarich, then a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, used a simple protein-molecular clock to show that humans share a common ancestor with the great apes from as recently as 5 million years ago ― overturning previous estimates of more 20 million years. Here he teams up with Frank Miele, a senior editor at Skeptic magazine, to lament the neglect of "racial realities" by social scientists. The voice is one of loners crusading against conventional wisdom, although the book also reads as if it were a legal brief prepared for use in court to counter affirmative action. The authors' 'case for race' draws heavily on contentious claims by raciolo-gists such as Arthur R. Jensen and J. Philippe Rushton, notorious for having postulated natural racial hierarchies in intelligence, criminality, athletic performance, sexual endowment and the capacity to accumulate wealth. This is a shame, because there are good reasons to believe that certain aspects of race are very real, and that important questions of human origins, prehistoric migrations and medical therapeutics can be fruitfully addressed by properly re-examining human biovariation.