Interview with Anthropologist Alan H. Goodman:
Refuting the False Claim That Differences Among Races Are Genetic and the Driving Forces of Human History
August 4, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Revolution Interview
A special feature of Revolution to acquaint our readers with the views of
significant figures in art, theater, music and literature, science, sports and politics. The views expressed by those we interview are, of course, their own; and they are not responsible for the views published elsewhere in our paper.
Editors’ note: Nicholas Wade, a former science writer for the New York Times, has written a book, entitled: A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History. Behind what our interviewee calls “a veneer of genetics,” the book recycles pseudoscientific (supposedly scientific, but actually non scientific) justifications for the savage inequalities in U.S. society and the world by claiming they are inherent in supposed genetic differences among “races.” Alan H. Goodman (no relation to the correspondent for revcom.us/Revolution newspaper) is Professor of Biological Anthropology at Hampshire College and the former president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). He co-directs the AAA’s public education project on race (understandingrace.org) and has written widely on race, human variation and racism, including Race: Are We So Different? Here he discusses A Troublesome Inheritance with Revolution:
Q: What, essentially, is the claim made in A Troublesome Inheritance.... and how does it stand up to what is scientifically understood to be true about evolution and the concept of biological races?
A: Nicholas Wade makes two central claims, both of which are categorically false. First, it is taken as obvious that humans are divisible into biological races. Second, Wade tries to build a case that differences among races are genetic and deep and the driving forces of human history, leading to, among other things, wealth in the West and poverty elsewhere. If race is real and wealth differences are due to race-genetic differences, then that is just the way nature (or evolution) made it!
Unfortunately, even though Wade completely misunderstands the science of human variation, his tiresome and profoundly unscientific argument is being taken as fact by a wide audience and has ominous political and social implications. His book gains readership and acceptance precisely because it increases racial smog, a phrase used by Beverly Tatum to describe the way that unscientific racial ideology pervades our society.
Q: Can you break down what you mean by that? What is wrong with Wade’s view of human variation—the differences among humans and how they related to classifying people into races?
A: First, humans do not apportion genetically into races or subspecies. Race might seem obvious because both our cultural eye is programed to detect and characterize differences and we often see big differences in outward appearance, for example in the skin color of someone from equatorial Africa and someone from Scandinavia. However, our genetic variation is continuous. Moreover, there is more genetic difference within a race than among races. The average genetic difference between individuals from the same continent is basically the same as the average genetic difference between individuals from different continents.
Races are not evolutionary units; they can’t be defined in a useful and replicable manner, and there is so much variation within any human group that it makes the differences among groups rather inconsequential.
However, Wade sees variation and calls it race. That is wrong. Variation is real, but it is not race. Race is an idea used to explain variation and that use is wrong. Race is real socially and as what I call “lived experience” because we invented it. However, evolution and history, and not race, explains biological variation.
Second, because there are no human races (rather a complex world wide pattern of variation) racial differences obviously can’t explain wealth differences. But it is more than that, or said differently, there is more than a single error. It is a huge leap to say that that any simple variation is the cause of a complex attribute like the ability to drum or to swim the butterfly or even more so, emotions and political patterns. These complex phenomena are the result of hundreds of genes working in different environments in complex ways.
Q: The political implications of arguments that behaviors like criminality are based on genetics, as opposed socioeconomic conditions (broadly speaking), seem to have very ominous implications. History teaches us that such assertions have led to terrible events, including slavery and genocide.
A: There is no scientific argument in Wade’s book for linking race to genetics to complex traits. Wade can’t identify anything like a form of a gene (an allele), differences in frequency of that allele or anything else that could with any plausibility explain histories of, say, domestication, forms of governance, and affiliative behavior. He admits that his race-gene explanations are speculative, but they are not even on the map of plausible.
Wade’s house of cards falls down because of two scientific errors. First, thinking races are real and second, thinking genetic differences among races are behind differences in wealth and the like. Wrong and wrong.
Q: Despite being based in those scientific errors, as you put it, the book has seems to have been greeted quite favorably in mainstream media. Fareed Zakaria on his popular Sunday morning show on CNN, deemed this an important book. The Wall Street Journal, in promoting the book, dug up the infamous Charles Murray, who co-wrote the fully discredited book The Bell Curve about how Black people and other oppressed nationalities are genetically inferior in intelligence. How do you respond to this acclaim on the level of the science involved?
A: The reviews, the plentiful on-line discussion of the book, sales and attention exposes cultural beliefs. The right and extreme right loves it. This includes virulent anti-immigration websites like VDARE and white supremacist groups. David Duke ran a radio show on Wade’s book. Their only complaint is that Wade is stating the obvious: that god or evolution color coded races from dark to white with whites getting the better of most everything.
Scientifically, this argument—and the book—is a sham. It is an embarrassment to the New York Times. Wade had for years been skewing his reporting in a way that accepted all genetic claims (to explain human behavior and phenomena like social inequality), and left out anything like capitalist exploitation that was not natural or pre-ordained. Similarly, he championed papers that suggested anything that supported assertions of racial differences. His book, however, free of reportage, shows his racism behind a veneer of genetics. Wade asserts that race is real and relies on a couple of scientific papers to buttress his assertion. But even here, he misinterprets these papers.
When he gets into the historical and political implications of so-called race differences his book goes even more into fantasy land. The basic argument is that we have found a tiny average difference in an allele (or have not but might) and who knows, there might be other tiny differences, and who knows, these might be important. And over here, we see some differences in something like crime or wealth or whatever and maybe that tiny genetic difference explains the thing we saw. Oh, and we’re not considering colonialism or slavery, oh, let’s not.
I have to say, this is not really a book about science. Wade’s book shows how little he understands about the sciences he has been writing about and the scientific process. Wade says that science should be free of politics. (I say that this is impossible. Science is in the service of humanity. And that is politics.) Paradoxically, Wade’s psycho-pseudo-science is all about politics: defending racial hierarchies in wealth and hanging on to the status quo.
Q: You’ve just pointed to some profound social and political implications of this book and the way it is being promoted in these times of extreme inequality in this country, and around the world, and the historical and social, economic and political factors behind those things—like colonialism and slavery as you point out. And how Wade’s book serves to—as you put it “defend racial hierarchies in wealth and hanging on to the status quo.” And again, this is without scientific evidence. Yet, the book will have or already is having a very bad impact, right?
A: Although critiques of the book have been many and strong from those who work in the fields of genetic, history and human variation, I am afraid that the book (and the arguments it reverberates and reinforces) will still do tremendous harm. Heuristically, one might consider two audiences. The first audience, “true believers,” are convinced of the naturalness of racial hierarchies. White Supremacists, for example take the book as support for their position. They will continue to use it to legitimize their racism.
I am, however, even more concerned about another group: those without well formed beliefs, such as young individuals and others who have not yet formed an intractable position. I am extremely disturbed by the possibility that individuals without access to counter arguments will read Wade’s book and think that it all makes sense. That would be a terrible thing.
A friend just told me that he met a high school teacher is a highly educated community (Amherst, Massachusetts) and that this teacher and his partner were reading the book a second time. They wanted to make sure they got it all. But this teacher should be using his critical thinking skills and knowledge, rather than accepting what he reads as true. If he falls prey, what can we expect from those less educated? That is disturbing.
On the other hand, I have faith in the open minds of younger individuals. It can seem counterintuitive to say that race is not real genetically because we seem so able to divide individuals into races based on their appearance. But if one thinks about the actual data and processes that lead to variation, then it is like seeing that the world is round for the first time. It is an “ah ha” moment. And youngsters seem most able to get there because they have fewer preconceived biases.
Q: You’ve been talking about what race is not. That humans are all one species not genetically divided into distinct biological groups, as Wade claims, that coincide with what people see as race. Does race have a scientific meaning when talking about human beings?
A: The best Wade can do is say that races are obvious and that the actual classification doesn’t matter. Well, obvious is not a criteria for truth. And if classification and race grouping are not clear then one can’t use them scientifically.
In science, race has been used in two ways. First, race has been used to identify individuals, especially in the field of forensics. Second, race has been used as a causal variable, for example as a risk factor for disease in medicine. Let’s take a quick look at the problems with both uses—where, to borrow a phrase, the rubber hits the road.
Forensic scientists are asked to check a “race box” if they find a body. They think they are good at checking the right box. But my research suggests that they are not. A formula that works in one place where it is developed works less well the further one moves away in time and place, to the point where it might be no better than a coin flip. The reason why is simple: race is socially defined and biology and the social definitions change from place to place. Color lines change. So who is white in Boston in 1914 is different in 2014 and different even more in Boise in 2014.
The same instability of race invades medicine. So, for example, a study in the 1950s suggests that bone loss varies by race based on individuals who were born decades earlier. That study freezes in time the notion that there are race differences in the risk of bone fractures. But it is never repeated so we never know if it is still true. Moreover, we do not know if the original difference was because of genetics or the embodied experience (stress, poor nutrition, etc.) of living in a racialized and racist society.
I used to say that race isn’t biological. But that is not true because there are profound racial differences in health. Racism gets under the skin. Racism is biological.
Q: You are saying, racism has a profound affect on the lives of humans, including on their biology (like their health and even lives), right? But there is no biological foundation for breaking humans into races.
A: Humans do not have races or subspecies. It isn’t even close. What is clear is that the amount of variation within any so-called race is so great that it simply renders unimportant the small average differences one could find among races.
Q: In an article you wrote, you said Wade doesn’t know the difference between a theory and a fact, and that he doesn’t understand the scientific process. Would you elaborate on how you see that difference, and why it is important?
A: Yes, this is important. Wade mistakes the facts that humans vary (based on data, observation) with a theory (we are divided into races) used to explain variation. Race is not a fact, rather it is a discredited theory used to explain variation. Wade can’t comprehend the difference: human variation (facts) are real but race (theory) is not. Race as an explanatory theory is a tautology—there is no process to go from theory to fact. It is a thing trying to explain itself. As I said above, evolution and history are processes. Those processes explain the facts of variation (and they have nothing to do with race).
Q: If I understand you correctly, you’re saying methodologically Wade blurs the distinction between identifying a pattern, or a perceived pattern, on the one hand, and the necessary rigorous scientific process of analysis and testing that must take place before that pattern or perceived pattern is identified as a broader explanation (a theory)? In this case, saying essentially: Well, some “races” are poorer than others, higher official crime rates, and different “races” have visible differences, thus there is an element of inherent biological factors behind that inequality? And you are arguing that a) even if there were significant defining biological differences within the species of human beings that had a relationship to race, you would have to know much more, and have a much larger context to understand how that related to things like poverty or crime; and b) there are no such biological factors. Am I understanding you correctly?
A: Human variation is explained by evolution and history. Those are grand processes, and processes that have nothing to do with race.
Q: You have written: “I have a long political and scientific interest in how race became reified (made real) and is still frequently used as if it was a ‘natural’ reality, rather than a politically useful cultural meme.” Why is that important—both in terms of the political and social implications, but also in epistemological terms—how we humans understand how we got here, so to speak, and why the world is the way it is (and how it might be changed)?
A: Explanations are powerful. We are meaning making beings. And one of the biggest myths we have told ourselves is that race differences in health, wealth and access to resources are natural and inevitable. This myth is powerful because it lets white and powerful individuals off the hook. But the deplorable differences in wealth and health are not divine will or natural. They are not in the genes. They are the result of history, racial ideologies and racist institutions.
Q: And if this inequality is not natural or inevitable, there is a moral imperative to change?
A: If we see race differences in wealth and health as due to social institutions, rather than nature, then we, as justice, kind and sentient beings, have an obligation to right that wrong.
Q: Thank you for making time in your busy schedule to discuss these important questions for our readers.
A: My pleasure! Thank you too for the opportunity to engage with you and your readers.
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