Race: The Reality of HumanDifferencesby Vincent Sarich & Frank MieleWestview Press: 2004. 320 pp. $27.50

Robert N. Proctor

This is a disturbing book, especially giventhe stature of its primary author, VincentSarich, as one of the founding pioneers ofmolecular anthropology. In 1967, in a paperwith Allan Wilson, Sarich, then a graduatestudent at the University of California,Berkeley, used a simple protein-molecularclock to show that humans share a commonancestor with the great apes from as recentlyas 5 million years ago — overturning previ-ous estimates of more 20 million years.

Here he teams up with Frank Miele, asenior editor at Skeptic magazine, to lamentthe neglect of “racial realities” by social sci-entists. The voice is one of loners crusadingagainst conventional wisdom, although thebook also reads as if it were a legal brief pre-pared for use in court to counter affirmativeaction. The authors’ ‘case for race’ drawsheavily on contentious claims by raciolo-gists such as Arthur R. Jensen and J. Philippe Rushton, notorious for having postulatednatural racial hierarchies in intelligence,criminality, athletic performance, sexualendowment and the capacity to accumulatewealth. This is a shame, because there aregood reasons to believe that certain aspects of race are very real, and that important questions of human origins, prehistoricmigrations and medical therapeutics can befruitfully addressed by properly re-examin-ing human biovariation.

Here, though, we have an exercise inbombast and overstatement.The book beginsby claiming that, throughout history, peoplehave always had pretty much the same con-ception of race.Miele explains their method-ology: “Vince suggested that I (Frank Miele)search the anthropology library at the Uni-versity of California-Berkeley for examplesof the way ancient civilizations … describedthemselves and other races in their art, theirliterature, and their oral tradition. Did theydistinguish races … as we do today?” Basedon this quick review, the authors concludethat people from ancient Egypt, Greece,Rome, India, China and the Islamic world allsorted peoples “based on the same set ofcharacteristics — skin colour, hair form, andhead shape” that we do today. As evidence,the authors display an Egyptian jug with anegroid head on one side and a rather European-looking face on the other, fromwhich they infer a universal “common sense”reality of race.

Flaws in this book are so numerous that it would be difficult to list them all. Long passages are quoted without attribution,and many strong claims are presented withlittle or no supporting evidence.We hear thatchildren as young as three classify people onthe basis of racial characteristics that theyalready recognize as immutable.The authorspostulate “an inborn tendency to sort peopleinto groups” and a “module” in the humanbrain that predisposes people to distinguishan “us” from a “them”. There are blanketassertions that “the Greeks believed in race”and that “few of us resent a rich kinsman orcoethnic”. Historians will be disturbed tohear that Giordano Bruno was burned at thestake for affirming that “the earth was thecenter of the universe”, an assertion which,like several others in this volume, comes closer to the truth when inverted.

Stronger claims are made that border on the incendiary. In a chapter attackingaffirmative action, the authors write that “alarge number of white Americans harbor the suspicion that all minority members in high-status positions are there only becauseof affirmative action and not because ofability or achievement”. A large number?Where’s the evidence? The authors write that“All around the world downwardly mobilemales who perceive themselves as beingdeprived of wealth, status, and especiallyfemales by up-and-coming members of adifferent race are ticking time bombs”. Timebombs? Again,where’s the evidence?

Sarich and Miele make similar claims in adiscussion of South African plans under theapartheid regime to develop “pigmentationweapons” that would “target only black peo-ple”. After outlining how such weaponsmight be developed, the authors proposeracial intermarriage as a “best defense” butalso warn that “intermarriage, particularly of females of the majority group with malesof a minority group, is the factor most likely

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to cause some extremist terrorist group tofeel the need to launch such an attack”.The authors add some old-style eugenicsrhetoric, worrying about “plunging” birthrates in the United States and WesternEurope and the “evolutionary irony lurkingon the horizon” that, having conquered andcolonized the world, Europeans and theirdescendants now risk bringing about “theirown extinction”from having too few babies.

Towards the end of this book, the authorstell of a bioanthropologist colleague, HenryHarpending, who was travelling in the Kala-hari and got stuck when his pick-up brokedown. An ingenious bushman in the partysuggested jacking up the vehicle and jump-starting it by running a rope around the backtyres and pulling. The trick worked, and theauthors are clearly puzzled that an Africancould have come up with such an imagina-tive solution, given “the mean sub-SaharanIQ of 70”. Harpending’s explanation is that“bushmen are really quick and clever”and inthis respect quite different from their “blackAfrican neighbors”. Sarich and Miele thenponder whether the development of agricul-ture may have dulled the intelligence of thecontinent’s former hunter-gatherers.

What I found remarkable about this story,however, is how willing the authors are toaccept this low figure for the sub-Saharan IQ,based on so little supporting evidence. Theauthors cite an apartheid-era study of a SouthAfrican high school and an ‘in press’ litera-ture review by Rushton and Jensen, ignoringthe many ways that such a sweeping andgrotesque generalization could be flawed.

The authors scoff at the idea of race as asocial construct, but the historical accountthey present is full of idealized white-and-black polarities. The authors side with ErnstHaeckel over Rudolf Virchow, MadisonGrant over Franz Boas, and Carleton Coonover Ashley Montagu. There is little effort to explore which of the myriad historical

Racial realities or bombast?When is it helpful to categorize people according to race?

True colours? The Greeks and Egyptians seemed to be aware of differences in race.

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‘realities’ postulated for race might havealternative explanations.

I suspect that the impact of this bookcould be the opposite of the authors’ inten-tions. There is much to be said for studyinghuman genetic variability to explore ques-tions of prehistoric ancestry and migration,and to investigate how different human pop-ulations respond to medical interventions.But the leap from these to immoderate spec-ulations about the permanence of present-day inequalities is likely to give sceptics evenmore reason to question racial ‘realities’.

Anthropology has a mixed history ofdealings with human racial injustice (thinkof Carleton Coon’s view that Africansbecame human some 200,000 years afterwhite Europeans). The present book, so fullof flim-flam and loose speculations, is morelikely to re-arm than to deflate sceptics. ■

Robert N. Proctor is in the Department of History,Pennsylvania State University, University Park,Pennsylvania 16802, USA.

book to develop quantitative cyclical theoryin two main areas: territorial expansion andcontraction in agrarian states, and popu-lation growth and decline in relation to political stability. He has taken care to writefor historians: the verbal theories and math-ematics are clearly presented, and the work is thoroughly researched and erudite.

Turchin bases his ‘mature’ approach onthe work of the fourteenth-century Arab his-torian Ibn Khaldun, who sought to explainwhy desert nomads topple North Africandynasties. Ibn Khaldun argued that thefounders of dynasties rule well and tax lightly.Succeeding generations, though, develop ataste for luxury, resulting in higher taxationand declining welfare. Late-phase dynastiesare challenged by desert nomads who havehigh degrees of asabiya, defined as collectivesolidarity or a capacity for collective action.Nomads with asabiya topple dynasties thatlack it, starting the cycle anew. Ibn Khaldunperhaps meant his theory as a critique, butTurchin takes it literally. It might be calledthe ‘team spirit’ theory of history.

In his ‘metaethnic frontier theory,’Turchin proposes that areas where imperialfrontiers coincide with major ethnic bound-aries function as ‘asabiya incubators’. Highasabiya allows a peripheral people to expandas an old empire contracts. Turchin buildsthis idea into quantitative simulations ofexpansion and contraction in European territorial history from AD 500 to 1900. Thequantification is built on ordinal scaling,judgemental assignment of values, and arbi-trary cut-offs.

Like Polybius, Turchin can mimic actualoutcomes despite having a dubious socialtheory. Metaethnic frontier theory is flawedby its primordial assumptions (for example,that ethnic groups are ‘quintessential humangroups’ and that conflict is innate) and by failures of fact and logic. Turchin ignoresproblems of complexity in large societies,and asymmetrical warfare between states and

non-states. States, of course, inculcate some-thing akin to asabiya in their armed forces.Ask soldiers why they fight and they willanswer: “For my buddies” — rather likenomads. Asabiya was strangely ineffectiveduring the centuries when North Africannomads failed to expel the Carthaginians,Romans, Vandals and Byzantines. And onewonders about the ethnic solidarity ofRenaissance armies that were filled with mer-cenaries, a matter that Turchin ignores whenhe simulates European territorial changes.

‘Demographic-structural theory’ buildson Jack Goldstone’s excellent work on popu-lation growth and state breakdown, and on Turchin’s own experience in populationbiology. This exercise quantifies how polit-ical instability and population interact.Unsurprisingly, Turchin’s models show thatinteraction between population dynamicsand a state’s fiscal health produces cycles ofexpansion and breakdown.

This theory is on firmer ground thanasabiya, but much of the discussion remainssimplistic. In his population model, Turchintreats élites like an inert organic mass thatexpands and contracts with resources, ignor-ing the organizational aspects of hierarchy.A need for organization may raise the pro-portion of élite administrators regardless ofresources,as in the later Roman Empire.

Turchin cites archaeological settlementdata from Roman Gaul that display twopeaks and troughs.The relationship betweenthe number of archaeological sites and population is complex, as Turchin acknowl-edges. If this pattern reflects populationoscillations, he asserts, then unchecked population growth in the first peak led toinsolvency and breakdown. In fact, neitherpeak reflects simple population growth. Thefirst (from the first to the second century AD)came from Romanization and settlement ofveterans, the second (in the fourth century)from changes in taxation.

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Plotting the downfallof societyHistorical Dynamics: Why StatesRise and Fallby Peter TurchinPrinceton University Press: 2003. 264 pp.£22.95, $35

Joseph A. Tainter

In one of history’s most extraordinary fore-casts, the Greek historian Polybius in thesecond century BC predicted the demise ofthe Roman Empire some 600 years before itfell. Like others of his time, Polybius held acyclical view of history in which societies,like biological systems, develop throughgrowth, maturity, senescence and death.Polybius might be more celebrated todayhad he based his prediction on a differenttheory. Retrospectively, his forecast was nomore challenging than anticipating thedeath of an ox.

Cyclical theories, like the phenomenathey postulate, come and go. They have beenespoused by historians from Polybius toOswald Spengler. Serious historians havelong held cyclical theories in disrepute, butnow they’re back, pushed in part by biolo-gists who are accustomed to cycling or pulsing in such systems as predator–preyrelationships and ecosystem development.C. S. Holling, for example, has developed anuanced cyclical view in his ‘panarchy’ theo-ry, and Kenneth Watt has explored cyclingin population,resources and economics.

Beginning with the aphorism that a discipline usually matures only after it hasdeveloped mathematical theory, populationbiologist Peter Turchin attempts in this

Pride comes before a fall: artist Ippolito Caffi shows how the Roman Empire was left in ruins.

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