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Title: Race: The Reality of Human Differences by Vincent Sarich, Frank Miele ISBN: 0-8133-4086-1 Publisher: Westview Press Pub. Date: 06 January, 2004 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.6 (5 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Doubtful races
Comment: This book has the advantage that it is by a serious human geneticist and anthropologist(Sarich--Miele seems to be purely a journalist, helping Sarich write the prose and adding some minor points). Sarich knows about human evolution and explains it well, though professionals will have various quibbles. Previous racist books have been rendered worthless by ignorance of the simplest human genetic truths. Sarich is aware that "race" is only 15% of the variance between any two distant-origin individuals, and, more important, that one can recognize any number of "races" by making finer and finer distinctions--there could be thousands of "races" in Europe alone. (Anthropologists abandoned "race" not because they don't believe in human differences, but because the number of different populations they could recognize got unmanageably large--we work with thousands now.) Sarich reasonably critiques the claims that "race does not exist," but seems not to realize that this claim, when seriously made, refers to the ridiculous "races" of American folk speech--Mexican, Latino, Asian-Pacific, Irish, Arab, and other non-biological categories. (Even "African-American" refers not to a biological population, but to a gradient from basically African to almost pure white--remember, "one drop of African blood" makes you African-American in the US.)
The book points out that human races differ enough biochemically to necessitate some differences in medical treatment. True enough (though the differences are very minor and merely statistical). But Sarich and Miele don't emphasize enough the point that this is true only of actual biological populations (Europeans vs Sub-Saharan Africans, for instance), not of folk or social races. American doctors treating African-Americans who are 98% White as if they were "Africans" are doing no one a favor.
The serious problem with this book concerns IQ differences. Here, Sarich does not control the relevant psychological and behavioral-genetic literature so well. Intelligence is now known to be affected by countless genes and environmental factors, and they do not work together in some neat, harmonious system. If local populations differ in innate intellectual gifts, this could well involve a bunch of verbally superior people next to some not-so-verbal math geniuses, or a bunch of spatial-perception hotshots next to some who are weak in that area. Sarich buys the claims of a "g factor" that underlies intelligence; this "g" shakes out of factor analyses of IQ test performance, but remains impossible to ground in genetics or brain physiology, both of which indicate a much more complex reality. It is not demonstrated in psychological performance other than standard IQ tests, either; again the evidence is for more complexity. For instance, a unique gene found among certain Amish makes them more prone to bipolar disorder, which would surely screw up their performance on at least some tests. In any case, IQ testing has avoided like poison any attempts to control for malnutrition, illness, lead poisoning, lack of knowledge of tester's language (monolingual Spanish speakers are still tested in English in my area), etc.
The worst thing in the book is that Sarich accepts the guesstimate of 70 as the IQ of Sub-Saharan Africans, which is ridiculous in view of the high levels of education and performance seen in those African cities and regions that have anything like a functioning educational system (to say nothing of adequate nutrition). An adult with a 70 IQ can barely walk or talk; African nations now produce physicists and biologists and poets. To their credit, Sarich and Miele present a lot of evidence that Africans are perfectly sharp people, but don't really know what to do with it and wind up unconvincingly trying to explain it away. (And, just to prove that African-American IQ testing problems aren't genetic, those 98% White "African-Americans" test the same as the 100% African ones.)
The other really silly thing in the book is comparing human races with breeds of dogs. Dog breeds have been artificially selected for differences in behavior and ability. Human groups have not. They are more comparable to wild subspecies of animals. If there are any demonstrated differences in intelligence and behavior between naturally evolved subspecies of any species of animal, I don't know about it.
I think this book will be valuable in that it will teach racists something about actual human evolution and variability. Above all, it will teach them that real races are, as Sarich says, "fuzzy sets"--loosely defined regional populations--not ironclad and utterly different creatures, and not the ridiculous "races" of American folk speech. It will teach them something about actual human evolution and genetics. However, psychologists and psychological anthropologists will cut it to pieces when it trespasses on their turf. (See e.g. U. Neisser, ed., THE RISING CURVE; Jencks and Phillips, ed., THE BLACK-WHITE TEST SCORE GAP.)
Rating: 4
Summary: Excellent, but goes on too long...
Comment: 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!
Rating: 5
Summary: Honesty about race
Comment: 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.
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Title: Intelligence, Race, and Genetics: Conversations with Arthur R. Jensen by Arthur Robert Jensen, Frank Miele ISBN: 081334008X Publisher: Westview Press Pub. Date: 05 November, 2002 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 by Charles Murray ISBN: 006019247X Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 21 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (3rd Edition) by J. Philippe Rushton ISBN: 0965683613 Publisher: Charles Darwin Research Inst Pr Pub. Date: May, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: A Race Against Time: Racial Heresies for the 21st Century by George McDaniel, Jared Taylor ISBN: 0965638324 Publisher: New Century Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: One Sheaf, One Vine: Racially Conscious White Americans Talk About Race by Robert S. Griffin ISBN: 1410744191 Publisher: Authorhouse Pub. Date: 01 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.50 |
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