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| Home > Reviews > RACE (The Reality of Human Differences) by Vincent Sarich + Frank Miele |
| RACE (The Reality of Human Differences) by Vincent Sarich + Frank Miele | | Date Created: Mar 21, 2005, 10:17 PM |
 In the psych department at Princeton University in '72/'73, I recall getting it drilled into my head that race was an artificial distinction among humans and that there were "more differences within races than between them". Like a lot of thinking that got started in the 60's, politically correct thinking was more important than reality and it has only gotten worse.
Now comes a book that's as definitive on the subject of race as The Bell Curve was on the subject of the distribution of abilities and characteristics of groups, including races. The book is RACE (The Reality of Human Differences) by Vincent Sarich + Frank Miele. I don't think this will be a bestseller and it certainly won't be touched by the mainstream media, but not because it's not important. Read it and understand. But it will step on what you think is correct. The subject is about as taboo as it gets.
In fact it's hard to even review such a book. There is such a thing as racial divisions of humans and we'd best acknowledge reality and deal with it rather than engage in PC science. The take home point if you follow the reasoning and the proof regarding racial differences is that humans need to be treated as individuals and not as groups. Or as the authors put it, "...the most important thing government can do is to remove all reference to group identity from both statutory and administrative law and to focus instead on enhancing the potential for achievement by individuals". Fat chance of that. As the authors point out elsewhere, government can't improve on what individuals can do for themselves.
"The meritocracy recognizes that there are certain harsh realities in life. Society is not omnipotent. It can provide opportunity, but it cannot mandate that individuals will make equal use of those opportunities. It can in no sense make groups equal. It cannot level up -- only down -- and any such leveling is necessarily at the expense of individual freedom and, ultimately, the total level of accomplishment."
That's a more general way of saying what the real damage of affirmative action and the drive to make everyone equal. You can only level down. Unfortunately the prevailing PC science view ignores the reality and denies even the existence of racial differences.
"Individuals are not equal, nor are races. They cannot be. That can sometimes be a problem; for more often, it is an opportunity. But there will be neither an opportunity made available nor results to take advantage of if we cannot accept that we can't make it come out "even". "
"...Unless we pursue such study, our understanding of our species, our origin, and our place in nature will remain captive to religious or political dogma. Widespread rejection of the evolutionary perspective by religious zealots, whether humanist or fundamentalist, and by political partisans, whether liberal or conservative, does not bode well at a time when the issues of environmental perservation, interethnic conflict, and inequalities in the distribution of wealth and status have taken center stage. The key concept here is variation..."
"...To summarize, if we employ a straightforward definition of race -- for example, a population within a species that can be readily distinguished from other such populations on genetic grounds alone (that is, using only heritable features) -- then there can be no doubt of the existence of a substantial number of human races. And the simple answer to the objection that races are not discrete, blending into one another as they do, is this: They're supposed to blend into one another, and categories need not be discrete. It is not for us to impose our cognitive difficulties upon Nature; rather we need to adjust them to Nature."
"Races are populations, or groups of populations, within a species, that are separated geographically from other such populations or groups of populations and distinguishable from them on the basis of heritable features."
Amazingly as far back as the 13th century, Roger Bacon understood what PC science was all about.
"In his 1265 Opus Maius (Major Work), Roger Bacon identified the causes of error as authority, custom, popular prejudice, and the concealment of ignorance with the pretense of knowledge. According to Bacon, there were two methods of acquiring knowledge, argument and experience, but "the strongest argument proves nothing so long as the conclusions are unverified by experience." "
In it's own way, this book is as tough to read as 102 Minutes, but ultimately this book is more important for the entire human species.
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