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Human Variation: Races, Types, and Ethnic Groups (6th Edition) |
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Home: You are here: Human Variation: Races, Types, and Ethnic Groups (6th Edition) |
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Human Variation: Races, Types, and Ethnic Groups (6th Edition)  Rating: Rating:  - Science at a low levelI have very mixed feelings about this book. It is a good introduction to the human DNA, Chromosomes and Genes, and it is also good at showing the diversity around the world when it comes to Blood Groups, Enzymes and Hemoglobin Variants. But Mr. Molnar is so afraid of admitting that races exists that he hides away important facts that he don't like. He strongly denies that there are different behavior among the races when the opposite actually is prooved all over. Just ask prison officers and teachers. That Negroids has up to 20 % more of the Hormone Testosterone than Whites is a so importent fact that it indeed should have been paid attention to in this book, but it is not mentioned at all! Where else than in a book like this should it have been discussed??? This high Testosterone-level makes people more aggressive and sexually active and is an importent reason for behavioral differences among the races. It explains, among many other things, the high crime-rate among Negroids (149 per 100 000 is a murder or rapist in USA), and the rellative low crime-rate among Whites (42 per 100 000 in USA) because Whites have less Testosteron. I know this is taboo, but it is altso facts that Molnar obvious hide in his book to stay politically correct. When there are theories that not fit in with Molnar's bias, he just call them pseudo-science instead of trying to argue against it. An excample is the measure of the skulls of different races. This has been done in more than a hundred years and always brings out the same results; that Asians have biggest brains, Europeans middle, an Negroids the smallest. A hundred years with IQ-testing shows also a relationship between races concerning brain-size an intelligence. Molnar tries to cope with this by pointing to a couple of writers long time ago who had medium to small brains, and by this "argument" prove that there are no correlation with brain-size and IQ. As if there is an eternal rule that writers are more intelligent than others! This is science at a very low level. Molnar must know that the brains of two random writers from long ago can't proove anything about brain-size and IQ among races. In Norway, where I live, you have to pass an exam called Exam Philosophicum if you want to study at the university, and during The Exam Philosophicum you learn, among many other things, logical argumentation. The way Molnar argue wouldn't pass this test at all. To find out the correlation between IQ and brain-size you have to measure a lot of brains from different races. This have been done in more than a hundred years and the result are always the same: Asians have biggest brains and score highest on IQ-tests, Europeans in the middle, and Negroids at the bottom. This is well known facts, but Molnar call it pseudo-science and refuse to discuss it further. I think that is cowardly. In the book, Molnar don't like to divide Etnic populations into races, but suddenly he finds it useable although in attacking the IQ-results of Negroids because, as he argue, there are different "races" in Africa with different mental ability, and therefore it is wrong to test all Negroes from Sub-Sahara as if they where one race. So in attacking the IQ he suddenly find it acceptable to do divide people into races nevertheles. It is very confusing when Molnar, as an expert, try to fool the reader the way he does. But as I mentioned, the book also has it's better sides. Skip the pages about intelligence or read J. P. Rusthons book "Race, Evolution and Behavior" instead. It's a much more honest book. Rating:  - Human Variation and GeneticsMolnar's book is a wonderful introduction to human genetics, variation, and racial classification (that is, race is an illusion), just as the title suggests. Parts of the book are highly involved and technical, giving both the amateur and the professional room for learning. The book would be great for undergrads and graduate students. Rating:  - A diverse, useful, yet disorganized work on human variation.Having survived a quarter-long course in anthropology using this as a textbook, I've acquired a pretty good feel for its strengths and its faults. Let's start with the latter and work toward the former. What will bother most people is the occasionally lacking organization/illustration of the subject matter. While this is fine in a college environment, the layman can easily get lost in its pages. The chapters were probably practical enough from the author's perspective, the bulk going from one "racial" feature to another and exposing the actual evolutionary roots, but I would have liked more theoretical continuity. Also, despite the mass of excellent data, the book lacks a proper genetic analysis of human variation. Research has given us an idea of how far various conventional "groups" are from each other, genetically speaking--sometimes in direct contravention to the expected associations. This sort of analysis is elementary to tracking our remarkable journey into the far reaches of the world, and should not be omitted in a text that considers what happened in the process. As an extension of my first complaint, it's the lack of theoretical perspective which makes "A reader's" review possible. Had the author made the meta-scientific point of race being an irrelevant construct, my fellow reviewer would not have spoken of "...the big *racial* differences in size, speed, leaping ability, and muscularity...," since there are quite valid selective factors behind such variation, independent of any perceived "race." To Molnar's credit, he *does* take a look at stature in its evolutionary context. In any case, one must not turn "a feature present in people seen as belonging to a race" into "a racial feature." Accordingly, Molnar should have noted the inherent logical circularity of racial distinctions: Races are defined by certain features, and those features are racial because they define races. How do they define races? Because races have them. What defines a race? Those features. It is our perceptual emphasis on apparent differences that creates racial categories, and only secondarily do some intrepid pseudo-scientists attempt to provide a more sophisticated academic "justification" of those categories. This book is rife with detailed information to use against these sorts, but it helps to grasp the bigger picture in advance. Ultimately, Molnar fails to ask a rather philosophical question: What makes a category scientifically real? If you're going to say that races don't really "exist," the standard of existence must be made explicit. The short answer is that things are scientifically real insofar as they fit into science's theoretical machine; in this case, evolutionary theory and its applications. The concept of distinct "races" arose in less enlightened times, and it is thus incommensurable with the language of modern biology. Science has no use for it, since, functionally, there is only the genetic paint of human inheritance spread over a geographical canvas, tinted by natural selection. Internally, there is no way to rigidly divide the resulting image, since one shade blends into another through space and time; externally, the substrate and the tint are often indistinguishable. Does the blending occur in more or less dramatic ways? Certainly. However, as Molnar amply illustrates, there are no simple *primary* colors in human variation (save Homo sapiens sapiens itself), and the belief that they do exist overlooks a complex history of inheritance and selection. As a result, attributing features to those "colors" is scientifically sloppy, and socially sloppy as well. "Black" Entertainment Television, "Black" crime, "Black" culture, "Black" poverty, "Black" genetic resistance to disease: Some forget the generality of racial terms, and all hide the functional factors, be they cultural, historical, selective or deeply hereditary. Race is the ultimate red herring, and Molnar should have made that explicit. Intelligent readers will find that his data can speak for itself, or at least it will help the reader recognize that understanding can only be found in that data, which, taken unto itself, contains no meta-categories. All in all, "Human Variation, Races, Types, and Ethnic Groups" is best seen as the educated man's reference book on race, for use in illustrating your own arguments. If you're seeking a guided journey through the subject, look elsewhere. Rating:  - Ho hum textbook on what ought to be a fascinating topicEverybody is supposed to "celebrate diversity" these days, but in practice that seems to mean stomping on anybody who actually want to do it. Few things are less welcome these days in American academia than a discussion of what we all see as we walk down the street each day: the remarkable biodiversity of the human species. Only a few selectively bred species like dogs exceed humans in variability of size, color, and temperment. This textbook reviews most of the duller, politically less incendiary topics in human biodiversity: e.g., blood types, sickle cell genes for preventing malaria, and high-altitude adjustments. He shies away from the more fun topics like the big racial differences in size, speed, leaping ability, and muscularity, which we all see so vividly illustrated in the Olympics and in American pro sports. (What are all those huge Samoans doing in the NFL if human biodiversity doesn't matter much?) And, to prove that his heart is in the right place politically, Molnar mails in a pro forma denunciation of Arthur Jensen and the other Bell Curvers. Ho hum. Steve Sailer Human Variation: Races, Types, and Ethnic Groups (6th Edition) |
