Darwinism, Democracy, and Race

American Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology in the Twentieth Century

John Jackson, David Depew

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351810777
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Darwinism, Democracy, and Race examines the development and defence of an argument that arose at the boundary between anthropology and evolutionary biology in twentieth-century America. In its fully articulated form, this argument simultaneously discredited scientific racism and defended free human agency in Darwinian terms.

The volume is timely because it gives readers a key to assessing contemporary debates about the biology of race. By working across disciplinary lines, the book's focal figures--the anthropologist Franz Boas, the cultural anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, and the physical anthropologist Sherwood Washburn--found increasingly persuasive ways of cutting between genetic determinist and social constructionist views of race by grounding Boas's racially egalitarian, culturally relativistic, and democratically pluralistic ethic in a distinctive version of the genetic theory of natural selection. Collaborators in making and defending this argument included Ashley Montagu, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Lewontin.

Darwinism, Democracy, and Race will appeal to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and academics interested in subjects including Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, Sociology of Race, History of Biology and Anthropology, and Rhetoric of Science.

1 Introduction

In the footsteps of Franz Boas

Evolution, politics, and race: how things stand

Two conflicting facts lie at the heart of the American experience. First, the United States was for a time the only democratic republic since antiquity to have survived more than a few years. Lincoln may have been right to say that if the Union was not preserved government of, by, and for the people might perish from the earth. Second, no less after the Civil War than before it the policy of this country’s regime was racist. The Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal identified this persistent tension as An American Dilemma (Myrdal 1944). Any claim to fame that the United States might enjoy – and its oft-asserted “exceptionalism” shows that its citizens do indeed crave fame for their democracy in the eyes of history – has rested on efforts to erase the shame of slavery, segregation, and other forms of racism.

It is a truism that World War II, the end of colonialist imperialism abroad, and the Civil Rights Movement at home changed how we talk about race. Still, racism has survived the revelation that “race” is an ideological (by)product of European globalization, even if it is no longer assumed to be a primordial category of our being or an inference from evolutionary biology. Racism lurks in the social world as “institutional racism” and “racism without racists” (Bonilla-Silva 2014). Periodically, it resurfaces in political life, sometimes speaking the language of contemporary evolutionary theory in order to confer legitimacy on itself, but at the same time muttering under its breath the language of the discarded science of biological racism. On the very day of the sixty-first anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, which declared racial segregation of schools unconstitutional, the website of Richard Spencer, the man credited with reinvigorating the “alt-Right” that contributed to Donald Trump’s electoral victory, posted an article declaring that muddle-headed liberal social scientists were waging a “war on human nature” in denying racial differences in intelligence. According to its author, the notion of racial equality “emerged in the 1960s and had, by the 1970s, become an unchallengeable orthodoxy” (Roth 2015). The article relied on race/IQ researchers such as Arthur Jensen and Richard Herrnstein as well as the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson and the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker to claim that, “Darwinian evolution revolutionized the natural sciences. The social sciences have been immune for far too long.” We will encounter these figures again.

Especially under the present circumstances, it is important to understand the scientific basis of racial egalitarianism. Contra the article just cited, it arose long before the 1960s and when it did it used the language of Darwinism to undo scientific racism, which was an entrenched feature of late nineteenth century non-Darwinian evolutionary biology. Working with the evolutionary geneticists Theodosius Dobzhansky and Leslie C. Dunn, the anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Ashley Montagu were pivotal during and after World War II in taking scientific credibility away from American “racialists,” as they called them (Montagu 1942; Benedict and Weltfish 1943; Dunn and Dobzhansky 1946). They succeeded for at least three reasons. First, centered at New York City’s Columbia University, they could leverage new means of influence opened up by the ideological and military victory over Nazi racism, most straightforwardly in the 1950 and 1951 UNESCO Statements on Race that Montagu and Dunn drafted with help from Dobzhansky (UNESCO 1950, 1951). UNESCO’s first Director, Julian Huxley, a biologist, supported their work, not least because he himself was so deeply immersed in the conceptual framework on which Dobzhansky, Montagu, and Dunn based their arguments that he gave it its name: the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis (Huxley 1942).¹

Second, this initiative was both interdisciplinary and carried on at the permeable boundary between academic and public spheres of discourse. Dobzhansky’s claim that natural selection generally favors the evolution of flexible, even anticipatory, ways of meeting environmental contingencies reinforced the signature proposition of Benedict’s and Montagu’s mentor Franz Boas, the founding father of American academic anthropology, that the equally distributed capacity of humans for acculturation renders racial differences both mutable and trivial (Boas 1911; Dobzhansky 1937, 1951; Chapter 2 of this book). What could be a more “plastic” way of dealing with changing environments, Montagu and Dobzhansky argued in a 1947 paper in Science, than our species’ naturally selected cultural way of learning and living (Dobzhansky and Montagu 1947)? Admittedly, there was a lot of “black-boxing” of details in this conjecture. There still is. But in the decades since, this sketch of the process of anthropogenesis has continued to facilitate solid discoveries by blocking assumptions that put human races on different rungs of an evolutionary latter. It placed out of bounds the “stadial” thinking, as we call it, that underpins much racist argumentation.

Boas had long been arguing that refusing to rank-order races carries with it a presumption against legal barriers to the considerable amount of interracial mixing that regularly occurs in societies free of caste-like constraints (Boas 1928, 1940). Dunn, Dobzhansky, and their anthropological collaborators anchored his opposition to anti-miscegenation laws in the population-genetic approach to evolutionary theory of the Modern Synthesis. Their arguments informed Supreme Court decisions against racially segregated schools and laws barring racial intermarriage (Brown v. Board of Education 1954; Loving v. Virginia 1967; see also Jackson 2001, 17–42; Pascoe 2009, 124–128). But the collaboration did not end there. The mid-century alliance of American biologists and anthropologists also proposed that natural selection is congenial to racially and culturally pluralist democratic institutions (Dobzhansky 1962a; Beatty 1994). How these claims were articulated and defended is the focus of the five studies comprising this book.

In these studies, we highlight a third reason why these arguments gained a foothold in the postwar period. The arguments were persuasive because they were based on science better than the outdated approaches to classification and tendentious appeals to single genes as fixed determinants of traits they challenged. The Modern Synthesis proposed unifying biology’s diverse fields by viewing them in the light of evolution and by viewing evolution as a process in which the combined effects of genetic mutation and recombination, natural selection, and several auxiliary factors interact. Evolutionary biologists and biological anthropologists still use these methods, concepts, mechanisms, and inventory of evolutionary scenarios, even if since the 1940s they have added many more tools to their kit.

According to the Modern Synthesis, the interaction of evolution’s various factors comes into view only by way of statistical and probabilistic representations. From the perspective of “population thinking,” as the makers of the Synthesis called it, evolution is not development or ontogeny writ large, as many biologists previously thought. Rather, it consists in context-dependent shifts over multi-generational time in the relative proportions of genotypes in races and species. Viewed in this way, neither races nor species can possibly be, or embody, types. Races are biogeographically distinctive populations that contain a great deal of genetic diversity, but can interbreed. Species are populations that, having evolved isolating mechanisms, are reproductively closed (Dobzhansky 1937, 11; 1951, 6, 138, 261). The explanatory power of the Modern Synthesis has enabled anti-racist and anti-eugenic theorizing to flourish in both evolutionary biology and biological anthropology since the 1940s because racialism and eugenics are hostage to the typological thinking that the Synthesis rejects. In the 1950s, the physical anthropologist Sherwood Washburn used this insight to transform biological anthropology from its previous fixation on static types to a dynamic understanding of the “functional complexes” that link our morphology to our behavior as encultured beings (Washburn 1951, 1953). Anxious to maintain the unity of Boas’s “four fields” (cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics) as a bulwark against racialist thinking, Washburn used what he dubbed the New Physical Anthropology to insist that anthropologists of all four flavors share a common goal, form a community of inquiry, and together enable the discipline of anthropology to present our species as a unified “family of man” (Haraway 1989). He largely succeeded.

In recent years, however, the new tools of gene sequencing and “genetic cluster” analysis have revived the notion that the complement of genes each of us has correlates fairly well with the received racial categories we use to socially mark off our own and others’ communities of descent. “Racial research” writes sociologist Catherine Bliss, “has reemerged and proliferated to occupy scientific concerns to an extent unseen since early twentieth-century eugenics” (Bliss 2012, 2). The mid-century Synthesizers certainly knew of correlations between races and particular traits, especially differential vulnerability to various hereditary diseases, but they rejected the “essentialist” implication that particular traits reveal racially distinctive profiles that integrate a large array of morphological, physiological, psychological, and behavioral characteristics. They also rejected the deterministic implication that our genes circumscribe our life prospects (Dobzhansky 1962a; Washburn 1963). Yet recently some gene-sequencing scientists and pundits who laud their work as “cutting edge” have preached just such essentialist and deterministic implications. The science journalist Nicholas Wade, for example, has suggested that Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese Chinese, and Icelanders have successfully embraced advanced capitalism in ways that the transplanted African population of Haiti has not because their genomes have been co-adapted by natural selection to environmental challenges not too different from those they still face (Wade 2014, 14). Wade suspects that transported populations and “mixed races” (as if all races weren’t mixed) such as African-Americans labor under a particularly “troublesome inheritance,” as the title of his book puts it. “This is just what would be expected,” he writes, “for populations that had to adapt to different challenges on each continent. The genes specially affected by natural selection control not only traits like skin color and nutritional metabolism, but also some aspects of brain function” that Wade admits are “not yet well understood” but he assures us soon will be (Wade 2014, 4).

For Wade culture does not play the formative role it does for Montagu, Dobzhansky, and Washburn. His implication is that the greater authority of molecular genetics and computer-assisted analyses of clusters of allelic differences over the older and supposedly cruder methods of genetic analysis to which the Modern Synthesis was confined before Crick, Watson, and the Human Genome Project lends new support to views about racial divisions that Boas’s mid-century followers were, it is alleged, too quick to dismiss purely for ideological reasons. Speaking more or less on behalf of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), biological anthropologists such as Augustin Fuentes and Alan Goodman challenge this narrative by defending American anthropology’s long and productive alliance with the population biology of the Modern Synthesis (Fuentes 2012; Goodman 2013; Callaway 2014). They labor, however, under a disadvantage: the received view of historians of race, eugenics, and evolutionary science was that, after the war, it became “politically correct” to be anti-racist, but the science itself did not change much (Provine 1973; Samelson 1978; Provine and Russell 1986; Barkan 1992s). Implied, if not stated, is a suggestion that even Dobzhansky and Dunn remained eugenicists at heart and, in spite of their good intentions and self-deceptions, showed themselves in the practices and prejudices of everyday life to be almost as racist as the next guy (Paul 1984, 1994, 1998). Those who celebrate correlations between gene sequences and conventionally identified continental races perpetuate this historiographical commonplace.

In embracing the conception of race that the Synthesis sought to evade, Wade is confident that racism will recede as knowledge of racially correlated risks leads to therapies that will help individuals no matter what their race (Wade 2014, 37–38). He seems confident that those who analyze these risks will be more empirically scrupulous than their eugenicist and racist forebears. Those less sure that today’s scientists have abandoned their predecessors’ prejudices have pointed out, however, that enthusiasts for correlating “races” with allelic clusters and distinctive gene sequences, many with no known biological function or adaptive significance, have no way of calling into question the racial categories with which they begin. If you had only genetic markers for height, cranial capacity, skin coloration, or susceptibility to malaria you would not discover the human species dividing itself even approximately into three, five, or even more continental races (Fuentes 2012, 91–93).

Realizing this, one might alternatively respond to proposals like Wade’s by advocating returning to the population genetic approach to the term “race,” this time really giving it a try (Fullwiley 2014). The difficulty is that the very idea of race may be too socially laden under any description to have biological significance. Montagu urged this point in a friendly decades-long debate with Dobzhansky that we examine in Chapter 4. He did not question the population-genetic turn in evolutionary biology. On the contrary, Montagu sought out Dobzhansky as a tutor precisely because he took that turn (Montagu 1942; see Gannett 2001, 2003; Chapter 4 of this book). By 1950 he was arguing that use of “race” should be confined to experts looking for populations that “differ in the frequency of one or more genes”...