Rating: 
Summary: Biological Theories of Race
Review: A book that concludes with the declaration that biological races do not exist and that the concept of Race . . . was socially constructed arising from the colonization of the New World and the importation of slaves, mainly from western Africa? (p. 193) merits a salute right off the bat. Of course anyone can just say such things, and a public bombarded by claims and counter-claims might be tempted to dismiss such statements as simply manifestations of ?political correctness.? In this instance, however, the author, Joseph L. Graves, Jr., is a lab geneticist, and he has made his case based upon solid science and not on feel-good social motivations. Of course, the social circumstances cannot be ignored, and in this case, the author, who identifies himself as ?an African-American intellectual? (p. 2), can speak from personal experience. The intentions are declared in the first page with the words, ? Specifically, my goal is to show the reader that there is no biological basis for separation of human beings into races and that the idea of race is a relatively recent social and political construction? (p. 1). It is race itself and the grip it has on the public mind that he is presenting as the emperor without clothes. If races are social constructs and not manifestations of biological reality, how did the universal acceptance of their existence ever come about? The structure of the book is an exploration of the development and application of that perspective from the Greeks to the present day. It gets off to a somewhat rocky start. Aristotle is credited with authorship of the Systema Naturae and the idea that living creatures are hierarchically organized in a scala naturae. In fact that title was used by Linnaeus in the 18th century. Aristotle?s Historia Animalium may have qualified him as the ?Father of the Biological Sciences,? but in it he did not arrange the creatures described in a logical hierarchy of differential worth. It was the Enlightenment application of Aristotelian logic that actually accomplished the construction of that ?Great Chain of Being,? and Linnaeus did embody that approach. After that somewhat bumpy beginning, the book gets better and better as it goes on. It really comes into its own with the discussion of the establishment of eugenics in the 19th century. In Chapter 6, Pseudoscience and the Founding of Eugenics, he characterizes its founder, Sir Francis Galton, as ?an intellectual mediocrity, a sham, and a villain? (p. 100), and he backs this up with a demonstration of why that was the case. This is worth the price of the book in the first place. In chapter 7, Graves makes the case that the leader of the American eugenics movement, Charles B. Davenport, director of the Eugenics Records Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, had engaged in ?one of the largest medical frauds of the twentieth century: the pellagra cover-up? (p. 121). The next chapter, Eugenics, Race, and Fascism, is subtitled ?The Road to Auschwitz Went Through Cold Spring Harbor.? After the subsidence of eugenic enthusiasm following the realization of its applications in Nazi Germany, Graves traces its resurgence in chapters 9 and 10. In the latter, ?The Race and IQ Fallacy,? he declares that ?No one better typifies the return to scientific racist ideology in the period after World War II than eugenicist Arthur Jensen? (p. 159), Professor emeritus of Educational Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Jensen, most recently in The g Factor: The Science of Mental Ability (1998), takes race to be a self-defined entity and assumes the existence of racial differences in mental ability as his ?default position.? This constitutes his null hypothesis although there is nothing null about it. It is a racialist assumption by definition. Graves goes on to discuss the misunderstanding and misuse of the concept of heritability by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in America (1994). Joe Graves is a laboratory scientist which is both a strength and a weakness in the book. His scientific grasp and up-to-date sources puts his presentation on a rock-solid basis. On the other side of the coin, many of his most important points are backed up in the kind of crabbed and minimalist writing that is de rigeur in scientific journals, ultimately being rendered in symbolic form as equations. This is no problem for the scientifically literate, but it will be less satisfying for the general public who could well stand to benefit from the case that is being made. The text is only 200 pages long, and could easily have been fleshed out for the general reader. As Graves shows when the occasion demands, he is quite capable of rendering things in perfectly fluent prose. One could only wish that he had kept that up throughout. Even with this caveat, however, The Emperor?s New Clothes is a fine start for thinking about race at the dawn of a new millennium. C. Loring Brace University of Michigan
Rating: 
Summary: The Emperor's has no clothes!
Review: As a Cancer reseacher I'm constantly bombarded with questions concerning the significance of race and cancer incidences and survival. We have repeatedly shown that based on patients treated on prospective randomized trials, when the quality of care is comparable, race is no longer an important factor. This book explains in a clear way why based on historical misconceptions, so many people think that race may be important . It also explains why it is not likely to be. There are numerous implications resulting from this conclusion. The most important is "judge a person by the content of their character not their race". This should be required reading for all cancer researchers!
Rating:
Summary: A cautionary tale of research bias
Review: As the title suggests, The Emperor's New Clothes lays bare the fallacy of race as a meaningful biological concept in human society. Despite the inability for science to justify race classifications in the human species, Graves explains how racists have historically abused the scientific method to promote their own agendas, such as unfounded claims for intelligence differences among the so-called races. This book provides a deeply moving account of the abuses of the race concept throughout the ages. In these pages we read about the dire consequences when a handful of researchers (intentionally or unintentionally) claim that their results prove certain members of society should be held low; thus, the book spins a cautionary tale regarding the critical need for diversity in research science. The work provides an enjoyable (yet stirring) introduction to the subject suitable for a lay audience. In addition, as evidenced by his Notes and Bibliography sections, Graves has thoroughly and meticulously researched his topic and he provides us with an invaluable list of resources for further exploration. Thus, this book is highly recommended for both the casual reader as well as the experienced scholar.
Rating: 
Summary: Postmodern Philosophy Mixed with Science
Review: C. Loring Braces's review above is a rehash of his review in the newsletter of the National Center for Science Education. It is a remarkably uncritical review. Dr. Brace stresses Dr. Graves role as a scientist. But he is also a professor of African-American Studies. Although the book shows impressive scholarship, it seems more of a political tract than a scientific one. To suggest that race is merely a "construct" is facile and wrong. This is a political line of the left that does not gain credibility merely by repitition. It is also a line imbued by disingenuousness. To paraphrase: race is a mere construct invented by the white race to justify the racism that is a characteristic of the white race. Dr. Graves is to be commended for his openess about his hatred of Sir Frances Galton, but that does not make it palatable. To blame Galton for Hitler's use of the word "eugenics" implies that Hitler's motivation was what he claimed and that he was not opportunistically stealing a term from science. Why do people give Hitler so much credit intellectually? Why can't they recongize that his motives were baser than he claimed? The connection of Galton with Hitler's later use of the term "eugenics" has always been nothing but a cheap shot.
Rating:
Summary: Splendid
Review: Contrary to the aimless rant of a previous viewer who accused the author of The Emperor's New Clothes of special pleading (Whatever that means), Joseph Graves presents a calm, highly rational and well researched refutation of two centuries of theories propounding the inferiority of people of African descent. I won't pretend to understand the very technical arguments he puts forth to reinforce his very factual claims, but I do have a grasp of the history of scientific racism and its origins. Joseph Graves does a tremendous service to the lay reader by combining hard science with a clear, socio-historical presentation and anylsis of his topic. The format of the history segment is chronological, enabling the reader to get a sense of how the fallacies of racial differentials, underpinned by warped science progressed and adapted through the decades even when discredited. Its a shame really that a book like this has to be written;a bigger shame that those who cling to ideas of the inferiority of any group in the human species makes this scholarly endeaver a necessity. But, as Graves points out, in regard to the American context, many people still believe that there are innate racial differences. Hence, out of these assumptions spring the stereotypes that are often damaging to the group so stigmatized. One thing Graves did not delve into, which I wish he had, was how dominant groups in other societies maintained control over disadvantaged, disenfranchised populations. By showing, for example how Japan's Korean minority has been the object of much of the same derision suffered by African Americans would have gone even further in bolstering the author's historical side of his argument. It would show that a group, racial, ethnic,religious, etc, wishing to stay at the top of a social hierarchy will concoct negative propaganda about lower echelon groups to maintain its position. No matter how adherents to the concept of black inferiority may argue its scientific validity, the fact remains that the architects of this thinking, as Joseph Graves has shown, were supported by an establishment bent on maintaining its power and position over dark skinned people. Of course dark skinned people were not the only victims. Whites who did not fit into the Anglo-Saxon mold also fell under the lash of this spurious science. Like the fairy tale emperer, this book does an excellent job of exposing the lies of scientific racism. The public should be saturated with more literature of this kind. It would, hopefully, bring greater enlightenment to individuals lingering in the darkness of erroneous racial ideas.
Rating: 
Summary: Neutrality?
Review: In speaking to the Louisiana education-committee on the anti darwinian-racism resolution, Mr Graves said of an infamous text of Darwin (pasted below) about civilized races that: "My evaluation of Darwin's analysis of the time, is that he was
looking at what was happening in the world around him. He saw a
European population spreading over the world and colonizing
non-European populations. He speculated as to whether particular
abilities in given groups might be responsible for that, and that
might lead to the extinction of indigenous groups. Now quite frankly if we look at the history of what happened with European colonialism, it *did* lead to the extinction of particular groups. He (Darwin) is only reporting as a scientist the objective facts. Now whether one wants to put a value on that is an entirely different question. But our job as scientists is to explain nature, to correctly and faithfully report what we see, and that's what Darwin was doing." The passage about civilized races in Descent of Man that Graves
commented on:
"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked,* will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian
and the gorilla." (C. Darwin, Descent of Man) Mr. Graves further argued that to say this passage is racist, is in effect itself a racist statement. This is so, he argued, because saying that the passage is racist, turns black people away from the science they so badly need to advance themselves.
Rating:
Summary: One Human Race
Review: Joseph Graves' The Emperor's New Clothes is a well-written exposition of the evidence for one single human race. Graves correctly points out that the human species could have developed into separate races, but that it didn't happen. This isn't a book of wishful thinking, but rather a book of hard science. If there is a political slant to the book, I didn't find it noticable. I enjoyed reading this book. A familiarity with high school-level genetics is required for a full appreciation of Graves' arguments and my 4-star rating is based on my feeling that Graves' intended this book for a wide audience, but wrote it beyond the level of many of the people it was intended for. People who are ignorant of one subject tend to be ignorant of many subjects. How many bigots actually paid attention in high school biology and remember their lessons in genetics?
Rating:
Summary: One Human Race
Review: Joseph Graves' The Emperor's New Clothes is a well-written exposition of the evidence for one single human race. Graves correctly points out that the human species could have developed into separate races, but that it didn't happen. This isn't a book of wishful thinking, but rather a book of hard science. If there is a political slant to the book, I didn't find it noticable. I enjoyed reading this book. A familiarity with high school-level genetics is required for a full appreciation of Graves' arguments and my 4-star rating is based on my feeling that Graves' intended this book for a wide audience, but wrote it beyond the level of many of the people it was intended for. People who are ignorant of one subject tend to be ignorant of many subjects. How many bigots actually paid attention in high school biology and remember their lessons in genetics?
Rating:
Summary: The results are in--"race" is real
Review: The basic premise of Joseph Graves's book is to show that there is more genetic variation "within" racial groups than there are "between" them. But before he embarks on this alleged debunking of racial classifications, he first gives the reader a history of how they came to be. It started, Graves claims, with European colonialism and exploration: "European populations subjugated the indigenous Indian nations of the New World, imported and enslaved Africans and created a hitherto nonexistent social and cultural system inextricably linked to the concept of race. Theories relating to the biology of the newly encountered populations could not help but reflect this process. For the first time, questions were posed as to whether the conquered and enslaved populations were truly human or were some subhuman varieties distinctly below Europeans on the scale of nature. The process of conquest and enslavement created the environmental conditions under which the natural (genetic) potentials of the populations involved were expressed. Thus, if naturalists of this period claimed that the African slave and the American Indian seemed less on any particular trait relative to the European, they sometimes were accurately describing what they observed." Incredibly, Graves then goes on to claim: "They made two mistakes however. First, they usually were judging these populations by some European norm of cultural accomplishment and, second, they confused the degradation imposed on these people by colonialism and slavery for their natural condition." Graves's appeal to colonialism overlooks his need to explain Europe's total dominance of Africa. To say that Europeans had better weapons and nautical technology begs the key question, namely, why Europeans weapons and nautical technology were better. Why hadn't Africans invented explosives or the science of ballistics? Additionally, to attribute these observations of "inferiority" to colonialism implies that whites have had a large effect on blacks in a short time, implying in turn a marked black/Asian difference. However, contact with Europeans, including extensive colonialism, did not lower Asian IQ 30 points below white norms. (Richard Lynn revealed in a 1991 issue of Mankind Quarterly that the average IQ of black sub-Saharan Africans was 70, thirty points below the white mean average of 100.) And what of the present day conditions of postcolonial Africa? It again begs the question to explain the disintegration of postcolonial Africa on the failure of Europeans to "prepare" it for independence. Who "prepared" Europe for independence? Why aren't England and France still divided into feuding tribes? Why were Africans "unprepared" during the millennia before contact with whites? As to Graves's main argument--the "scientific" one that "dismantles the concept of race"--about greater genetic variation within racial groups than between them, he couldn't be more misleading. The fact that there is much genetic diversity among people within local populations is indeed very important. However, the meaningful question about racial differences is not the percentage of total diversity, but rather how the diversity is distributed among the races, what traits it influences, and how it is patterned. It has indeed been a surprise to many geneticists to discover how much genetic diversity there is in local populations. Two brothers, for example, share fully half their alleles by descent, but differ in countless ways. Acording to Graves's statistical formulation the account for much genetic diversity just between the two of them. Nevertheless, to understand how meaningless this approach is as an analysis of racial differences, one might consider the extent to which humans and macaque monkeys share genes and alleles. If the total genetic diversity of humans "plus" macaques is given an index of 100 percent, more than half of that diversity will be found in a troop of macaques or in the population of Belfast. This does not mean Irishmen differ more from their neighbors than they do from macaques--which is what the Graves approach slyly implies. Since the mid-1980s there have been a number of population surveys looking at genetic diversity, and virtually all the serious ones find the same racial patterning. The thousand-page tome published in 1994 by L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza and his colleagues ("The History and Geography of Human Genes") is one of the better known. They present 491 world populations using data for 128 alleles at 45 polymorphic loci. The populations are grouped in various meaningful ways, aggregated into 42 populations, which are combined into nine clusters. In their words, from their genetic data, "the greatest difference within the human species is between Africans and non-Africans....The cluster formed by Caucasoids, nothern Mongoloids, and Amerinds is reasonably compact in all analyses." Thus, from investigation of gene distibutions not only are the races and major subraces of man clustered, but also the relative degree of genetic difference reflects the degree of differences observed for traits such as intelligence and criminality--sub-Saharan Africans are the most different from all other humans. The results are in--"race" is real, like it or not.
Rating:
Summary: Not convincing
Review: The book has a lot of interesting info. but is not really a persuasive argument for the abolition of the scientific concept of race. As he says in the introduction: his main goal is to improve society, not bring people closer to the truth.
Granted: race may not be as important as society deems it to be, but that is not the same thing as saying it has no basis in biology. I would like to add to the debate: It is often said that the extent of variation between individuals of the same race is greater than the extent of variation between racial groups. I'm sure this is true, but it doesn't mean that racial differences are not extremely important. It's a very misleading finding...an apples and oranges thing (as I pointed out to Steven Jay Gould whenever I had the chance. I'm sure he understood me, but his ideaology prevented him from admitting it.) In the first case, you are analyzing the variation in traits between millions of individuals who all share a few common traits; in the second case, you are analysing the difference in traits between representative ideals of two or more "races". To really do this expreriment, you should now compare the extent of variation between groups of hairy vs. non-hairy people (or some other trait that you think is just as important as race). I think variation between races is probably comparable or even greater than variation between large and small-eared people, or blue and brown-eyed people, when you consider many traits.
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