Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century

The evolutionary synthesis in biology, a historic moment for the biological sciences, was the union, in a Darwinian context, of theoretical population genetics, experimental genetics, and natural history.¹ The synthesis resolved several outstanding, and until that point seemingly intractable, issues for biology. First, it reached accord that natural selection was the mechanism that accounted for evolutionary change. This also meant the acceptance of evolution as a gradual process. Second, the synthesis resolved the long-standing issue of how to explain evolutionary phenomena. According to Ernst Mayr, himself an architect of the synthesis, the consensus that emerged on this issue understood that “by introducing the population concept, by considering species as reproductively isolated aggregates of populations, and by analyzing the effect of ecological factors…on diversity and on the origin of higher taxa, one can explain all evolutionary phenomena in a manner that is consistent both with known genetic mechanisms and with the observational evidence of the naturalists.”² Consensus on these issues was, to be sure, difficult for all involved. For example, for the first third of the twentieth century systematists rejected the discoveries of genetics and held fast to a worldview shaped by their own discoveries. This was primarily because their concepts of variation and inheritance were consistent with their own field observations and, they believed, could explain evolution better than the Mendelians.³ But between 1936 and 1947 this synthesis finally emerged in the literature, bridging a gap between two areas of research that had up until this time failed to communicate with each other.⁴

Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the architects of the synthesis, described the significance of the emerging consensus in a 1947 letter to R. C. Murphy, president of the American Museum of Natural History: “It is not particularly inspiring to continue to taxonomize as the nineteenth century taxonomists did. But no informed person can disregard the fact that a new science is being born from a synthesis of morphological and experimental biology, and that this science begins to occupy one of the central positions among the biological disciplines. On the taxonomic side, the new systematics uses, in part, the same apparatus of research which the old taxonomy has assembled and used, namely museum collections of dead specimens. But the new systematics studies dead specimens not merely in order to arrange them on museum shelves; dead specimens are used as means to discover the new laws of life.”5 Among the seminal works of that period were Dobzhansky’s Genetics and the Origin of Species, Julian Huxley’s Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, George G. Simpson’s Tempo and Mode in Evolution, and Ernst Mayr’s Systematics and the Origin of Species.⁶

Ernst Mayr, one of the architects of the evolutionary synthesis, has written about the impact the synthesis had on a biological understanding of race and human diversity. According to Mayr, one of the more significant characteristics of presynthesis thinking was that while the “naturalists had wrong ideas on the nature of inheritance and variation; the experimental geneticists were dominated by typological thinking that resulted in pure lines and mutation pressure.”⁷ Mayr believed that prior to the synthesis geneticists were stuck in a mode of thought in which “species and populations were not seen as highly variable aggregates consisting of genetically unique individuals, but rather as uniform types.”⁸ This perhaps paints too simplistic a picture of broader arguments about the nature of variation in presynthesis biology. Mayr’s point makes the most sense, however, not in explaining the fixity of two contrasting worldviews (typology versus populationist thinking) but as a way to illustrate the way typology had, before the synthesis, circumscribed thinking about variation.

And Mayr understood these contrasting worldviews to be a fundamental struggle within evolutionary thinking; in fact, his writings traced the origins of modern populationist thinking back to Darwin and his cousin Galton. Galton, while the epitome of a typologist, would contribute to the emergence of populationist thought by developing mathematical models that accounted for variability.9 The sharp dichotomy between pre- and postsynthesis thinking on variation as Mayr described it was not, of course, absolute, and others have acknowledged the transitional work on variation occurring in genetics research in the decades just prior to the synthesis. For example, in the work on human ABO blood-group maps from the latter years of the first decade of the twentieth century through the 1940s, one can see the evolution from typological to populationist thinking.¹⁰

But regardless of this transitional work in human diversity, the failure to fully conceptualize genetic variation led directly to the belief in the existence of “uniform types,” or races as they were commonly known. One of the more significant effects of the synthesis would be the rejection by most biologists of typological thinking; it may be recalled from chapter 5 that one of the reasons why eugenics fell out of favor, and why Charles Davenport’s status in American science quickly went from leader to quack, was his failure to embrace this shift.¹¹

Yet this rejection of typology by the “new” biology did not mean that an evolving biological race concept somehow left scientists in the field above racist conjecture or left the race concept itself invulnerable to misuse. Indeed, there is no doubt that while by the 1930s new findings in population genetics and evolutionary biology witnessed significant changes in racial thinking, there was still no shortage of opportunity for the integration of racism into biological conceptions of human difference.¹² To be sure, there remained those who held on to the legacies of typological thinking who were part of the modern synthesis. Julian Huxley was, for example, the popularizer of the synthesis and the author of a book on race titled We Europeans—written in large part to attack the Nazi’s racial doctrines, the book rejected the race concept as unscientific. He would also write in 1938 that “in human genetics, the most important immediate problem is to my mind that of ‘race crossing.’…The question whether certain race crosses produce ‘disharmonious’ results needs more adequate exploration. Social implications must also be borne in mind in considering this subject.”¹³

Despite Huxley’s prominence in the synthesis, his typological “voice” on this subject becomes less interesting than that of persons who through their research, publications, and correspondence struggled to redefine the postsynthesis biological meaning of race difference in humans. Ultimately, it would not be the holdover typologists and racists who developed a modern biological race concept. It was rather the scientists who sought to reconcile concepts of human diversity and modern biology who shaped a new consensus on racial difference. Those who sought to eliminate the race concept in biology altogether also played an important role in this debate. It is more interesting to consider those who recognized the need for change in the context of the new synthesis and how they made that change rather than to examine “more of the same” racist conjecture. It is the legacy of this work on race and human genetic diversity from the 1930s through the 1960s that has had continued significance as modern biology, genetics, and related disciplines continue to struggle with these concepts. And it is the work in this area conducted by the evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, the population geneticist L. C. Dunn, the evolutionary anthropologist Ashley Montagu, and the geneticist Curt Stern that will capture the attention of the remainder of the present and subsequent chapters.

Theodosius Dobzhansky, according to the evolutionary biologist and geologist Stephen Jay Gould, “was preadapted to initiate the synthesis.”14 A Russian-trained zoologist who received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to study with Thomas Hunt Morgan beginning in 1928 (first at Columbia and then at Caltech), Dobzhansky’s training in Russia and subsequent work in the United States prepared him for his role in the modern synthesis in a way that was unparalleled in biological circles at the time.¹⁵ From Russia Dobzhansky inherited a rich tradition of experimental genetics in the context of natural history, a tradition absent at that time in American biology.¹⁶ Dobzhansky would later recall that to Morgan, “‘naturalist’ was a word almost of contempt…the antonym of ‘scientist.’”¹⁷ Nevertheless, in the United States Dobzhansky had the opportunity to apply this tradition by working with Morgan and others. Surrounded by such a distinguished group of colleagues, Dobzhansky thrived and quickly went on to become one of the architects of the evolutionary synthesis and one of the foremost evolutionary geneticists of the twentieth century.

The importance of Dobzhansky’s work and those biologists who helped drive the evolutionary synthesis forward is well documented. One historian, for example, underscores the significance of Dobzhansky’s Genetics and the Origin of Species, writing that it “thus became the ground on which the heterogeneous practices of the biological sciences were stabilized and bound.”¹⁸ At the time of its publication the population geneticist Sewell Wright, whose own mathematical models proved indispensable to Dobzhansky, heralded Genetics and the Origin of Species as “a book which will be a necessity for all interested in the recent development of the theory of evolution” and called it “by far the best synthesis that has come out.”¹⁹ In an introduction to the 1982 edition of the book, Stephen Jay Gould calls it “a long argument for a general attitude toward nature and a specific approach that might unite the disparate elements of evolutionary theory.”²⁰

The historiography on racial science—the murky place where the biological race concept intersects with prejudice both within and outside science—suggests that in post–World War II America the race concept continued a decline it had begun in the 1920s. According to Elazar Barkan, that decline ushered in an era that saw the emergence of egalitarianism in scientific discourse that would force racial science into retreat.21 This book argues instead that racial science—if defined as the use of science, both by scientists and laypersons alike, generally as part of a greater arsenal of oppression, and specifically as a scientific language utilized for this general purpose—did not decline. Instead, in the interwar period racial science thrived, and beginning in the 1930s through the postwar period, the language and ideas of racial science were adapted to the evolutionary synthesis by both participants in the synthesis and by outsiders trying to influence debates on the nature of human genetic differences. This is not to say that the evolutionary synthesis was itself racist in the same way as the eugenics movement. Indeed, most modern geneticists rejected racism in the 1940s but nevertheless continued to embrace the biological race concept.²² This seeming contradiction was at the center of efforts by many geneticists to preserve the race concept for their work (in all species) and cast off the racist aspersions formerly associated with it. As the nation’s preeminent geneticist, and as one of the architects of the evolutionary synthesis in modern biology, Theodosius Dobzhansky was at the forefront of this change.

From Dobzhansky’s perch as one of the preeminent scientists of his time he had the desire, prestige, and audience to write on matters social as well as scientific. And so he did, reaching beyond the confines of academia on subjects ranging from race and society to radiation and its impact on humankind to popular books about human evolution.²³ For an émigré from Russia who had begun learning English only upon his arrival in the United States, this was quite a feat. His first popular book, Heredity, Race, and Society, published in 1946, was written on the subject of race and coauthored with his colleague at Columbia (where he had become a professor of zoology in 1940), the geneticist L. C. Dunn. But Dobzhansky had already written about the race concept in biology—with a very specific purpose—earlier in the 1940s, and his scientific work on the modern synthesis as well as his deep humanitarian streak motivated his work in this area.

The laboratory life of Theodosius Dobzhansky had a marked impact on the way he perceived and conceptualized difference in the species he studied and, by extension, on how he understood diversity in his fellow man. The fact that Dobzhansky’s scientific and intellectual authority as a leader of the evolutionary synthesis was brought to bear on the development of a new race concept in biology should not be surprising given the importance of genetic variation as a key concept in the synthesis. For Dobzhansky and others involved in the synthesis, natural selection, speciation, and adaptation could be understood only in the context of population, not typological thinking, and understanding genetic variation within populations was essential to understanding the mechanisms of evolution. Dobzhansky’s Russian training played a formative role in his approach. In Russia, where Dobzhansky began his training as an entomologist, his work was rooted in a system of knowledge that emphasized natural history in a way that the American and European biological traditions did not.24 And it is in Dobzhansky’s earlier foundational work on variation, race, and speciation that these Russian roots are evident. While still in Russia, prior to his work with Drosophila pseudoobscura, Dobzhansky worked primarily with ladybug beetles (Coccinellidae) as his experimental animal of choice. One early paper on ladybugs sought to examine the problem of “the formulation of races by means of selection of biotypes.” Other papers would look more closely at the mechanisms and nature of speciation, and during the 1920s Dobzhansky’s research program matured to examine “geographical distribution and variability in populations, individual variability within populations, and inheritance of variability”—all important components of his growing research into microevolution. Although the seeds of Dobzhansky’s synthetic thinking would be present in his 1920s work, at that time he still had yet to make the connections between evolution, genetics, and morphology that would be present in his groundbreaking work of the 1930s.²⁵

It is not simply that Dobzhansky was interested in problems of race and variation in his earlier work; his training as a naturalist helped to focus his understanding of the genetics of natural populations. The attention to populations in the wild, as opposed to laboratory-bred populations, was a characteristic of the Russian biological tradition emphasizing the naturalist’s viewpoint—one that was centered on the observations of wild populations and using those observations to construct wider theories about the nature of biological systems at the micro- and macrolevels.²⁶ Dobzhansky ascribed the roots of this tradition in Russia to “perhaps the great size and environmental diversity of the country,” which led to “new and unusual animals and plants [that] were collected and brought for study in university laboratories, zoological and botanical museums and marine institutes. A majority of biologists had experience working in the field and observing living beings in their habitats.…Anyway, it was taken for granted that a biologist must know animals, or plants, or both.”²⁷

By fusing experimental and laboratory traditions in evolutionary biology, Dobzhansky was able to not only speculate about the nature of populations through laboratory analysis but also, through his meticulous fieldwork in natural environments, witness the genetics of population dynamics firsthand. Through his long-standing collaboration with the population geneticist Sewell Wright, Dobzhansky was able to make sense of the genetics of natural populations. Dobzhansky provided the observational and biological data as well as the theory; Wright helped Dobzhansky with the mathematical models underlying those theories. The breaking down of barriers between experimental work (the laboratory geneticist) and fieldwork (the naturalist) was, of course, another important legacy that Dobzhansky left to biology.

Dobzhansky’s description of a 1943 trip to Brazil in a letter to Sewell Wright suggests the way his fieldwork shaped his own understanding of variation in natural populations. “Tropical forest is an environment so different from ours of the temperate zones that all biological conceptions or preconceptions with which a ‘temperate’ biologist starts have to be critically examined,” Dobzhansky wrote. Dobzhansky noted that “the richness of species is of course commonplace; the population density of most species being or seeming low is also something for what I have been prepared.” But he was surprised to “see the incredible heterogeneity within even what seems superficially the same type of environment. Up to now I can not tell with assurance which Drosophila species is the commonest because different ones are commonest in different places.”28

Race as a taxonomic term predated Dobzhansky’s reimagining of the concept in biology and would have been a classificatory tool used by taxonomists for at least a century before the evolutionary synthesis. Race was part of the set of standard categories that Linnaean taxonomy utilized to help organize biodiversity, specifically the morphological and physiological diversity found within named species. As a Russian trained natural scientist, Dobzhansky utilized race in his work to describe species subdivisions, or subspecies. In fact, race and subspecies were often used interchangeably in the naturalist literature. Dobzhansky described the taxonomic meaning of race in a 1933 paper on “Geographical Variation in Lady-Beetles.” “The different patterns known in a given species do not occur equally frequently in every part of the area inhabited by the species,” Dobzhansky wrote about the variation of color patterns found in lady beetles. Dobzhansky continued, “In some sections of the specific area a majority of the population may consist of individuals having a pattern or patterns which are rare or absent in other sections of the same area. The species becomes, thus, differentiated into geographical races (subspecies). Each of the subspecies is characterized by a definite frequency of the different patterns in the population.”²⁹

It is no accident that Dobzhansky, who was trained in this tradition of natural history, was able to make the theoretical leaps that helped usher in the evolutionary synthesis. It is also no accident that, like the Russian colleagues he left behind, he was mathematically unsophisticated, a shortcoming he himself acknowledged. Writing to his collaborator and mathematical muse, the theoretical population geneticist Sewell Wright, Dobzhansky admitted his own “mathematical understanding is far too insufficient to read and understand” Wright’s papers “completely.” “But,” Dobzhansky continued, “I have done the same thing that I have with other papers: read the part of the text preceding and following the mathematics, skipped the latter in assurance that to it the expression ‘papa knows how’ is applicable.” Throughout his career Dobzhansky turned to mathematically minded population geneticists for guidance on the bases of his evolutionary theories. Fruitful collaborations with Alfred Sturtevant and Sewell Wright were critical to his overall success as a scientist.30

But Dobzhansky, of course, was not the only evolutionary synthesizer to write about variation in the scientific literature. Sewell Wright and Ernst Mayr, for example, wrote extensively about genetic variation in the 1930s and 1940s but paid only minimal attention to the race concept.³¹ Ultimately, that Dobzhansky became so invested in discussions about genetic variation in the context of the synthesis and in both scientific and popular deliberations about the race concept had also to do with his personal history as well as his political and moral beliefs. Dobzhansky’s thinking on race was shaped by both his deep-seated humanism and his belief in the important role of the intellectual in society. These forces drove his scientific interests. Furthermore, Dobzhansky’s dedication to the study of evolution was not simply about uncovering the mechanisms of that process but was also about understanding the implications of evolution in and for humans—an approach that shaped his popular discussions of race.³²

Looking back on his career and on his role in scientific debates about race, Dobzhansky’s own hindsight suggests that a veritable “changing of the guard” in his field (older geneticists retiring and dying) precipitated his and others’ entry into the debates on race. Dobzhansky recalled that race prejudice was potent among the “older geneticists” and remembered an exchange with Edward East while visiting Woods Hole Laboratory in Massachusetts in 1936. East insisted that Dobzhansky was “not a Russian” given that Russians are a genetically inferior people. A small minority of Nordics lived among that population, and Dobzhansky had to have been part of that group. Dobzhansky was also motivated to become involved in debates about the nature of the biological race concept because of the “impact of Nazi atrocities against the Jews” and because the biological evidence did not support the alleged dangers of race crossing.33 Dobzhansky would have seen those who held fast to racist and typological viewpoints as anachronisms, and he himself believed that “changing one’s views is not at all shameful, and in fact when we reach the state when we can no longer change it may be time to retire.”³⁴ But it is clear that it was not simply that Dobzhansky’s interest in race was about a temporal changing of the guard but also about significant differences in the worldviews of those who chose to tackle the race issue beginning in the 1930s.

The other important characteristic that defined Dobzhansky to a very large degree, and also defined others involved in rethinking the race concept in biology, was that they were outsiders of one sort or another. Dobzhansky was not simply an immigrant to the United States but also an exile who could not return to his Russian homeland in the wake of Stalin’s growing purges. Dobzhansky was also, early in his career, a scientific outsider, arriving in the United States with only limited training in genetics and a strong background, unlike most of his colleagues, in natural history. Dobzhansky’s collaborators and allies on matters of race had similar stories. L. C. Dunn, who briefly flirted with the eugenics movement, had a son with cerebral palsy whose condition would come to shape his antieugenical thinking. Ashley Montagu, born Israel Ehrenberg in London in 1905, changed his name to avoid the anti-Semitism of the British academic aristocracy. And Curt Stern, a German Jew, was unable to return home after the rise of Hitler.

Dobzhansky’s objective—seeking to redefine the biological concept of race in a genetic context—began in earnest in his 1937 Genetics and the Origin of Species. While race is not itself the subject of the book, the importance of the concept of variation to the evolutionary synthesis meant that defining populations and other groupings of organisms received significant attention. By privileging variable over fixed populations, Dobzhansky’s synthesis helped reconceptualize the idea of difference between and among populations of all organisms, including human beings. His description of the race concept in Species should be considered one of the most important writings in the history of this subject, yet it has received relatively little attention. This is surprising given Dobzhansky’s standing in genetics, his popular and scientific writings on the subject, and the legacy he left in the form of his students (several of whom, including Richard Lewontin and Francisco Ayala, later contributed to the discussions about race and genetics and were leaders in the fields of genetics and evolutionary biology).

To be sure, Dobzhansky was not the only biologist writing about race at that time, nor was he the first to write against the typological race concept. Indeed, typological approaches to race difference were, over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, losing favor among geneticists as population genetics offered alternative explanations for intraspecies diversity.35 That information was, albeit slowly, making its way into popular thought about race even as Dobzhansky was helping to devise the evolutionary synthesis and place the race concept within that context. For example, Ralph Bunche, who would later garner fame as a United States representative at the United Nations and as the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize (1950), wrote A World View of Race the year before Genetics and Origin of Species was published. In his book Bunche, then a freshly minted Harvard Ph.D. in political science, wrote a chapter titled “What Is Race?” in which he reviewed the then current state of race thinking in anthropology and biology. In that chapter Bunche described the limits of typological thought (“the plain fact is that the selection of any specific physical trait or set of traits as a basis for identifying racial groups is a purely arbitrary process”), historicized race (“our concept of race is a comparatively recent one”), and reviewed emerging biological ideas about the race concept (“the study of hereditary phenomena, or genetics…throws much light upon this human problem of race”).³⁶ In the emerging language of population genetics, Bunche, commenting on why pure human races did not exist, wrote that “human variation is so great, in fact, that perhaps such homogeneous groups never existed at all.” Bunche also suggested “we drop the term race with reference to existing groups and substitute some more accurate description such as ethnic groups or peoples.”³⁷ This call to drop “race” went far beyond what geneticists like Dobzhansky were willing to do in rethinking the concept but anticipated what would become a more commonplace suggestion among some anthropologists and biologists in the 1940s and 1950s. Finally, Bunche, like Du Bois before him and Ashley Montagu in his footsteps, concluded that “though racial antagonisms constitute a serious world problem, they have no basis in biology, nor can they be accepted as the inevitable result of group differences. Such differences must be analyzed and understood in their social and historical setting.”³⁸ Unlike Bunche, Dobzhansky would not reject the biological race concept, but did concur that “the term race is one employed…with a looseness and inaccuracy matched only by its frequency in our literature.”³⁹ In Genetics and the Origin of Species, Dobzhansky hoped to remedy this problem.

A reader first encounters the term “race” in chapter 3 of Genetics and the Origin of Species. Dobzhansky wrote that “a living species is seldom a single homogenous population. Far more frequently species are aggregates of races, each race possessing its own complex characteristics. The term ‘race’ is used quite loosely to designate any subdivision of species which consists of individuals having common hereditary traits.”⁴⁰ Dobzhansky, however, admitted to complications regarding the use of this term; he was troubled that “so many diverse phenomena have been subsumed under the name ‘race’ that the term itself has become rather ambiguous.” And Dobzhansky worried about the unavoidable contradictions when applying the term, noting if races are “described usually in terms of the statistical averages for all the characters in which they differ from each other,” it inevitably “begins to serve as a racial standard with which individuals and groups of individuals can be compared.” Dobzhansky recognized the limitations of such a model: “From the point of view of genetics such an attempt to determine to which race a given individual belongs is sometimes an unmitigated fallacy.” This is because—and this point is central to the modern synthesis’s novel view of race—“racial differences are more commonly due to variations in the relative frequencies of genes in different parts of the species population than to an absolute lack of certain genes in some groups and their complete homozygosis in others.…Individuals carrying or not carrying a certain gene may sometimes be found in many distinct races of a species.”⁴¹

By revealing a core contradiction of race in a population genetics context, Dobzhansky explicitly acknowledged the imprecise nature of race. But he didn’t stop there. He also noted “that individuals of the same race may differ in more genes than individuals of different races”; that the “units of racial variability are populations and genes, not the complexes of characters which connote in the popular mind a racial distinction”; that to understand race “the geography of the genes, not of the average phenotypes, must be studied”; and that “racial variability of phenotypic traits is continuous.”42 Yet despite Dobzhansky’s insights into the limitations of a biological race concept, he refused to jettison it, and in his writings throughout his career, including Genetics and the Origin of Species, he sought to articulate why this was so.

In Genetics Dobzhansky insisted that the discussions about what he refers to as the “endless and notoriously inconclusive discussion of the ‘race problem’” could be boiled down to the following question: “Is a ‘race’ a concrete entity existing in nature, or is it merely an abstraction with a very limited usefulness?” But for Dobzhansky, this question missed the point: race was neither a concrete or “static” entity nor an abstraction, but instead an organic “process” that can be identified as the frequency of a gene or genes in a segment of a population begins to differ from the rest of that population. Race is therefore a temporal and geographic concept, changing as gene frequencies change, sometimes a stepping-stone to the formation of a new species as genes become fixed in populations as mechanisms prevent interbreeding between races, thereby “splitting what used to be a single collective genotype into two or more separate ones.”⁴³ The caveat to this, of course, is that gene flow must stop between populations for this to happen. If it does not, then, in Dobzhansky’s estimate, races will always be in flux and to a large degree indeterminable.

In a paper published in the Scientific Monthly in February of 1941, Dobzhansky outlines his justifications for why the biological race concept was as important for studying humans as it was for studying Drosophila. The article’s content is an expanded view of what he says on the subject in Genetics. Dobzhansky argues that previous discussions of the race concept had not been “conducted on a scientific plane,” primarily because biologists had “with few exceptions, disdained to take part in the debate.” Anthropologists and others had gotten the race concept wrong and he was going to fix it. These claims by Dobzhansky read more like rhetoric than fact, helping him structure an argument that essentially says, what came before me was scientific bunk proffered by nonbiologists. As an expert biologist I will offer important scientific insight to this debate. Where Dobzhansky was correct, however, was in his assertion that biology itself offered “no clear definition of what constitutes a race.” In Genetics, in the Scientific Monthly article, and in many future publications, he sought to offer a working definition that he believed was essential to the work of scientists operating in the paradigm created by the evolutionary synthesis. In Dobzhansky’s calculation, “the refined analytical methods of modern genetics may permit a better insight into this problem to be gained than was possible in the past, but the work in this field is now barely begun.”44 And of that past, of those anthropological methods, Dobzhansky recognized their origins—“a strictly pragmatic purpose—to place the almost infinite variety of living beings into pigeonholes where it can be kept until it is needed for further study”—and their shortcomings—“what actually happened was that pigeonholes were sanctified to become God given units (nominalism from which zoological and botanical taxonomies are just now trying to free themselves).”⁴⁵

>Dobzhansky began his argument in support of the biological race concept by rejecting the taxonomic and anthropological definition, one that posits races as averages of morphological, physiological, and psychological characters. This typological approach could, in Dobzhansky’s estimation, provide a “rough description of the observed variety of humans or of other living beings.” It could not, however, provide “an analysis of the underlying causes of this variety.” To Dobzhansky, this problem could be fixed by the application of genetics in helping to understand the processes of organismal diversity. As he had previously suggested in Genetics, it was not precise enough for geneticists to “define races as populations that differ from each other in the frequencies of certain genes.” Ultimately, such a definition tells us little about the “extent” of such differences. Dobzhansky provided an example from his work with Drosophila to explain the shortcomings of this definition and provide one of his own. It is worth noting that Dobzhansky anticipated critiques of using Drosophila models to discuss human races, writing that “the laws of heredity are the most universally valid ones among the biological regularities yet discovered. The mechanisms of inheritance in man, in the Drosophila flies, in plants and even in the unicellulars are fundamentally the same.”46 That Dobzhansky sought consistency in the use of racial terminology across species and clades was driven by his classical training in taxonomy and his rigid view of terminology. Also, as mentioned above, Dobzhansky was trying to appropriate the race concept under the evolutionary synthesis. In order to do so it seems certain that he needed to rid it of its anthropological and eugenic stigma. By placing race under the rubric of genetics, he had hoped to save it for biological practice and thought.

Dobzhansky’s Drosophila examples were meant to reinforce the biological nature of the race concept. In the Scientific Monthly paper Dobzhansky describes how no populations of Drosophila are genetically uniform, and that “in every one of them some individuals carried chromosome structures and mutant genes not present in others.” He also notes that the genetic composition of populations in this species do not remain constant over time. These changes, as he noted in Genetics, can, over evolutionary time, lead to speciation. Changes of this nature are “subject to natural selection.” Dobzhansky also notes that none of the populations of Drosophila are “pure races.” In bringing up this point Dobzhansky was directly engaging the broader social debates about race, and in doing so hoped to disconnect the science from its social context. In Dobzhansky’s estimation, “the idea of a pure race is not even a legitimate abstraction: it is a subterfuge used to cloak one’s ignorance of the nature of the phenomenon of racial variation.” Instead, populations showed variability between them in “geographically graded series” or clines.⁴⁷

One of the challenges Dobzhansky faced using Drosophila races as a way to explain the concept for its use among Homo sapiens is that there is an obvious distinction in race between human and nonhuman species; the use of race in Drosophila obviously does not carry the same social and historical burden as it does for the human species. For naturalists and evolutionary biologists, race was an important piece of the puzzle of natural selection, the chief mechanism of evolution. Species are, of course, made up of heterogeneous populations. That heterogeneity in nonhuman species leads to geographical races (or populations), and these populations are the raw material for speciation. Humans, however, do not have the same ecological niches as other species and therefore are not races in the same way in this evolutionary context.⁴⁸ In trying to preserve the race concept for all taxonomic usage, Dobzhansky never explicitly addressed these inconsistencies.

Dobzhansky concluded his article by again arguing that postsynthesis genetics must be the arbiter of the race concept. His rhetoric called for more scientific study into this matter and noted that despite the difficulties involved in race-level research in populations, “the difficulty of the task is not a sufficient reason to cling to the outworn methods of racial study…and still less is it a reason for erecting far-reaching theories on the basis of admittedly faulty data. To do so would be a travesty on science.”49 In trying to appropriate race for postevolutionary synthesis genetics, Dobzhansky was trying to preserve a biological race concept. But in his “mission” to inject genetics into the debate over the meaning of race, Dobzhansky was up to something more, and concomitantly hoped that if the public understood the “ABCs of genetics,” then the biological race concept would not engender racism.⁵⁰ In a 1947 letter to his colleague L. C. Dunn, Dobzhansky referred to several encyclopedia commissions he had recently taken on the subject of race and science. “The pay is not very attractive,” Dobzhansky wrote, but “I am told that this book will be in every school library all over the country, so I regard this as a sort of obligation.” That obligation, he wrote Dunn, was to “help straighten things out” given “what stuff was fed about human heredity to people.” In considering whether to take the commission to revise Encyclopedia Americana’s entry on “Races,” Dobzhansky decided to do so because “what stands there now could have been written by Dr. Goebbels.”⁵¹

Dunn also facilitated the emergence of the modern synthesis through his relationship with Dobzhansky. The two geneticists had known each other since at least the mid-1930s, when, at the invitation of Dunn, Dobzhansky delivered a series of lectures at Columbia in 1936 (and a year later was named as part of the revitalized Jessup Lecture Series at Columbia).⁵³ Those lectures, at the prompting of Dunn, were adapted into Genetics and the Origin of Species.⁵⁴ After reading the book, Dunn acknowledged its importance, writing to Dobzhansky that “it fills a need we have all felt for a long time.”⁵⁵ In 1940 Dunn would also be responsible for bringing Dobzhansky to Columbia from Caltech, where he had been working with T. H. Morgan since the late 1920s. Thus began a lifelong friendship and collaboration that lasted until Dunn’s death in 1974.⁵⁶

Dunn’s interest in race and genetics preceded his collaboration with Dobzhansky on the subject by more than twenty years. He was, in the early 1920s, active in the American eugenics movement, even delivering a paper at the “Second International Congress of Eugenics” held at the American Museum of Natural History in 1921. During the 1920s Dunn published several papers on race and race mixture that indicated his growing distance from the eugenics movement, including his 1925 paper “A Biological View of Race Mixture,” which argued “popular assumptions of hybrid inferiority are shown to lack support. Biological evidence indicates that neither inbreeding nor outbreeding has uniform effects, and that each case of crossing may have to be considered as a special problem.”⁵⁷ Dunn’s conclusions ran counter to most eugenic and genetic work being done at the time, and, like Dobzhansky, he seemed to share a desire to both explain the race concept in the context of the modern synthesis and to depoliticize and preserve it for scientific purposes. In his 1928 study called “An Anthropometric Study of Hawaiians of Pure and Mixed Blood,” part of the research originally presented at the American Museum of Natural History in 1921, Dunn tried to make this point. The paper argues both that there was currently not enough good data (which Dunn himself would collect) and that, based on this work, he and others could help develop a racial definition for Hawaiians.⁵⁸

Dunn held a divided opinion of eugenics during the 1920s, according to one of his biographers. On the one hand he accepted “biological eugenics” as a valid extension of Mendel’s laws to humans. On the other hand, he was skeptical of the application of social eugenics to human populations, recognizing early on that heredity was complex and unpredictable, and that sterilization laws could not account for such complexity. Dunn’s position was complicated by his own evolving views on the subject, driven by both the changing scientific landscape and circumstances in his personal life. In 1928 Dunn’s second son, Stephen, was born with cerebral palsy.59 Although Dunn would always believe in the potential of applying genetics to social problems in human populations, by the 1930s he came to reject the eugenics movement for its mix of science and politics, and for the fear that a child like Stephen, who despite his physical handicaps grew up to receive a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia, would have been deemed unfit in most eugenic circles. Later that decade, Dunn would assist the Carnegie Institution of Washington—then still the principal sponsor of Charles Davenport’s work at Cold Spring Harbor—in evaluating the work of the Eugenics Record Office. In a letter sent in 1935 to John Merriam, president of the Carnegie Institution, Dunn summarized his views of eugenics: “Eugenical research was not always activated by purely disinterested scientific motives, but was influenced by social and political considerations tending to bring about too rapid application of incompletely proved theses.”⁶⁰ The Eugenics Record Office was officially closed in December 1939, when it had become abundantly clear that its work was scientifically unacceptable in the United States and increasingly objectionable, particularly in light of the extremes of eugenics of the Third Reich in Nazi Germany.⁶¹

That Dunn rejected eugenics and continued to believe that genetics could be (carefully) applied to human populations was similar in many ways to Dobzhansky’s thinking on the subject, and the two men, as well as many of their genetics colleagues, saw no contradiction in rejecting what they considered a politicized eugenics movement and at least theoretically embracing its possibilities. In the 1950s Dunn even founded the Institute for the Study of Human Variation at Columbia, an effort to identify the “causes of evolutionary changes in human populations” and to see how such evolutionary changes “could be initiated and developed.”62 Dunn’s eugenic venture was short-lived. The institute didn’t survive the decade, and Dunn retired from his position at Columbia in 1962. Dunn’s work through the institute reflected his long-standing interest in issues of discrimination and equality as they intersected with science. He launched two population genetic studies, one on the Jewish population of Rome and one on the Gullah peoples of James Island, South Carolina. Although his scientific hypotheses sought to examine the evolution of human populations, Dunn’s work on these groups also addressed issues of ongoing discrimination, particularly the role of discriminatory social isolation as a factor in human evolution.⁶³ Dunn’s student Dorothea Bennett remembered his devotion to the potential of genetics in this way: “He was equally interested in man, mouse and garden flowers in the sense that they presented interesting biological correlates that were just as real to him although their overall importance might be very different.”⁶⁴

At the peak of their influence in the 1940s—Dobzhansky because of his role in the synthesis and Dunn because of his role in establishing the discipline of genetics—they were well positioned to author a popular book on genetics, race, and racism. And their collaboration on Heredity, Race, and Society bore unquestionable fruit; its print run exceeded 500,000 copies over its four editions, and it was translated into many languages as well. The book brought together their personal and disciplinary views on race, racism, and genetics: that race was a useful biological concept that, in itself, did not buoy racism. Instead, racists misused genetics for their own nonscientific ends. The book also ventured into the nature-nurture debate, arguing that “between so-called ‘hereditary’ and so-called ‘environment’ traits there is no hard and fast line.”⁶⁵ Finally, Dunn and Dobzhansky acknowledged the historical nature of the race concept, writing, “The belief that the differences between men and races are inborn and unalterable is probably older and more widespread than the other extreme view that human peculiarities result from peculiarities of the environment in which they occur.”⁶⁶

The book, directed at a general audience, meant to “acquaint them with the biological facts necessary for understanding human likenesses and differences.”⁶⁷ In its chapters titled “Human Differences,” “Nature and Nurture,” “The Method of Heredity,” and “Group Differences and Group Heredity,” Dunn and Dobzhansky updated their readers on the state of genetics and evolutionary biology, the failings of eugenics, and the emergence of population thinking. But it is their final chapter on race where they sought to leave a mark on general science readers, or on “John Q. Busrider,” whom a derisive reviewer suggested was the target audience of their book.⁶⁸

In the book’s final chapter, “Race,” Dobzhansky and Dunn made a case for why race is an important concept for science and society, and why racism is not supported by science. These arguments were meant to support their belief that the race concept could and should be divorced from racism and racists. “Races can be defined as populations which differ in the frequencies of some gene or genes,” they wrote, using scientific language to describe the nature of differences between human groups. And they emphasized the point that even though “military leaders and politicians have been learning how to use real or assumed scientific discoveries to add an appearance of respectability to their propaganda,” that propaganda “cannot accomplish its purpose if we know the facts of human biology.”69 In other words, even the biological race concept endorsed by Dunn and Dobzhansky could provide support and cover for racist thinking, since science could also challenge that use.

Yet reading the book, one can’t help but wonder if Dunn and Dobzhansky were aware of the contradictions in their reasoning about the nature and meaning of the race concept and why they believed it to be such an important classificatory tool for biology. The book’s final chapter is marked by contradictions obvious to any observer. On the one hand, the authors assert “races are populations which differ in the relative commonness of some of their genes,” yet at the same time they write tentatively that “when we say that populations are racially different we are not saying very much. They may be so different that it is possible to tell to which of them any individual belongs, or so similar that only very careful study by specialists can reveal their distinctions at all.”70 This position seems to assert that ultimately only “specialists” can determine race, and that what laypersons may think they know about race is, in fact, inaccurate. Similarly, Dunn and Dobzhansky wrote, “Human races differ usually in many genes and many traits,” and also stated that “attempts to subdivide mankind neatly into several hard and fast racial compartments evidently failed.”⁷¹ Moreover, Dunn and Dobzhansky believed that the existence of human races would eventually cease to exist, that “there is no doubt that civilization leads slowly but inexorably, toward breakdown of the race divisions.”⁷²

The book’s reception was decidedly mixed. In the Quarterly Review of Biology Bentley Glass recognized the book as “outstanding for the clarity and simplicity of its exposition,” and wrote that “the authors have not been afraid to express their own view, growing out of their understanding of population genetics, on such subjects as the difficulties of eugenics, evolution, and ‘social Darwinism.’”⁷³ Other reviews were not as kind. Writing in the Journal of Heredity Robert Cook and Jay Lush worried that the book might leave its readers’ “thinking about individual and racial differences dangerously muddled.” Cook and Lush also accused Dunn and Dobzhansky of “ideological biases and value judgments” and hinted that the authors harbored communist sympathies.⁷⁴ An unsolicited review sent directly to Dobzhansky by Frederick Osborn, president of the American Eugenics Society and a founder of the Pioneer Fund, attacked the book’s positions on eugenics and race. “As you know,” Osborn began, “I felt very badly that in the little Penguin book published by yourself and Dr. Dunn, you failed to recognize the authoritative statements on eugenics and leveled your fire instead at social class eugenics and racism, which were discarded by all responsible people many years ago.” Dobzhansky mocked Osborn’s critique in a letter to the anthropologist Ashley Montagu: “Ho-Hum!!! I really did not know that he felt badly, although I sort of guessed he might. And when, at what date, have ‘all responsible people’ discarded ‘social class eugenics and racism’? I wish he might, as President of the Eugenics Society, make the discarding quite explicit and official.”⁷⁵

Dunn and Dobzhansky’s postsynthesis approach to race was not the only position on race being offered in public and scientific circles. In 1948, Harvard University Press published Human Ancestry: From a Genetical Point of View, by R. Ruggles Gates. The book was a mix of eugenic and polygenic thinking, and Gates was an advocate of the position that races did not exist because the so-called races of man were actually different species, among which a hierarchy of abilities existed. In correspondence with Ashley Montagu, who had reviewed Gates’s book for the Saturday Review, Dobzhansky refers to Human Ancestry as “excrement.” But Dobzhansky, ever the arbiter of the misuse of heredity and race by scientists and nonscientists alike, was less concerned with Gates’s opinion than he was with the work of the evolutionary biologist C. D. Darlington, a pioneer in chromosome studies. Darlington believed that not only did races and classes of humans have different values but also that the languages spoken around the globe were genotypically controlled. Because Darlington was no scientific kook or fringe eugenicist, Dobzhansky worried that his theory of race had “dangerous potentialities of spreading its evil smell” and feared in its wake “a big comeback of racialism in a virulent form!”76

For Dunn and Dobzhansky the biological race concept itself was not a problem, and they believed that they had written an important book that made that point. “As far as spreading the light is concerned this is what we (or I at any rate) owed to members of our species,” Dobzhansky wrote to Dunn in November of 1946, just after the book’s release. “How much light will come from our efforts is another matter and one not under our control,” Dobzhansky continued. “At any rate we tried honestly.”⁷⁷ That “honestly” for the two geneticists was that in the context of the modern synthesis, race made perfect sense and the public needed to understand what that meant. It was the social application of this idea that caused trouble. As such, racism, not race, was what scientists and others needed to be vigilant about. They sought to undermine scientific racism, not the biological race concept. The problem with this argument, of course, is that they simultaneously argued that race was imprecise and arbitrary as a biological category (outlined above as the “difficulties” of using race) and that it was a legitimate scientific concept. On the face of it, this is not necessarily contradictory. Biological concepts can be imprecise and still have utility. The evolutionary biology term “homology,” which shares with “race” a similar imprecision and a similar struggle among scientists to define its precise meaning, has been the subject of significant debate within biology.⁷⁸ However, unlike “homology,” “race” has both social and scientific meanings.

In 1942 the British-born anthropologist Ashley Montagu wrote Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, the first book by a natural scientist to call for the abandonment of the biological race concept.79 Montagu was a controversial figure who, throughout his long career (he was a prolific contributor to anthropological, biological, and sociological thought well into his nineties), took on controversial subjects with aplomb. Montagu trained first in England in social anthropology at the London School of Economics with Bronislaw Malinowski and later in the United States in cultural anthropology at Columbia University under Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict. Following the completion of his Ph.D. at Columbia, Montagu taught anatomy at Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia and in 1949 founded the Anthropology Department at Rutgers University. Montagu’s position at Rutgers was short-lived, however. A staunch antiracist, integrationist, and early feminist, as well as an outspoken critic of the rabid anticommunist senator Joseph McCarthy, Montagu was driven from his position at Rutgers in 1953.⁸⁰ Montagu’s expertise crossed emerging anthropological subfields and he published widely in areas that today would be considered both cultural and physical anthropology. His obituary in the American Anthropologist referred to him as an evolutionary anthropologist.

Beginning in the late 1930s Montagu began his assault on the race concept. At first, however, he only articulated an opposition to racism. In 1939 Montagu presented a motion at the American Association of Physical Anthropologists stating that physical anthropology provided no scientific basis for discrimination based on race, religion, or linguistic heritage. The motion was not passed.⁸¹ By the 1940s Montagu began a direct attack on the race concept itself. Montagu’s struggles with the race concept were similar to Dobzhansky’s and Dunn’s and were drawn largely from Dobzhansky’s work Genetics and the Origin of Species. But whereas Dobzhansky and Dunn rejected a typological approach to race in lieu of a genetical approach, Montagu would reject both.

In a paper presented at the April 1940 meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (published in 1942 in American Anthropologist), Montagu attacked the anthropological/typological race concept, writing, “What a ‘race’ is no one exactly seems to know, but everyone is most anxious to tell.” Instead of upholding an outdated and scientifically useless typological approach to race, Montagu argued that an anthropologist should investigate human diversity “not as a taxonomist but as a geneticist, since the variety which is loosely called ‘race’ is a process which can only be accurately described in terms of the frequencies with which individual genes occur in groups which represent adequate ecologic isolates.” The influence of Dobzhansky’s work is clear in Montagu’s when he writes that “race formation is genetically best understood in terms of the frequency with which certain genes become differentiated in different groups derived from an originally relatively homogeneous species population and subsequently undergo independent development.”82

But it is at this point—where Montagu accepts the populationist view of race—that he departs from the growing consensus on this matter. Instead of trying to save the race concept for the biological sciences (including physical and evolutionary anthropology), he rejects it out of hand, questioning, “What aggregation, then, of gene likenesses and differences constitutes a race or ethic group?” Montagu believed that the race concept, even with Dobzhansky and Dunn’s modifications, was a convoluted idea, “a rather fatuous kind of abstraction, a form of extrapolation for which there can be little place in scientific thought.”⁸³ Alternatively, Montagu proposed substituting the term “ethnic group” for “race.” This was not, in Montagu’s reckoning, simply a terminological sleight of hand. Montagu’s notion of an “ethnic group” was a rejection of the static and immutable notion of race, a denial of “the unwarranted assumption that there exist any hard and fast genetic boundaries between any groups of mankind,” and an acceptance of the genetic unity of humanity. Up to this point, his approach was no different than Dobzhansky and Dunn’s. Montagu distinguished his position by his belief that even a revised race concept could not transcend the idea’s long and disconcerting history in the natural sciences, especially anthropology. In Montagu’s estimation, the history of physical anthropology from the middle of the nineteenth century was “a gradual inversion of this genetic approach to the problem of the variety of mankind. The investigation of causes steadily gave way to the description of effects.”⁸⁴

Montagu wrote to Dobzhansky explaining why he believed “ethnic group” was preferable to “race.” But Dobzhansky, with whom Montagu carried on a friendly forty-year correspondence beginning in the 1940s, made clear his opposition to eliminating race from the biological parlance.85 Dobzhansky was not alone in his criticism of Montagu’s proposed abandonment of race; Montagu’s anthropological colleagues were also quite critical. At a 1941 celebration on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the University of Chicago, Montagu read a paper titled “The Meaninglessness of the Anthropological Conception of Race.” The anthropologists in attendance were not supportive. From Fay-Cooper Cole to Harry Shapiro to Aleš Hrdlička, the rejection of Montagu’s idea was overwhelming.⁸⁶ Resistance to Montagu’s position was driven by the novelty of his ideas about race and ethnicity in the face of a field whose work was defined, in large part, by its embrace of a biological conception of race, and by both the covert and overt racists who popularized the discipline.⁸⁷

Montagu believed there were several reasons why “ethnic group” was a better term than “race.” First, he argued that “it emphasizes that we are dealing with a distinguishable group” that has “been subject to cultural influences.” Second, the term “is non-committal, and leaves the whole question of the precise status of the group on physical or other ground open to question.” Third, and finally, it eliminated what Montagu called “any obfuscating emotional implications.” For Montagu, “the term ethnic group is not merely a substitute…it’s a new concept, a concept for human groupings which modern knowledge has for the first time made possible.”⁸⁸

In 1942 Montagu expanded his ideas about abandoning the race concept in the book Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. The book, written more than seventy years ago, remains in print—an indication of its lasting significance and impact. At the time, it quickly rose to become a best seller. As in his earlier publications on the race concept, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth argued “that the term ‘race’ itself, as it is generally applied to man, is scientifically without justification and that as commonly used, the term corresponds to nothing in reality.”⁸⁹ Despite chapters on “The Genetical Theory of ‘Race’” and “The Biological Facts” (Montagu embraced Dobzhansky’s views of human genetic diversity), he continued to reject the biological race concept for the same reasons he outlined in earlier articles—that the race concept was a vestige of history, that it measured differences that were “more or less temporary expressions of variations in the relative frequencies of genes,” and that “ethnic groups” was a viable alternative term for describing the states of human genetic diversity.⁹⁰

Reviews of the book reveal how novel and revolutionary the postmodern synthesis view of race was at that time, and how many remained unfamiliar with its propositions. Writing in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the Smith College psychologist Frank Hankins wrote that the book “falls somewhere in the twilight zone between strictly scientific treatment of its subject and propaganda,” and clearly without knowledge of Dobzhansky’s and others’ work on a genetical race theory, attributed its ideas solely to Montagu. Hankins’s review revealed his own typological thinking and fundamental misunderstanding of populationist thought: he wrote that “instead of trying to deny what the man in the street finds all too clear, namely, that there are such things as race differences,” Montagu should instead have simply emphasized overlap between racial groups.91

Other reviews were more sympathetic of Montagu’s project, although not always of the book’s sometimes-polemic style. Writing in Isis the Harvard cultural anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn agreed “with the central thesis that the traditional view of ‘race’ which has prevailed in anthropology is utterly inadequate in the face of contemporary genetics and experimental biology.”⁹² In the Quarterly Review of Biology the geneticist Bentley Glass acknowledged Montagu’s thesis, stating, “One point should be clearly understood from the beginning by every reader. The author is not denying the existence of human ethnic groups which would fit the genetic definition of geographic race. He is careful throughout the book to make it clear that it is the older anthropological conception of ‘race’ that he regards as utterly fallacious and pernicious.”⁹³

In the foreword to the book, the writer Aldous Huxley, no stranger to genetics and its controversies—he was the brother of Julian Huxley and grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley (both distinguished biologists) as well as the author of the genetically dystopic Brave New World—offered a bleak assessment of the impact of Man’s Most Dangerous Myth. Although he acknowledged the book’s “great merits” in exposing the fallacies of race, he lamented its limitations, writing that educating the public about the limits of the race concept was not enough. Facts were not enough, believed Huxley, because “most ignorance is voluntary and depends upon acts of the conscious or subconscious will.” Race and its associated ideas and behaviors would, for the moment, continue to win the day because “facts are mere ventriloquists’ dummies, and can be made to justify any course of action that appeals to the socially conditioned passions of the individuals concerned.”94

Despite Huxley’s admonition, Montagu continued, both in scholarly and popular publications, to argue against the biological race concept. Montagu also published widely in the 1940s, seeking to debunk American’s racial prejudices against African Americans.⁹⁵ Given that in the 1940s and the 1950s the crucible of race would reach fever pitch in American society, it is no surprise that Montagu, who had risen to become one of the most prolific and dynamic scientists writing about race, found himself at the center of that storm as head of a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization committee on the race concept.