The Return of Scientific Racism?
DNA Ancestry Testing, Race, and the New Eugenics Movement
Science has a lot of uses. It can uncover laws of nature, cure disease, inspire awe, make bombs, and help bridges to stand up. Indeed science is so good at what it does that there’s a perpetual temptation to drag it into problems where it may add little or even distract from the real issues.
—H. Allen Orr, “Fooled by Science”
Ancestry.com, a popular website, extends an extravagant scientific promise to make a difference in how you understand your life: “Who Were Your People? For only $79, our test takes you back 30,000, 50,000 … even 100,000 years to discover your ancient ancestors—in addition to helping you connect with more recent genetic cousins.” Spencer Wells, Ancestry.com’s spokesperson and Harvard PhD, National Geographic book author, and PBS documentarian, writes in Deep Ancestry: Inside the Genographic Project:
Genetics has become a kind of genie of sorts, promising to grant our wishes with the magic spell of its hidden secrets…. By sending in a simple cheek swab sample, a participant can learn about his or her own place within the story of human migration while contributing to and participating in the overall Project.1
This sort of claim has a history. This chapter talks about that history and about the science, the pseudoscience, and the misconceptions that go with such promises from the DNA ancestry-testing industry. I enter this discussion as a student of race and society, rather than as a biologist, so I will engage the science of DNA ancestry testing mainly on conceptual rather than technical grounds. It will become apparent that the DNA ancestry-testing people—as distinct from serious DNA scientists—are selling bad science built on racist delusions of long standing.2
THE HERITAGE OF RACIALIST SCIENCE
The lineage of ideas about human ancestry, and specifically about race, that passed for science during much of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth is well known. People styling themselves as scientists made what they presented as racial distinctions and created hierarchies of those racial groups using supposedly scientific methods, categories, and ideas.3
The founding father of this movement was Carl Linneaus. In the 1750s Linnaeus did future generations the estimable service of creating a system for classifying all living things into a nested hierarchy of categories. Every organism belonged to one of two kingdoms, plant or animal. Then, proceeding downward through a multiplying hierarchy, organisms were divided into various phyla, the phyla into classes, the classes into orders, and thence to families, genera, and species. Supposedly, the species were fully distinct one from another. It was all very tidy, and it was quite an efficient device for organizing information about a multitude of organisms. For generations neither working scientists nor the thinking public had reason to question Linnaeus’s system. Although species were not quite as sealed off from one another as the system represented and although it turned out that there were a lot of organisms, like bacteria, that were neither plant nor animal, still the system possessed a kind of elemental beauty. It was not a tested scientific theory so much as abstract philosophizing based on a lot of data about the structures of northern European plants and much less about other organisms. Yet it was useful for organizing a lot of information, and people thought of it as scientific.4
Subsequent generations of European scientists elaborated Linnaeus’s system in several ways. On one hand, working biologists examined innumerable species, delimited them with care, discovered new ones, explored the relationships among them, and so on—all against the intellectual backdrop of Linnaeus’s categories. That is, they developed the science of biology and what they called natural history. Taking off in another direction, philosophers inclined to think about human beings took Linnaeus’s idea of species one step further, asserting that there were several distinct races of humankind, each with a separate physiognomy, intellect, and moral character. These were the pseudoscientific racialist speculators. Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, published his Histoire Naturelle, Generale et Particuleire in forty-four volumes between 1748 and 1804. He argued that all humans were one species but that they were divided into several races, each with its own location on the planet, its own physical type, character, and intellectual propensities. The source of the physical, intellectual, and moral differences, thought Buffon, came mainly from climate.5
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, working in the 1770s, decided first that there were four and then that there were precisely five races—European, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay—into which all human beings could be divided. He decided further that Europeans had been the original race and that the others had diverged and degenerated from European stock. Finally, he divided each race into what he called “nations,” what people much later would come to call “ethnic groups.”6 He worked at around the same time as Georges Léopold Cuvier. Both Blumenbach and Cuvier decided that the Europeans, who by now were being called Caucasians, were the most beautiful of the races. They were called Caucasians in part because some people thought the Caucasus region was where Europeans originated but mainly because in Cuvier’s eyes, “various nations in the vicinity of Caucasus, the Georgians and Circassians, are … the handsomest on earth.”7 Cuvier was a scientist and the chancellor of the University of Paris, but this racial speculating sounds as if he had left science behind somewhere and wandered into poetry.
The villain of the piece, if there be one, was another French aristocrat, Joseph Arthur, comte de Gobineau. In a hugely influential treatise, The Inequality of Human Races (1853–55), still in print today in many languages, Gobineau arranged the races in a strict hierarchy of intellect, ability, and morality: Whites, Asians, Indians of the Americas, Malays, and Africans. Race, he said, explained everything in human affairs and human history. Some of his chapter titles give the flavor of his ideas: “Degeneration: The Mixture of Racial Elements,” “Racial Inequality Is Not the Result of Institutions,” “Some Anthropologists Regard Man as Having a Multiple Origin,” “Racial Differences are Permanent,” “The Human Races Are Intellectually Unequal,” “The Different Languages Are Unequal, and Correspond Perfectly in Relative Merit to the Races That Use Them.” And again, when he spoke of race and beauty: “Those who are most akin to us come nearest to beauty; such are the degenerate Aryan stocks of India and Persia, and the Semitic people who are least infected by contact with the black race. As these races recede from the white type, their features and limbs become incorrect in form; they acquire defects of proportion which, in the races that are completely foreign to us, end by producing an extreme ugliness.” Richard Wagner welcomed Gobineau into his Bayreuth circle when the latter wore out his welcome in France, and Adolf Hitler admired his writing in a later generation.8
By the time these ideas reached Gobineau, what had hitherto been science—speculative science, to be sure, but arguably science nonetheless—was shading over into something quite different: popular intellectual underpinnings for a racialized public policy. Perhaps in part because of such public popularity, the racialist ideas of Blumenbach, Gobineau, and the others continued to shape scientific orthodoxy, especially among avatars of the growing discipline of physical anthropology. So one saw books like The Races of Europe (1899), by William Ripley, a professor of sociology at MIT and of anthropology at Columbia. Ripley’s book had a lot of pictures of “racial types”—not just five big races, but subsidiary ethnic groups, and maps that showed the distribution of people according to their cephalic indexes. The cephalic index was an attempt to make racial and ethnic distinctions, the products of social interactions and mutual perceptions, arrived at in the context of colonial relationships, look more like science by quantifying them. One selected a “typical” member of an ethnic group, measured the breadth and length of that person’s head, and calculated the relationship of those two numbers as a percentage. Each head shape was supposed to have its own characteristic temperament and intellectual capability.9
A. H. Keane, in a 1901 book, Ethnology, which became the standard textbook on its subject for generations, presented the family tree of humankind (which he called “hominidae,” perhaps because that Latinate term sounded more scientific than “humankind”). He presented Anglo-Saxons as the central branch of the human species, with Anglo-Americans and other worldwide colonizers as their fullest expression. Slavs branched off earlier and were further removed from the Anglo-Saxon core group; Southern Europeans, Semites, and Ainu, before that; Polynesians, before that; and Asians, before that. Africans (with subgroups that included Australian Aborigines and Melanesians), Keane posited, had diverged so long ago as to be almost a separate species. Of course, Keane presented no data other than skin color on which to base his schema or the historical relationships he supposed to have existed between peoples (fig. 6.1).10
Vice president of the British Anthropological Institute and a professor of Hindustani at University College, London, Keane laid out his ideas about the current state of the races in a table I have reproduced as table 6.1. He placed religion and temperament alongside eye shape, nose shape, and skin color, as if they were all genetically determined. He used big words that sounded scientific (brachycephalous, orthognathus, mesodont, etc.). But he revealed his underlying social agenda—to excuse slavery and the colonial domination of Whites over darker peoples—in the final row: temperament. Dividing a welter of peoples into four ideal physical types and masking his enterprise in a cloud of pseudoscientific jargon, he expected his readers to follow him as he leaped to conclude that each type had a characteristic temperament that explained its social position. Hence, African-descended people were “sensuous, indolent, improvident; fitful, passionate, and cruel,” with “easy acceptance of the yoke of slavery” and a lack of science and art. Europeans, by contrast, were “active, enterprising, imaginative,” and either “serious, steadfast, solid and stolid” or “fiery, impulsive, fickle”—but in either case good at science and the arts. Africans were biologically destined to be slaves, said Keane and other pseudoscientists. Europeans were biologically destined to be scientists and poets. If it were in their genes, the implication was, it was no one’s fault. This passed for science a century ago in the United States, Britain, and the rest of the colonizing countries of Europe and North America.
Such ideas, then, were accepted scientific orthodoxy, and they became unquestioned popular orthodoxy as well. A map that appeared in the 1904 Annual Report of the US Commissioner-General of Immigration made a “grand division of race” that presented the peoples who came to the United States as “Slavic,” “Teutonic,” “Iberic,” “Keltic,” “Mongolic,” and “Hebrew,” as if each of these “racial” distinctions had some scientific meaning. Similarly, one of the forty-one volumes of the 1910–11 report of the Dillingham Commission, a comprehensive report on US immigration, was titled Dictionary of Races or Peoples, which purported to lay out a definitive list of races and ethnic groups, their locations in the world and their characters and physiognomies, and other material.11
It was a short step from pseudoscientific ideas that had made their way into public life to using those ideas to advocate particular public policies. In fact, in the first decades of the twentieth century there appeared a slew of racist screeds against immigrants in general, Southern and Eastern European immigrants in particular, and Asian immigrants most especially. Social and marital mixing among divergent ethnicities was a topic of special scorn. None of the attacks was more pointed than Alfred Schultz’s diatribe against race mixing and immigration, which he called “racial suicide.” The book’s full title tells its story: Race or Mongrel? A brief history of the rise and fall of the ancient races of earth; a theory that the fall of nations is due to intermarriage with alien stocks; a demonstration that a nation’s strength is due to racial purity; a prophecy that America will sink to early decay unless immigration is rigorously restricted.12
One of the classic texts was Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race. Published first in 1916 and then in several editions, Passing had an enormous influence on American public opinion, medical practice, and public policy. Grant argued that Europeans—in particular, a subset that he called at various stages Aryans, Nordics, and Teutons—were the central figures in all that was good, true, and beautiful in human history. He followed racial scientists in assigning scientific-sounding Latinate names to peoples—Dolicho-lepto, Lappanoid, etc.—and in assorting all European peoples into three groups: Nordics (Homo sapiens europeau), Alpines (Homo sapiens alpinus), and Mediterraneans (Homo sapiens mediterraneus). He arranged them according to what he believed to be their ancient linguistic roots, as well as their typical physical stature; eye, hair, and skin color; nose and face shape; and cephalic index. He claimed that each group, in addition to possessing a distinctive physical type, possessed a particular temperament and set of intellectual capabilities. Teutons, for instance, were a branch of the Nordic race of Europeans. They were tall of frame and had long heads and high, narrow faces. Their hair ran from flaxen to chestnut but never to black, their eyes from blue to gray to green. They were gifted in intellectual and artistic pursuits. The common feature of all Nordics was that their languages descended from ancient Aryan roots. This set them apart from other European races in his schema.
Table 6.1. Racial Types in Pseudoscience
Source: A. H. Keane, Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901), 228.
One can catch the flavor of Grant’s polemic in the following excerpt, in which he dismisses the notion that non-Nordic immigrants could assimilate and become good Americans.
With a pathetic and fatuous belief in the efficacy of American institutions and environment to reverse or obliterate immemorial hereditary tendencies, these newcomers were welcomed and given a share in our land and prosperity. The American taxed himself to sanitate and educate these poor helots, and as soon as they could speak English, encouraged them to enter into the political life, first of municipalities, and then of the nation.
The result is showing plainly in the rapid decline of the birth rate of native Americans because the poorer classes of Colonial stock, where they still exist, will not bring children into the world to compete in the labor market with the Slovak, the Italian, the Syrian, and the Jew. The native American is too proud to mix socially with them, and is gradually withdrawing from the scene, abandoning to these aliens the land which he conquered and developed. The man of the old stock is being crowded out of many country districts by these foreigners, just as he is to-day being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish Jews. These immigrants adopt the language of the native American; they wear his clothes; they steal his name; and they are beginning to take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his ideals, and while he is being elbowed out of his own home the American looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which are exterminating his own race.
There was a German edition, and it has been said that The Passing of the Great Race was Adolf Hitler’s favorite book and one of the works that inspired Nazi racial policies in Germany.13
Not all pseudoscientific racism was directed toward blocking further immigration to the United States. Some of these ideas were used on unfortunate members of subordinate races and classes already here, in the form of a new pseudoscience: eugenics.14 Eugenics grew to become a dominant influence from the 1920s through the 1950s in several scholarly circles: biology, anthropology, sociology, law, social work. The idea was that science could gauge the heredity of individuals, use that knowledge to judge their mental abilities and their degree of physical perfection, and then use that knowledge to perfect the human race by weeding out the unfit and selecting the fittest for special benefits, including increased access to procreation. Originally the brainchild of Francis Galton, a British aristocrat and adventurer who mapped parts of Africa and studied how weather worked, the idea of perfecting the race by selective breeding took hold in the United States, Britain, and Germany more than in other countries, though it had offshoots around the globe.
Eugenicists purported to bring together all the sciences in order to direct human evolution. It had both positive and negative dimensions. Positive eugenics would theoretically encourage people who were regarded as the best examples of the human species to breed and presumably create superior offspring. Some White Americans competed in the 1910s and 1920s, as Germans did in the 1930s and 1940s, to have babies who would be judged the finest physical and mental representatives of their race. There was not a national, government-sponsored program in the United States, as there was in Germany, to breed Aryan super-babies, but there were attempts to prevent breeding by people whom eugenicists deemed to be inferior. The anti-immigrant campaign of the 1910s and 1920s was argued partly in eugenic terms, and the US Surgeon General and leaders of the Public Health Service advocated screening immigrants to keep out “inferior stock.” Eugenicists imposed a medical model of defective genetics on homosexuals. And, beginning in 1907, thirty states passed laws that empowered governments to force sterilization on women who were deemed to be “degenerates,” “feeble-minded,” “morally delinquent,” or otherwise unfit. From Massachusetts to Hawai‘i, girls and women were incarcerated, labeled “incorrigible” or “feeble-minded” because they appeared to enjoy sex or had borne babies out of wedlock, and sterilized—64,000 in all, most of them poor, and many of them women of color. The American eugenicist Henry Laughlin helped take the show on the road, as one of the authors of the Nazi regime’s “race hygiene” law; two million Germans were sterilized as a result.
Eugenics was the force behind the vogue of intelligence testing that swept the nation in the wake of World War I and has been with us ever since.15 The first intelligence test was created in France by two Galton devotees, Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon. Charged by the French government in 1904 to devise a method by which to detect “mentally deficient” children, Simon and Binet devised a standardized series of questions and problems that, they said, could determine the “mental age” of a particular child. The goal was then to devise particular curricula to fit the educational needs of children of different mental ages. Binet perceived there was a great deal of variability in mental age within any social group (and indeed within a given person over time), but this realization was overlooked when his test was brought to America in 1908 by H. H. Goddard, a former schoolteacher and University of Southern California football coach who was doing research at the Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys in Vineland, New Jersey.
Goddard distributed thousands of English-language copies of the test across the country and began a lifelong campaign to bring it into every arena of American life. He and other advocates convinced the US Army to use a similar test to determine the assignments of soldiers during World War I. As Lewis Terman, another devotee of intelligence testing, put it, “If the Army machine is to work smoothly and efficiently, it is as important to fit the job to the man as to fit the ammunition to the gun.”16 In 1912 Goddard convinced the authorities at Ellis Island to let him test immigrants, using two assistants. One assistant would scan the room for people who, to his eyes, looked stupid. They were pulled out of line and tested by the second assistant. If the test found them to be, in Goddard’s terminology, an “idiot,” an “imbecile,” or a “moron,” they were denied entry to the country. Goddard claimed that 40 percent of steerage passengers were “feeble-minded.” As a result, at least for a time, the numbers of would-be entrants who were sent back to wherever they came from skyrocketed.17 Carl Brigham, one of the army testers, contended that the tests indicated an ethnic difference in intelligence. Echoing the categories of Madison Grant, he concluded that the Alpine and Mediterranean “races”—that is, people of Central and Southern European origin—were “intellectually inferior to members of the Nordic race.”18
New versions of the Binet-Simon test, including the famous Stanford-Binet test devised by Terman, made their way into business hiring practices and classrooms across the country. Goddard, Terman, Brigham, and others not only convinced the American public that intelligence was a measurable quantity. Without much scientific evidence, they also persuaded people that intelligence was an inherited, not an acquired, trait and that different groups of people—including races—tended to have different amounts of intelligence per capita. These ideas—founded in racial prejudice and nourished by dubious science—have not died. Goddard’s and Terman’s tests are the direct ancestors of today’s SAT and GRE examinations for college and graduate school admission.19
Beginning in the 1920s, mainstream social science struck back, with a systematic refutation of pseudobiological ideas about race. Frank Hankins made a head-on assault in 1926 with The Racial Basis of Civilization: A Critique of the Nordic Doctrine. He inveighed against “Aryanism[,] … Gobinism[,] … Teutonism[,] … Celticism[,] … Gallicism[,] … Anglo-Saxonism[,] and Nordicism” on philosophical, scientific, and pragmatic grounds. The legendary anthropologist Franz Boas and a generation of disciples made their careers (and the discipline of cultural anthropology) out of confronting and gradually undercutting racialist pseudoscience and substituting cultural analysis. In mainstream academic circles, pseudoscientific racialist ideas had been fairly conclusively refuted by the 1940s, although it took another two decades for the public to begin to catch on.20
Even so, throwbacks to pseudoscientific racism continued to pop up now and then. For more than four decades beginning in the late 1930s, the Harvard anthropologist Carleton Coon wrote a series of big books for an ever shrinking audience in which he pushed a pseudoscientific racial angle of analysis. The books lacked the vitriol and obvious policy agenda of Grant and Goddard, but Coon’s analysis was not much different from theirs. Despite his pretense to objectivity, Coon had a barely hidden policy agenda. In 1959 he joined a number of colleagues in forming the International Society for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, with the expressed purpose of linking race and intelligence in order to win a reversal of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling that aimed to end school segregation.21 Sociobiology in the 1980s and its stepchild of the 1990s and 2000s, evolutionary psychology, expanded on several of the tracks laid down by Keane, Grant, Stoddard, and Galton. But in scholarly circles, these have remained minority opinions.22
If the number of purportedly scientific treatments based on racialist ideas has declined, policy advocacy based partly on racialist science is still quite common. Stretching from Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 screed against affirmative action, The Bell Curve, through Peter Brimelow’s Alien Nation (1995), Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations (1996) and Who Are We? (2004), and Jon Entine’s Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk about It (2000) to Patrick Buchanan’s The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (2002) and State of Invasion: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America (2006), popular racism based partly on long-discredited pseudoscience has been a regular feature on best-seller lists.23
DNA TESTING AND PROMISES ABOUT YOUR ANCESTRY
Spencer Wells and the DNA testing people adopt a scientific posture, too, with the imprimatur of the National Geographic Society. They promise to find out the scientific truth about who your ancestors were, even if there are no historical records, and also to find out about your ancestry much further back in time than any historical records could go.24 A similar organization, AlphaGenic Testing Services, says, “The ethnicity DNA test will provide you with an estimated percentage of Ethnicity from the four population groups: East Asians[,] … Native American[,] … Indo-European[,] … Africans”—Keane’s four racial groups, which scientists say never existed as separate types, nonetheless brought back to life.25 Alpha-Genic promises help “if you are seeking to validate your eligibility for government entitlements such as Native American rights”—but they hedge, saying, “you will need to verify with the specific tribe or entity you are seeking benefits from, if they will accept this type of test.”26
Other purveyors of DNA ancestry testing focus on more medical-sounding services. DNA Direct concentrates on projecting a medical image. Its website pictures doctors with stethoscopes, lab technicians, clean-cut health care plan managers, and smiling families. And it markets to those same four groups: “We deliver guidance and decision support for genomic medicine to patients, providers and payors—reducing health risks, preventing disease, and better targeting therapies.” DNA Direct’s website warns, for example, “Seven to ten percent of breast cancers are hereditary.” Could you have diseased ancestors? You’d better find out. We’ll sell you a test.27
DNA is real, and scientifically it is vitally important. Each human being, in the nucleus of every ordinary cell, has forty-six chromosomes. These are arranged in pairs—one inherited from each parent—two very long, narrow, complex, twined strips of deoxyribonucleic acid. Each of these chromosomes is made up of genes, tiny coded bits of material that instruct the cells how to grow. Genetic research and testing of individuals for medical purposes are, on balance, great things. There are several hundred tests that can be run for susceptibility to a host of different diseases and conditions. Some of them test for individual mutations, others for susceptibilities that may be inherited. For example, it is probable that predispositions toward some kinds of cancer are inherited. There is a limitation: increased susceptibility to many diseases seems to reside not on single genes but rather in the interaction of several, even myriads of genes.28 Nonetheless, on the whole genetic research for medical purposes is probably good science. I have no problems with the scientific mechanics of DNA work, although there is a great deal of controversy over whether one can make meaningful racial aggregations of genetic data for medical purposes.29
I do have one small conceptual problem, however, not with the way DNA lab work is done but with the way it may be used. The scientists who do the DNA tests only check a couple or at most a very small number of genes out of the 20,000 to 40,000 that they think we have. That makes DNA testing less useful for identity confirmation and ancestry purposes than for medical uses. Since DNA testing only checks a tiny fraction of any person’s DNA, it is only useful for proving a negative, a nonmatch. If one is checking an individual for a particular disease, one can be ruled in or out on the basis of a small number of markers.
But for establishing an individual’s identity, one must analyze a lot more markers, and forensic DNA analysis does not do that. It can prove difference, for example, that a particular person’s DNA was not on the bloodstained knife. But DNA testing, contrary to what you may have imagined from watching CSI, cannot prove sameness conclusively. It cannot prove that the blood on the knife is that of a particular person, only that it has a relatively small number of characteristics in common with the blood of that person. DNA testing for this kind of match assumes that the rest of the genes are irrelevant to the goal of making the match, because we did not test for them.30
There is also a much bigger problem, one that I believe invalidates the whole project of using DNA analysis for genealogical purposes—again, as distinct from medical ones. Historically speaking, using DNA analysis to prove genealogical links is nonsense. Wells writes, “I consider myself to be a historian.”31 If so, then he is a bad one. He makes a classic freshman mistake that no good historian would make: he assumes that there was a Time Before, when things were unchanging:
By analyzing samples from people who have been living in the same place for a long period of time, so-called indigenous people, it is possible to infer details about the genetic patterns of their ancestors…. Once they enter the melting pot, their DNA loses the geographic context in which the genetic patterns create a clear trail…. In the Genographic Project, we … want to look at a representative sample of people from around the world…. [W]e need a database of the way things were before the mobility revolution began in the 19th century…. By assembling a database of genetic data from indigenous populations around the world we can reconstruct worldwide genetic patterns as they were before the mobility revolution began.32
Well, no. There was no Time Before. Wells assumes—contrary to all historical and archaeological evidence—that people before 1800 were stationary. It is just not true. Human history is nothing if not a record of many vast migrations. People have moved back and forth across great distances and mixed everywhere. The modern-day Turks are descended largely from people who came to Anatolia from Central Asia only recently—as late as the eleventh century—although since that time they have mixed with all the peoples of the Mediterranean basin and western Asia. Creeks and other Native peoples of the American Southeast migrated into what we think of as their home region in a similar time frame, and then they mixed with each other, with Europeans, and with Africans. Most of the ancestors of the Apaches once lived in central Canada, although the tribe came together out of several different peoples in the American Southwest. Polynesians spread throughout the wide Pacific in many waves of exploration, emigration, and mixing that occurred over more than two thousand years, probably including some visits to the western coasts of the American continents. Inuit from northeastern Canada have engaged in transpolar travel and marriage patterns with circumpolar relatives from northern Norway for many hundreds of years.33
It is possible that DNA analysis of very large populations might be useful to guess at very general movements of very large groups of people over very long periods of time. But we absolutely cannot pin down where X person’s ancestors came from, much less what percentage of X’s ancestors came from where. The lessons of recorded history, going as far back in time as we can go, and of archaeological evidence before that, are clear. Every group of people came to where they are from somewhere else. Every group of people has been mixing with other groups of people for many, many centuries. The dominant fact about any single person’s ancestry is that it is mixed. It has always been so. The myth of primitive isolation and purity is just that: a myth.
Pick a genetic marker—almost any marker. There are people inside one’s group who don’t have it. There are other people outside the group who do have it. That means that the existence of a particular genetic marker says nothing at all about a particular individual’s ancestry, for all analyses are based on percentages and frequencies.34 Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that our judgment of African descent is based on possession of a certain chromosome configuration because we observe that 90 percent of the people whom we believe to be African-descended possess that marker. The problem is twofold: (1) the other 10 percent of the people we believe to be African descended don’t have that marker, and (2) some people we believe to be White do have that marker. Does this mean that the socially White people who possess the marker are really Black? Some would say so, but that is false scientism, where technique trumps social reality. What about the 10 percent of the people who have lived Black lives but don’t have the marker? Are they not Black? Then what of the lives they have lived, of the families to whom they are related and with whom they have lived?
Conceptually, all this amounts to the same thing as nineteenth-century racialist science. Instead of skin color, eye shape, nose shape, or cephalic index, the current generation of DNA racialist pseudoscientists substitutes a different kind of physicality—something deeper than the surface, in the chromosomes, and so perhaps we may assume it is more true somehow—and they pretend it trumps social experience. That is a dubious contention at best.
It is especially troubling when promoters use DNA to pretend to determine a particular individual’s ancestry. There are some key logical leaps of faith that render the whole enterprise unworkable. Always the claims made by Wells and the online DNA testing marketers are carefully hedged so they cannot be held liable for false promises. They speak just enough about averages and percentage chances of relatedness between populations so that no one can win a lawsuit. They are pretending to sell something—concrete information about a person’s ancestry—but actually they promise only percentage likelihoods, similar patterns in frequencies of appearances of particular genes in populations who currently live at various locations around the globe.
Yet that is not the way that consumers perceive the tests, and therein lies the problem. People who read the ads and hear the claims think that DNA testing is a magical device for divining one’s ancestry. Erin Aubry Kaplan is a smart, well-educated journalist. In 2003 she wrote a Los Angeles newspaper column, “Black Like I Thought I Was.” In it she told the story of Wayne Joseph, then a fifty-one-year-old Black man, descended from Louisiana Creoles, living in Los Angeles. He was a high school principal and an African American community activist. On a whim, he took a DNA ancestry test. Kaplan wrote:
Here was the unexpected and rather unwelcome truth: Joseph was 57 percent Indo-European, 39 percent Native American, 4 percent East Asian—and zero percent African. After a lifetime of assuming blackness, he was now being told that he lacked even a single drop of black blood.
Well, no. Wayne Joseph was an African American man, and he had led the life of an African American man in California. Like most descendants of Louisiana Creoles, he likely had multiple ancestries, probably European as much as African, and Native American as well. The DNA ancestry test proved nothing, and it changed nothing about the life he had lived. Yet Kaplan appears to have believed it revealed a deeper, more essential truth about who he really was.35
Perhaps the most famous example of misconceiving the value of DNA ancestry testing appeared on PBS, in Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s TV series, African American Lives. Gates, like many thoughtful African Americans, was frustrated by the at best fragmentary knowledge of family history that is available to most African Americans. The era of slavery put an insurmountable roadblock in the path of many a would-be genealogist. Writes Gates:
I was searching not just for the names of my ancestors but for stories about them, the secrets of the dark past of Negroes in America…. [S]earching for my ancestry was always a fraught process, always a mix of joy, frustration, and outrage…. I even allowed myself to dream about learning the name of the tribe we had come from in Africa. But … the people who created [slavery] so perversely designed it to destroy any possibility of maintaining the family ties necessary to tracing one’s ancestry[,] … making us fragmented and not whole, isolated, discrete parts, not pieces of fabric stitched together in a grand pattern.36
So Gates set out to discover the histories of nineteen prominent African Americans, himself included. He sent a team of researchers to the archives and found out a lot of information that the celebrities did not know about their family histories. He also had the celebrities talk on camera about what they thought they knew about their ancestry. And he gave them a DNA ancestry test. Then he recorded their reactions when he revealed the DNA results.
Oprah Winfrey was shocked:
She told me she’s often been told she was a Zulu—a descendant of the great South African nation who fought so hard and so effectively against the British [sic] for so many years. She said, “When I’m in Africa, I always feel that I look Zulu. I feel connected to the Zulu tribe.” … But Oprah’s DNA told a different story.37
Anyone who has ever read the history of the Atlantic slave trade could have told Oprah that her chances of Zulu ancestry were infinitesimal: the vast majority of slaves were taken from West Africa; there are no records of slaves being abducted from Zulu territory in extreme southern Africa. The report that her DNA looked a lot like the DNA of West Africans apparently was a shock to her, but it should not have been a surprise.38
WHAT IS THE UPSHOT of all this? I have no objection to scientific data gathering—and that seems to be Spencer Wells’s ulterior motive. He wants to help scientists find out as much about the whole human genome as possible. For that purpose, he recruits people to contribute DNA samples, and he gets them to pay for the privilege. Wells explains:
We need more samples. A lot more. What we know about human migratory patterns is based on a few thousand people who have been studied for a handful of genetic markers. There might be as many as 10,000 people whose DNA has been studied if you add up all of the samples in every paper that has been published in the last few years. But this isn’t a great sample of the world’s 6.5 billion people. It’s like attempting to describe the complexity of outer space with a pair of binoculars. We need to increase this number by at least an order of magnitude, to 100,000 or more, to have the power to answer some of the key questions about our past. That will give us the genetic telescope we need…. By sending in a simple cheek swab sample, a participant can learn about his or her own place within the story of human migration while contributing to and participating in the overall Project … by purchasing a kit.39
DNA analysis can be a good thing. It can tell a lot about an individual’s potential susceptibility to certain diseases. DNA analysis may tell us some things about the frequencies of particular characteristics in groups we designate by social means. For example, it might be able to tell us that the people we perceive as Jews have a higher susceptibility to Tay-Sachs disease than the rest of the population; so if we want to test people for that disease, we should look first at the Jewish population. DNA analysis may tell us that the people we designate as Black have a higher frequency of occurrence of sickle cell anemia, so we can direct the majority of our sickle cell anemia prevention resources toward that population.
DNA analysis can also tell us some things about group characteristics. With regard to any of several major characteristics, DNA analysis can tell us that Blacks are like this on average, while Whites are like that on average. Of course, we already knew about Tay-Sachs and sickle cell anemia, but other characteristic group features may appear, and we should welcome knowledge from DNA research that allows us to target medical services to particular socially defined groups. What DNA analysis cannot tell us, however, is anything meaningful about the racial or ethnic group ancestry of a particular individual. For such a purpose, DNA analysis seems pretty clearly to be junk science.40
The British Society for Human Genetics and the British Association for Adoption and Fostering agree. Their “Statement on the Use of DNA Testing to Determine Racial Background” concludes, “The use of genetic testing to determine ethnic background is not recommended.” The Human Genome Diversity Project at Stanford University concurs:
Are ethnic groups genetically definable? As far as scientists know, no particular genes make a person Irish or Chinese or Zulu or Navajo. These are cultural labels, not genetic ones. People in those populations are more likely to have some alleles in common, but no allele will be found in all members of one population and in no members of any other…. There is no such thing as a genetically “pure” human population.41
So the DNA ancestry-testing sellers’ scientific and historical claims are bogus. But even so, on the surface not much harm appears to have been done. It is not pleasant to see people being conned into giving money under false pretenses, either buying products of dubious value to make someone some money or thinking they are learning about their personal ancestry when what they are really doing is contributing data to Spencer Wells’s big project. It’s a bit like giving money to faith healers, and it’s sad to see. But if they want to give their money to be entertained by test results of doubtful validity, then okay.
To be completely fair, DNA ancestry testing for race is bogus, annoying, and fraudulent, but it is not precisely eugenic. That is, although it is founded on the same intellectual principles as the earlier eugenics movement, it does not seek actively to alter the genetic character of particular populations, as the eugenics movement did. The same cannot be said for several other recent uses of scientific and medical technologies.
We must also ask, to what use will Wells and the DNA bankers put the data they collect through this fraud? Once they have collected the DNA, it is theirs to keep and use as they choose. Will they turn the the things they learn about the genome over to crime labs that one day might experiment with DNA profiling, picking people out as genetically predisposed to commit crimes? Terrie Moffitt, a Duke University researcher, asserts, “Today the most compelling modern theories of crime and violence weave social and biological themes together.”42 While other researchers emphasize that even predisposition is not destiny and that no DNA test can predict the conscienceless rapaciousness of a Bernie Madoff or the guys from Enron, afficionados of TV cop shows are likely not to appreciate the distinction. What is to keep us from going down the path predicted in the sci-fi film Minority Report, where people were sentenced for crimes they had yet to commit, on the basis of technologies predicting future behavior?43 On the other hand, will future researchers use DNA technology and information for what some might see as more positive eugenic purposes? Will they, for example, enable rich parents to create designer babies? Some labs are already advertising in vitro fertilization services offering sex selection and screening for hereditary diseases.44 Both criminal profiling and selecting the characteristics of babies fall well within the orbit of eugenic practices, and they seem to me ethically irresponsible.
There are other problems as well. This whole DNA business tends to reinforce some pernicious ideas. In the first place, the selling of DNA ancestry analysis tends to support the popular impression that science is a magical template—“a kind of genie of sorts,” in Wells’s words—that works with unerring, mechanical precision. Most practicing scientists know otherwise, but the public remains awed. Second, all this tends to reinforce the popular belief (really a new phenomenon since World War II and the Manhattan Project) that science is smarter than nonscience and therefore should be funded lavishly while other ways of exploring and understanding are impoverished.45
Worse still: although Wells contends that like Darwin he is searching for the underlying unity of humankind,46 DNA analysis for ancestry purposes tends to reinforce the idea that there exist in fact indelible, measurable biological differences between groups. It focuses on tiny similarities within socially and historically defined groups. It ignores vast variations inside each of those groups. It ignores huge similarities across all people from all groups. That approach has worked out badly in the past (e.g., Nazi Germany). One is left, sadly, with the conclusion that DNA ancestry testing is very much like the eugenics movement, operating with much fancier technological tools.
NOTES
H. Allen Orr’s “Fooled by Science” appeared in the New York Review of Books on August 18, 2011. I must thank Lily Welty, Mike Osborne, Edwina Barvosa, Anna Spickard, Jörg Hölscher, Jim Spickard, Patrick Miller, Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly, Reginald Daniel, Cathy Tashiro, Ryan Colon, and Terence Keel for listening to these ideas at various times over the past few years and giving me many suggestions for making them better. Miri Song hosted my presentation of a version of this paper at the University of Kent, and she shared ideas and materials. Michelle Gadpaille and Victor Kennedy did the same at the University of Maribor. I expect that none of them would want to take responsibility for all the things I write here, but I much appreciate their ideas, encouragement, and company on life’s journey.
1. Spencer Wells, Deep Ancestry: Inside the Human Genographic Project (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2007), 2, 8. See also Steve Olson, Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002); Chris Pomery, Family History in the Genes: Trace Your DNA and Grow Your Family Tree (Richmond, UK: National Archives, 2007); Megan Smolenyak and Ann Turner, Tracing Your Roots with DNA: Using Genetic Tests to Explore Your Family Tree (Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 2004); Bryan Sykes, The Seven Daughters of Eve (New York: Bantam, 2001). Other promoters include the International Society of Genetic Genealogy, www.isogg.org.
2. My argument here fleshes out in more historical and conceptual detail the findings published by several other authors in a key scientific article: Deborah A. Bolnick, Duana Fullwiley, Troy Duster, Richard S. Cooper, Joan H. Fujimura, Jonathan Kahn, Jay S. Kaufman, Jonathan Marks, Ann Morning, Alondra Nelson, Pilar Ossorio, Jenny Reardon, Susan M. Reverby, and Kimberly TallBear, “The Science and Business of Genetic Testing,” Science 318 (October 19, 2007): 399–400. They conclude, “Consumers often purchase these tests to learn about their race or ethnicity, but there is no clear-cut connection between an individual’s DNA and his or her racial or ethnic affiliation…. [T]here is little evidence that four biologically discrete groups of humans ever existed.” See also Kimberly TallBear, “DNA, Blood, and Racializing the Tribe,” Wicazo Sa Review (Spring 2003): 81–107; Patricia McCann-Mortimer et al., “‘Race’ and the Human Genome Project: Constructions of Scientific Legitimacy,” Discourse and Society 15 (2004): 409–32; Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (New York: New Press, 2011); Richard C. Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (New York: Harper-Collins, 1991); Richard C. Lewontin, It Ain’t Necessarily So: The Dream of the Human Genome and Other Illusions, 2nd ed. (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001); Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan, eds., Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Keith Wailoo, Alondra Nelson, and Catherine Lee, eds., Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012); Peter Wade, ed., Race, Ethnicity, and Nation: Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007); Barbara A. Koenig, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Sarah S. Richardson, eds., Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008).
3. It should be remembered that the scientific class did not enjoy in those days quite the high regard for intellectual dispassion and investigatory care that they were granted in later decades and, in any case, that there is not a great deal of similarity between the methods of scientists in those days and these. This section is adapted from my book Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity (New York: Routledge, 2007), 262–73.
4. Linnaeus’s masterwork is Systema Naturae, 10th ed. (1758), translated as The System of Nature (London: Lackington, Allen, 1806).
5. Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, A Natural History, General and Particular, 2nd ed. (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1785).
6. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, On the Natural Varieties of Mankind (New York: Bergman, 1969; orig. English 1865; orig. German 1775); Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (Boston: Milford House, 1973; orig. 1865).
7. Georges Léopold Cuvier, Le règne animal (1817), translated into English as Animal Kingdom (London: W. S. Orr, 1840). Quotation is taken from Emmanual Chukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 105. Terence Keel reminds me that though it was Cuvier who made this judgment, it was Blumenbach who coined the term Caucasian.
8. Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races (New York: Fertig, 1999; English orig. 1915; French orig. 1853–55), v–v1, 151; Michael D. Biddiss, Father of Racist Ideology: The Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1970); Michael D. Biddiss, ed., Gobineau: Selected Political Writings (New York: Harper and Row, 1970).
9. William Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe (New York: Appleton, 1899).
10. A. H. Keane, Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901), 224.
11. United States Commissioner-General of Immigration, Annual Report, 1904 (Washington, DC, 1904), endpaper; United States Congress, Reports of the Immigration Commission, 61st Cong., 3rd sess., vol. 5: Dictionary of Races or Peoples (Washington, DC, 1910–11).
12. Alfred P. Schultz, Race or Mongrel? (Boston: Page, 1908).
13. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History (New York: Scribner’s 1916); quote on 80–81. The German edition is Der Untergang der grossen Rasse: Die Rassen als Grundlage der Geschichte Europas (Munich: J. F. Lehmanns Verlag, 1925). See also Jonathan Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2008).
14. Sources on eugenics include Edwin Black, War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003); Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell, eds., Popular Eugenics (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006); Gregory Michael Dorr, Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008); John M. Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); Amy L. Fairchild, Science at the Borders: Immigrant Medical Inspection and the Shaping of the Modern Industrial Labor Force (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Mark H. Haller, Eugenics (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963); John P. Jackson Jr., Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case against Brown v. Board of Education (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Gregory D. Smithers, Science, Sexuality, and Race in the United States and Australia, 1780s–1890s (New York: Routledge, 2009); Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Tukufi Zuberi, Thicker than Blood: How Racial Statistics Lie (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), esp. chaps. 3–5.
15. Sources on intelligence testing include Alfred Binet, The Development of Intelligence in Children, trans. Elizabeth S. Kite (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1916); N. J. Block and Gerald Dworkin, eds., The IQ Controversy (New York: Pantheon, 1976); Jeffrey M. Blum, Pseudoscience and Mental Ability (New York: Monthly Review, 1978); Paul L. Boynton, Intelligence: Its Manifestations and Measurement (New York: Appleton, 1933); Hans J. Eysenck, Intelligence (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1998); Jefferson M. Fish, ed., Race and Intelligence (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002); Henry H. Goddard, The Criminal Imbecile (New York: Macmillan, 1915); Henry H. Goddard, Feeble-Mindedness: Its Causes and Consequences (New York: Macmillan, 1914); Henry H. Goddard, The Kallikak Family: A Study in Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (New York: Macmillan, 1912); Henry H. Goddard, School Training of Defective Children (Yonkers-on-Hudson, NY: World Book, 1914); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1996); Seymour W. Itzkoff, The Decline of Intelligence in America (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994); Nicholas Lemann, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000); Henry L. Minton, Lewis M. Terman: Pioneer in Psychological Testing (New York: New York University Press, 1988); Ashley Montagu, ed., Race and IQ (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); J. David Smith, Minds Made Feeble: The Myth and Legacy of the Kallikaks (Rockville, MD: Aspen Systems, 1985); Theta H. Wolf, Alfred Binet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973); Leila Zenderland, Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
16. Quoted in Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 81.
17. Henry H. Goddard, “Mental Tests and the Immigrant,” Journal of Delinquency 2 (1917): 243–77; Gould, Mismeasure, 165. The historian Patrick Miller writes, “Goddard claimed that he could spot a moron amidst the mass of immigrants coming through Ellis Island—not just with the test but by eye—which may give new meaning to the word ‘moron’” (pers. comm., April 14, 2004). Roger Daniels points out that immigrants and their advisers soon learned how to cope with the eyeballing and the testing, and the number of rejections dropped (pers. comm., March 23, 2013).
18. Carl Campbell Brigham, A Study of American Intelligence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1923), 197, quoted in Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 82–83. African Americans also were supposedly inferior to Whites. But differential access to education played a part. Midwestern Blacks scored higher on Brigham’s measures of intelligence than did southern Whites.
Even scholars who held benign attitudes toward immigrants and peoples of color found their ideas all wrapped up with pseudoscientific racialist thinking. Caroline Bond Day, a Radcliffe-educated instructor at all-Black Atlanta University, was a protégé of the anthropometrist Earnest Hooton. Hooton described Day as “an approximate mulatto, having about half Negro and half White blood.” The fractions seemed important to both Day and her mentor. Hooton sponsored the publication of Day’s Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States by Harvard’s Peabody Museum. It is an inexpressibly detailed accounting of the body parts of several hundred people whom Day interviewed, measured, and photographed, all of whom she marked as having some racial mixture. She displayed hundreds of pictures of racially mixed people, tying them together in family trees and listing them by racial fractions (“Jewett Washington, 7/16 N 9/16 W”), across scores of quarto pages. The book offered nearly a hundred tables recording detailed measurements of body parts for various categories of people. There were four tables on lips alone (“Lips, Integumental Thickness,” “Lips, Membranous Thickness,” “Lips, Eversion,” “Lip Seam”), eleven on noses, and, of course, cephalic indexes. Day’s work is a monument to misbegotten precision and the piling up of data without thinking about what they are for. Caroline Bond Day, A Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum, 1932).
Julie Kelley made a similar study among Asians in Hawai‘i, with similar photographs, measurements, and tables. Sidney Gulick, one of the great defenders of Asian immigrants against their critics, nonetheless felt compelled to preface his book on race in Hawai‘i with thirty-two race-fractionated photographs and to include sections such as “Psycho-Physical Race Differences,” “Psychological Race-Differences,” “Intelligence Tests on Race-Mixtures,” and “Comparative Racial Intelligence (IQ).” Julie P. Kelley, “A Study of Eyefold Inheritance in Inter-Racial Marriages” (MS thesis, University of Hawai‘i, 1960); Sidney L. Gulick, Mixing the Races in Hawaii (Honolulu: Hawaiian Board, 1937). See also Louis Wirth’s chapter, “The Jewish Type,” in The Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1926).
19. On the SAT, see Rebecca Zwick, Fair Game? The Use of Standardized Admissions Tests in Higher Education (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2002); Rebecca Zwick, Rethinking the SAT: The Future of Standardized Testing in University Admissions (New York: Routledge Falmer, 2004); Lemann, The Big Test.
20. Frank H. Hankins, The Racial Basis of Civilization: A Critique of the Nordic Doctrine (New York: Knopf, 1926); Franz Boas, Race, Language, and Culture (New York: Free Press, 1940); Edward H. Beardsley, “The American Scientist as Social Activist: Franz Boas, Burt G. Wilder, and the Cause of Racial Justice,” Isis 64 (1973): 50–66; Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
21. Carleton Stevens Coon, The Races of Europe (New York: Macmillan, 1939); Carleton Stevens Coon, The Story of Man (New York: Knopf, 1954); Carleton Stevens Coon, The Origin of Races (New York: Knopf, 1962); Carleton Stevens Coon, The Living Races of Man (New York: Knopf, 1965); Carleton Stevens Coon, Racial Adaptations (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1982); Wesley Critz George, The Biology of the Race Problem (Richmond, VA: Patrick Henry Press, 1962); Jackson, Science for Segregation; Carleton Putnam, Race and Reason (Washington, DC: Public Affairs, 1961); Carleton Putnam, Race and Reality (Washington, DC: Public Affairs, 1967).
22. Pierre L. van den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon (New York: Elsevier, 1981); J. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). While this vector in research is a less than reputable minority opinion, it is well funded. Among its prominent supports is the Pioneer Fund, which has also given large sums to support the research of the eugenicists Arthur Jensen, Hans Eysenck, and J. Philippe Rushton; see www.pioneerfund.org (retrieved September 2, 2009). Among their writings are Arthur R. Jensen, Genetics and Education (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); Arthur R. Jensen, Educability and Group Differences (New York: Harper and Row, 1973); Arthur R. Jensen, Straight Talk about Mental Tests (New York: Free Press, 1981); Arthur R. Jensen, The G Factor: The Science of Mental Ability (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998); Frank Miele, Intelligence, Race, and Genetics: Conversations with Arthur R. Jensen (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2002); H. J. Eysenck, The Scientific Study of Personality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952); H. J. Eysenck, The Biological Basis of Personality (Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1967); H. J. Eysenck, The IQ Argument: Race, Intelligence, and Education (New York: Library Press, 1971); H. J. Eysenck, The Inequality of Man (London: Temple Smith, 1973); H. J. Eysenck, A Model for Intelligence (Berlin: Springer, 1982); H. J. Eysenck, Intelligence: A New Look (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1998); J. Philippe Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, 3rd ed. (Port Huron, MI: Charles Darwin Research Institute, 2000).
23. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994); Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation: Common Sense about America’s Immigration Disaster (New York: Random House, 1995); Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004); Jon Entine, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk about It (New York: Public Affairs, 2000); Patrick J. Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our County and Civilization (New York: St. Martin’s, 2002); Patrick J. Buchanan, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America (New York: St. Martin’s, 2007); Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History (New York: Penguin, 2014). Sometimes Huntington uses the word culture when he really is talking about racialized distinctions; the other authors are not so squeamish.
24. www.ancestry.com (retrieved February 13, 2009).
25. Bolnick et al., “The Science and Business of Genetic Testing.”
26. www.alphagenic.com (retrieved February 13, 2009).
27. www.dnadirect.com (retrieved October 2, 2009).
28. Benedict Carey, “Gene’s Link to Depression Now Questioned,” New York Times, June 18, 2009. It is worth noting that it was once common medical wisdom that tuberculosis was inherited; Jean Dubos, The White Plague: Tuberculosis, Man, and Society (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987).
29. Some places to begin on that controversy are Nadia Abu El-Haj, “The Genetic Reinscription of Race,” Annual Review of Anthropology 36 (2007): 283–300; Nikolas Rose, “Race, Risk and Medicine in the Age of ‘Your Own Personal Genome,’” BioSocieties 3 (2008): 423–39; Troy Duster, “Race and Reification in Science,” Science 307 (February 18, 2005): 1050–51; Priscilla Wald, “Blood and Stories: How Genomics Is Rewriting Race, Medicine and Human History,” Patterns of Prejudice 40.4–5 (2006): 303–33; Sander L. Gilman, “Alcohol and the Jews (Again), Race and Medicine (Again): On Race and Medicine in Historical Perspective,” Patterns of Prejudice 40.4–5 (2006): 335–52; Katya Gibel Azoulay, “Reflections on Race and the Biologization of Difference,” Patterns of Prejudice 40.4–5 (2006): 353–79; Judith S. Neulander, “Folk Taxonomy, Prejudice and the Human Genome: Using Disease as a Jewish Ethnic Marker,” Patterns of Prejudice 40.4–5 (2006): 381–98; Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell, “Eugenics and the Racial Genome: Politics at the Molecular Level,” Patterns of Prejudice 40.4–5 (2006): 399–412; Philip Alcabes, “The Risky Gene: Epidemiology and the Evolution of Race,” Patterns of Prejudice 40.4–5 (2006): 413–25; Troy Duster, “The Molecular Reinscription of Race: Unanticipated Issues in Biotechnology and Forensic Science,” Patterns of Prejudice 40.4–5 (2006): 427–41; Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, “Biobanks of a ‘Racial Kind’: Mining for Difference in the New Genetics,” Patterns of Prejudice 40.4–5 (2006): 443–40; Kelly E. Happe, “The Rhetoric of Race and Breast Cancer Research,” Patterns of Prejudice 40.4–5 (2006): 461–80; Joseph L. Graves Jr. and Michael R. Rose, “Against Racial Medicine,” Patterns of Prejudice 40.4–5 (2006): 481–93; Jonathan Michael Kaplan, “When Sociological Determined Categories Make Biological Realities: Understanding Black/White Health Disparities in the US,” The Monist 93.2 (2010): 281–97; Elizabeth M. Phillips et al., “Mixed Race: Understanding Difference in the Genome Era,” Social Forces 86.2 (2007): 795–820; Richard S. Cooper, Jay S. Kaufman, and Ryk Ward, “Race and Genomics,” New England Journal of Medicine (March 20, 2003): 1166–70; Jenny Beardon, “Decoding Race and Human Difference in the Genomic Age,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 15.3 (2004): 38–65; Barbara A. Koenig, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, and Sarah S. Richardson, eds., Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008); Rick Kittles and Charmaine Royal, “The Genetics of African Americans: Implications for Disease Gene Mapping and Identity,” in Genetic Nature/Culture, ed. Alan Goodman, Deborah Heath, and M. Susan Lindee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 219–33; Joe Markman, “New Law Bars Bias Based on Genetics,” Los Angeles Times, November 21, 2009; Nadia Abu El-Hau, The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
30. For a judicious appraisal of the usefulness and limits of DNA forensic analysis, including privacy concerns and a range of other issues, see Sheldon Krimsky and Tania Simoncelli, Genetic Justice: NDA Data Banks, Criminal Investigations, and Civil Liberties (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), esp. chap. 8, “The Illusory Appeal of a Universal DNA Bank,” and chap. 16, “Fallibility in DNA Identification.” See also Richard Lewontin, “Let the DNA Fit the Crime,” New York Review of Books (February 23, 2012): 28–29; Jason Felch and Maura Dolan, “FBI Resists Scrutiny of ‘Matches’: A Crime Lab’s Findings Raise Doubts about the Reliability of Genetic Profiles,” Los Angeles Times, July 20, 2008; Helen Briggs, “Dispute over Number of Human Genes,” BBC News Online, July 7, 2001.
Human Genome Project people say humans have 20,000 to 25,000 genes, as we have an unusual number of genes that control other genes. Other scientists estimate 40,000 to 60,000 to 100,000. We don’t test for a lot of these genes partly because we don’t know what they do. It is a little like the assumption once made about the Mayans and writing. I was taught in school in the 1950s and 1960s that the Mayans, who left a lot of texts full of symbols, did not have writing because at that time no one knew how to read those texts. Now we can read them because we have learned to decipher their characters. See, e.g., Gerardo Aldana, The Apotheosis of Janaab’ Pakal: Science, History, and Religion in Classical Mayan Palenque (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007).
31. Wells, Deep Ancestry, 11.
32. Ibid., 4, 44–45, 48.
33. Carter Vaughn Findley, The Turks in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Alice Beck Kehoe, America before the European Invasions (London: Longman, 2002), 8–12; Dean R. Snow, “The First Americans and the Differentiation of Hunter-Gatherer Cultures,” in Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. 1, pt. 1, ed. Bruce G. Trigger and Wilcomb E. Washburn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 61–124; E. James Dixon, Quest for the Origins of the First Americans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993); Tom D. Dillehay, The Settlement of the Americas: A New History (New York: Basic Books, 2000); David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 261–68; Patrick Vinton Kirch, The Lapita Peoples: Ancestors of the Oceanic World (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997); David Lewis, We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1994).
34. Jonathan Marks, What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
35. Erin Aubrey Kaplan, “Black Like I Thought I Was,” LA Weekly, October 7, 2003. On Louisiana Creoles, see Andrew Jolivétte, Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed-Race Native American Identity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995); Sybil Kein, ed., Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000); Gary Mills, Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977); Arnold Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, eds., Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992).
36. Henry Louis Gates Jr., In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past (New York: Crown, 2009), 5–6. Gates reprised the act on PBS in 2010 with a new series, Faces of America with Henry Louis Gates Jr., as well as another book, Faces of America: How 12 Extraordinary People Discovered Their Roots (New York: New York University Press, 2010), commented on by Matea Gold, “In ‘Faces,’ Blood Will Tell,” Los Angeles Times, February 10, 2010. He took a third shot at the same theme on PBS in 2013 with Finding Your Roots.
37. Gates, In Search of Our Roots, 222. Actually, the Zulu fought a war of resistance against the Boers, who were descendants of Dutch, not British, colonists.
38. On the demography of the slave trade, see David Eltis, Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity, and Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Routledge, 1997); David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein, The Transatlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
39. Wells, Deep Ancestry, 6, 8.
40. For concurring opinions, see Bolnick et al., “Policy Forum: Genetics: The Science and Business of Genetic Ancestry Testing”; TallBear, “DNA, Blood, and Racializing the Tribe”; and Roberts, Fatal Invention.
41. British Association for Adoption and Fostering and British Society for Human Genetics, “Statement on the Use of DNA Testing to Determine Racial Background,” www.baaf.org.uk/info/lpp/adoption/ethnictesting.pdf (retrieved October 18, 2009); Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, Stanford University, Human Genome Diversity Project, “Frequently Asked Questions,” www.Stanford.edu/group/morrinst/hgdp/faq.html (retrieved February 22, 2008).
42. Patricia Cohen, “Genetic Basis for Crime: A New Look,” New York Times, June 19, 2011; Machael Haederle, “Brain Function Tied to Risk of Criminal Acts,” Los Angeles Times, July 15, 2013. Troy Duster of New York University adamantly disagreed; see his book, Backdoor to Eugenics (New York: Routledge, 1990).
43. Stephen Spielberg, dir., The Minority Report (Dreamworks, 2002).
44. See the web page of the Fertility Institutes, www.fertility-docs.com (retrieved January 29, 2013). Linda L. McCabe and Edward R. B. McCabe critique the designer baby industry in “Are We Entering a ‘Perfect Storm’ for a Resurgence of Eugenics? Science, Medicine, and Their Social Context,” in A Century of Eugenics in America, ed. Paul A. Lombardo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 193–218. Nikolas Rose takes a more sanguine view in The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
45. Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985).
46. Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2009).
