TRAITS OF LIVING POPULATIONS [Book - Section II]

SECTION II

TRAITS OF LIVING POPULATIONS

“[T]he various [human] races, when carefully compared and measured, differ much from each other,—as in the texture of hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body, the capacity of the lungs, the form and capacity of the skull, and even the convolutions of the brain. But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of difference. The races differ also in constitution, in acclimatization and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual faculties.” (Darwin, 1871, pp. 461-74).

Sergeant Friday on the old TV show “Dragnet” always wanted, “Just the facts, ma’am.” In this section we examine the facts, as best we could find them, about living human populations, particularly the three major races.(FN1) Some of those facts will be very unpleasant to some people, but no progress can be made without facing the facts and dealing with them. (FN2)

Racial differences arise for the same reasons that species differences do – populations become isolated and there is little or no inflow of alleles from other populations. While it is widely taught and accepted that “race is just a social construct,” (FN3) the scientific evidence tells a different story.(FN4) The egalitarians may insists that a black person is just a white person with a sun tan and nappy hair but, as this Section will document, there are actually hundreds (if not thousands) of racial differences besides skin color and hair and, to a scientist who studies racial differences, those are not even the most important differences. Of far greater importance are differences in bone shape and structure, muscle size, brain size and intelligence, and behavior. All of the traits discussed in this section are heritable, which means that they are controlled by genes.

Since any theory of human origins must account for the presence of living ethnic and racial groups and the differences between them, it is important to know exactly what those difference are. First, we will examine the three principal populations (races) indigenous to Africa, Europe, and Asia. Since races have mixed somewhat almost everywhere, we will limit the discussion primarily to those populations that best characterize the differences between three major races. There are genetically different populations within each of those three races, for example, in Africans there are Capoids (Bushmen and Hottentots, who live around the Cape), Nilotids, who live around the Nile River basin, and the Congoids, who live around the Congo River basin. (FN5) The Capoids and Nilotids have some Asian and Caucasian features due to interbreeding. North Africans have so much Caucasian heritage that they are usually classified separately from the “sub-Saharan Africans,” who are all the black Africans living south of the Sahara Desert. Unless stated otherwise, “Africans” will refer to sub-Saharan Africans and, for physical features, specifically to the Congoids, who have more typical Negroid features, as can be seen in this photo:

“Blacks” will mean people of noticeable African heritage (e.g., very curly hair, broad nose, long, narrow skull) regardless of where they are living or their degree of admixture with other races. “Europeans” will mean Caucasoids of European heritage. “Asians” will mean Mongoloids from Northeast Asia, i.e., China, Japan, and Korea (as opposed to the “Southeast Asians,” who are similar to the NE Asians, but whose Asian traits are less pronounced). Some other populations, such as aborigines in Africa, Australia, and the South Pacific, will also be briefly discussed.

(1) The egalitarians, who insist that we “celebrate diversity,” have done their best to prevent anyone from determining just what that diversity is so that it can be celebrated. Thus, the reader will find that for many traits older data had to be used, if any data at all could be found.

(2) Physical anthropology, the science which initially studied racial differences, has ceded to the Egalitarian Imperative and has abdicated that role. Fortunately, the egalitarians have not yet persuaded the public that murderers should go free rather than admit that bones and other remains can be identified by race, and forensic science has filed in the gap. The Journal of Forensic Sciences is loaded with techniques for determining what egalitarians insist does not exist - race.

(3) One might wonder how adults can think race is just a social construct when babies as young as 3 months prefer faces of their own race (Bar-Heim, 2006; Kelly, 2005), genetic analysis can identify the (self-identified) race of people with nearly 100% accuracy (Tang, 2005), and pathologists and forensic anthropologists can easily tell the race of a person from examining only a fleshless skull.

(4) “Races differ in the extent and manner in which the fine subcutaneous muscles of the lips and cheeks have become differentiated from the parent mammalian muscle body; in the chemical composition of hair and of bodily secretions, including milk; in the ways in which different muscles are attached to bones; in the sizes and probably secretion rates of different endocrines; in certain details of the nervous system, as, for example, how far down in the lumbar vertebrae the neural canal extends; and in the capacity of individuals to tolerate crowding and stress.” (Coon, 1962, p. 662).

(5) Europeans are sometimes divided into Nordic (northwestern Europe), Alpine (central and eastern Europe), and Mediterranian (southern Europe and northern Africa). (Boyd, 1955)