This section presents the case for race-realism, that there are real and important racial differences. The race-deniers insist that we believe “there is no such thing as ‘race’,” but in this section we examine what our lying eyes tell us. 1 Sergeant Friday, on the old TV show “Dragnet,” always wanted “Just the facts, ma’am,” so let us examine the facts, as best they can be found, about living human populations, particularly the three major races. 2 Egalitarians do not take kindly to this information, but no progress can be made without facing the facts and dealing with them. 3
Racial differences arise for the same reasons that different species do – populations become isolated and gradually change, and there is little or no inflow of alleles from other populations. Although it is widely taught and accepted that “’race’ is just a social construct,” 4 the scientific evidence tells a different story. 5 The egalitarians may insists that a black person is no different than a white person with nappy hair and a sun tan 6 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. The focus of the race-deniers solely on skin color is an attempt to trivialize racial differences. Of far greater importance than skin color are differences in bone and tooth 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 largely controlled by genes, not the environment.
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 differences 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 have mixed less and better epitomize the three major races.
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| Figure II-1 |
There are genetically different populations within each of those three races, 7 but the populations in s-S Africa (“Negroids”) differ the most. For example, in the s-S Africans, 8 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 and Niger River basins (West Africa). The Capoids and Nilotids have some Asian and Caucasian features due to interbreeding, but the Congoids are less hybridized so they will be used as the prototypical s-S Africans (Fig. II-1; Coon, 1962, plate IV). Most African Americans came from the Slave Coast of West Africa 9 and their African ancestors were Congoids. Africans living north of the Sahara Desert will be “North Africans.”
“Blacks” will mean people of noticeable African heritage (e.g., tightly curled black hair, broad nose, large lips), regardless of where they are living or their degree of admixture with other races. “Europeans” or “whites” will mean Caucasoids who are of European heritage and have no obvious mixed heritage. “Mongoloids” or “East Asians” will refer to NE Asians who are at least somewhat cold-adapted.
