Race is a Biological Reality

by David Sims

RACE DOESN’T come from social inequality, but rather from biological inequality. The racists (the word by today’s standards would include practically everyone prior to 1950) actually had it right, and the liberals have been wrong about race the whole time. At least two generations of Americans have been miseducated in regard to the nature, the magnitude, and the significance of race differences.

Let me explain.

A social construct is something like “human dignity,” which exists only because people agree to behave as if it did. But when faced with forces that don’t share that agreement, such as an enemy, a hungry wild animal, or an elemental force of nature, most people quickly realize that “human dignity” isn’t really a fact of nature, but rather a human fiction, which offers no protection at all for the simple reason that it has no physical existence.

The idea that race might be a social construct began as an hypothesis introduced by Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist, in 1972. He claimed that the genetic differences between races were so slight that no one working only with genetic data would categorize people as Asians, Whites, Blacks, Mestizos, etc. Lewontin said that racial classification “is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance.”

Leftists were quick to pick up on Lewontin’s words and create a number of slogans from them, including “Race is a social construct” and “There’s only One Race, the Human Race.” The Lewontin Hypothesis almost immediately became a required belief among the politically correct. And that was very unfortunate for them, because less than 30 years later it would become possible for geneticists and forensic scientists to conduct a statistical analysis of genetic markers in order to see whether their clusters correlated with the commonly identified racial groups.

They did. By 2005, it was well documented that Lewontin had been wrong. Practically every analysis of genetic markers demonstrated the biological reality of racial identities. In one of them, a study entitled “Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies,” conducted by Hua Tang, Tom Quertermous, Beatriz Rodriguez, and others in 2005, all except five of 3636 test subjects (which included Asians, Whites, Blacks and Mestizos) sorted statistically into the cluster of genetic markers that corresponded to their self-identified racial group. The success rate for predicting how someone would classify himself racially, using only his genes as information, was approximately 99.9 percent, according to that study, which was published in American Journal of Human Genetics 76: 268-275 (2005).

It had long been possible for physical anthropologists to sort skeletal remains by race with very good accuracy, using only the shapes of skull, jaw, teeth and bones as guides. By the first years of the 21st century, it had become possible for forensic experts to do the same thing with DNA, which enabled more accurate identifications of fathers in paternity disputes and in showing police when they have arrested the right suspect, or, sometimes, when they’d nabbed the wrong fellow.

Although it’s true that all the races of humans share over 99% of their DNA in common, that’s not a convincing argument because most of that genetic code has to do with determining us as animal rather than as plant, as chordates, as vertebrates, for being warm-blooded, for giving live birth, for being a primate rather than (e.g.) a feline, for being a hominid rather than a monkey, for being human rather than ape. That’s where most of our DNA goes. We’re very nearly the same genetically as the apes. And you’d have to look closely, and know what to look for, in order to distinguish any mammalian species from any other mammalian species by their DNA alone.

So that small fraction of DNA that sets the White race apart from the Black races is enough to cause very significant biological differences in principle.

And, really, the idea of racial equality ought to have been suspect in any thinking person’s mind from the beginning. Nature produced the visible racial differences, which we usually notice on inspection, and which we mostly agree are trivial. But then the liberals declared that those “cosmetic” racial differences were the only differences between the races, and that simply doesn’t follow logically.

It would be a very strange thing indeed if nature, which created all of the heritable traits in organisms, had been aware of liberal sensibilities since the dawn of time, and had taken great care — with humans — to permit the evolution of only those racial differences having no social significance of which liberals might disapprove.

Nature doesn’t respect our opinions that way, of course. And it didn’t carry out the evolution of mankind with any such restraints.

Allow me to make a simple analogy. Races may be compared with metal canisters filled with gas. The net effect of their collective behavior is like the temperature of the canisters. You can measure their temperatures in order to find out whether they are inside a safe-handling range. If you forgo testing the temperature, or if you are informed about the temperature but choose to disregard any “too hot to handle” warnings, then you risk being burned. However, temperature does not predict the speed of any particular molecule in the canister. It only tells you what the average speed is.

Likewise, statistics on HIV infection rates, per capita crime rates, IQ scores, and similarly important subjects, broken down by race, might tell us that a certain race is, in general, a bunch of nasty savages, even though we realize that there are bound to be a few exceptions. The existence of those exceptions does not justify or require our going over to those other races and associating ourselves in such a way that we will be burned.

Further Reading

1. “Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies,” Hua Tang, Tom Quertermous, and Beatriz Rodriguez, American Journal of Human Genetics, 2005.

2. “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” Arthur R. Jensen, Harvard Educational Review, 1969.

3. “Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability,” Arthur R. Jensen and J. Philippe Rushton, Psychology, Public Policy and Law, 2005.

4. “A Normative Sample of Intelligence and Achievement of Negro Elementary School Children in the Southeastern United States,” W.A. Kennedy, V. Van de Riet, J.C. White, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 1963.

5. Which Way Western Man, chapter 18, William G. Simpson, National Vanguard Books, 2003.

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Source: David Sims