joseph graves the emperor's new clothes

'Race in the present state of things is an abstract conception', wrote Paul Broca, the leading physical anthropologist of the late nineteenth century. Race was, he conceded, 'a conception of continuity in discontinuity, of unity in diversity. It is the rehabilitation of a real but directly unobtainable thing.' By the end of the nineteenth century, even racial scientists despaired of establishing race as a physical entity. Every measure of racial type, from headform to blood groups, was shown to be changeable and not exclusive to any one group. As racial scientists searched desperately for more and more trivial manifestations of race, the biologist WJ Solas noted, apparently without a hint of irony, that 'it is on the degree of curliness or twist in the hair that the most fundamental divisions in the human race are based.'

What racial scientists themselves denied at the end of the nineteenth century, many scholars continue to defend at the beginning of the twenty-first. According to the anthropologist George W Gill, more than half of his colleagues accept 'the traditional view that human races are biologically valid and real'. For such 'race realists', the denial of the concept of race is simply 'political correctness' or 'postmodern' fallacy. 'The people in "race denial" are in "reality denial" as well' Gill claimed in a recent online debate with fellow anthropologist Loring Brace.

In The Emperor's New Clothes, evolutionary biologist Joseph L Graves Jr sets out show that scientific, not political, correctness underlies the critique of the race concept. 'There is no biological basis for separation of human beings into races', he argues; 'the idea of race is a relatively recent social and political construction.'

The concept of race, or subspecies, has validity in the natural world, where it refers to the existence of two or more geographically isolated or localised subpopulations within a species that differ from each other by virtue of certain non-trivial hereditary features. Isolation is important because it prevents interbreeding, and hence a flow of genes, between the populations. The creation of races is often a stepping stone to speciation.

Such a concept of race, however, has little validity in human biology. Virtually no human group is isolated from all others. Every population shades imperceptibly into the next. While the people of Kenya and those of China may look very different, there is no point at which the race to which Kenyans belong ends, and that to which Chinese belong begins.

Human populations clearly differ in their genetic make-up. Differences in the size, shape and colour of people from different parts of the world reveals how human body-forms have been shaped by natural selection to suit particular environments. But the fact that there are physical differences between human groups does not mean that such differences can be reduced to racial distinctions. The presence of the sickle-cell trait, for instance, can help distinguish between white and black Americans, but not necessarily between white and black South Africans, because sickle cell is specific to West Africans and their descendents - including African Americans. Nor can sickle cell unambiguously distinguish between West Africans and Europeans, because several European populations around the Mediterranean also possess the trait. Despite the promotion of sickle cell anaemia as a 'black' disease, there is no relationship between sickle cell and skin colour. And this is true of most traits. Because there are different selection pressures on different traits, so there is rarely a link between the distribution of one trait and that of another. 'A key error in the work of modern racial thinkers', Graves observes, 'is their failure to see that genetic traits [are] distributed independently among various populations.'

The scientific invalidity of the concept of race, Graves argues, reveals its ideological roots. Historically, he writes, 'social change' not 'objective scientific reasoning... drove much of the development of the biological concept of race and racism.' The Emperor's New Clothes attempts to unearth the ideological underpinnings of the concept of race through a history of the idea of racial difference from Aristotle to The Bell Curve.

Neither the Ancients, nor premodern Europeans, Graves argues, possessed biological concepts of race. It was the creation of new social institutions, particularly in response to slavery, which encouraged the development of racial theory. This argument is, of course, a familiar one, and it has been expounded in a number of outstanding historical studies over the past three decades. Graves attempts to avoid simple repetition by presenting not so much a history of the idea of race as a history of scientific, and pseudoscientific, theories of human diversity. His aim, he writes, is to use scientific reasoning to evaluate racial thinking. This might sound anachronistic, but Graves avoids most of the problems of presentism by judging racial arguments in the light of facts a particular thinker would have known in his time. It is a method that allows Graves both to dissect the arguments of past racial thinkers and to show the relevance of such dissection for contemporary debates.

Take for instance his discussion of Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics. Galton collected statistics on a wide number of human characteristics, such as height and strength, and discovered that most characteristics followed a normal distribution - or 'bell curve'. Galton argued that intelligence must also distributed in a similar fashion, that the bell curve reflected variation in innate propensities, and that the various races and classes were endowed with different amounts of natural intelligence. 'Galton's reasoning that the intellectual characteristics of people should also follow [a normal distribution]', Graves observes, 'is probably his greatest contribution to modern psychology'. But his 'explanation of the pattern and its consequences for human society was fundamentally flawed because he could only observe particular patterns; he could not determine the causative agents that were producing them.' In inferring causation from an observed pattern, Galton 'committed the main logical error in all pseudoscientific investigation'.

The final two chapters of The Emperor's New Clothes is given over to a discussion of contemporary debates about racial differences in the distribution of intelligence and disease prevalence. Graves' critique of the attempts of psychometricians to suggest that differences in IQ scores between black, white and Asian Americans reflect genetic differences will be familiar to anyone who has followed the debate over the past two decades. Less familiar, and hence more valuable, is Graves' questioning of arguments that differences in disease prevalence between blacks and white reflect distinct racial constitutions. 'Traditional medical research literature', Graves observes, 'assumes racial genetic difference as if it were a fait accompli in explaining disease prevalence'. But this assumption 'is made without consideration of what is known about the nature of human genetic variability'.

African-Americans, for example, exhibit higher age-adjusted mortality rates in twenty-two of twenty-four mortality categories. 'What is the probability', Graves asks, 'that a combination of natural selection and genetic drift produced a one-sided asymmetry in mortality?' If the differences between whites and blacks in disease prevalence were the consequence of their being distinct biological races, we would expect blacks to show higher mortality rates for some diseases and whites for others. The fact that the dice seem so loaded against African-Americans suggests that the differences cannot be explained in terms of biological race.

Graves' discussion of the logical problems of racial science, both now and in the past, is lucid and sharply-focused. He displays a less sure touch, however, in his discussion of the history of the concept of race. Graves views the modern idea of race as largely the product of slavery, and primarily shaped by American circumstances. 'The concept of discrete racial categories, and the fixed nature of their relations', he writes, 'originated from conditions most extremely illustrated on American soil'. This approach may be understandable given Graves' view of his mission as that of re-educating the American public. Its consequence, however, is to distort the history of race.

For a start, Graves overemphasises the importance of race to eighteenth century discourse. Particularly in Europe, the arguments of planters and slavers about the inferiority of blacks were not representative of much intellectual debate. Michael Banton, Robert Miles, Anthony Barker and others have pointed out in their various surveys of racial thinking that, in Banton's words, 'though there was a substantial literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries about Africans and other non-Europeans, the word "race" was rarely used either to describe peoples or in accounts of differences between them.'

Graves also tends to overplay the importance of colour differences to nineteenth century conceptions of race. For nineteenth century thinkers, race was a description, not so much of colour differences, as of social distinctions,. The domestic lower classes were, to nineteenth-century eyes, as racially different as were Africans or Asians. A report about working class life in the British Saturday Review in 1864 observed that 'The Bethnal Green poor are a caste apart, a race of whom we know nothing, whose lives are of quite different complexion from ours, persons with whom we have no point of contact . ''Distinctions and separations, like those of English classes', the Review suggested, 'which always endure, which last from the cradle to the grave, which prevent anything like association or companionship, produce an effect on the lives of the extreme poor, and subject them to isolation, which offer a very fair parallel to the separation of the slaves from the whites.' The genesis and development of the modern concept of race is more complex than Graves allows.