The History and Geography of Human Genes, by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza (Princeton, 1,032 pp., $150)
JUST as a hundred years ago the Victorians worried about reconciling Darwin with God, today every honest mind must be perturbed by what appears to be the mounting scientific evidence of racial differences. This perturbation is all the greater because of the dishonesty and personal viciousness that characterized much of the reaction to The Bell Curve when it broke the taboo on public discussion of the issue last year. Since much of the evidence was already well known to scholars, the question now must be whether science will inform politics or politics chill science. This book, although by respected scholars, appears to be evidence that politics is winning. It has been advertised as an antidote to The Bell Curve because of a passage proclaiming the “scientific failure of the concept of human races” due to the problem of overlap and gradation between groups. Of course overlaps and gradations exist in all systems of classification, but taxonomy remains fundamental to science. And the genetic evidence in the balance of the book makes clear that human beings can indeed be grouped roughly in accordance with traditional racial divisions.
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