By a paleoanthropologist, this new book brings debates and discoveries about human evolution to a non-academic audience. Readable and informative, Evolution runs from Darwin, through eugenics and Nazism, right up to the Human Genome Project and the Violence Initiative. Still, it's not as good as Stephen J. Gould's (less current) The Mismeasure of Man, which has a better analysis for political purposes.

Her biggest weakness is a naive liberal quest for value-free science, and bemoaning the fact that biological theories get caught up in the politics of the day. For her, power struggles belong outside the realm of science, and scientists can't do good science if they are going to be held accountable for the political implications of their work.

Darwin Beats The Church

While Charles Darwin's The Origin Of Species (1859) struck a progressive blow against the hegemony of the Church, it did not undermine hierarchy among humans. It was falsely used (though not against Darwin's will) to explain differences in wealth and power between different human populations. Darwin himself thought non- Europeans were not fully human.(1)

One of the first widespread misuses of Darwinism was in its application to human society - for which Darwin had not offered any evidence, for there was none. In Germany this idea was developed by Ernst Haeckel, in Britain by Herbert Spencer, who coined the term "survival of the fittest" and applied it to all aspects of social life. This thinking - Darwinian evolution reflected through bourgeois ideology - obviously continues to the present.

The term "eugenics" (breeding to improve the human race) was introduced in 1883 by Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton. "Could not the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied?" he asked.(2)

By the time Darwin died in 1882, he was convinced of the necessity of eugenics; and he was rehabilitated by the Church: "Once berated as an enemy of morality and religion, Darwin was now sanctified and transformed into an icon acceptable to all aspects of society," writes Shipman. Darwin's son Leonard went on to be president of the Eugenics Society in England from 1891 to 1928.(3) Darwinism had "adapted" to capitalist society.

Eugenics got a big boost in Amerika and Germany just after 1900 with hundreds of thousands of dollars donated to research by big capitalists (Carnegie and Krupp).(4) Their goal was to collect records on individuals and families for the purpose of sterilization and matchmaking to improve their "race" (synonymous with nation, for them).

So they collected records for everyone they could find, on such "genetic" traits as: "insanity, epilepsy, alcoholism, pauperism, criminality, tuberculosis, goiter ... feeblemindedness ... nomadism, athletic ability, shiftlessness and thalassophilia (love of the sea)." All of these were assumed to have hereditary causes.(5)

This research in turn contributed to laws restricting immigration, and formed the basis for the first IQ tests, which were intended to identify the "intelligence" required for every different position in society - and then force children into those positions. Finally, the research led to forced sterilization, with the Supreme Court's blessing and laws in many states.

In both the United States and Germany, Shipman makes virtually no effort to connect these biological and medical theories to imperialism and the motivations of the capitalist class and patriarchy; without that analysis it becomes too easy to justify eugenics and genocide as "mistakes" based on primitive scientific understanding. In fact, the scientists were coming up with ways to justify actions that reflected the demands of the politically powerful at that time.

Why The "Races" Aren't

Visible (phenotype) traits used to define current "races" are not linked to each other at the genetic level. Someone can have the hair of one "race," the eyes of another, the skin of a third, etc. So "races" identified by visible features would be different from those based on blood types, for example.(6)

Evolutionary biology now recognizes that a species is any group capable of reproducing together, and "the action [of evolution is] at the species level," where genotype (underlying genetic traits), not phenotype, is what matters.(7) And contrary to popular belief, evolution is *not* the process of species becoming "more adapted" or "better" than they were before. While individual species adapt, life on earth is no better adapted overall.

In other species, races are frequently the precursors to splitting off new species; population separated geographically for long enough eventually develop enough differences to loose *interfertility* with the others. Since the early 1960s there has been a consensus in biology that, "Because the races are fully interfertile, because different races frequently live together in the same regions, and because humans are so mobile, pure races do not exist and the races cannot diverge into separate species."(8)

But genetic studies still threaten the oppressed in Amerika. The predominant recent example of this is the Violence Initiative, which tried to identify genetic "causes" of violent behavior, with the intention of identifying potentially violent children and "treating" them preventively. Shipman devotes the last part of her book to this controversy.

The proponents and followers of this research make the very common error of looking at a behavior that appears common in a certain group and assuming it has a genetic basis - rather than a social and economic one. If MIM behaved this way, we would be looking for a gene for imperialism or parasitic social behavior, and we would conclude - with strong circumstantial evidence - that white Amerikans have a genetic predisposition to oppress other people.

Frederich Goodwin, the highest ranking psychiatrist in the government (head of the Alcoholism, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration), said in 1992: "If you look, for example, at male monkeys, especially in the wild, roughly half of them survive to adulthood. The other half die by violence. That is the natural way of it for males .... There are some interesting evolutionary implications of that because the hyperaggressive monkeys who kill each other are also hypersexual, so they copulate more ....

"Now, one could say that if some of the loss of social structure in this society, and particularly within high impact inner city areas, has removed some of the civilizing evolutionary things that we have built up and that maybe it isn't just a careless use of the word when people call certain areas of certain cities jungles, that we may have gone back to what might be more natural..."(9)

In other words, without proper "social control," Black males "revert" back to a "nature" of behaving like monkeys! Goodwin's statement was too outrageous (it wasn't even true of monkeys). So, after much protest, he was demoted - to director of the National Institute of Mental Health!(10)

A University of Maryland professor, David Wasserman, was among those promoting this research. He tried to organize a conference called "Genetic Factors in Crime," for which he received federal funding, which he advertised with this text: "Genetic research ... gains impetus from the apparent failure of environmental approaches to crime - deterrence, diversion, and rehabilitation - to affect the dramatic increases in crime, especially violent crime .... Genetic research holds out the prospect of identifying individuals who may be predisposed to certain kinds of criminal conduct ... and of treating some predispositions with drugs and intrusive therapies."(11)

Apparently, for Wasserman, "environmental approaches" don't include self- determination, employment, education relevant to Black people's lives, etc. So it can be concluded that these approaches have failed! This also raised enough of a stir (including by anti-psychiatric medication psychiatrist Peter Breggin, some NAACP chapters and others) to cancel the conference. But the research continues.

Shipman does a good job of presenting the debates, but her opinion of them is liberal and idealistic. She is upset that "objective" research is being stifled because of the "volume" of the debate and the knee-jerk reaction to anything that could have racist implications. Readers of The Evolution of Racism should be prepared for some annoying anti- "politically correct"ism, as well as a useful presentation of the facts and issues.

NOTES:
1. Shipman, p. 1.
2. Ibid, p. 111.
3. Ibid, p. 121.
4. Ibid, pp. 123-132.
5. Ibid, p. 125-6.
6. Ibid, p. 148.
7. Ibid, p. 154.
8. Ibid, p. 195.
9. Ibid, pp. 237-8.
10. Ibid, p. 238.
11. Ibid, p. 246.

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