Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Human Variation, Races, Types, and Ethnic Groups (5th Edition) by Stephen Molnar ISBN: 0-13-033668-8 Publisher: Prentice Hall Pub. Date: 27 August, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $58.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A diverse, useful, yet disorganized work on human variation.
Comment: Having survived a quarter-long course in anthropology using this as a textbook, I've acquired a pretty good feel for its strengths and its faults.
Let's start with the latter and work toward the former. What will bother most people is the occasionally lacking organization/illustration of the subject matter. While this is fine in a college environment, the layman can easily get lost in its pages. The chapters were probably practical enough from the author's perspective, the bulk going from one "racial" feature to another and exposing the actual evolutionary roots, but I would have liked more theoretical continuity.
Also, despite the mass of excellent data, the book lacks a proper genetic analysis of human variation. Research has given us an idea of how far various conventional "groups" are from each other, genetically speaking--sometimes in direct contravention to the expected associations. This sort of analysis is elementary to tracking our remarkable journey into the far reaches of the world, and should not be omitted in a text that considers what happened in the process.
As an extension of my first complaint, it's the lack of theoretical perspective which makes "A reader's" review possible. Had the author made the meta-scientific point of race being an irrelevant construct, my fellow reviewer would not have spoken of "...the big *racial* differences in size, speed, leaping ability, and muscularity...," since there are quite valid selective factors behind such variation, independent of any perceived "race." To Molnar's credit, he *does* take a look at stature in its evolutionary context. In any case, one must not turn "a feature present in people seen as belonging to a race" into "a racial feature." Accordingly, Molnar should have noted the inherent logical circularity of racial distinctions: Races are defined by certain features, and those features are racial because they define races. How do they define races? Because races have them. What defines a race? Those features. It is our perceptual emphasis on apparent differences that creates racial categories, and only secondarily do some intrepid pseudo-scientists attempt to provide a more sophisticated academic "justification" of those categories. This book is rife with detailed information to use against these sorts, but it helps to grasp the bigger picture in advance.
Ultimately, Molnar fails to ask a rather philosophical question: What makes a category scientifically real? If you're going to say that races don't really "exist," the standard of existence must be made explicit. The short answer is that things are scientifically real insofar as they fit into science's theoretical machine; in this case, evolutionary theory and its applications. The concept of distinct "races" arose in less enlightened times, and it is thus incommensurable with the language of modern biology. Science has no use for it, since, functionally, there is only the genetic paint of human inheritance spread over a geographical canvas, tinted by natural selection. Internally, there is no way to rigidly divide the resulting image, since one shade blends into another through space and time; externally, the substrate and the tint are often indistinguishable. Does the blending occur in more or less dramatic ways? Certainly. However, as Molnar amply illustrates, there are no simple *primary* colors in human variation (save Homo sapiens sapiens itself), and the belief that they do exist overlooks a complex history of inheritance and selection. As a result, attributing features to those "colors" is scientifically sloppy, and socially sloppy as well. "Black" Entertainment Television, "Black" crime, "Black" culture, "Black" poverty, "Black" genetic resistance to disease: Some forget the generality of racial terms, and all hide the functional factors, be they cultural, historical, selective or deeply hereditary. Race is the ultimate red herring, and Molnar should have made that explicit. Intelligent readers will find that his data can speak for itself, or at least it will help the reader recognize that understanding can only be found in that data, which, taken unto itself, contains no meta-categories.
All in all, "Human Variation, Races, Types, and Ethnic Groups" is best seen as the educated man's reference book on race, for use in illustrating your own arguments. If you're seeking a guided journey through the subject, look elsewhere.
Rating: 3
Summary: Ho hum textbook on what ought to be a fascinating topic
Comment: Everybody is supposed to "celebrate diversity" these days, but in practice that seems to mean stomping on anybody who actually want to do it. Few things are less welcome these days in American academia than a discussion of what we all see as we walk down the street each day: the remarkable biodiversity of the human species. Only a few selectively bred species like dogs exceed humans in variability of size, color, and temperment.
This textbook reviews most of the duller, politically less incendiary topics in human biodiversity: e.g., blood types, sickle cell genes for preventing malaria, and high-altitude adjustments. He shies away from the more fun topics like the big racial differences in size, speed, leaping ability, and muscularity, which we all see so vividly illustrated in the Olympics and in American pro sports. (What are all those huge Samoans doing in the NFL if human biodiversity doesn't matter much?) And, to prove that his heart is in the right place politically, Molnar mails in a pro forma denunciation of Arthur Jensen and the other Bell Curvers. Ho hum.
Steve Sailer
 |
Title: Who Is Black?: One Nation's Definition by F. James Davis ISBN: 0271021721 Publisher: Pennsylvania State Univ Pr (Txt) Pub. Date: November, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
 |
Title: The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould ISBN: 0393314251 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: June, 1996 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
 |
Title: The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, Sarah Thorne, Heather Mimnaugh ISBN: 0201442310 Publisher: Perseus Publishing Pub. Date: October, 1996 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
 |
Title: Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past Through Our Genes by Steve Olson ISBN: 0618091572 Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Co Pub. Date: 15 May, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
 |
Title: Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History (Foundations of Human Behavior) by Jonathan Marks ISBN: 0202020339 Publisher: Aldine de Gruyter Pub. Date: January, 1995 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
