Turning to arguments from reason, foul odors might arise among groups of people from unhealthy habits of diet or hygiene. But Jewish dietary laws guarantee moderation and good sense, while drinking habits tend to abstemiousness—“seldom offending in ebriety or excess of drink, nor erring in gulosity or superfluity of meats; whereby they prevent indigestion and crudities, and consequently putrescence of humors.”
If no reason can therefore be found in Jewish habits of life, the only conceivable rationale for a noxious racial odor would lie in a divine “curse derived upon them by Christ… as a badge or brand of a generation that crucified their Salvator.” But Browne rejects this proposal even more forcefully as a “conceit without all warrant; and an easie way to take off dispute in what point of obscurity soever.” The invocation of miraculous agency, when no natural explanation can be found, is a coward’s or lazy man’s escape from failure. (Browne does not object to heavenly intervention for truly great events like Noah’s flood or the parting of the Red Sea, but a reliance upon miracles for small items, like the putative racial odor of unfairly stigmatized people, makes a mockery of divine grandeur. Browne then heaps similar ridicule on the legend that Ireland has no snakes because St. Patrick cast them out with his rod. Such inappropriate claims for a myriad of minor miracles only stifles discussion about the nature of phenomena and the workings of genuine causes.)
But Browne then caps his case against the proposition “that Jews stink” with an even stronger argument based on reason. The entire subject, he argues, makes no sense because the category in question—the Jewish people—does not represent the kind of entity that could bear such properties as a distinctive national odor.
Among the major fallacies of human reason, such “category mistakes” are especially common in the identification of groups and the definition of their characters—problems of special concern to taxonomists like myself. Much of Browne’s text is archaic, and strangely fascinating therefore as a kind of conceptual fossil. But his struggle with errors of categories in debunking the proposition “that Jews stink” interleaves a layer of modern relevance, and uncovers a different kind of reason for contemporary interest in the arguments of Pseitdodoxia Epidemica.
Browne begins by noting that traits of individuals can’t automatically be extended to properties of groups. We do not doubt that individuals have distinctive odors, but groups might span the full range of individual differences, and thereby fail to maintain any special identity. What kid of group might therefore qualify as a good candidate for such distinctive properties?
Browne argues that such a group would have to be tightly defined, either by strict criteria of genealogy (so that members might share properties by heredity of unique descent) or by common habits and modes of life not followed by other people (but Browne had already shown that Jewish lifestyles of moderation and hygiene disprove any claim for unsavory national odor).
Browne then clinches his case by arguing that the Jewish people do not represent a strict genealogical group. Jews have been dispersed throughout the world, reviled and despised, expelled and excluded. Many subgroups have been lost by assimilation, others diluted by extensive intermarriage. Most nations, in fact, are strongly commingled and therefore do not represent discrete groups by genealogical definition; this common tendency has been exaggerated among the Jewish people. Jews are not a distinct hereditary group, and therefore cannot have such properties as a national odor:
There will be found no easie assurance to fasten a material or temperamental propriety upon any nation; … much more will it be difficult to make out this affection in the Jews; whose race however pretended to be pure, must needs have suffered inseparable commixtures with nations of all sorts.… It being therefore acknowledged that some [Jews] are lost, evident that others are mixed, and not assured that any are distinct, it will be hard to establish this quality [of national odor] upon the Jews.
In many years of pondering over fallacious theories of biological determinism, and noting their extraordinary persistence and tendency to reemerge after presumed extirpation, I have been struck by a property that I call “surrogacy.” Specific arguments raise a definite charge against a particular group—that Jews stink, that Irishmen drink, that women love mink, that Africans can’t think—but each specific claim acts as a surrogate for any other. The general form of argument is always the same, and always permeated by identical fallacies over the centuries. Scratch the argument that women, by their biological nature, cannot be effective as heads of state and you will uncover the same structure of bad inference underlying someone else’s claim that African Americans will never form a high percentage of the pool of Ph.D. candidates.
Thus, Browne’s old refutation of the myth “that Jews stink” continues to be relevant for our modern struggle, since the form of his argument applies to our current devaluings of people for supposedly inborn and unalterable defects of intelligence or moral vision. Fortunately (since I belong to the group), Jews are not taking much heat these days (though I need hardly mention the searing events of my parents’ generation to remind everyone that current acceptance should breed no complacency). This season’s favorite myth has recalled another venerable chapter in this general form of infamy—The Bell Curve’s version of the claim that people of African descent have, on average, less innate intelligence than all other folks.
Following Browne’s strategy, this claim can be debunked with a mixture of factual citation and logical argument. I shall not go through the full exercise here, lest this essay become a book, (see the first two essays of this section). But I do wish to emphasize that Browne’s crowning point in refuting the legend “that Jews stink”—his explication of category mistakes in defining Jews as a biological group—also undermines the modern myth of black intellectual inferiority, from Jensen and Shockley in the 1960s to Murray and Herrnstein today.
The African American population of the United States today does not form a genealogical unit in the same sense that Browne’s Jews lacked inclusive definition by descent. As a legacy of our ugly history of racism, anyone with a visually evident component of Africa ancestry belongs to the category of “black” even though many persons so designated have substantial, often majoritarian Caucasian ancestry as well. (An old “trick” question for baseball aficionados asks: “What Italian American player hit more than forty home runs for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1953”? The answer is “Roy Campanella,” who had a Caucasian Italian father and a black mother, but who, by our social conventions, is always identified as black.)
(As a footnote on the theme of surrogacy, explanations of the same category mistake for blacks and Jews often take the same prejudicial form of blaming the victim. Browne, though generally and refreshingly free of anti-Jewish bias, cites a particularly ugly argument in explaining high rates of miscegenation between Jews and Christians—the supposed lasciviousness of Jewish women and their preference for blond Christian men over swarthy and unattractive Jews. Browne writes: “Nor are fornications infrequent between them both [Jewish women and Christian men]; there commonly passing opinions of invitement, that their women desire copulation with them rather than their own nation, and affect Christian carnality above circumcised venery.” American racists often made the same claim during slavery days—a particularly disgraceful lie in this case, for the argument works to excuse rapists by blaming the truly powerless. For example, Louis Agassiz wrote in 1863: “As soon as the sexual desires are awakening in the young men of the South, they find it easy to gratify themselves by the readiness with which they are met by colored [half-breed] house servants.… This blunts his better instincts in that direction and leads him gradually to seek more spicy partners, as I have heard the full blacks called by fast young men.”)
Obviously, we cannot make a coherent claim for “blacks” being innately anything by heredity if the people so categorized do not form a distinctive genealogical grouping. But the category mistake goes far, far deeper than dilution by extensive intermixture wit
h other populations. The most exciting and still emerging discovery in modern paleoanthroplogy and human genetics will force us to rethink the entire question of human categories in a radical way. We shall be compelled to recognize that “African black” cannot rank as a racial group with such conventional populations as “Native American,” “European Caucasian,” or “East Asian,” but must be viewed as something more inclusive than all the others combined, not really definable as a discrete group, and therefore not available for such canards as “African blacks are less intelligent” or “African blacks sure can play basketball.”
The past decade of anthropology has featured a lively debate about the origin of the only living human species, Homo sapiens. Did our species emerge separately on three continents (Africa, Europe, and Asia) from precursor populations of Homo erectus inhabiting all these areas—the so-called multiregionalist view? Or did Homo sapiens arise in one place, probably Africa, from just one of these Homo erectus populations, and then spread out later to cover the globe—the so-called out-of-Africa view?
The tides of argument have swung back and forth, but recent evidence seems to be cascading toward Out of Africa. As more and more genes are sequenced and analyzed for their variation among human racial groups, and as we reconstruct genealogical trees based upon these genetic differences, the same strong signal and pattern seem to be emerging: Homo sapiens arose in Africa; the migration into the rest of the world did not begin until 112,000 to 280,000 years ago, with the latest, more technologically sophisticated studies favoring dates near the younger end of this spectrum.
In other words, all non-African racial diversity—whites, yellows, reds, everyone from the Hopi to the Norwegians, to the Fijians—may not be much older than one hundred thousand years. By contrast, Homo sapiens has lived in Africa for a longer time. Consequently, since genetic diversity roughly correlates with time available for evolutionary change, genetic variety among Africans alone exceeds the sum total of genetic diversity for everyone else in the rest of the world combined! How, therefore, can we lump “African blacks” together as a single group, and imbue them with traits either favorable or unfavorable, when they represent more evolutionary space and more genetic variety than we find in all non-African people in all the rest of the world? Africa is most of humanity by any proper genealogical definition; all the rest of us occupy a branch within the African tree. This non-African branch has surely flourished, but can never be topologically more than a subsection within an African structure.
We will need many years, and much pondering, to assimilate the theoretical, conceptual, and iconographic implications of this startling reorientation in our views about the nature and meaning of human diversity. For starters, though, I suggest that we finally abandon such senseless statements as “African blacks have more rhythm, less intelligence, greater athleticism.” Such claims, apart from their social perniciousness, have no meaning if Africans cannot be construed as a coherent group because they represent more diversity than all the rest of the world put together.
Our greatest intellectual adventures often occur within us—not in the restless search for new facts and new objects on the earth or in the stars, but from a need to expunge old prejudices and build new conceptual structures. No hunt can have a sweeter reward, a more admirable goal, than the excitement of thoroughly revised understanding—the inward journey that thrills real scholars and scares the bejesus out of the rest of us. We need to make such an internal expedition in reconceptualizing our views of human genealogy and the meaning of evolutionary diversity. Thomas Browne—for we must award him the last word—praised such inward adventures above all other intellectual excitement. Interestingly, in the same passage, he also invoked Africa as a metaphor for unknown wonder. He could not have known the uncanny literal accuracy of his words (from Religio Medici, Book 1, Section 15):
I could never content my contemplation with those general pieces of wonder, the flux and reflux of the sea, the increase of Nile, the conversion of the [compass] needle to the north; and have studied to match and parallel those in the more obvious and neglected pieces of nature, which without further travel I can do in the cosmography of myself; we carry with us the wonders we seek without us: there is all Africa and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature.
Racial Geometry
Interesting stories often lie encoded in names that seem either capricious or misconstrued. Why, for example, are political radicals called “left” and their conservative counterparts “right”? In most European legislatures, maximally distinguished members sat at the chairman’s right, following a custom of courtesy as old as all our prejudices for favoring the dominant hand of most people. (These biases run deep, extending well beyond can openers and writing desks to language itself, where “dextrous” comes from the Latin for “right,” and “sinister” for “left.”) Since these distinguished nobles and moguls tended to espouse conservative views, the right and left wings of the legislature came to define a geometry of political views.
Among such apparently capricious names in my own field of biology and evolution, none seems more curious, and none elicits more inquiry from correspondents and questioners after lectures, than the official designation of light-skinned people from Europe, western Asia, and North Africa as Caucasian. Why should this most common racial group of the Western world be named for a range of mountains in Russia? J. F. Blumenbach (1752—1840), the German naturalist who established the most influential of all racial classifications, invented this name in 1795, in the third edition of his seminal work, De generis humani varietate nativa (On the Natural Variety of Mankind). Blumenbach’s original definition cites two reasons for his choice—the maximal beauty of people from this small region, and the probability that humans had first been created in this area. Blumenbach wrote:
Caucasian variety. I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighborhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, and because … in that region, if anywhere, we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones [original forms] of mankind.
Blumenbach, one of the greatest and most honored naturalists of the Enlightenment, spent his entire career as a professor at the University of Göttingen in Germany. He first presented his work De generis humani varietate nativa as a doctoral dissertation to the medical faculty of Göttingen in 1775, as the minutemen of Lexington and Concord began the American Revolution. He then republished the text for general distribution in 1776, as a fateful meeting in Philadelphia proclaimed our independence. The coincidence of three great documents in 1776—Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (on the politics of liberty), Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (on the economics of individualism), and Blumenbach’s treatise on racial classification (on the science of human diversity)—records the social ferment of these decades, and sets the wider context that makes Blumenbach’s taxonomy, and his decision to call the European race Caucasian, so important for our history and current concerns.
The solution to big puzzles often hinges upon tiny curiosities, easy to miss or to pass over. I suggest that the key to understanding Blumenbach’s classification, the foundation of so much that continued to influence and disturb us today, lies in a peculiar criterion that he used to name the European race Caucasian—the supposed maximal beauty of people from this region. Why, first of all, should anyone attach such importance to an evidently subjective assessment; and why, secondly, should an aesthetic criterion become the basis for a scientific judgment about place of origin? To answer these questions, we must turn to Blumenbach’s original formulation of 1775, and then move to the changes he introduced in 1795, when Caucasians received their name.
Blumenbach’s final taxonomy of 1795 divided all humans into five groups defined by both geography and appearance—in his order, the “Caucasian variety” for light-skinned people of Europe and adjacent areas; the “Mongolian variety” for inhabitants of eastern Asia,
including China and Japan; the “Ethiopian variety” for dark-skinned people of Africa; the “American variety” for native populations of the New World; and the “Malay variety” for Polynesians and Melanesians of Pacific islands, and for the aborigines of Australia. But Blumenbach’s original classification of 1775 recognized only the first four of these five, and united members of the “Malay variety” with the other people of Asia whom Blumenbach later named “Mongolian.”
We now encounter the paradox of Blumenbach’s reputation as the inventor of modern racial classification. The original four-race system, as I shall illustrate in a moment, did not arise from Blumenbach’s observations or theorizing, but only represents, as Blumenbach readily admits, the classification adopted and promoted by his guru Carolus Linnaeus in the founding document of taxonomy, the Systema naturae of 1758. Therefore, the later addition of a “Malay variety” for some Pacific peoples originally included in a broader Asian group, represents Blumenbach’s only original contribution to racial classification. This change seems so minor. Why, then, do we credit Blumenbach, rather than Linnaeus, as the founder of racial classification? (One might prefer to say “discredit,” as the enterprise does not, for good reason, enjoy high repute these days.) I wish to argue that Blumenbach’s apparently small change actually records a theoretical shift that could not have been broader, or more portentous, in scope. This change has been missed or misconstrued in most commentaries because later scientists have not grasped the vital historical and philosophical principle that theories are models subject to visual representation, usually in clearly definable geometric terms.