Race and Evolution1

Abstract

UNTIL rather recently race in man was held to be fixed, unchanging, and static, stable over long periods of time, except in the event of admixture. And in similar fashion the criteria of race, the natural characteristics that distinguish one race from another, were also considered as constants, neither adaptive nor inadaptive, but adaptively neutral. Franz Boas opened new chapter in physical anthropology by demonstrating the plastic nature of those metric traits once extensively used as taxonomic criteria. But to Boas, race itself was fixed, race being a stable type reaching into deep antiquity (Herskovits 1943:43). Earnest Hooton did more than anyone else to spur popular interest in human evolution. Yet in the first edition of Up from the Ape, and for some years afterward, he insisted upon nonadaptive bodily characters as racial criteria (cf. Hooton 1946:452). It is not surprising, therefore, that the blood groups were first extolled as of particular taxonomic value on the basis of supposed adaptive neutrality. Blood groups were hereditary, free from environmental modification, and there was no reason to suppose that A had any advantage over B, or disadvantage compared to O. Seemingly, blood groups were the answer to the taxonomist's prayer.