I Have Landed (55 page)

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
Pseudodoxia 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 kind 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 disproved 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 maintain such properties as a national odor:

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 remains perennially the same, 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 false 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). Following Browne's strategy, any particular version of this general 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. 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 and
The Bell Curve
in the 1990s.

The African American population of the United States today cannot be identified as 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 African ancestry belongs to the category of “black” even though many persons so designated can trace their roots to substantial, often majoritarian, Caucasian sources 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, became identified as black.)

(As a footnote on the theme of surrogacy, explanations of the same category mistake for blacks and Jews often follow 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 functions primarily 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 with 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 “Africans are less intelligent” or “Africans 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 rapidly 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 about 100,000 years ago.

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 far 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
includes 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 ourselves—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 promise 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
NTERESTING
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 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:

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.