Race : a study in modern superstition / Jacques Barzun.

  • Jacques Barzun
Date:
1938
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Race : a study in modern superstition / Jacques Barzun. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    29/376 (page 15)
    had a long and troubled history. It includes all explana tions from the simple ascription of a dark skin to the heat of the sun, to the oversubtle explanation of German philosophy by means of fog and heavy annual rainfall. At this juncture two questions arise: How do striking characters get transmitted from parent to progeny? and What are the results of mixing strikingly different groups? The answer to the first question is the subject of a whole science, Genetics, and its most competent students are the most hesitant to give categorical an swers. Some of the facts of heredity are known, but these are few compared to the questions that an average educated man could ask without even the remote hope of getting an answer. This is not the place, and the author lacks the competence to deal with particular problems of heredity. What few general remarks can be made will be found further on, together with the simple conclusion that the idea of race does not make sense until we know a great deal more about the transmission of individual and family traits. To build racial anthro pologies without a solid genetics is like starting a house with the roof. This self-evident proposition has, never theless, not deterred even the best scientific minds of this and the last century. That is why we cannot stop the discussion of race here, but must show in detail how absurd and unsubstantial, and what a confused wreck age, all the unsupported roofs of the nineteenth-century anthropological erections really are. We are no nearer finding out what a race is by asking