Justin’s Notes

History Is Not an Alternative to Biology

2026-08-23 · AI-generated insight

Boas's foundational move was to split explanation in two: observed group differences reflect "different histories, not different biological experiences." The whole architecture of twentieth-century anti-racist science rests on that disjunction. But the population-divergence account described by Winegard and Carl quietly dissolves it. In their telling, history is a biological process — migration out of Africa, dispersal across novel environments, oceans and mountain ranges throttling gene flow for millennia. Divergent selection pressures are not something other than history; they are what history looks like at the genetic level. Boas's either/or turns out to presuppose the very thing under dispute: that human history is too shallow, or gene flow too thorough, for populations to have diverged in anything that matters.

Lewontin's argument was supposed to close that gap empirically — most variation lies within groups, therefore classification is genetically meaningless. But notice how his quote ends: classification is "positively destructive of social and human relations," so "no justification can be offered for its continuance." The empirical finding and the moral verdict arrive fused together, each lending the other authority. The filing under Correlation Across Many Variables gestures at why the fusion is fragile: Edwards later showed that small per-locus differences aggregate into reliable population structure, meaning the statistic never carried the taxonomic conclusion it was asked to bear.

The Coon episode shows what happens when the moral verdict starts doing the epistemic work outright. An anthropological association denounces a book that, by show of hands, almost none of its members had read or even heard of. This is the endpoint of treating an empirical question as settled by its ethical stakes: examination becomes unnecessary, even suspect. The deeper irony is that everyone in these four notes claims to be defending science against prejudice — Boas against racial hierarchy, Lewontin against classification, Coon against condemnation-by-committee. The disagreement was never science versus prejudice. It was about whether the conclusion could be fixed in advance and the evidence conscripted afterward.

Woven from these notes

Boas’s rejection of the traditional view was truly radical; it simply denied the existence of any significant innate differences between savage, colored people and civilized, white people. The differences in physical appearance, in short, did not lead to any significant difference in mental or social function. That there were observable social differences was undeniable, but the explanation for those differences. Boas maintained, was that they were the product of different histories, not different biological experiences.
— Carl Degler In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought

A more plausible conception of race, one that is consistent with how careful philosophers and geneticists use the term, recognises that: When humans began leaving Africa around 75,000 years ago, they dispersed across a much greater range of environments than they had previously inhabited. The humans that settled in different geographic regions subsequently came under different selection pressures (e.g. temperature, seasonality, altitude). Natural barriers such as oceans (e.g. the Atlantic), deserts (e.g. the Sahara) and mountain ranges (e.g. the Himalayas) impeded gene flow between different populations for substantial periods of time. When there is limited gene flow between populations that have come under different selection pressures, we would expect them to gradually diverge from one another over via the processes of genetic drift and natural selection.

— Bo Winegard, Noah Carl Superior: The Return of Race Science—A Review
Carleton Coon was one of the greatest anthropologists of the 20th century and a champion of the study of racial differences. In 1961 he was elected president of the American Anthropological Association. It was during this year that Carleton Putnam's infamous book Race and Reason came out. Putnam's book argued that there were significant differences between the races and that this had important political implications. A few anthropologists became upset when they saw the book gain popularity and wanted the AAA to intervene. But they knew that Coon supported the book and that, as a result, having the AAA take action against it would be difficult. So they organized a secret meeting behind Coon's back in order to issue a statement denouncing Putnam's work. Coon found out about the meeting and went to stop it. Upon entering the meeting Coon asked all the association members who had actually read Putnam's book to raise their hands. Only one rose. He then asked for the hands of everyone that had even heard of the book prior to that meeting. Only a few hands rose. None the less, the statement against the book passed. Coon, disgusted by the actions of his peers, resigned from the AAA (1). This incident stands out in the history of science as a particularly clear example of scientists not living up to what people expect of them. People often take what scientists say for granted. They trust that scientists have looked at the evidence rationally and are giving the public as accurate an account of all the relevant facts as they can. When explaining science to laypeople researchers are expected to only make authoritative statements on topics they are knowledgeable of, to not lie about scientific evidence, and to not omit obviously relevant facts. People trust scientists to do these things and so feel comfortable taking what they tell them for granted. (See
It is clear that our perception of relatively large differences between human races and subgroups, as compared to the variation within these groups, is indeed a biased perception and that, based on randomly chosen genetic differences, human races and populations are remarkably similar to each other, with the largest part by far of human variation being accounted for by the differences between individuals. Human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations. Since such racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance either, no justification can be offered for its continuance.
— Lewontin