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130  Changes in Scientific Opinion on Race Mixing: The Impact of the Modern Synthesis Paul Farber In the early 1950s, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) issued two statements on race. They were crafted in response to a resolution passed by the organization at its fourth General Conference in 1949 as part of the organization’s campaign against racism. The director-general had given the Social Science Department a charge to gather scientific information on the problems of race, to disseminate it, and to prepare an educational campaign.1 Arthur Ramos, the head of the department, put together a group of social scientists. Although he died shortly thereafter, the project went ahead, and a committee began meeting in Paris toward the end of 1949. Before publication, a draft of the statement was circulated among some life scientists such as Theodosius Dobzhansky, L. C. Dunn, Julian Huxley, and Hermann Muller, as well as some social scientists such as Gunnar Myrdal. The final draft was written by Ashley Montagu. It soon drew criticism, partly because of the composition of the committee (social scientists), so a new committee (with L. C. Dunn as rapporteur) was appointed.2 This committee consisted of geneticists and physical anthropologists, and it drafted the second statement.3 The UNESCO statements reputed the virulent scientific racism that had characterized the Third Reich and rejected the pervasive scientific racism that had developed for well over a century in most Western countries.4 In part, the statements did this by defining human races in a manner that reflected the evolutionary biology of the time. The first statement defined the scientific use of the term race as populations of Homo sapiens that vary genetically from other populations. These populations “are capable of interbreeding with one another but, by virtue of the isolating barriers which in the past kept them more or less separated, exhibit certain physical differences as a result of their somewhat different biological histories.”5 The differences are in “the frequency of one or more genes. Such genes, responsible for the hereditary differences between men, are always few when compared to the whole genetic constitution of man and to the vast number of genes common to all human beings regardless of the population to which they belong.”6 Or, put more succinctly, “the term ‘race’ designates a group or population characterized by some concentrations, relative as to frequency and distribution, of hereditary particles (genes) or physical Changes in Scientific Opinion on Race Mixing  131 characters, which appear, fluctuate, and often disappear in the course of time by reason of geographic and/or cultural isolation.”7 Equally important, the statements distinguished the scientific use of the term race from everyday uses that commonly referred to national, religious, linguistic, or cultural groups. These “national, religious, geographic, linguistic and cultural groups do not necessarily coincide with racial groups; and the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated genetic connection with racial traits.”8 The statement also clearly rejected the long-held notion that race mixing produced biologically inferior results. “With respect to race-mixture, the evidence point unequivocally to the fact that this has been going on from the earliest times . . . no convincing evidence has been adduced that racemixture of itself produces biologically bad effects.”9 HistorianshaveoftencitedtheUNESCOstatementsascentraldocuments in the rejection of scientific racism and, in particular, the idea that race mixing was biologically unwise.10 They have also correctly noted that the UNESCO statements had deep political and social roots. The memory of the Second World War was fresh, and racial tensions were an important part of the cultural landscape in many parts of the globe. Scholars have argued that although the rejection of scientific racism and antimiscegenation thought had a strong ideological foundation, there was little in the way of new, empirical evidence to justify the stance. The scientific community’s rapid acceptance of these positions, therefore, has often been portrayed by historians as a result of humanitarian or ideological factors, rather than a scientific shift.11 Without diminishing the importance of the cultural dimension of the rejection of scientific racism, I would like to suggest that part of the story—the scientific roots of the change—has generally been overlooked or misunderstood. Science and its misuse had indeed been a large part of the problem of scientific racism by providing a strong intellectual foundation to legitimate racism. But science also played a role in the solution to the problem by removing that foundation. To understand the importance...

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