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  • Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century by Michael Yudell
  • Terence Keel, Ph.D.
keywords

modern synthesis, racial science, population genetics, human biodiversity

Michael Yudell. Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century. New York City, New York, Columbia University Press, 2014. xvi, 304 pp., $40.00.

The race concept has been the most widely adopted, contested, reconfigured, and enduring idea within the history of modern biology. Michael Yudell’s Race Unmasked tells the story of the transformation and persistence of the race concept following the “modern synthesis.” Theodosius Dobzhanky’s contribution to this transformation [End Page 107] looms large in Yudell’s treatment of this history as he explains how Dobzhansky’s 1937 book, Genetics and the Origin of Species, pushed modern biologists to abandon the typological reasoning that previously led scientists to believe races were populations with distinct and fixed units of inheritance.

Within the pages of Race Unmasked Yudell provides two narratives about race in twentieth-century biology. In the first narrative, Race Unmasked tells the story of how racial science thrived in post-World War II America. Yudell challenges Elazar Barkan’s longstanding thesis in The Retreat of Scientific Racism, which claimed that liberal-mind scientists denounced and eliminated racial science from the field of biology and genetics in the wake of World War II. Yudell argues that “the field’s shift on race was not simply the liberal triumph of science over ignorance. Instead, it was first a struggle to find meaning for the concept within taxonomic nomenclature and the evolutionary synthesis, and, second a struggle to find alternative ways to explain human genetic diversity” (6–7). Yudell goes on to explain that the scientists who followed Dobzhansky found themselves in a “contradictory space” as they “struggled to both find meaning for a race concept in science and fight against racial science and racism more generally” (7). Charting the persistence of racial thought beyond the modern synthesis, Yudell argues that scientists have been haunted by a troubling paradox: race in biology has been acknowledged as an imprecise category yet continues to be deployed as if it captures human biodiversity. Its continued use has led scientists to naturalize what Yudell argues are fundamentally social categories in the study of human biology.

This is the most compelling and fascinating of the two narratives jockeying for our attention throughout Race Unmasked, but it is not without its problems. The tension between scientists seeing the limits of race as a concept for ordering human diversity yet still using race as a tool for studying human life is not unique to twentieth-century biology. Had Yudell expanded his timeline to the previous century he would have also found Charles Darwin caught in the very same paradox that haunted Dobzhansky. Darwin in the Descent of Man came to reject the very idea that species were fixed and doubted if there were any character constant and stable enough to be considered a racial trait. Nonetheless, Darwin and the evolutionists who followed him, continued to use racial categories to talk more generally about where each race stood in relation to each other, as all races were perceived to be moving toward higher states of civilization. Given Darwin’s own ambiguity on the race concept one might ask did Dobzhansky invent or inherit the “contradictory space” that Yudell believes has haunted post-synthesis racial thought?

It is possible that Yudell has avoided these connections between nineteenth- and twentieth-century racial science because of his belief that eugenicists created a fundamental break with the racial science of the past. This brings us to the second narrative embedded in Race Unmasked. According to Yudell, “the biological race concept, as we understand it today, originated with eugenic theories of difference and was re-created and integrated into modern biological thought by population geneticists and evolutionary biologists in the 1930s and 1940s during the evolutionary synthesis in biology” (6). Concerning the actual content of eugenic racial thinking Yudell goes on to explain that eugenicists “shifted to seeing and measuring race as a reflection of unseen differences they attributed to heredity, an area of study they would help [End Page 108] to create in...

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