Getting back to the op subject is an excerpt from the book.
The classifiers of the "races" of mankind who have devised
the various classificatory schemes of mankind during the last
hundred years have mostly agreed in one respect they have
unexceptionally taken for granted the one thing which they
were attempting to prove, namely, the existence of human
"races." Starting off with the fact that "extreme" types of man-
kind, such as Negro, white, and Mongol, could obviously be
recognized as races, they proceeded to refine these grosser
classifications by attempting to fit local groups of mankind
into similar racial schemes. Thus, to take a contemporary ex-
ample, Coon has recently created a large number of new
European "races" and "sub-races" upon the basis, principally,
of slight differences in the characters of the head exhibited by
different groups of Europeans, and this in spite of the fact
For the latest anthropological example of this fractionating method see
Coon, The Races of Europe.
4 Huxley and Haddon, We Europeans, p. 114. In order to avoid possible
misunderstanding of this passage, it is desirable to point out that by the
words "genetically purified into their original components" the authors do not
have reference to preexisting "pure races/' but to the earlier states of their
ancestral groups.
4 ORIGIN OF THE "RACE" CONCEPT
that it has been repeatedly shown that the form of the head
is not as constant a character as was formerly believed. 5 It is
true that some biologists have seen fit to create new sub-races
among lower animals on the basis of such single slight char-
acters as difference in pigmentation of the hair on a part of
the tail. Such a procedure would be perfectly justifiable if it
were taxonomically helpful. One would not even have to make
the requirement that animals in other groups shall not ex-
hibit this character, but one would have to insist that every
member of one or both sexes of the new subrace shall exhibit
it. No such requirement is fulfilled by the "races" and "sub-
races" which Coon has created.
Coon simply assumes that within any group a certain nu-
merical preponderance of heads of specified diameters and,
let us say, noses of a certain shape and individuals of a certain
stature are sufficient to justify the creation of a new "race" or
"sub-race." Few biologists would consider such a procedure
justifiable, and there are few anthropologists who would. Yet
this kind of overzealous taxonomy, which has its origin prin-
cipally in the desire to force facts to fit preexisting theories,
continues down to the present day. More often than not such
theories do not even require the sanction of facts to be put
forward as such. Thus, the term "race" and the concept
for which it stands represent one of the worst examples we
know of a word which from the outset begs the whole ques-
tion.
The very failure of ambitious anthropological attempts at
classification strongly suggests that human races do not, in
fact, exist in anything like the number that many of these
classifiers would have us believe.
From the standpoint of a classificatory view of mankind
which has due regard for the facts it is possible to recognize
four distinctive stocks or divisions of mankind. These are the
Boas, Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants; Shapiro,
Migration and Environment; Dornfeldt, "Studien fiber Schadelform und
Scha'delveranderung von Berliner Ostjuden und ihren Kindern," Zeit. f. Morph.
. Anthrop., XXXIX (1941), 290-372; Goldstein, Demographic and Bodily
Changes in Descendants of Mexican Immigrants.
