Common Fallacies About Group Differences (1957)

[Music] in the drowsy days between even those who are not away are usually thinking more of play than of study the love of learning that animates the classroom is never really absent even when the room is temporarily taken over by the painters and plasterers wherever two or three are gathered together there you will find the play of man's Restless intellect among the great ideas listen any American can beat any 10 freshman trouble with a French braces they're all too exciting it's in their blood you know the Latin temperament and I don't know my sister's married to one oh no that's absolutely wrong oh yeah what's wrong what's wrong everything hey there is no French race be there is no Latin temperament see the people who speak the Latin languages are neither all excitable or all anything d behavior is not simply a matter of heredity e heredity is not in the blood if the fact that you happen to know one specimen of anything is no evidence that other specimens are the same you please remain where you are I'll explain may I have your attention here at the board again to begin with there is no French race as a matter of fact it's not easy to stay just what a race is the most widely accepted modern definition says it is a group of people with certain physical traits in common based on a common heredity the question is which traits [Music] once upon a time the answer seemed obvious skin color today we know this classification doesn't work at all because skin coloring may shade off continuously from light to dark within a single biological group so that there was no point at which we could say one race ended in another began as a result many individuals didn't have the right coloring to go with their alleged race for example you could find plenty of members of the so-called brown race who were actually lighter than some members of the so-called white race and so on so you see classification of man into five races based on skin color wasn't at all satisfactory in attempting to find a better classification [Music] modern anthropologists have turned to more reliable traits such as body build cephalic index nasal index facial structure eye color color and texture of the hair one racial classification based on such traits and widely used today lists three major races Caucasian [ __ ] and negroid plus a doubtful category for those that don't seem to fit anywhere else these are further divided into 15 sub races but even with this classification we run into difficulty which we can see by considering the characteristics of three of the sub races within the Caucasian group we know of course which traits are supposed to belong to each of these subrip the Alpine the Mediterranean an arrowhead medium to short stature and dark brown or black hair the Nordic has an arrowhead tall stature and blond hair however the more we study these things the less simple they become these various traits refused to stay put for example we find individuals with the short stocky body of the Mediterranean the round skull of the Alpine and the blond hair coloring of the Nordic nature apparently unimpressed by our earnest efforts of classification create such wrong combinations by the millions of every part of the world the biological concept of race gentlemen cannot be applied to individuals as simply as is popularly believed [Music] but no matter what classification you apply if the word race means an inherited physical type then almost every existing nation would include not just one race but many races the French nation for example includes nordiques alpine's and Mediterraneans the percentages varying as you move from one part of the country to another in short a nation is not a race there is no such thing as the French race anymore than there is an English race German race or American race neither is there any such thing as a specific Latin temperament [Music] the word Latin refers only to a group of languages spoken by various countries whose populations may or may not resemble each other in other ways actually a sampling of the peoples who speak the Latin tongues would turn up a very wide range of behavior patterns differing sharply from nation to nation such a sampling would have to include not only the people of France but also of Romania Spain Italy portugal south and central america mexico and cuba people in all these countries speak the latin languages yet their behavior differs widely from country to country therefore all people who speak the Latin tongues are not all excitable nor all anything and now for the major fallacy the belief that group differences in behavior are the result of heredity down through the ages people have more or less taken it for granted that a Japanese child for example inherits his distinctive behavior his gestures his manners his attitudes toward life just as he inherits the color of his eyes and the shape of his nose this belief which has had an important and sometimes an unfortunate influence on human relations was not confined to the uneducated English literature including the best of Shakespeare is full of references to English blood and noble ancestry as supposedly decisive factors in determining noble behavior now let's look at the scientific evidence [Music] [Applause] in modern times many hundreds of careful studies have been made to test this theory that group differences in behavior are hereditary yet in all the books and articles that have been published describing these studies to date not one shred of positive evidence in favor of the theory has ever been reported on the contrary a great deal of evidence is accumulated which shows that people acquire their behavior as they acquire their speech from the culture they grow up in it isn't easy to carry out scientific experiments in the field of group differences as a rule the most we can do is to study and observe as this anthropologist is doing with a group of South Sea Island children however an experiment of sorts was made quite unintentionally but on an enormous scale in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a large number of West Africans was forcibly uprooted from their own culture and sat down three thousand miles away in a totally different culture some of the folkways these african tribesmen brought with them have persisted influencing our culture in various ways but despite many factors tending to perpetuate the African group as a group a number of their descendants are today indistinguishable from Americans of other stocks except by their physical appearance obviously these people would be no more at home in an African village than their tribal ancestors would have been in an operating room in short so far as we can tell now group differences in behavior are the result of learning not heredity and of course biologists today know that the physical traits that distinguish one race from another are not transmitted by the blood but by the genes many fallacies about group differences can be traced to the bad habit of generalizing from selected cases this young man notices how excitable his French brother-in-law is but conveniently forgets the millions of French people he's never met the behavior of isolated cases should not be over generalized to represent the behavior of a group I just a moment young man I have a feeling there was one more fallacy in your statement all i said was one American compete tent Frenchman at what but anything baseball ah yes that was it thank you the fallacy of the ethno centered criterion which let me put it this way would you care to bet a week's pay you could beat ten Frenchmen at let us say fencing you see bill a skill typical of one culture is not a proper yardstick for general comparisons between cultures [Music] [Applause] [Music] now then let's take another look at these fallacies we've been discussing a a nation is not a race for any nation includes many inherited physical types be there is no such thing as a Latin temperament for the behavior of the people in the various Latin speaking countries varies widely from country to country see people who speak these Latin tongues are never all excitable or all anything nor are the members of any group d group differences in behavior are the results of learning not heredity e hereditary traits are transmitted not by the blood but by the genes F the behavior of isolated cases should not be over generalized to represent the behavior of everyone in a group and finally a skill typical of one culture is never a proper yardstick for general comparisons between cultures now let me leave you with just one more thought many popular notions about races heredity and group differences are completely wrong when they are not completely meaningless but the trouble is when it comes to human relations most of us tend to cherish beliefs and ignore facts [Applause] [Music] [Applause] I don't care what the guy said I still see one American can look any temperature see what I mean [Music]