To believe or not to believe?

                                                          To believe or not to believe? 

      The Emperor’s New Clothe by Joseph L. Graves Junior tackles the biological theories regarding race and its emergence into our society.  Graves gives a background about the concept of race and then proceeds to question the manner in which scientists, government etc have used the word race.  Similarly, the Biology 103 class has been geared towards exploring biological questions and forming one’s own thoughts about the answers to the questions.  Graves presents the fact very well with an account of the origin of race and the theories that were circulating pre-Darwin and those that appeared post-Darwin.  Graves raises a number of good points that demands the need for society to change the way that the word race is used.
 Graves discusses early instances of cultures recording differences among people, but there was not any real racist ideology except in the case of the Jews.  The Jews were the only people thought to be physically and mentally inferior.  Even then, there was not a systematic racist ideology.  Graves argue “The raw materials were indeed present, but the evolution of the racism that we know today would require social, cultural, and scientific developments originating in the age of discovery and its concomitant colonialism.”(22)  It is ironic that the age of discovery along with colonialism was one of the reasons that caused racism to ensue.  Age of discovery should have been a time period where people are exploring and becoming more knowledgeable, instead a very negative concept emerges.  The fact that the age of discovery was happening during the time of colonialism created an environment where people are encountering people of the new world that were different from them, combined with the age of discovery which calls for the need to understand new people and account for their differences.  Therefore, that created a slue of thoughts to emerge as to the origin of differences among people.
 With colonialism, there emerged the notion that Europeans are superiors than those of other background.  Graves provides two explanations for this view, with the first one being that racist ideology stems from people trying to examine human diversity with an objective view. Second, there was already a preconceived notion of Europeans being superior and then biological theory then evolved based on biased science.  Some of this biased science included taking measurements of physical traits.  The explanation that revolves around the fact that Europeans already had a preconceived notion does not specify what caused the preconceived notion, and so it is not a very clear explanation.  The explanation seems to insinuate that racism is innate; the notion of superiority of Europeans is something that just exists between them.  Where did they get this preconceived notion from exactly?
 Furthermore, Graves proceed to explain how scientist conducted and evaluate research related to human diversity.  Pre-Darwinian, a number of scientists try to classify people into groups based on skin color, measurements and they call it science.  The most surprising theory was the idea of polygeny.  There were some scientists that believe that there is a hierarchy amongst races.  These scientists used measurements and compared them to that of an ape.  They concluded that Negroes were of a lesser specie in the human specie and resembled more of an ape.  It is clear that these scientists did not have knowledge about DNA and the basic data that sheds on light on the genome of people.  It is incredulous to think of all the kind of theories scientist used in order to account for the differences.  However, it was also impossible for racist ideology not to ensue in the early ages because there was no proper way for scientists to conduct research on differences.  A lot of the research that was conducted on human diversity was rooted in preconceived notion setting up a situation where nonbiased research could not evolve.         
  It was not until post-Darwin that a significant amount of knowledge and light was shed about differences in species.  Darwin presented a significance amount of evidence, and yet his evidence was misconstrued in order to support the negative notions of racism.  Out of Darwin’s theory emerged this idea of social Darwinism.  Social Darwinism revolved around the idea of “survival of the fittest”, where some races were thought to be innately superior to others.  Graves also goes into specific details about Spencerism in order to show how some scientists seem on the surface to agree with Darwin, but was actually misusing Darwin’s theory. Spencer wanted to prove that sociology is a science and that the universe is being pushed by an “unknowable” force.  There are very different ways which people interpret Darwin.  These different interpretations of one data reflects how science is not about finding the truth as the class biology 103 have pointed out, because there is no one truth.  One can simply come up with a story using evidence, and many of these scientist used Darwin’s data to come up with their own story. 
 Graves also goes into an extensive explanation into eugenics and how the US spends a lot of time and money in trying to get rid of any sort impurities in the races.  Most people do not recognize that the US was also involved in the movement.  The book puts in perspective how racist ideology that presented itself in the beginning has continue to manifest itself.  Even at times when scientists were trying to do research as to human diversity, it is very hard for those racist ideologies to not penetrate those results, as was the case with Darwin.  Therefore it’s very hard for one to present new research without people using it in some way to provide evidence for their own racist theories.
 This book provided an interesting view on racism and the ideas that leads to racism.  Graves does not provide a lot of his opinions; he presents a clear background on the research and the people that conducted that research.  At the end and the beginning of the book, Graves provide his opinion on why he believes that racism exist.  This book allows one to form an opinion about how research is conducted.  It allows for people to realize that there is not one specific answer when it comes to science, and so it is always good for people to try to comprehend for themselves the scientific evidence that are presented to them.