262 READINGS IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE 



and other miscellaneous influences as to render them useless as racial cri- 

 teria. Here must be mentioned height, weight, thoracic dimensions and 

 proportions, nasal proportions, facial width, proportions of forearm and 

 hand, relationship of vertebral column and pelvic girdle, and shaft propor- 

 tions of femur and tibia. 



It may be finally emphasized that we must, in problems of racial inter- 

 pretation, pay general attention to the sum total of all bodily traits, but 

 specific and critical attention to the nonadaptive bodily characters, for 

 these are transmitted regardless of the multifarious and complex extraneous 

 factors of the environment. All things equal, it is not one, nor two, but 

 the majority or all of the traits, in unique combination, which really con- 

 stitute racial or group differences. But until we know more of the heredity 

 of the several traits, of the effect of the growth-pattern upon these traits, 

 we can not truly assess them in terms of non-adaptivity, acquired stability, 

 or modifiability.^° 



For the last thirty years we have had reason to doubt the stability of 

 certain morphological features, as in the cephalic index studies of Boas and 

 his students, wherein significant generational differences were observed 

 when foreign-born parents and American-born Jews and Sicilians were 

 studied. In recent years Shapiro " has suggested that instability is char- 

 acteristic of a majority of Man's physical racial traits. He studied three 

 generations: (i) "sedentes," native parents born and still resident in Japan; 

 (2) Japanese-born (of these parents) who migrated to Hawaii in their 

 late 'teens; (3) Hawaiian-born children of these immigrants. The anthro- 

 pometric battery comprised twenty-eight measurements with twenty-one 

 derived indices and twenty-two observations. When the first two genera- 

 tions were compared it was found that they differed significantly in all 

 traits measured and observed as follows: male, 72.4 per cent.; female, 67.9 

 per cent. As between the second and third generations the corresponding 

 differences were 55.2 per cent, and 42.9 per cent., respectively. These dif- 

 ferences are progressive from sedentes, to immigrants, to Hawaiian-born, 

 but whereas between sedentes and immigrants disproportionate changes 

 occur, between immigrants and Hawaiian-bom proportionate changes are 

 the rule. The progression is apparently a real one, relatively unaffected by 

 age-changes or changes in occupational status. The causes of the changes 

 are twofold; the immigrants probably constituted a sub-group of the 

 sedentes population from which they are drawn; the new environment 

 (of Hawaii) provided a stimulus toward change and some inbreeding in- 

 tensified the variant exemphfied by the immigrants. But the changes are of 

 course, limited in extent — the Japanese in Hawaii, as long as they marry 

 within their own group, will always be Japanese; biologically they will 



low. M. Krogman, op. cit. pp. 144-145. 



11 H. L. Shapiro (with F. S. Hulse), "Migration and Environment," Oxford Uni- 

 versity Press, N.Y., 1939. 



