BIOLOGY IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 



The racial question is too complex for summary inclu- 

 sion.^ The order, the extent, the interrelation of racial 

 traits are all written somehow in the varieties of nervous 

 organization: they are determinations of nature and cumu- 

 late with those of sex and stock. We reach the individual 

 through common remote (racial) and immediate selective 

 ancestry, everywhere differentiated by the (glandular) 

 determinations of sex. Racial intermingling, as well as 

 the large ancestral community of all races, served to 

 obliterate differences. But such an experiment as transport- 

 ing West African negroes to a wholly different environment 

 still leaves intact the racial differentiations, as shown by 

 the fact that the average I.Q. of the negroes drafted in the 

 war was 10.4 years, while that of the mixed whites was 

 13.6 years. The capacity of races to adopt and adapt 

 themselves to alien cultural environments is demonstrated 

 by the same experiment. 



The question of interpreting biologically the differential 

 psychology of men and women comes back to that of 

 secondary or derivative sexual characteristics. The physical 

 differentia admit of no dispute; nor are we under the 

 temptation of confusing conspicuousness with importance. 

 That men have beards and women have none gives us no 

 concern; if nature wills it that way, we accept the dis- 

 pensation or nullify it with a razor. The functional differ- 

 ences we accept with equal calm, noting the different 

 distinctions, such as liability to disease, or the varying 

 emotional nature centering about the care of the child. But 

 the intellectual sphere under the dominion of the highest 

 orders of cortical organization presents a different problem, 

 which has disturbed empires, created political entangle- 

 ments, and turned economists, sociologists, psychologists, 



^ For an example of its treatment under the guiding principles of modern psy- 

 chology, see S. D. Porteds and M. E. Babcock, "Temperament and Race," Richard 

 G. Badger, Publisher, Boston, 1926. 



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