278 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1953 



Mayr himself, probably more than any other man, has brought 

 taxonomy back into the biological social register. He has shown how 

 essential the study of systematics is to a comprehension of the total 

 life process. Although his interest in ecological rules does not repre- 

 sent a complete rediscovery, as Morgan rediscovered Mendelian 

 genetics, yet his emphasis on this aspect of biology may turn out to 

 be an equally important landmark in biological history. 



If the study of ecological rules has been neglected by biologists, 

 physical anthropologists have slighted it even more. The study of 

 race in man has been influenced not only by biological fashion but 

 also by current political ideologies. In each country of Europe, as 

 in America, and in some African and Asiatic nations, a small but 

 persistent group of men has continued to pile up objective data on 

 the metrical and morphological characters of human beings. In some 

 European and Asiatic countries, before World War II, politicians 

 and propagandists concocted theories of racial superiority and in- 

 feriority with which to bolster their political schemes. In other 

 European countries corresponding politicians and propagandists in- 

 terested in internationalism brewed up opposite theories : first, to the 

 effect that all races are equal in every respect, and second, to deny 

 the existence of races at all. In America we have followed both of 

 these fashions in turn. Each has served the political motives of its 

 period. The second movement, imfortunately for the progress of 

 science, is still with us. So strong is the feeling against thinking or 

 talking about race that the study of the facts of race itself is nearly 

 at a standstill. But fashions come and go. Wliat is laughed at in 

 one decade becomes the rage in another. Perhaps our turn will come. 



Just as Rensch was the only voice crying in the zoological wilder- 

 ness, the combined plea of three men, Garn, Birdsell, and myself, 

 raised, in 1949, a feeble noise in the desert of physical anthropology. 

 In our small and conceptually indiscreet book "Races" (Coon, Gam, 

 and Birdsell, 1950), we suggested that some of the racial variations 

 in man may be due to adaptations, by mechanism or mechanisms 

 unknown, to extremes of environment. At the time we wrote it I, 

 at least, had never heard of Allen, Gloger, Bergmann, or Rensch. It 

 was only in a review of our book by Dr. M. T. Newman (1951) that 

 I learned of their work. Since then I have found a little time to read 

 what these zoologists have written, and to think about how their find- 

 ings may possibly apply to man. Just this small amount of contempla- 

 tion has made it abundantly clear that if a person is to study the racial 

 variations in man in terms of ecology, he must be a superscientist, 

 thoroughly conversant not only with his own subject, including 

 anatomy, but also with physiology, particularly heat-and-sweat physi- 

 ology, nutrition and gi'owth, radiation physics, optics, body mechanics, 



