The Race Question - Controversy

Controversy

Despite the introduction stating that "The competence and objectivity of the scientists who signed the document in its final form cannot be questioned", the first version of the statement was heavily criticized. A revised edition in 1951 explained the controversy as "At the first discussion on the problem of race, it was chiefly sociologists who gave their opinions and framed the ‘Statement on race’. That statement had a good effect, but it did not carry the authority of just those groups within whose special province fall the biological problems of race, namely the physical anthropologists & geneticists. Secondly, the first statement did not, in all its details, carry conviction of these groups and, because of this, it was not supported by many authorities in these two fields. In general, the chief conclusions of the first statement were sustained, but with differences in emphasis and with some important deletions."

Some examples of differences include that the first version argued that there was no evidence for intellectual or personality differences. The revised version stated that "When intelligence tests, even non-verbal, are made on a group of non-literate people, their scores are usually lower than those of more civilised people" but concluded that "Available scientific knowledge provides no basis for believing that the groups of mankind differ in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development."

Another that the revised version acknowledged but did not name the 3 major races which were called the Mongoloid, the Negroid, and the Caucasoid in the first version.

The first version stated that "National, religious, geographic, linguistic and cultural groups do not necessarily coincide with racial groups: and the cultural traits of such groups have no demonstrated genetic connection with racial traits. Because serious errors of this kind are habitually committed when the term ‘race’ is used in popular parlance, it would be better when speaking of human races to drop the term ‘race’ altogether and speak of ethnic groups." The revised version instead stated that the experts "agreed to reserve race as the word to be used for anthropological classification of groups showing definite combinations of physical (including physiological) traits in characteristic proportions."