Black brain, white brain: Race, racism and racial science

Title: Black Brain, White Brain
Subtitle: Race, racism and racial science
Author: Gavin Evans
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers SA
Cape Town; Johannesburg; South Africa, 2014
ISBN 9781868426065 / ISBN 978-1-86842-606-5
Softcover, 15 x 24 cm, 360 pages

Description: Black brain, white brain: Race, racism and racial science

Racist thinking, that intelligence is influenced by racial origin, for example, was part of mainstream science a century ago and, surprisingly, is still endorsed by maerick scientists at some of the world’s most respectable institutions today. The myths being perpetuated on genetics, race, IQ and general intelligence are what the book Black brain, white brain: Race, racism and racial science challenges, precisely, systematically and in painstaking detail. In this immensely readable book Evans tackles highly complex subjects, from the origin of humans and the genesis of intelligence to athletic performance and genes, IQ and cleverness, in a fluent and engaging style that makes science accessible and the facts absorbing. Persuasive, without being didactic or sermonising, and lightened by a wry sense of humour, Evans’s text weaves it all together in such a way that one is keen to follow all the threads the better to see the larger tapestry. Carefully balancing claims, testing dodgy propositions and presenting fairly the theories of modern scientists and evolutionary psychologists, Evans shows just how uniform we are, genetically, as a species and that it’s mainly the environment we grow up and live in that’s the strong determining factor in general intelligence.

Content: Black brain, white brain: Race, racism and racial science

An introduction in black and white
PART 1: OUR AFRICAN HERITAGE
200000 years of modern humanity
Human origins
Humans settle the world
The myths of civilisation
The mythology of Afro-barbarism
Afrocentric mythology
Apartheid South Africa: a veil drawn on its African past
Mapungubwe's goldsmiths
The kingdom of Nubia
The Ethiopian dynasty
Timbuktu and the Mali kingdom
The kingdom of Benin
Bunyoro and the Buganda kingdom
Great Zimbabwe and the Swahili coast
From hunting and gathering to farming, writing and shooting
PART 2: RACE, RACISM AND BIOLOGY
Dribins of race, origins of racism
Origins of scientific racism
Social Darwinism and eugenics
Sociobiology and the revival of biological determinism
Dawkins rides to the rescue
Another view: cooperative genes and evolutionary spandrels
Why some people are racist
Race and the quest for an intelligence gene
What is race?
What is intelligence?
The decoded human genome and the slow death of determinism
Bruce Lahn and the quest for an intelligence gene
Black men can swim, white men can run
The mysterious country
The Kenyan conundrum
Fighting genes?
Jumping genes?
White men can't sprint?
White cyclists, black linemen
Black men can't swim?
Apples and pears, fish and bicycles
PART 3: RACISM AND IQ
A short history of race and IQ
Psychology, science and race
Is psychology a science?
The invention of IQ and how it latched on to race
Race and IQ in South Africa
The invention of g
The Burt affair
Postwar IQ testing
The two Jims: what twin studies tell us about IQ (and what they don't)
A short history of twin studies 164 Adoption studies of IQ
Why do population groups have different IQs?
The Flynn effect: how the environment shapes IQ
Computer games and well-to-do IQs
Poverty and lawnmower IQs
White Brits, black Americans, low scores
The Bell Curve and the revival of race science
Jensen, Eysenck and Rushton prepare the ground
The Bell Curve in four pages
The Bell Curve land grab
Andrew Sullivan plays the race card
The case against The Bell Curve
Richard Lynn and the IQ of nations
Richard Lynn on the San
Kamin exposes Lynn's South African data
The condensed Lynn
Kanazawa, IQ and the health of nations
Thornhill, disease and IQ
Richard Lynn's impact
The Jewish intelligence debate
Jewish immigrants: the 'feeble-minded' 83%
The parallel rise of Asian American IQ
Richard Lynn on Ashkenazi brains
Cochran, Hardy and Harpending's 'Natural History' of the Jews
Steven Pinker joins the chorus
Ashkenazi IQ: innate or acquired?
Charles Murray on the genius of the 'Chosen People'
Nicholas Wade and the capitalist-adapted Jews
Why (so many) Jews are smart
The future of race science
Race 'science' revisited
What is evolutionary psychology?
EP and race science
Media agendas and the future of race science
Postscript: Race, intelligence and IQ 29B
Last words on IQ
And a final word on racism
NOTES
GLOSSARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX