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"The common assumption that Americans do not gesticulate is not correct. Even aside from the well-known oratorical gestures we are fairly lively. Most of our gestures may be designated as descriptive. We supplement our speech with move ments that indicate the form of what we are talking about. Nevertheless on the whole our gestures are moderate."
The young of immigrants who move out of the family orbit change their motor habits completely, begin to gesture like those in the new environment. Mixed marriages may alter the gestures of the spouses. Even in the same country motor habits are not stable. The British, for example, have not always manifested their present immobility. In Elizabethan times they gestured violently. Dr. Boas' conclusion from all this is direct and simple : motor habits are cultural, not biological.
Magna Charta. Currently in England a group of scientists including Sir Arthur Smith Woodward and Julian Huxley are engaged in knocking the flimsy props from under Nazi ideas of race purity and race superiority. A quarter-century ago Franz Boas was attacking the same sort of ideas. At that time the view was popular that different races had their characteristic mentalities which determined their culture. Boas had piled up enough data to convince him that such was not the case. His Mind of Primitive Man was published in 1911. When he was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1931, that book was called "A Magna Charta of self-respect for the 'lower' races."
Boas observed that nowhere on earth was there such a thing as a pure race, and that the term "race" was a vague and ap proximate one at best. He doubted that there were any "superior" races. To Boas it seemed that if one person was innately superior to another, it was because there was more genetic difference between family lines than between racial types. Anatomists cannot tell the difference between the brains of a Swede and a Negro. They may distinguish the skulls, but it has been shown over & over that neither the size nor shape of the skull, within the range of normality, has anything to do with intelligence. Dr. Boas has no confidence in intelligence tests as measures of race superiority, because such tests cannot be divorced entirely from environment and experience. During the War it was found that Chicago Negroes did better with intelligence tests than Louisiana blacks, although the two groups were anthropologically alike.
If it is argued that that race is best which has evolved farthest from an apelike ancestor, some curious champions appear. The narrow, prominent noses of Armenians are least like the broad, flat noses of apes. Negroes have the thickest, therefore the most "human" lips as contrasted with the thin lips of apes. Apes are hairy; Mongols have the least hair. Apes have small brains; Eskimos have big ones.