OF all animals, man is the most unpredictable. Toynbee notwithstanding, history makes an uncertain prophet: the same circumstances, involving different times and different men, can lead to war or peace, love or hate, fraternity or murder. The same hereditary material, pooled by the same man and woman in the act of reproduction, can produce children who do not much resemble either their parents or one another. Even identical twins, issuing from the same egg, can vary; for instance, they never possess identical fingerprints or dispositions.
Classifications may not exist in nature, but order does. And the observable differences among men, as broadly varied as the species, have long challenged the orderly human mind to catalogue them—to find a way, in short, to subdivide the fascinating and unruly diversity of humankind. Within the diversity may lurk patterns, and the patterns may aid man's understanding of himself and his differences.
This prospect has endlessly occupied—and eluded—the inquiring human mind. If the species could be sensibly subdivided into races, then the races could be measured one against another, could be assigned proper places in the hierarchy of mankind. Cultural and geographical isolation, occurring over numberless millennia, could conceivably have bred peoples of widely differing physical and intellectual capacity. And taking Western technological man as the norm, it could be possible, given the right tools, to compare his performance against those of all the other human varieties.
What Eyes Can See
The problem is far more complicated than that, as any scientist who has tried merely to determine the biological races has discovered. Among the first to try was the German zoologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1775. On the basis of physical characteristics, he saw five human subspecies or races—a term possibly deriving from the Arabic rds (beginning). Blumenbach divided humans into races that he called Caucasian (white), Mongolian (yellow), Ethiopian (black), American (copper) and Malay (brown).
In Blumenbach's century, other naturalists and philosophers disputed his arbitrary racial census; with equal arbitrariness, it has been reduced and expanded many times in the 192 years since. Sorting men into groups according to their differences may seem a simple task. But even now, anthropologists argue heatedly on how to do it. They have partitioned the human species into anywhere from two to 200 races; some anthropologists maintain that humanity cannot or should not be subdivided into races at all. The debate does not particularly concern the great majority of nonexperts. Man's eyes tell him that the species comes in three predominant skin shades, which are chromatically though imperfectly described as white, yellow and black. From much the same evidence, three major divisions are frequently deduced: Caucasian, Mongolian and Negroid.