Race: Reality or Illusion ? a comment on the 1964 Unesco proposals

Professor Coon's views have been stated in The Origin of Races, the British edition of which was published in 1963 by Jonathan Cape. Professor Coon is one of the signatories of the new UNESCO proposals.

I am using for convenience (which, after all, is why populations are given names) the nomenclature of Dr. J. C. Trevor, Director of the Duckworth Laboratory of Physical Anthropology, Cambridge, which is explained in his articles on 'Race' in Chambers Encyclopaedia (1950) published in London, and the Encyclopaedia Hebraica (1955) published in Tel Aviv, Israel.

This point is further elaborated by the human geneticist Dr. Curt Stern, University of California at Berkeley, in Chapter 32 of his book Principles of Human Genetics, the second edition of which was published in 1960 by W. H. Freeman & Co., San Francisco and London.

The chance of incompatibility in respect of the Rhesus factor for an English woman marrying an Englishman is approximately 14 in 100; if she marries a Chinese, the chance of incompatibility is 17 in 100. The chances of having a child affected by erythroblastosis foetalis, however, will depend first upon the proportions of homozygous and heterozygous Rhesus-positive males in the population. Chinese males will be virtually all Rhesus-positive homozygotes, and so the chances must accordingly be higher than in the case of English males, many of whom will only be heterozygotic Rhesus-positives.

If a Rhesus-negative female marries a heterozygous Rhesus-positive male, there is an even chance that any given child will be Rhesus-negative and therefore unaffected. About 47.6 per cent of English fathers will be heterozygous Rhesus-positives, as opposed to only about 0.5 per cent of Chinese fathers.

Whilst the calculation of risks is complicated by the fact that apparently a minimum of two Rhesus-positive pregnancies are necessary to produce erythroblastosis, it has been suggested on a basis of observations that in only one out of every 200 pregnancies in Britain is there any complication caused by this haemolytic disease. There is also the suggestion that ABO incompatibility may exert some protective influence against potential haemolytic disease.

It would be extremely difficult and most incautious therefore to attempt to compute the precise risk of any child born to a Chinese father and an English mother being affected by this haemolytic disease, but it seems clear that the chances of any such child being Rhesus-positive are far higher than those affecting conventional English offspring.

This quotation was taken from Dr. Weiner's Presidential Address to the Royal Anthropological Institute entitled 'The Biology of Social Man', which was subsequently published in the Journal of the Institute, Vol. 94, Part 2, 1964.

This quotation is taken from Professor Washburn's Presidential Address at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Chicago, on 16 November 1962. The address was entitled 'The Study of Race'.