In an intellectually engaging narrative that mixes science and history, theories and personalities, Pat Shipman asks the question: Can we have legitimate scientific investigations of differences among humans without sounding racist?

Through the original controversy over evolutionary theory in Darwin's time; the corruption of evolutionary theory into eugenics; the conflict between laboratory research in genetics and fieldwork in physical anthropology and biology; and the continuing controversies over the heritability of intelligence, criminal behavior, and other traits, the book explains both prewar eugenics and postwar taboos on letting the insights of genetics and evolution into the study of humanity.

Pat Shipman is Professor of Anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including the 1997 Rhône-Poulenc Prize for The Wisdom of the Bones (coauthored with Alan Walker) and the Phi Beta Kappa Prize for Science for Taking Wing, which was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1998.

Read More by Pat Shipman:

• The Human Skeleton
• The Man Who Found the Missing Link: Eugène Dubois and His Lifelong Quest to Prove Darwin Right
• The Ape in the Tree: An Intellectual and Natural History of <i>Proconsul</i>