Biography

Born in Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

, he received a bachelor of science in chemistry

Chemistry

Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....

 from Illinois Institute of Technology

Illinois Institute of Technology

Illinois Institute of Technology, commonly called Illinois Tech or IIT, is a private Ph.D.-granting university located in Chicago, Illinois, with programs in engineering, science, psychology, architecture, business, communications, industrial technology, information technology, design, and law...

 and his masters and doctorate in anthropology from University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

. He was a member of the Department of Anthropology at Stanford from 1967 to 1981, and taught at UC Berkeley from 1966 through 1994.

As a doctoral student, and along with his PhD supervisor Allan Wilson

Allan Wilson

Allan Charles Wilson was a pioneer in the use of molecular approaches to understand evolutionary change and reconstruct phylogenies, and a contributor to the study of human evolution. He was one of the most controversial figures in post-war biology; his work attracted a great deal of attention...

, Sarich measured the strength of immunological cross-reactions of blood serum

Blood serum

In blood, the serum is the component that is neither a blood cell nor a clotting factor; it is the blood plasma with the fibrinogens removed...

 albumin

Albumin

Albumin refers generally to any protein that is water soluble, which is moderately soluble in concentrated salt solutions, and experiences heat denaturation. They are commonly found in blood plasma, and are unique to other blood proteins in that they are not glycosylated...

 between pairs of creatures, including humans and African apes (chimpanzee

Chimpanzee

Chimpanzee, sometimes colloquially chimp, is the common name for the two extant species of ape in the genus Pan. The Congo River forms the boundary between the native habitat of the two species:...

s and gorilla

Gorilla

Gorillas are the largest extant species of primates. They are ground-dwelling, predominantly herbivorous apes that inhabit the forests of central Africa. Gorillas are divided into two species and either four or five subspecies...

s). The strength of the reaction could be expressed numerically as an Immunological Distance, which was in turn proportional to the number of amino acid

Amino acid

Amino acids are molecules containing an amine group, a carboxylic acid group and a side-chain that varies between different amino acids. The key elements of an amino acid are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen...

 differences between homologous proteins in different species. By constructing a calibration curve of the ID of species' pairs with known divergence times in the fossil

Fossil

Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals , plants, and other organisms from the remote past...

 record, the data could be used as a molecular clock

Molecular clock

The molecular clock is a technique in molecular evolution that uses fossil constraints and rates of molecular change to deduce the time in geologic history when two species or other taxa diverged. It is used to estimate the time of occurrence of events called speciation or radiation...

 to estimate the times of divergence of pairs with poorer or unknown fossil records.

In 1967, Sarich and Wilson published a seminal paper in Science

Science (journal)

Science is the academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is one of the world's top scientific journals....

 that estimated the divergence time of humans and apes as four to five million years ago, at a time when standard interpretations of the fossil record gave this divergence as at least 10 to as much as 30 million years. Subsequent fossil discoveries, notably Lucy

Lucy (Australopithecus)

Lucy is the common name of AL 288-1, several hundred pieces of bone representing about 40% of the skeleton of an individual Australopithecus afarensis. The specimen was discovered in 1974 at Hadar in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia's Afar Depression. Lucy is estimated to have lived 3.2 million years...

, and reinterpretation of older fossil materials, notably Ramapithecus, showed the younger estimates to be correct and validated the albumin method. Application of the molecular clock

Molecular clock

The molecular clock is a technique in molecular evolution that uses fossil constraints and rates of molecular change to deduce the time in geologic history when two species or other taxa diverged. It is used to estimate the time of occurrence of events called speciation or radiation...

 principle revolutionized the study of molecular evolution

Molecular evolution

Molecular evolution is in part a process of evolution at the scale of DNA, RNA, and proteins. Molecular evolution emerged as a scientific field in the 1960s as researchers from molecular biology, evolutionary biology and population genetics sought to understand recent discoveries on the structure...

.

Sarich's later work on race strengthened his reputation as a controversial figure. He applied his earlier work to racial differentiation, which he sees as the beginnings of speciation

Speciation

Speciation is the evolutionary process by which new biological species arise. The biologist Orator F. Cook seems to have been the first to coin the term 'speciation' for the splitting of lineages or 'cladogenesis,' as opposed to 'anagenesis' or 'phyletic evolution' occurring within lineages...

, arguing that the smaller the amount of time required to create a given number of morphological difference, the more selectively significant the differences become.

Sarich is a proponent of sociobiology

Sociobiology

Sociobiology is a field of scientific study which is based on the assumption that social behavior has resulted from evolution and attempts to explain and examine social behavior within that context. Often considered a branch of biology and sociology, it also draws from ethology, anthropology,...

, evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology is an approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological traits such as memory, perception, and language from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations, that is, the functional...

, and his position that racial differences represent the beginnings of speciation, which often caused him to be the subject of controversy by activists at Berkeley.

In 1994, Sarich was a signatory of a collective statement titled Mainstream Science on Intelligence

Mainstream Science on Intelligence

Mainstream Science on Intelligence was a public statement issued by a group of academic researchers in fields allied to intelligence testing that claimed to present those findings widely accepted in the expert community...

, written by Linda Gottfredson

Linda Gottfredson

Linda Susanne Gottfredson is a professor of educational psychology at the University of Delaware and co-director of the Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society. Gottfredson's work has been influential in shaping U.S...

 and published in the Wall Street Journal. Sarich also wrote a favorable review of The Bell Curve

The Bell Curve

The Bell Curve is a best-selling and controversial 1994 book by the Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray...

.

After retirement from Berkeley, he occasionally lectured in anthropology at the University of Auckland

University of Auckland

The University of Auckland is a university located in Auckland, New Zealand. It is the largest university in the country and the highest ranked in the 2011 QS World University Rankings, having been ranked worldwide...

, New Zealand for a number of years.

Criticism

Some of his teaching was criticized by students and faculty for not being based in science, statements his critics said were demeaning to women, nonwhites and homosexuals.

In an interview with The New York Times, Sarich concurred with his critics that there was little or no scientific basis for his claims about homosexuality, or on the relationship that he was then teaching of brain size to intelligence. He told the Times there seems to be a correlation but "there is not a lot of evidence to support that theory because there isn't a lot of research done on the subject."

Selected publications

• Sarich VM, Wilson AC. Immunological time scale for hominid evolution. Science 158, 1967, p. 1200-1203.
• Sarich VM, Miele F. Race: The Reality of Human Differences. Westview Press (2004). ISBN 0-8133-4086-1
• Sarich VM. The Final Taboo. Skeptic (Altadena, CA) January 1, 2000. Volume: 8 Issue: 1 Page: 38
• Sarich VM, Dolhinow P. Background for man; readings in physical anthropology ASIN: B00005VHM2

External links

• Vincent Sarich biography by Kozue Takahashi via Minnesota State University
  Minnesota State University, Mankato
  Minnesota State University, Mankato is a public four-year university located in Mankato, Minnesota, a community of 53,000 located southwest of Minneapolis-St. Paul. As of Fall 2011, the student body is the third-largest in the state of Minnesota with over 15,000 students...