Or rather, most of the book. Here's a full list of the table of contents:
The Futility of Philosophy
Mysticism in Modern Physics
Muddlers of Science
Christian Cowardice and Atheist Courage
Froth and Fraud in Fundamentalism
Christianity and Insanity
Sea Gulls and Christian Gullibility
Atheism--and Jesuit Duplicity
Christianity and Astrology
Whitewashing the Infamous
Bigotry: Ally of Religion
Grading the Races
Brains and Civilization
There Are Superior Races
Shall We Breed Rationally?
Natural Selection and War
Sociology in Slumberland
Will Mankind Become Extinct?
The Ape Ancestry of Man
Monkeying with Darwin
Hamstringing the Health Seekers
Humanism--a New Religion
Egoism and Altruism Considered
Christianity and Einstein
"Fictional Biography" and Thomas Paine
A Reply to Critics
A Hill-Billy Book
Sociological Pipe-Dreams
Is the Bible Valuable?
That Jonah Stuff Again
Chameleonic Christianity
St. Patrick's "Gift" to Ireland
Dr. Gregory and Religion
No More Failures
Sideline Criticism
Our Gun-Powder Survival
Super-Sensory Superstition
Telepathy: a Vulgar Delusion
Politicians and Prayer
A Non-Kosher Tax-Payer Speaks
Kosher-Killing Cruelty
Flouting the Bill of Rights
Evolution Implies Atheism
Molasses or Vinegar?
A Columnist Barks up the Wrong Tree
The Fallacy of Free Will
The Miracle Joint at Lourdes
Vivisection, Euthanasia, and Cremation
Miscellaneous Notes
One might wonder why Mr. Babinski felt he ought not include such essays as "Shall We Breed Rationally?" But apparently Mr. Teller was able to write a book with chapters titled "Bigotry: The Ally of Religion" and "There Are Superior Races" and yet not notice any disconnect between these two statements.
Fine astronomer though Mr. Teller may have been, he didn't really know much about biology (so I should probably apologize to PZ for writing "Some of what Mr. Teller wrote about could have been a blog post at Pharyngula, almost"). For instance, in "Grading the Races" after citing Nott and Gliddon's Types of Mankind, he wrote:
Biologically considered, all men are not "created" equal. Neither in cranial capacity and brain weight nor in physiological potentialities are individuals alike. The same applies to major races or groups. We distinguish races not merely by the color of the skin and the texture of the hair and physiognomical features but by the differentials of craniological structure. The Negro skull is an earlier and more primitive type in the scale of evolution.
Mr. Teller soon also flirts with the idea of polygenism, stating
[W]e can still distinguish three distinctive races of man, namely the Negroid, the Mongolian, and the Caucasian. Whether these came from a single anthropoid ape stem, or from several, is lost in the obscurity of the past.
Mr. Teller talks a lot about skulls, writing:
The Caucasian skull, anatomically considered, is the highest in the world. It is distinctly higher than the Mongolian or the Negroid. Its brain capacity is larger; and brain weight is an important factor in the potentialities of mental endowment. As the brain of the anthropoid ape is larger than that of the long-tailed monkeys, so is the brain of the white European larger than that of a Bantu tribesman or an Australian savage. The "Caucasian" skull derives its name from the model specimen found in the Caucasus. It is the highest in the scale of evolution.
This reviewer, therefore, is definitely of the opinion that there are superior (and therefore inferior) races--races that are superior in cranial structure, brain weight and capacity, and in the physiological potentialities which make for a higher intelligence.
It seems that Mr. Teller, aside from subscribing to poor caricature of evolutionary theory, was also something of a quote-miner. He writes:
Dr. Franz Boas, professor of anthropology, Columbia University ("The Mind of Primitive Man", p. 25) states:"There are, however, sufficient data available to establish beyond a doubt the fact that the brain-weight of the whits is larger than that of most races, particularly larger than that of the negroes. . . . The investigation of cranial capacities are quite in accord with these results.
Modern Europeans: about 1560 cc. Mongoloid race: 1510 cc. African negroes: 1405 cc. Negroes of Pacific Ocean: 1460 cc.
"Here we have, therefore, a decided difference in favor of the white race. . . . Does this increase in the size of the brain prove an increase in faculty? This would seem highly probable, and facts may be adduced which speak in favor of this assumption."
If you know anything about Franz Boas, that quote immediately becomes suspect. Thomas Gosset writes in Race: The History of an Idea in America
The racists of the 1920's rightly recognized Boas as their chief antagonist. Although his opinion was then a minority one, he never wavered before the onslaughts of biological interpretations of history and civilization. More importantly, he was able to meet his opponents with arguments which could not be brushed aside as humanitarian twaddle. It is possible that Boas did more to combat race prejudice than any other person in history.
Knowing this, I looked up the book that Teller cites. Sure enough, the quote he has is in there, but here's how the chapter containing it ends:
We may now sum up the results of our preliminary inquiry. We have found that the unproved assumption of identity in cultural achievement and of mental ability is founded on an error of judgment; that the variations in cultural development can as well be explained by a consideration of the general course of historical events without recourse to the theory of material differences of mental faculty in different races. We have found, furthermore, that a similar error underlies the common assumption that the white race represents physically the highest type of man, but that anatomical and physiological considerations do not support these views.
Oh well. Some of Mr. Teller's notions of science simply don't hold up well in the face of history:
"A God who rewards and punishes is ... unthinkable, because man acts in accordance with an inner and outer necessity, and would, in the eyes of God, be as little responsible as an inanimate object is for the movements which it makes." This dispenses with the Christian doctrines of heaven and hell, of future rewards and punishments, and of free will.
There you have Einstein at his best. If, on the other hand, you prefer relativity jargon, try this:--
"If a person were hurled at the velocity of light away from the earth and from a certain point allowed to return at the same speed, he would not become a second older in the interim even though the time of the earth had elapsed a thousand years while he was on his journey."
Now all this, coming from Professor Einstein, may sound very profound, but anyone not bereft of his reason might tell him to tell it to the marines. It is, on the face of it, a silly enough remark, since any lapse of time, no matter how short the interval, leaves a person that much older than he was before. You cannot be of the same age you were the day before yesterday. And going away on a cosmic journey won't prevent you from getting old.
...
Professor Einstein is primarily a blackboard physicist, who has built up a titanic world out of mathematical symbols. It is, at best, a gossamer world, which sometimes falls apart and has to be assembled again with a new set of symbols. It is, in short, a fanciful and shadowy realm, in which space bends back upon itself, parallel lines meet, and yardsticks shrink to the vanishing point if they travel too point. And it is a world which has no visible counterpart in space.
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