Race Part 1: What is Race? --- A Succinct Review
(Adapted from: Race Differences in Intelligence An
Evolutionary Analysis by Richard Lynn
Inspired by Wikipedia Race article and RationalWiki article:
Racialism, as well as Lewontin’s Fallacy, the work of Rushton, Baker, and many of the classical anthropologists, and thinkers before them!)
By Independent Thinker
IMPORTANT NOTE: WORK IN PROGRESS!!! This is intended to
be a bare-bone template for an article that discusses the idea of biological
race, and its validity. To write this
properly will take me a lot of time, and a lot of editing and revision, which I
currently DO NOT have enough time for.
It is important however for a blog about race to give an idea of what
race actually IS, and what the controversy surrounding it is. I also do not
want to devote too much time to this one topic, as I want to move onto other
things. Thus, this is just a bare-bone template which I will try to revise
bi-weekly, or monthly, until it becomes a somewhat comprehensive, yet readable
article. If it does become that I will try to publish the final version here and
elsewhere. This should really be seen as
an almost bullet point rough draft version. But if you don’t know much about
the scientific concept of race, here are important points to consider.
ALSO PLEASE KEEP IN MIND:
This is a very long and complex topic about which much has
been written. I can’t hope to address
all of the issues here for the first time, so please be patient, and see this
more of an introduction, and points to consider over anything else.
Introduction &
Definition:
Amidst debates of racial science, primarily discussing
racial differences, a common topic that comes up is what is race? Egalitarians
often argue that race is a meaningless concept, and people of all persuasions
use the word to refer to ethnic groups that couldn’t properly be categorized
into race, i.e. are the Irish a race, are the Jews a race, are "Asians" a race? To
begin the discussion we need to define race. So what is a race? Richard Lynn provides a definition of this in
his chapter on race in his work Race Differences in Intelligence an
Evolutionary Analysis: simply put “a race consists of a group that is
recognizably different in a number of inherited characteristics from other
groups.”
“A fuller definition is that a race is a breeding population
that is to some degree genetically different from neighboring populations as a
result of geographical isolation, cultural factors, and endogamy, and which
shows observable patterns of genotypic frequency differences for a number of
intercorrelated, genetically determined characteristics, compared with other
breeding populations.”(Lynn 2015)
A point to be kept in mind is that people can usually
recognize a member of another race quite easily. It is something that is
biological and perceptible without the need for some kind of complex scientific
analysis. Pure races exist where they
evolved in geographic isolation.
Geographic areas of contact are usually inhabited by somewhat
mixed race populations, which resulted from generations of interbreeding. These
areas are called clines, and the populations are called clinal populations. For
example, areas of Southern Europe are a clinal region between Europeans, and
North Africans, and Near Easterners. This is a concept we will return to when we’ve
refuted many race denier arguments.
Process of Racial
Evolution:
When two or more populations become geographically and/or
reproductively isolated they come to form different races or sub-species. They
evolve due to founder effects, genetic drift, mutation, and adaptation. The
founder effect occurs when a population is founded by a few individuals, and as
a result the succeeding population has a high frequency of alleles that are
characteristic of the founders.
Genetic drift effect refers to the idea that gene frequencies will change over time to a certain extent by chance and this will cause differences between the populations. Drift continues with time, and the differences between populations increase.
Genetic drift effect refers to the idea that gene frequencies will change over time to a certain extent by chance and this will cause differences between the populations. Drift continues with time, and the differences between populations increase.
The adaptation effect is that, when a population migrates to
a new territory, some alleles will be advantageous that were not advantageous
in the old location. Individuals possessing advantageous alleles in the new
territory have more surviving offspring, so their alleles will be selected for
and will gradually spread though the population.
Eventually the new advantageous alleles entirely replace the
less advantageous alleles and are then said to have become “fixed.”
It has long been recognized that most species have several
varieties, sub-species, breeds or what in humans are called races. Early in his
career, Charles Darwin (1809-1882) noted the different varieties of turtles on
the Galapagos Islands, and it was this that set him thinking how these had
evolved. Later in his book The Variation of Animals and Plants under
Domestication (1868), he described the different varieties of a number of
species such as pigeons, each of which have their own distinctive manner of flight, movement, and cooing.
(Lynn 2015)
(Lynn 2015)
Races in the Animal
Kingdom and Selective Breeding:
There are a number of different varieties or races among the
apes. There are four races of common chimpanzee. These are the western
chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes versus), indigenous to West Africa between Guinea
and Nigeria, the central chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes troglodytes) of Cameroon
and Gabon, the Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes ellioti) of Nigeria
and Cameroon, and the eastern chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) of
central Africa. These races differ in physical appearance, genotypes,
distribution of blood groups, and the cries they utter.
There are many different breeds among human derived animals.
Dogs, horses, cows, pigs, roosters, and so forth. The FCI recognizes 339 dog
breeds as of 2018. In addition to the
great morphological variation found within dogs, there is also notable
behavioural variation. Some dog breeds
are more suitable for a particular set of tasks than are other breeds. It has
also been noted that intelligence is a traits that varies with dog breeds.
[Application of the subspecies concept to humans will follow
shortly]
Brief History of
Classification:
Biologists and anthropologists began to analyze and classify
races in the middle years of the 18th century. The first taxonomy of races was
advanced by the Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus (1708-1778) in 1758. In his
System Naturae, he proposed that there are four races, which he designated
Europaeus (Europeans), Afer (Black Africans), Asiaticus (Asians), and
Americanus (Native Americans). In 1776, the German physician Johann Friedrich
Blumenbach (1752-1840) added a fifth race and proposed a classification based
principally on skin color. He designated these five races the Caucasian
(white), Mongolian (yellow), Ethiopian (black), American (red), and Malayan
(brown). These taxonomies were based on the clustering of morphological
features and coloration in different races, such as the Europeans’ white skin,
straight hair, and narrow nose, the sub-Saharan Africans’ black skin, frizzy
hair, and wide nose, the Mongolians’ (East Asians) black hair, yellowish skin,
and flattened nose, the Native Americans’ reddish skin and beaky nose, and the
Malaysians’ brown skin. Morton (1849) used Blumenbach’s five-race
classification when he made the first analysis of brain size in relation to
race. In the early 20th century, data were collected on differences in the
frequencies of blood groups in various populations throughout the world. Ludwik
Hirszfeld (1884-1954) showed
the frequencies of a number of blood groups are consistent
with race differences in coloration and morphology.
A more detailed taxonomy of races was advanced by Carleton
S. Coon, Stanley M. Garn, and Joseph Benjamin Birdsell (1950), who proposed
seven major races, each of which was subdivided into two or more subraces.
These were (1) Caucasoids, subdivided into Nordics of Northwest Europe, Slavs
of Northeast Europe, Alpines of Central Europe, Mediterraneans of South Europe,
North Africa, and the Near East, and Hindi of India and Pakistan; (2) East
Asians, subdivided into Tibetans, North Chinese, Classic East Asians (Koreans,
Japanese, Mongolians), and Eskimos; (3) Southeast Asians, subdivided into South
Chinese, Thais, Burmese, Malays, and Indonesians; (4) American Indians,
subdivided into north, central, south, and Fuegians; (5) Africans, subdivided
into East Africans, Sudanese, West Africans, Bantu, Bushmen, and Pygmies; (6)
Pacific Islanders, subdivided into Melanesians, Micronesians, Polynesians, and
Negritos; and (7) Australian Aborigines, subdivided into the Murrayian peoples
of southeastern Australia and the Carpentarian people of northern and central
Australia. A closely similar seven-race taxonomy was proposed by John Baker
(1974) comprising the five major races of Blumenbach and the Khoi Bushmen,
consisting of the Hottentots and Bushmen of southwest Africa and the Kalahari
desert, and the Australids, consisting of the Australian Aborigines and Melanesians.
(Lynn 2015)
Modern Classification
Methods:
In the 1980s and 1990s, Masatoshi Nei and A.K. Roychoudhury
(1993) and Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza (1994)
developed a new method of classifying humans into races on the basis of a
number of genetic polymorphisms (meaning that a gene has more than one allele
or alternative form). The technique is to take a number of polymorphic genes for
blood groups, blood proteins, lymphocyte antigens, and immunoglobins, and
tabulate the different allele frequencies in populations throughout the world.
Tabulations are then factor analyzed to find the degree to
which the allele frequencies are associated to form clusters of populations
that are genetically similar to one another. The Nei and Roychoudhury data for
26 populations have been factor analyzed by Jensen (1998) to show the existence
of six major groups of humans that correspond closely to the races proposed by
classical anthropologists. Using the traditional terminology, these are (1)
Africans of sub-Saharan Africa (Pygmies, Nigerians, Bantu, Bushmen); (2)
Caucasoids (Lapps, Finns, Germans, English, Italians, Iranians, North Indians);
(3) East Asians (Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Tibetans, Mongolians); (4)
Southeast Asians (Southern Chinese, Thais, Filipinos, Indonesians, Polynesians,
Micronesians); (5) Amerindians (North and South Native American Indians and
Inuit); and (6) Australian Aborigines (Australian Aborigines and New Guineans).
The same technique has been used by Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza (1994)
to analyze a larger data set of 120 alleles for 42 populations. These data were
used to calculate the genetic differences between each population and every
other population. From these, they calculated a genetic linkage tree that
groups the populations into what they called “clusters.” They have found 10
major clusters. These are (1) Bushmen and Pygmies; (2) sub-Saharan Africans;
(3) South Asians and North Africans; (4) Europeans; (5) East Asians; (6) Arctic
Peoples; (7) Native American Indians; (8) Southeast Asians; (9) Pacific
Islanders; and (10) the Australian Aborigines and the
Aboriginal New Guineans. It is clear that this classification
corresponds closely to the racial taxonomies of classical anthropology based on
visible characteristics of color of skin, hair, eyes, body shape, limb length,
and the like, but for some reason Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza (1994)
prefer the term “clusters.”
This is somewhat of a “cladistic” picture of race. A clade is a
taxonomic group of organisms consisting of a single common ancestor and all the
descendants of that ancestor (a monophyletic group).
Every creature produced by sexual reproduction has two immediate lineages, one
maternal and one paternal.[71] Whereas Carl Linnaeus established
a taxonomy of living organisms based on anatomical similarities and differences, cladistics seeks to
establish a taxonomy – the phylogenetic tree – based on genetic similarities and differences and
tracing the process of acquisition of multiple characteristics by single
organisms. [source: Wikipedia Race]
From Wikipedia Clade article.
Counter-arguments & Rejoinders:
Now, there have been several objections raised to the race
concept, its usefulness, its validity and the application of population
genetics, and other disciplines to show that the concept of race is a valid,
and meaningful concept. Of course in day-to-day
life, and especially when one uses the analogy of breeds of animals, the
concept itself is easy to understand, nevertheless those with certain political
inclinations will try to refute that which goes against their ideology.
The central concept to keep in mind in refutation of these
arguments is the definition of race provided above, as well as the
understanding that the races evolved when human populations became separated
from one another in different environments during the Ice Ages. They were
largely isolated from one another for tens of thousands of years, and evolved
their differences in response to different selection pressures. Once that
concept is understood and accepted the race denier arguments fall apart with
some thought.
One idea is that the race concept is a murky idea that is an
approximation of geographic ancestry:
“[B]oundaries in global variation are not
abrupt and do not fit a strict view of the race concept; the number of races
and the cutoffs used to define them are arbitrary. The race concept is at best
a crude first-order approximation to the geographically structured phenotypic
variation in the human species.” —biological anthropologist John Relethford in 2009
The point being made above is not entirely correct. Racial concepts may indeed be a crude
first-order approximation to the “geographically structured
phenotypic variation in the human species”, but only if we lump too many races
together into too few groups. That is we restrict the analysis to three groups:
Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid, rough macro-race groupings, as opposed to
the more detailed groupings given by Cavalli-Sforza et al. These are macro-races,
aggregations of many similar racial groups, partially based on common descent,
and partly based on apparent phenotypic similarity. Once we divide the races
into the ten groups given above it reflects their isolated and shared
evolutionary history from their isolation to the Neolithic age, at the end of
the last Ice Ages. Thus again once we keep the definition of race, and how they
developed in mind it clears up the misunderstandings as given by the quote
above.
Now let’s go through three important points
raised and how they’ve been misapplied to trying to refute the validity of the
biological race concept.
1)
Demes
& Clades
2)
Application
of population genetics to race research
3)
Clines
Now, in regards to demes, let’s start with a discussion as
to what they constitute:
“The rationale for naming population units
below the species level comes from the simple fact that members of a species
are seldom, if ever, evenly distributed throughout the species’ geographical
range. Uneven distribution can result in clusters of individuals partially
isolated from other such clusters—that is, with more interbreeding within the
clusters than between them—simply because of proximity. It is to such clusters
that the term deme is usually applied. Thus, the green frogs in an isolated
pond, a town of prairie dogs, or a field of wild sunflowers might be examples
of demes. If demes inhabit different local environments, natural selection can
operate in different directions in these populations with the result that there
may be genetic and even physical variation in the characteristics of individual
demes. Other processes of evolution, such as mutation and other forms of
genetic change, can also enhance these differences, depending upon the extent
of demic isolation.”
The deme concept has been criticized when applied to human
races:
“Application
of much of population genetics works best when considering variation between
local populations and not between aggregates. The fine detail of our species'
evolutionary history and its impact on patterns of genetic variation are lost
when trying to categorize and classify into races. The proper study of human
biological variation needs to be rooted in evolutionary theory and population
genetics.”
Relethford, J. H. (2017). "Biological
Anthropology, Population Genetics, and Race" in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy
and Race. Oxford University Press.
Now, although the concept of the deme has been criticized as
being “transient, and ephemaeral”, and even less applicable to human races:
What this fails to understand is that after the human
migrations out of Africa, during the Ice Ages, humans groups were largely separated from one another,
by geographic barriers that were very difficult to pass through. Thus human populations were largely separated
from one another in different environments for tens of thousands of years. Tens
of thousands of years that natural selection had time to work to favour some
traits, and not others, and thus to change the populations genotypically and
phenotypically. The demic groups that
formed the races lived largely in the same environments and were largely
prevented from interbreeding with members of other races. Thus the criticisms above fail to take into
account the evolutionary history of the races.
The arguments seem to assume that the conditions of today, or at the
beginning of the Neolithic were always the condition of man. Again we go back
between demes and clades, and again to the central point that the races were
large demes, and clades that were reproductively isolated from one another for
tens of thousands of years.
Human races can sort of be thought of as clades made up of
demes that were mostly separated from each other for tens of thousands of
years.
2) Application of population genetics to race research:
Many of these arguments revolve around how “arbitrary”
groupings, and genetic similarity clustering can be, along with the idea of
clines and how they refute the race concept. On the other hand some racialists
insist on grouping all races into three clusters, or macro-races. Both lines of thought are fallacious.
Race Denier Argument:
“Human
gene clusters don't divide neatly into geographical groupings”
"Clusters" of very high genetic
similarity can be -- purposefully or accidentally -- "created" via inadequate
sampling of intermediate populations. In this case, three "races" are
obtained (blue, purple, red) even though the overall system shows no such
breaks (Maglo et al. 2016):
“An evolutionary-based grouping of world
populations attempts to summarize the complex human population history while an
instrumental grouping lumps pragmatically world populations into five
continental groups reducing evolutionary relations. It is
this instrumentally engineered clustered picture of human evolutionary history
that is misleadingly construed as corresponding to socially defined races in
countries such as the US. Although these
socially defined races and continental genetic clusters do not actually match,
the alleged correspondence has generated its own sets of debates.”
Maglo, Koffi N., Tesfaye B. Mersha, and Lisa J.
Martin. "Population Genomics and the Statistical Values of Race:
An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Biological Classification of Human
Populations and Implications for Clinical Genetic Epidemiological Research." Frontiers in genetics 7 (2016).
In short: There are no sharply defined
"jumps" of genetic difference between humans, and so no reason to
have sharply defined races of humans.
Racial Science
Counter-Argument
Irrelevant: Evolution of racial differences starts out as
being mutations within an isolated population and diverging as a result, the
lack of jumps reflects the aggregated differences that evolved. But also, one must keep in mind that one
needs to look for ancestral populations, not modern ones which have had much
more of a chance to interbreed, through more modern migrations and contacts. To apply such a criteria to the human races
and say it is completely arbitrary is misleading. Looking back at the definition of races, one
can see that they are recognizably different, and that this is due to having
differences in allele frequencies as a result of evolution; this was a result
of geographic and reproductive isolation and being selected for traits in
different environments.
Supplementary discussion (can be omitted):
Another misconception and
argument comes from medical research into race and genetics. There have been several studies done where a
large grouping of individuals has been analyzed and found to cluster
statistically into 3 or 5 groupings.
Thus some people mistakenly believe that it implies that it implies that
there are 3 to five races. What this misses
above all else is that it completely ignores the central point of race, in
terms of how we defined it, and the point about evolution and isolation.
I refer here to Rosenberg, et al.’s
study of 2002, for example. In the work here:
They studied genetic differences
of a somewhat large population of people.
Without prior knowledge of their ancestry they found that they could be
clustered into groups, and that these roughly corresponded to geographic
ancestry. Should we either be surprised
by this, and does this in any way contradict the definition, or data that was
previously given? Not at all. Based on
the previous information given it is obvious that different racial groups would
cluster with each other in a rough way, but this in no way contradicts the
results of Cavalli-Sforza et al., nor is it a better or even appropriate method
for studying the same question. In fact
that was never the author’s intent. To
define, or find the amount of races that there are in men. The point was in relation to practicing
medicine that there are genetic differences in human populations that reflect
different genetic ancestries.
Their samples were in no way
reflective of the aboriginal populations of the world, and most likely did not
include a representative sample at all, especially considering the fact that
some of the racial populations have very small populations in comparison to
other ones, as well as the fact that mixed, or clinal populations that may have
been included. Thus when you have an
unrepresentative sample of the world’s population, and included mixed and
clinal populations, and set some arbitrary standards of what would constitute a
cluster, all you would get are certain clusters. Those that are more similar to each other
would cluster together i.e. North African race people, and European people may
form a single cluster since they are more genetically related than are
Northeast Asians, or Sub-Saharan Africans.
But again keeping the above in mind and what really constitutes a race
this clustering really does not somehow show that Cavalli-Sforza’s research has
been superseded in any way whatsoever, unlike what some have suggested. To suggest that is actually to miss the
central point of what a race is and the basic scientific logic to determine
what it is.
In any case without going into
too much detail about this the STRUCTURE method like PCA, is sensitive to what
people are included in the analysis and if the sample is unrepresentative of
the aboriginal populations of the world as a whole in roughly equal numbers it
would tend to skew the results. If
anything this paper shows that on some level of resolution this kind of
individual rather than population based study can show that the individuals
cluster into macro-races.
Lewontin’s Fallacy
And now we move on to another important argument from race
and genetics that is used to make several related point in regards to how the
race concept is meaningless. It has been argued that race is meaningless for
humans since the variation within a race is larger than the variation between
races.
AmRen published a good article for a lay audience on this
and I’ll defer to what was printed there due to time constraints at the moment:
“In the 1972 study "The
Apportionment of Human Diversity", Richard Lewontin performed a fixation index (FST) statistical analysis using
17 markers, including blood group proteins, from individuals across classically
defined "races" (Caucasian, African, Mongoloid, South Asian
Aborigines, Amerinds, Oceanians, and Australian Aborigines). He found that the
majority of the total genetic variation between humans (i.e., of the 0.1% of
DNA that varies between individuals), 85.4%, is found within populations, 8.3%
of the variation is found between populations within a "race", and
only 6.3% was found to account for the racial classification. Numerous later
studies have confirmed his findings.[5] Based on this analysis, Lewontin concluded, "Since such
racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic
significance either, no justification can be offered for its continuance."
This argument has been cited as evidence that racial categories
are biologically meaningless, and that behavioral differences between groups
cannot have any genetic underpinnings.”
However. Edwards published a critique of this idea which he
has called Lewontin’s fallacy.
“The anti-racists twist this fact to
imply that individuals of different races are (or can be) more similar to
people of other races than to people of their own race.
In fact, since there are no racial
patterns to 85 percent of human genetic variation, that is theoretically
possible. Purely random variation in these areas could conceivably make two
individuals of different races more alike than two individuals of the same
race. However, in the remaining 15 percent — the genetic variation where
consistent racial differences are found — they would be as different from each
other as any two typical members of the different races. Theoretically, a
Chinese could be found who was indistinguishable from a Frenchmen in large
parts of their DNA, but this would not make them particularly similar. This
Chinese would not have the gene variants that contribute to producing
light-colored eyes or hair, or Caucasian facial features, for example.
“unwarranted
because most of the information that distinguishes populations is hidden in the
correlation structure of the data and not simply in the variation of individual
factors.” What this means is that looking at individual genes is not enough to
distinguish between populations; groups of genes must be taken together.
Here
is an example from the Edwards paper: Imagine two populations in which the
frequency of a particular gene variant compared to its alternative is 70
percent in population A and 30 percent in population B. If you use this one
gene as the criterion for determining who is an A, you will mistakenly classify
30 percent of Bs as As because 30 percent of them have the variant that is more
common in As. As you increase the number of variants you are comparing, the
chances of misclassification decrease because it is increasingly unlikely for a
member of one group to have a distribution of many different gene variants
similar to that of the other group.”
Clines
Now just because admixed
populations of races exist at the geographic boundaries of where they evolved,
it does not mean that “pure races” do not exist. Just because you can have a mixed breed dog,
does not mean that pure breeds do not exist. Continuous variation from group to
group on a number of traits due to mixing at the border regions does not mean
that the pure races are meaningless or that they do not exist. In fact Cavalli-Sforza, et al. did find that
African (i.e. Sub-Saharan African) and non-African populations are
significantly different genetically. The biggest phylogenetic split happens
there.
Another race denier argument
considers what was said about Lewontin’s fallacy above, and in response to
Edwards, the idea that even when you consider many different traits together to
see the probability of people from different races matching up, and include
people of mixed heritage.
Race Denier Argument:
“On the other hand, if the entire world
population were analyzed, the inclusion of many closely related and admixed
populations would increase. This is illustrated by the fact that Formula and
the classification error rates, CC and CT, all
remain greater than zero when such populations are analyzed, despite the use of
>10,000 polymorphisms (Table 1,
microarray data set; Figure 2D).”
Racial science
counter argument:
Irrelevant:
Closely related and admixed populations show later
interbreeding between racial groups and does not mean that “pure” racial groups
do not exist, or that there do not exist significant differences between racial groupings. The fuzziness of race, and genetic
differences dependent on large numbers of genes over many individuals does not
mean that there are not pure races that have evolved. If one looks at ancestral
populations in the regions which were subject to geographic isolation the
chances would be about zero. Again looking at the definition of race, as well
as the evolution of the races, and Lewontin’s fallacy, and what was said about
clines we can clear this misconception up.
Do Races Exist?
From the 18th century up until the middle of the
twentieth all social scientists, biologists, etc., believed that there were
biologically distinct races. Sir Arthur Keith wrote:
“So clearly differentiated are the types of mankind that,
were an anthropologist presented with a crowd of men drawn from the Australoid,
the Negroid, East Asian or Caucasoid types, he could separate the one human
element from the other without hesitation or mistake (Keith, 1922, p. xviii).”
In the middle decades of the twentieth century a number of
anthropologists began to assert that human races don’t exist. Montagu, and
later others made this assertion however from their own writings they imply
that races actually do exist, in Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race
he states:
[I]n biological usage a race is conceived to be a
subdivision of a species which inherits the physical characteristics serving to
distinguish it from other populations of the species. In the genetic sense a
race may be defined as a population which differs in the incidence of certain
genes from other populations, with one or more of which it is capable of
exchanging genes across whatever boundaries (usually geographic) may separate
them. If we are asked whether in this sense there exist a fair number of races
in the human species, the answer is that there do (p. 6).
Clearly race is neither a myth or a fallacy, from his own
writings. (Lynn 2015). Other writers
would follow. Cavalli-Sforza
(remember him?) and Bodmer had made statements that race did in fact
exist. Later on they would dispute the
idea of race, and instead use the term cluster, which is essentially synonymous
with the categories of race of classical anthropology, though on and off again
Cavalli-Sforza would reveal that he did indeed believe that race was a valid
concept, after denial in his magnum opus he stated that:
Race could be defined
as “a group of individuals that we can recognize as biologically different from
others” (Cavalli-Sforza, 2000, p. 25).
In 1985 a survey of American anthropologists showed that 59%
believed that races existed, but by the beginning of the 21st century
the denial of the existence of races became more frequent.
‘In 2004, the American Anthropological Association announced
on its website that “race is not a scientifically valid biological category.”’
(Lynn 2015)
Despite this the reality of race is accepted in medical
journals, journals of sociology, education, and so on and so forth. There are
corporations dedicated to promoting racial diversity in hiring, affirmative
action programs, ethnic/racial group interest groups, and so on and so
forth. Race is generally accepted as a
scientific concept by European anthropologists, and some have pointed out that
the reason the concept is shunned by American anthropologists, and some others is
due to political correctnesss.
Conclusion:
Ultimately no amount of fallacious reasoning, and claims of
racial theorists using fallacious reasoning will ever refute the facts that
races most certainly do exist, either in line with the simple definition, or
the more complete one. Races, are just
like sub-species in the animal and plant kingdom, they are populations which
diverge evolutionarily and acquire a different frequency or set of traits. If even low animals can recognize degrees of
relatedness then surely humans can as well, and do. Not only that but
differences in average traits and ability are readily noticeable either
anecdotally, or through careful studies.
Just as breeds can be seen in dogs and other animals so is race readily
noticeable in humans. No amount of
denial or fallacious reasoning can refute, or change the facts. Just as no amount of fallacious reasoning
will change the facts that there are significant differences between breeds of
dog, the same is true in regards to the races of man. Thus we start with basic
biological, and evolutionary principles, and a straightforward definition of
race, and through looking at various aspects of it arrive at the same
definitions that we see are in fact applicable once we understand them in the
correct context.
IMPORTANT POINTS TO
REMEMBER:
“a race consists of a
group that is recognizably different in a number of inherited characteristics
from other groups.”
“A fuller definition
is that a race is a breeding population that is to some degree genetically
different from neighboring populations as a result of geographical isolation,
cultural factors, and endogamy, and which shows observable patterns of
genotypic frequency differences for a number of intercorrelated, genetically
determined characteristics, compared with other breeding populations.”(Lynn
2015)
The human races evolved when migrations out of Africa
occurred and spread early modern humans over the world. These groups later
became geographically isolated by huge barriers, and the challenges of the Ice
Ages. The race differences evolved over tens of thousands of years during the
Ice Ages until their end in the Neolithic. After human migrations became easier
after the Ice Ages, and they re-established contacts progressively more clinal
zones appeared.
Much of the human variation within a race, and between races
happens for non-coding DNA, and thus as far as racial differences are concerned
this is irrelevant. It is extremely
unlikely that two people of different races would have the exact same alleles
for a number of biological racially dependent traits.
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In Part 2 I will describe the formation of these ten races,
when and how they migrated, how they evolved, and what they were selected for…stay
tuned…
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