HiddenMysteries: Race does not exist. It is a figment of your imagination.

The word “race” has no biological definition.

The classification “race” is only applied to humans and is therefore not a general term of biology. In other species we talk of “subspecies” and occasionally “breed” (the result of deliberate breeding efforts).

These are terms that are defined in terms of genetic isolation, and therefore do not apply to humans. If we were to apply the same concepts of classification to our own species that we do to every other species on the planet (the system of Order, Family, Genus, Species, Subspecies), the word “race” would have no meaning.

Or to put it another way, there are more points of genetic variation between two random human beings, than there are between two “races.” The genomes of two “white” people will vary in hundreds of places that determine height, weight, hair color, size of ears, predisposition to baldness or cancer or depression, body hair, length of the third finger, artistic ability, left-handedness, etc. While the genomes of all “white” people differs from those of all “black” people in only a few dozen places (like chromosome 8).

The genetic differences you cite between, say, people of Central African descent and people of Northern European descent are purely explainable by geography and migratory patterns.

Of course people who spent the last 10,000 years (or even a few hundred years) primarily in the same region will have a common recent ancestry and thus have certain genetic markers in common that they do not share with people in a distant region. But almost no human populations have been completely genetically isolated from their neighbors. There is a smooth transition of interbreeding from one region to the next right around the globe. So there are no “boundaries” between “races.”

But 10,000 years is a blink of an eye in evolutionary/biological terms. As travel dissolves geographical boundaries even more, the very concept of “race” will slowly become even more meaningless. I doubt if, 1,000 years from now, it has any meaning at all.

Yes, it is useful for medical purposes to identify genetically related groups, and so, yes, they will still talk of “race” as a shorthand for “ancestry”. But they still use language like “African-Americans” to stress that this is purely an issue of ancestry and geography. There are lots of diseases associated with other ancestral groups that are not defined as “races”, such as Celiac disease (associated with people of Irish descent), Thalassemia (affecting mediteranean groups … Italians, Greeks, middle-eastern descent), Niemann-Pick disease (affecting people of French-Acadian descent in Nova Scotia), etc. So medical studies on the frequency of a disease in an ancestral or geographic group is not evidence of “race.”

Now, in all of this I’m speaking purely about biology. In sociology, race is a much bigger issue, as this brings in issues of culture and history (collective memory of past events). But from the point of view of pure biology, Homo sapiens cannot be subclassified into meaningfully defined “races.”

“Race” does not exist, there’s ample evidence and I have the backing of mainstream and reputable geneticists and organizations:

Prominent anthropologist C. Loring Brace: “There is no such thing as a biological entity that warrants the term ‘race.’”

The American Association of Physical Anthropologists recently announced: “old biological concepts of race no longer provide scientifically valid distinctions…”

The American Anthropological Association published that “differentiating species into biologically defined ‘races’ has proven meaningless and unscientific as a way of explaining variation.”

The New York Times has hailed Genes, Peoples, and Languages, the new book by Professor Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, the dean of population geneticists, for “dismantling the idea of race.” In the New York Review of Books, Jared Diamond salutes Cavalli-Sforza for “demolishing scientists’ attempts to classify human populations into races in the same way that they classify birds and other species into races”

Cavalli-Sforza himself wrote: “The classification into races has proved to be a futile exercise.” He says his research will “undermine the popular belief that there are clearly defined races, to contribute to the elimination of racism. The idea of race in the human species serves no purpose.”

Maverick

http://www.freemediaproductions.info

Race does not exist. It is a figment of your imagination.

Thursday, May 07 2009 @ 12:09 AM CDT