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Darwin and race

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Encyclopedia of race and racism

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Race remains an inflammatory issue, both socially and scientifically. Fortunately, modern human genetics can deliver the salutary message that human populations share most of their genetic variation and that there is no scientific support for the concept that human populations are discrete, nonoverlapping entities. Furthermore, by offering the means to assess disease-related variation at the individual level, new genetic technologies may eventually render race largely irrelevant in the clinical setting. Thus, genetics can and should be an important tool in helping to both illuminate and defuse the race issue.

race genetics

The idea of biological race assumes traits come packaged together, even color-coded for our convenience, as anthropologist Jonathan Marks jokes. In otherwords, if biological race were real, we'd find that skin color or other "racial" markers would correlate with a suite of other genetic traits. Knowing an individual's "race" should enable us to predict his or her other genes and traits.

race genetics

Over the last thirty five years a major change has taken place in our biological understanding of the concept of human “race,” largely as a consequence of an immense increase in our knowledge of human genetics. As a biological rather than a social construct, “race” has ceased to be seen as a fundamental reality characterizing the human species. Nevertheless, there appear from time to time claims that racial categories represent not arbitrary socially and historically defined groups but objective biological divisions based on genetic differences. The most recent widely noticed rebirth of such claims is an essay by Armand Marie Leroi on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times (March 14, 2005), an essay that illustrates both the classical confusions about the reality of racial categories and the more recent erroneous conclusions about the relevance of such racial identifications for medical practice.

race genetics

"Humans, as I have described, evolved to live in small isolated groups and are finely tuned to seek people of common values. Like it or not, common culture (common practices, expectations, and beliefs) correlates, even if imperfectly, with common biological ancestry. This means that markers of race and ethnicity come to be taken as markers of common values." (Mark Pagel | Prospect Magazine June 2008 issue 147)

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"We tend to imagine that our racial classifications map onto natural kinds in the world, that in carving humanity up into 'Caucasoid', 'Negroid', etc., we are, so to speak, carving nature at its joints. In fact, these categories are recent inventions." (3quarksdaily)

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