If You Still Think Humans Come In Distinct Races

[JustJohn or JJ]

If You Still Think Humans Come In Distinct 'Races,' This Biologist Will Set You Straight

The Huffington Post | By David Freeman

Posted: 07/06/2015 9:03 am EDT



There's no doubt that different groups of people can look very different from one another. But to contemporary anthropologists and sociologists, the notion that there are distinct "races" of human beings, each with its own specific attributes, doesn't make much sense.

feldman

Dr. Marcus Feldman

The same goes for biologists like Stanford University's Dr. Marcus Feldman, who has done pioneering research on the differences between human populations.

Recently, HuffPost Science posed several questions about race and racism to Feldman. Here, lightly edited, are his answers.

Does the concept of race have any scientific validity? Or have biologists discarded the term?

Many biologists have replaced the term “race” with "continental ancestry." This is because such a large fraction of the world has ancestry in more than one continent. The result is hyphenated nomenclature, which attempts to specify which continents are represented in one's ancestry.

For example, our president is as European in his ancestry as he is African. It is arbitrary which of these an observer chooses to emphasize. Obama’s opponents overtly and by implication denigrate him because of his African ancestry. But he is equally European.
How did the concept of race originate?

Probably from Aristotle’s predilection with classification. But more recently with [German physician Johann Friedrich] Blumenbach’s classification in 1775 of the five human races.

How do biologists today view race, and how has that view changed in recent years?

Biologists generally agree that with enough data on DNA, it is possible to say that someone’s ancestry is more likely to include representation from a given set of continents. However, the fraction of genes that contribute to visible differences between individuals from different continents is about 10 percent of all the genes that we carry.

How do biologists explain the differences between different populations of humans?

It depends what differences are referred to. Skin color differences, for example, may be the result of the action of 40 genes. Height might involve several hundred genes.

On one hand, some differences may be due to differences in the founding size of a population (for example, the relatively high frequency of some genetic diseases in Ashkenazi Jews could reflect the small original populations in Eastern Europe). Other differences could be due to natural selection--for example, tolerance of low oxygen pressure in Tibetans and Andean populations. Other differences are obviously cultural--for example, the preference of some Middle Eastern and South Asian populations to marry their cousins results in higher rates of genetic disorders in those populations than in other populations.

So why did we evolve to look so different from one another?

Some genes are involved in phenotypic differences that are detectable by the naked eye, and some are involved in musculature-related phenomena. Many people focus on these, ignoring the vast majority of genes whose differences are insignificant.


_{Engraving by the British artist John Emslie (1839-1913) showing facial portraits from different parts
of the world, and demonstrating racial and regional differences. The portraits are grouped under the
headings: Asiatics, Australians, Europeans, Polynesians, Africans and Americans, and illustrate
European perceptions of people indigenous to each are}a.

How much does DNA differ from one population to another?

Eighty percent to 90 percent of genetic variation is within populations, so the fraction between populations is very small.

As a result of the genes they carry, different populations can face different vulnerabilities—for example, their risk of suffering from certain diseases. Is there any evidence that certain populations have specific physical or intellectual attributes?

As I mentioned above, some populations do show higher frequencies of some disorders. These differences may be due to increases in the frequencies of genes that occurred by chance due to the small size or constitution of their founders. Other diseases can be due to cultural choices or societal constraints, such as dietary preferences or poverty. The latter are not genetically determined.

Do any non-human animals exhibit races?

Biologists use the term "race" to describe variants of a species that exhibit phenotypic differences over geographical ranges. The term gets confused with sub-species and other names. [Evolutionary biologist Theodosius] Dobzhansky referred to fruit fly races, and others use the term for populations that have chromosomal differences but can still mate successfully. It is not clear what the exact criteria for such races are.

Are humans “hard wired” to be suspicious of those who look different from ourselves?

"Hard-wired" is generally a synonym for genetically determined. Four-leggedness in dogs as opposed to two-leggedness in humans is probably genetic, but there is no evidence that I would accept xenophobia as genetic.

Are humans starting to look more like one another?

As migration increases around the world, features that might previously have allowed our eyes to classify people will undoubtedly become blurred. Then the small fraction of DNA differences that differ between populations will become even smaller.

So from a biological standpoint, it doesn't seem to make much sense to use the term "race." Should we stop talking about race and racism in everyday life?

I think race is outdated and often pejorative, but racism is alive and (unfortunately) not decreasing. I think we must remain on the alert for racism and have ready responses to it when it rears its ugly head.

[karl]

The biologist most likely are technically correct, but academically wrong. For in the world of reality of which we live in, race is a very important category to be placed in. How many work applications have your self looked at that did not have the space for placing race?

Some many years back {before time} my application contained five classifications of race: Negroid/Caucasian/mongoloid/Asian/Nordic or other. I of course marked Caucasian for the reason I am white. I learnt later the reviewer who ever, over wrote over Caucasian with broad pencil as Nordic and then time/date/year stamped the application.

There were never any explanations nor were my self to question, but even to the present with race, my personal papers are marked Nordic. This to my self indicates a over write of racial back ground not dominant enough to be classified as Germanic but predominantly Nordic by virtue of my mother and back ground family was/is Dansk whilst my father and his family were/are German.

As it is, not for sure of exact reason, but my self now have dual citizenship as Danish and German passports. Although my income is exactly of German sourced and my earnings are out of Denmark, I do not pay Danish taxes, although I do have a personal Danish and German Identity number.

It is a crazy world we live in, but with this, race is diffienantly very important.

Perhaps this is a similar case of race identification in America as Germany, or is it different?

Karl