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Race A social concept, but biologically

unsupportable!

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Most of us can see differences in humans:skin color, eye color, hair are obvious.

We, and most others in the world, tend touse these traits to categorize people.

Morally, many of us understand the

ramifications of our use of these categoriesand the harm they have brought and canbring.

We need to understand the difference

between what is essentially a sociologicalview of race rather than a biological view ofrace.

Is race in our genes or just in our heads?

Try some sorting by race.

http://www.pbs.org/race/002_SortingPeople/002_00-home.htmhttp://www.pbs.org/race/002_SortingPeople/002_00-home.htm

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A sociological view of race:Race is used as a means of determininghow a person should be related to ortreated, either on a personal level orunder some aspect of the law.

Race is a modern idea; ancient societiesdid not divide people of physical features,but by language, wealth, status, religion,or class.

http://members.nbci.com/Tara8000/Race.html

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A biological view

of race:

The anatomy of a givenracial group is used in

comparison with that ofother racial groups toinvestigate how peopleadapt to environments.

It is essentially " valuefree. "

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Homer (fl. 1200 - 850 B.C.)Iliad and Odyssey acknowledge variabilityAethiopians: People at the eastern and western edges of the

known worldCubit-men: African (?) pygmies

Herodotus (484?-425? B.C.)Historiae argues for an environmental cause of variability

between human groupsEgyptians have strong skulls due to exposurePersian skulls are brittle due to the use of felt hats

Hippocrates (460 - 377 B.C.)Environmental influences on human variability are noted in

Volume I of Corpus Hippocraticum Body build and temperament of different peoples are said to

be related to their climate and life style

Early Racial Classifications Homer

Herodotus

Hippocrates

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Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)Claims environmental causes of physical variation inhumans

Wooly hair of Aethiopians due to arid climate

Straight hair of Scythians due to moist air

St. Augustine (354-430)In De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos he says all menborn everywhere, no matter how strange they appearto us, are descended from Adam, i.e., are descendedfrom a single ancestral stock

Aristotle

St. Augustine

Early Racial Classifications

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Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

Questioned the environmental hypothesis in

accounting for human variation, suggestingan early hereditarian argument based on thepower of the mother's seed.

Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564)

Noted a relationship between race and theshape of the skull

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Differential Worth: TheBeginnings

Races are ranked on various criteria judged to assess intelligence ormoral standards

The rankings are used either tobolster the scala naturae or proto-evolutionary relationships

Such rankings are highly subjective

and loaded with potential forethnocentric abuse, with the highestrank always being reserved for therace of the person doing the ranking

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18th Century Racial Ideology

Monogenism versus Polygenism

Monogenism: All humans had asingle origin from Adam and Eve.

The races are seen as being due toenvironmentally determineddegeneration from Europeans

Polygenism: Different races aredescendants of different Adams,separate creations

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Carolus Linnaeus , 1707 1778

Viewed the task of classification as one of attempting tounderstand the natural laws of the Scala Naturae (theladder of nature)

Races of Linnaeus

Americanus: Red, choleric, erectEuropaeus: White, fickle, sanguine, blue-eyed, gentle,governed by laws

Asiaticus: Sallow, grave, dignified, avaricious, ruled byopinion

Afer: Black, choleric, obstinate, contented, regulated by

customsFerus: Wild man, walks on all fours, hairyTroglodytes: You wouldn't believe itMonstrous: Giants, mutants

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Johann Friedrich Blumenbach , 1752 - 1840German Anatomy ProfessorFather of Physical AnthropologyFather of Craniology

Founder of Anthropology in GermanyOn the Natural Variety of Mankind (1775)

We owe much of our view of the races to him, but he wasprobably one of the least racist people of his time.Advocated MonogenismRefuted the existence of "wild men" and "troglodytes" of earlierclassificationsProposed a system for classifying humans into five differentraces based on the shape of the skullUsing a skull from the Caucasus mountains as the perfectEuropean form, he claimed his four other races degenerated fromthis groupCaucasoid (Europeans), Mongoloid (Asians), American (NativeAmericans), Ethiopian (Africans), and Malayan (Southeast Asians)

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Samuel George Morton, 1799 - 1851Physician from Philadelphia

Polygenist, convinced of inferiority ofAfrican populations

Measured cranial capacity (volume of

braincase) to assess differential worth

Very careful technician, publishedextensive list of measurements of cranialcapacities

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Morton's Racial Rankings

RacialCategory

Morton'sAverages(cubic inches)

Gould'sAverages(cubic inches)

Caucasian 87 87

Mongolian 83 87

Malay 81 85

American 82 86

Ethopian 78 83

Modified from Gould, S.J. (1981)

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Pierre Paul Broca , 1824 - 1880Founder of French AnthropologyFirst Society of Anthropology (1859)First School of Anthropology (1876)

Instigated the study of CraniometryAttempted to quantify differential worthRatio of radius to humerus: a high ratio is ape-like,

hence lower worth.Found Caucasians scored higher than Hottentots,

Eskimos, and AustraliansHe discarded the ratio in favor of measures with

whites furthest from the apes

Brain size: bigger is betterMen > WomenEminent Men > Mediocre MenSuperior races (Caucasian) > Inferior (Otherraces)

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Definitions of RaceE.A. Hooton (1926): A race is a great division of mankind, themembers of which, though individually varying, are characterized as agroup by a certain combination of morphological and metrical features[which ones?], principally non-adaptive, which have been derived fromtheir common descent.

Brues (1990): A race is a division of a species which differs from otherdivisions by the frequency with which certain hereditary traits [which

ones?] appear among its members.

Mayr (1963): Biological races are noninterbreeding sympatric [in thesame area] populations that differ in biological charteristics but not, orscarcely, in morphology.He points out that human races do not experience such limitation of

interbreeding

Mayr (1963): considers the major divisions of humankind to besubspecies, which are aggregations of local populationsof a speciesinhabiting geographic subdivisions of the range of the species anddiffering taxonomically from other populations of the species.

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Author Number of Races

Linnaeus (1758) 4 (+3 imaginary)

Blumenbach (1781) 5

Hooton (1926) 3 (many levels)

Garn (1965) 9 (+ 2 lower levels)

How Many Races?

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Failure of the Race Concept

The classification [of humans] into races has proved

to be a futile exercise for reasons that were alreadyclear to Darwin (Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994)

While it is clear that there is only one human species,there are no objective reasons for splitting or lumpingat any lower taxonomic level (I.e., subspecies, races,varieties).

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Kennewick Man: A Troubling Case ofRace in Contemporary Anthropology

For all we now know about the first inhabitants of North America we stillhave lots of questions and recent discoveries still have us asking

Major controversy began in 1996 with the discovery of the Ancient One Kennewick Man.

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Kennewick Man or the Ancient One as the Umatillanation of Washington calls him

Unfortunately James Chatterss descriptions of him asCaucasoid got confused with Caucasian.

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Is repatriating such remains a crime against science? Is not repatriatingthem an echo of the 1890s Moundbuilder myth?

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The controversy has lead to a wide range of books

Evennovels...

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Ethnicity:The emphasis of culture over biology

Ethnic groups are formed by virtue of community oflanguage, religion, social institutions, etc., which havethe power of uniting human beings of one or severalspecies, races, or varieties and are by no meanszoological species (Deniker 1900)

When one uses the term 'ethnic group,' the question isimmediately raised, 'What does it mean? What does theuser have in mind?' And this at once affords anopportunity to discuss the facts and explore themeaning and falsities enshrined in the word 'race' andto explain the problems involved and the facts of the

genetic situation as we know them. (Montagu 1962)

Ethnicity is a multifactorial concept including, but notlimited to, cultural constructs, genetic background,ecological specialization, and self-identification. (After

Crews and Bindon 1991)

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Race and IQThe Bell Curve :A resurgence of Biological Determinism Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray , 1994

The IQ of migrants to the U.S. Non-literate vs. literate comparisons Genes versus environmental influences Immigration Restriction Act of 1924

Sir Cyril Burt Social Class and Intelligence

Intelligence tracks within British social classesMonozygotic (identical) twins reared apart

Experiments allegedly show very high

heritability for IQ scores (up to 80% ofvariability due to genes)

Scientific fraudCan't tell what parts of his research are true,

but he greatly increased his sample sizewithout changing any of his correlations--astatistical impossibility.

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The Fallacy of Heritability

Heritability is a measure of thedegree of genetic determination of acharacteristic within a givenpopulation

Heritability gives no indication ofthe genetic basis of differencesbetween populations

e.g., Black versus Whitedifferences on IQ scores couldbe due entirely to environment,in spite of studies (like Burt's)indicating a high heritability of IQscores within populations

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Mans Most Dangerous Myth: the Fallacy of Race

Montague and Livingstone suggested that we can make our race problemgo away by not calling a race a race, but by calling it an ethnic group, acomplex distinction.

A race refers to a group of people who share some biological or anatomicalcharacteristics, whereas an ethnic group is a group of people who share aparticular culture.

The implication was to substitute discrimination on the basis of culturaldifferences for discrimination on the basis of racial differences. Thisapproach hasn't solved any problems.

Montague and Livingstone said that biological differences are not restricted

to particular geographic regions, but are distributed as clines .Clines are gradual transitions in frequency of a trait over space as in ABO Blood Types and skin color.

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Skin Color Production

Skin color is due primarily to the presence of a pigment called melanin .

Both light and dark complexioned people have this pigment.

However, two forms are produced pheomelanin, which is red to yellow incolor, and eumelanin, which is dark brown to black.

People with light complexioned skin mostly produce pheomelanin, whilethose with dark colored skin mostly produce eumelanin.

To a lesser extent, the color is affected by the presence of fat under theskin and carotene, a reddish-orange pigment in the skin.

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Modern concepts of race

Races are categories that might be useful in some ways if theysimply refer to populations of people who have evolved inadaptation to their environment while remaining slightly ormoderately isolated from other populations.

A. Viewed in this way, the usefulness of race is in examining howpeople have adapted to their environments.

Most anthropologists think a biological concept of race is notharmful, but neutral.

B. A good example of race being used in an adaptational sense isthe analysis of skin color. Probably no other single factor is asimportant in any treatment of race as skin color.

C. First, dark skin has been shown to be advantageous near theequator.

The reason for this is simply that the dark skin pigment,melanin, protects the deep layers of the skin from theharmful effects of ultraviolet light. For this simple reason,we expect peoples from tropical areas to have darker skin -and they do.

Skin Color continued

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D. There are several advantages to having white skin in regions away from theequator, especially in Europe. All are probably contributing factors to theevolution of white skin.

1. Cold injury In Northern Europe it gets cold and during glacial times it was terribly cold.White skin is less prone to damage by cold injury, such as frostbite. This wasdiscovered during the Korean war, when it was observed that Black soldierssuffered about 3 times the amount of frostbite as White soldiers. This occurredeven though they spent equal amounts of time exposed to the cold, and were alldressed in the same uniforms.

2. Vitamin D Vitamin D is produced from cholesterol in the skin when the skin is exposed toultraviolet light. Not getting enough vitamin d results in an illness called rickets.If you remember, rickets was one of the characteristic diseases of European

Classic Neanderthals. The farther away from the equator, the less ultravioletlight is received at the surface of the earth. White skin can produce vitamin Dmuch easier than dark skin, so having white skin helps prevent vitamin Ddeficiency and rickets.

3. Camouflage or protective coloration Northern Europe is snowy today and was very snowy during glacial times.

Having pale skin might have been advantageous for a hunter, since it would notshow up as well against a snowy background

Skin Color continued

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How many races are there?

How do you define even a racebiologically?

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A formal genetic definition says that if you can correctly assignindividuals to their correct population with an accuracy of 75% ormore, then you have a race. If you can't assign them with 75%accuracy, then you don't have a race.

Using the formal definition of race, humanity has been divided intovarying numbers of races ranging from 3 to several hundred.

Cuvier (the same person who advocated the theory of catastrophism)split humanity into 3 major races: Negroid, Caucasoid, andMongoloid. In America we give this racial division almost sacredimportance. We think it's "natural" or scientifically valid.

The point is that there is no racial classification that has any morescientific merit than any other. This is a difference from the

sociological concept of race, where racial labels are thought of ashaving some validity, both to the persons doing the classification andto the people being classified.

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Using the biological concept of race, the goal of classifyinghumanity is now considered a waste of time.

There are some useful reasons to study racial variation, butclassification for the sake of classification is not one of them.

Biological scientists use racial labels only for convenience , anddefine races in terms of a particular goal of a particular study.

Raced-based genetic studies in medicine

This is what is meant by race labels being used for convenience. You use whatever name exists that refers to the group you want tostudy.

But this is vastly different from using race labels as a justificationfor behavior toward a group.

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Let's do our best to rid ourselves ofthe idea that race has biological

foundations.Only then can we deal with the fact

that there are only sociologicaldefinitions of race.

http://www.eastendtalking.org.uk/ThinkAboutIt/Posters/images/01-Nurul_Amin.jpg

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I know what its like to have a racial identity because I used to be an Indian. I

grew up with this idea and people accepted me as an Indian and I believed inthe whole concept of race. As a child, being Indian and having race feltshallow and mysterious at first, but it felt real enough. It felt important, too it wasnt at all a slight matter to have race.

So when I gave up being Indian during the late 1990s, it wasnt easy to do.

But I chose to give it up after I discovered the truth about race.Its a lie. The whole concept defaces the nature of humanity. Race has moreto do with satisfying the human impulse to sort things into convenientclasses than with any meaningful biological definition of humankind. Andits main purpose is not to comment on humankind, but rather to serve as ameans for gathering and wielding social power mostly the power todehumanize ourselves and each other.

Roger Echo-Hawk, The Magic Children

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How do we do dump the concept of race?

Just refuse to participate!