the myth of biological-race

[Cerdic]

What the Neanderthal MtDNA work showed was that it seemed unlikely that interbreeding took place. The results in no way imply that such interbreeding was impossible. This is an important distinction. Other researchers have claimed that given the amount of time which has elapsed that even a 25% input of Neanderthal genes into modern Europeans could have seen all Neanderthal MtDNA lineages become extinct. They also question how similar 30,000+ year old MtDNA extracted from anatomically modern human remains is to that of modern populations.

[Requiem]

I think that the problem that peopel have with the idea of human races is that they seem to forget that the term Race means something very different when talking about humans than when talking about other animals.

[Katea]

DeeperThought said:

Hi,

There are no biological-races in nature, none. Such races are arbitrarily constructed by "scientists" through the imaginative privileging of some inherited characteristics above others and the sheer invention of discontinuities in clinal variation.

In reality any number of "races" could be constructed, it's simply a matter of choosing which aspsects of human variation are to be privileged as "important" in determining race-identity and then choosing where, imaginatively, along any given cline, one "race" ends and another begins. This activity isn't discovery, it's invention.

Biological-race was a product of an 18th and 19th century obsession with categorisation and has actually been abandoned by mainstream science and scholarly endeavour from the early 20th century onwards.

Human variation is real of course, it exists among a huge myriad of non-codependent clines. There is no profound discontinuity among human populations which justify the notion that humanity is divided into a small number of idealised types called "races".

People still cling to the notion of biological-races because it appeals to their primitive desire for identity and cultural values as "belonging" to a group in some profound sense, but it's not science.

I tend to agree with this, ..mostly.

In a taxonomic/phylogenetic context there is no such thing as race. Human populations are too much of a genetic mix (in terms of deep ancestry) to constitute biological races. For instance, - Ethiopians are a genetic mix of both the earliest and latest african branches of the y-DNA phologenetic tree.

On the other hand, by looking at people from different parts of the world, - its rather obvious there are differences!!
- However those differences are morphological. Morphology has long been recognised as a misleading trait by taxonomists - Appearance is not neccessarily correlated to phylogenetic relatedness. Morphological traits can be affected by such things as natural selection, and sexual selection.

I tend to think of the tendacy of humans to categorise race as not out of control Victorian butterfly collecting per se., but probably a side effect of a sociobiological cognitive tendacy for people to relate more to those that look them - which would have been an adaptive sociobiological trait whilst humans were evolving in, terms of kinship/altruism and group selection. In human early history it is likely that populations lived in small co-operative groups of related people. Recognising different individuals appearances might have been a important component in "recognising" who belonged to the kinship group and who didn't.
This is the sort of thing that Evolutionary Psychologists & sociobiologists would "have a field day" theorising about - but its also rather difficult to empirically test (unless some-one invents a time machine ;D)

Thus, also, the Victorian obsession with categorisation itself, might merely be a cognitive side effect of human sociobiology.....