Fresh from the department of “things I can talk for a bit about without needing a few hours of research and more working brain cells first”, we have a short post at Tam’s that has inspired a minor kerfuffle in the comments, due to this aside:
For the record, the very word “race” is as quaint as the word “phlogiston”, and reflects about the same era of scientific theory. Any school of thought that gives weight to “race” is right up there with phrenology for predictive power.
Which is correct. Commenters pointed out that there a number of genes that can be accurately mapped to location and population groups, which is also correct. The real question was whether there really is any biologically viable concept of “race”, to which the answer is “kind of sort of but mostly not, because the cultural mappings have only a glancing resemblance to the biological reality”. Clear and helpful, I know.
Tam is right; the word “race” itself used in any scientific sense does date back to Victorian times and a very different view of biology. Darwin may have solidified natural selection as a concept, but its actual implications took a great many years to sort out, and at the time that “race” was a term in scientific currency, a very different (and inaccurate) approach to natural variation was taken. Mendel and his pea plant experiments gave biology the concrete model of heritability that natural selection needed, but the nature of the experiments also made genetics seem like a much simpler and more straightforward thing than they actually are. Natural selection predicted high degrees of variability, but the genetic experiments that were actually doable seemed to show a small number of highly discrete traits (low variability); naturalists and geneticists were at odds with each other on the subject until technology that could actually measure variability at genetic locuses allowed the settling of the debate- in the naturalists’ favor, as it happened. This new understanding and subsequent explosion in the advancement of biology is now known as the Modern Synthesis*.
Before the synthesis, even the naturalists hadn’t quite cottoned on to how much huge amounts of variation are crucial to the structure of life itself, and species were categorized, studied, and sorted as though each species had a single or small number of “normal” types and most variants were mutants that would either be weeded out or come to replace the old norms. The distillation of this concept is the “holotype”, a single physical example of a species that is meant to represent the species as a whole. Nowadays it’s understood that the holotype is more a tradition of taxonomy and collections procedures and it isn’t really possible to represent a whole species accurately with one “most normal” specimen, but holotype specimens used to be much more reflective of the way taxonomists thought about species**, and even after the Modern Synthesis it took a very long time for the true degree and significance of great variation to sink in; in some ways, it still hasn’t.
Race as a scientific concept was studied when it was still thought that it was possible to divide a species into multiple, distinctive “types” in this fashion, and all the old literature reflects this effort to catalogue every distinguishing difference that sorted people into those types, with no ability to get at the genetic information within. Stephen Jay Gould has done an admirable job of shredding these attempts to fine strips in Mismeasure of a Man, should you be interested in this often strange history, but suffice it to say that no one was ever able to fully agree on how many races of man there were and how they could be reliably catalogued, because there were too many points of overlap. No matter what gross physical feature was studied, there was always other some clearly different racial group that also shared a certain trait or range of measure, and some people that fitted the measurements for one group but clearly belonged to another.
This is not to say that nothing informative or useful was ever discovered about variation within human populations and traits that were clearly linked to certain populations; from shoveled incisors to inion hooks to Mongolian spots, there ARE physiological traits that are strongly associated with one population or another, and these kinds of physical markers are both useful to anthropologists in identifying the likely provenance of skeletons, and for studying the history of human population migrations. What was found was human variation, including variation by geography, as evolution would predict- what wasn’t were consistent racial categories that could be taxonomically defined with any sort of credibility.
Where the real trouble comes in is that the concepts of human population variation by geography, and the cultural constructs of race, are very often confused, even by scientists that should really know better. One of the biggest problems is that the cultural concept of “black” extends to the entire continent of Africa, but Africa contains more human genetic diversity than the rest of the globe put together; caucasians, Asians, and native Americans are thought to be the result of a genetic bottlenecking event during early human population dispersal. Once you get to “black” people in the Western hemisphere, things get even more genetically confused; “black” Americans and Caribbeans are the result of a blending of multiple African groups plus native Americans plus Caucasians plus whatever else managed to get into the gene pool. Thanks to the old racist “one drop” rule of defining “black” legally, black people in the Western hemisphere are some of the most thoroughly blended gene pools on the planet. Likewise “hispanic” people are the result of the mixture of several European bloodlines with multiple native American populations from Patagonia to Colorado, plus, given early slave-taking practices, some dose of some more of those African tribes. Given, for example, that most black slaves in the South descended from West African tribes, my family lived in the Delta South for most of the American slave-trading years, and President Obama gets his melanin from a particular tribe in East African Kenya, the odds are strong for white-as-a-sheet WASPy me to have more in common genetically with a randomly chosen American black person than he does.
Comparing “black” to “white” on an American IQ test is like doing a study of dogs that compares the tracking ability of all mutts without curly tails to all mutts with them. It’s a marker, and one traceable to certain populations, but what you’re actually trying to study has almost no relationship with that marker; the data is worthless unless you’re studying cultural effects, which do track quite well with that marker, rather than genetic.
Using race as a category is mildly useful for a physical anthropologist, which use a location and culture designation for any sample whose provenance is actually known anyway because that’s much *more* useful, thanks to the overlaps in races. It’s quite useful for cultural and sociological studies, since the cultural perceptions create cultural effects. It’s mildly useful for doctors who are trying to guess which kinds of population-based variants might be affecting their patients, like West African-linked sickle-cell alleles. For almost all other purposes for which it is generally applied, Tam is right- race is, biologically speaking, antiquated nonsense.
*The structure of evolutionary theory as it is understood and used today can really be said to have its true beginning here and not with Darwin; watching people attack him and think they’re undermining the entire edifice is kind of funny and sad all at the same time.
**Some taxonomists were more forward-looking than others. A wasp taxonomist that stood out in his discipline for his obsessive collecting habits and exhaustive recording of every single point of variation between everything about his studied species caused some consternation when his university assigned him to study human sexual behavior.
