User:Patrick0Moran/Race rewrite

Preface: Race is a type of classification used to group living things based on such elements as....

The term “race” is rarely used in contemporary scientific classification, but is sometimes used within, and often outside of, the scientific community in much the same sense as the terms subspecies, population or breed are used in biology.

I. Overview

A. Many people believe that physical characteristics of various Homo sapiens justify the classification of humanity into various races. Such characteristics include... but do not include...

B. In the early-to-mid 20th century many scientists began questioning the heretofore accepted causal relation between biological and cultural attributes, and some scientists also began questioning the taxonomic validity of race attribution.

C. In biology, a race was defined as a recognisable group forming all or part of a monotypic or polytipic species.

D. Humans clearly vary considerably -- enough to make early scientists accept the view of Carrolus Linaeus that humans should be divided into several sub-species

E. However, a distinct difference is only one of the two conditions that must be satisfied before a different form can be classified as a sub-species or even as a race -- lack of significant gene flow between populations.

F. Historians are apt to describe the notion of race as it applies to human beings as a “social construct”, preferring instead the to use the concept of “population”, which can be given a clear operational definition.

II. History of the term

A. The definition of race, before the development of evolutionary biology, was that of common lineage, a vague concept interchangeable with species, breed, cultural origin, or national character.

B. The word race, interpreted to mean common descent, was introduced into English in about 1580.

C. This late origin for the English term is consistent with the thesis that the concept of “race” as defining a very small number of groups of human beings dates from the time of Columbus.

D. The first published classification of humans into distinct “races” seems to have been Francois Bernier’s Nouvelle division de la terre par les differents especes ou races qui l’habitent, published in 1684.

E. The 19th century concept of race was based primarily on morphological and cosmetic characteristics such as skin color.

F. Because people of different races can interbreed, this method of classification is "weak" in the sense that it can be difficult to determine to which categories some borderline individuals belong. (Contrast the difficulty of determining to which group a child of mixed parentage belongs with the much more clear-cut decisions involved in determining membership in species.)

G. Among the 19th century naturalists who defined the field were Georges Cuvier,...

H. In Blumenbach’s day, physical characteristics like skin color, cranial profile, etc., went hand in hand with declarations of group moral character, intellectual capacities, and other aptitudes.

I. Modern criticism of the biological significance of “race” can be dated to the publication in 1935 ...

Template:Topic sentences fixed up to this point.

III. Politics of race

A. The concept of race was applied at the time of Blumenbach by political theorists such as... to nationalist theory to develop a militant ethnic nationalism.

B. Inequalities based on presumed racial differences have been a concern of United States politicians and legislators since the country’s founding.

C. Religious leaders active in the United States began to decry segregation and discrimination based on race in the latter half of the 20th century.

IV. Anthropological and genetic studies of race

A. In the 19th century many natural scientists made three claims about race:

B. Since human beings are the most complex entities we know of, the empirical study of man is in many ways the most difficult of all, making problems in fields like physics and chemistry look elementary in comparison.

C. A rejection of 19th century assumptions was initiated by Franz Boas, the founder of American academic anthropology.<<Remove the question mark originally found here.>>

D. By the 1950s, anthropologists had come to question the very existence of race as a biological phenomenon.

E These developments had important consequences. For example, some scientists developed the notion of "population" to take the place of race.

F. The "populationist" view does not deny that there are physical differences among people; it simply claims that the historical conceptions of "race" are not particularly useful in accounting for these differences scientifically.

G. Since the 1960s, some anthropologists and teachers of anthropology have re-conceived "race" as a cultural category or social construct, in other words, as a particular way that some people have of talking about themselves and others.

H. Two examples, one from the United States and one from Brazil, further illustrate the majority view.

I. One of the most striking consequences of the Brazilian system of racial identification was that parents and children and even brothers and sisters were frequently accepted as representatives of opposite racial types.

J. So although the identification of a person by race is far more fluid and flexible in Brazil than in the USA, there still are racial stereotypes and prejudices.

V. Race and intelligence

A. Lately people have tried, once again, to associate intelligence with race.

B. In his book The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould makes three criticisms of Jensen's work.

VI. Phylogenetic representations

A. Recent genetic analyses have enabled the concept of race to be represented in somewhat cladistic terms.

A different approach

When people speak of a person’s ‘’’race’’’ they refer to one of several kinds of subdivisions of the human species. Some subdivisions of human beings are ordinarily excluded from the above group. For instance, humans might be grouped into people over two meters tall, people under one meter tall, and people between 1 meter and 2 meters tall. But people belonging to any one of these groups are found scattered in all parts of the world. They do not seem to form themselves into compact communities. Some subdivisions of human beings are generally conceived to be races. For instance, people with very dark skins are frequently lumped together as members of the “black” race, and people with minimal skin pigmentation are lumped together as members of the “white” race.

The above simple picture of the variations among human beings is modified in an instructive way when it is discovered that there are very light-skinned people in Japan (called the Ainu people) and very dark-skinned people in several places outside Africa such as Sri Lanka, Australia and New Zealand, etc. One either has to include the Ainu and the so-called Caucasian peoples in one race, and the dark-skinned Africans and the Sri Lankans in another race, or one has to add qualifications for membership into the white and black races. The reason for these multiplying complexities of categorization is that the differentiation of humans is clinal, i.e, there are no truly discrete groups anywhere in the world, and a gradual change can always be found from the characteristics of people in one part of the world to people in any other part of the world. Even the Australian aborigines, who were separated for 80,000 years from the rest of humanity, still can be linked by gradual changes across space and time to the rest of the human family.

If the original single continent on which live evolved had produced humans and then had split into several continents that were so remote from each other that travel between them was impossible until large inter-continental sailing vessels were invented, then Homo sapiens might have developed several true subspecies. Subspecies occur when creatures that were once part of one breeding community get so effectively separated that travel between them is impossible, and when the habitats of the two or more groups of creatures are sufficiently different that each evolves different new characteristics and/or loses different old characteristics.

For instance, if Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas had separated from each other as effectively as Australia was separated from Eurasia and the Americas, then some interesting things might have happened. For instance, the mutation that produced “white” skin would have been limited to Europe instead of being found all over the world as is now the case. The Asian population might have completely lost the capacity to produce wisdom teeth (in much the same way that fish isolated in caves and underground rivers often lose their eyes). If Australia had settled into a band of land that was all good habitat for malaria, then the people of that continent might all share anti-malarial adaptations such as the recessive gene for sickle-cell anemia. Africans might have kept their pure black coloration. The inhabitants of the Americas might all have come to share the adaptation of the Indians of the high altitudes of S. America that permit greater oxygen absorption.

If the continents were that remote from each other, and the inhabitants had adapted to their different environments as assumed above, then if one found an individual lost at sea it would be easy to tell which continent to return him or her to by examining for the characteristics that pertain to each continent. The inhabitants of each continent would be members of different sub-species of Homo sapiens. They could still interbreed if brought together, but their geographical separation would make that a vanishingly rare occurrence.

If the inhabitants of each continent developed more than one adaptation, then an easily observable characteristic could serve as a useful marker for the presence of a characteristic that might otherwise require a laboratory examination to detect. For instance, if all Asians had both epicanthic folds and agenesis (the genetic loss of the ability to produce wisdom teeth), then any individual observed to have the epicanthic folds could be confidently regarded as incapable of developing wisdom teeth later in life.

In the case of honeybees, one can actually find examples like this. For instance, the subspecies of honeybees called Italians is easily recognizable by its physical appearance and is prized the world over for its peacefulness when beekeepers have to work with them. On the nearby island of Cypress is another sub-species that is kept apart from the Italians by the Mediterranean Sea. These bees have both a different physical appearance and also a markedly more aggressive attitude toward humans who approach or molest their hives.

In the real world, human beings are not like bees for two reasons: (1) Bees have been adapting to various terrestrial environments far longer than have humans. (2) Some humans may move to isolated environments, but it does not take too many thousands of years for other humans to find them and interbreed with them.

One might think that if two characteristics were on the same chromosome then they would stay together for all time. For instance, the genetic determinants for green eyes and for red hair might originally be on the same chromosome. A child of one parent with green eyes and red hair and one parent with black eyes and black hair might be presumed to pass on to his or her child either a chromosomal component for green eyes and red hair or a chromosomal component for black eyes and black hair. But when a cell splits in preparation for sexual reproduction, each chromosome untwines to form two filaments and at this point the filaments can become twisted together and at their intersection point the two strands can break and then rejoin -- having swapped components in the process. In that case a parent might pass on a chromosomal component for green eyes and black hair or black eyes and red hair.

If one characteristic is highly adaptive and another characteristic is highly maladaptive, then the maladaptive characteristic can be weeded out of an isolated community. For instance, if black hair were highly adaptive, red hair were strongly maladaptive, green eyes were highly adaptive, and black eyes were highly maladaptive, then in the long run one would expect to find a population in which most people had green eyes and black hair.

In the real world of human reproduction there are no truly isolated pockets of population. A characteristic that is valuable in one environment can come to be dominant in that environment. For example, once the mutation for white skin occurred it quickly spread throughout the agricultural communities of northern Europe. But it would be a mistake to assume that it carried any other characteristic along with it. If the same environment that welcomes white skin also gives an advantage to an unrelated characteristic such as an enhanced ability to utilize oxygen in the atmosphere, those characteristics would both spread within that environment. Moreover, they would frequently be shared by the same individual. But as transmission went beyond the first environment, the fates of the two characteristics could go their separate ways. An enhanced ability to utilize oxygen might be valuable in a community of pearl divers that would have no need for white skin because people’s needs for vitamin D were already supplied by animal foods.

(To be continued.) P0M