Real question. I am starting to not believe in race. Not form some high minded I’m such a good person way but actual science. Is there a logical scientific reason for race?
biologically, there’s no such thing as ‘race.’
socially, it’s very much alive and well; ditto racism.
-mike
We all come from Adam and Eve.
or eve, anyway. who lived about 175000 years ago in ethiopia.
-mike
My take is : we like to classify things and instead of using the word breed and to differentiate ourselves from animals, we came up with the word race to “classify humans”.
If I look at a German shepard and a Jack Russell Terrier, and if I look @ a Finn and a Pygmy, well in both cases I can easily identify visual differences.
So I do not thing it is necesarilly wrong to classify/catalog/group/etc.
The funny thing though is if you take a look at the color of the skin, for example, scientists cannot even come up with an agreement why some folks have a black skin (from a scientific reason): is it to protect against the heat? the sun (then why in some regions where there is limited sun exposure, people have black skin)? & at least another 4 or 5 reasons I cannot recall.
The problem is certain folks believe a race is far superior than an other for whatever reasons that usually/not always are not linked to the definition of race (since we end up including religion, ethnicity, etc…) & evolution played a big role…
I would strongely recommend two fantastic books by Jared Diamond: The 3rd Chimpanzee & Guns, Germs, and Steel
Fred.
**Guns, Germs, and Steel **
This one’s right up there on my “buy soon and read” list. Does it discuss some of the reasons people’s skin color doesn’t seem to match their environment? (like in instances you said- dark skin but not much sun exposure) My best guess for this would be that some other gene is being slected for, but there’s a significant amount of pigmentation coding that is “riding along” with that selected gene. Also, the environment plays a big role in determining phenotype of an organism- all out genotypes are pretty much the same, and differences like skin color are really irrelevant.
To give my view on Tibbs’ questions:
racism is real; its a product of a (very misguided) thought process
race: really just a primitive way of categorizing people. Its been shown to not be a good way to differentiate, thus anything based on it (ie racism) is flawed.
The skin color does not match their env. is in the 3rd Chimpanze.
However, I have not finished the Guns, Germs, and Steel and this could be mentioned in the unread chapters.
Fred.
Is there a significant difference between the two books. I have read 3rd Chimp but not the other.
Yes.
Fred.
I read an article a few years ago, probably in Scientific American, that made a very good argument that race does not exist. The argument was that the range of skin color, facial features, body types, etc., were mixed up so much among populations that you can only describe an individual by geographic ancestry which produced a given set of features. For example, having a particular shade of skin can place you in many different ancestral locations with a full range of body types, facial features, hair, etc. For the term race to be actual and relevant you would need hundreds of races and not the few that we tend to want to pigeonhole people into. There are genetic differences in any isolated population that grow relative to the length of isolation. Good luck on creating a definition of race out of this and showing me where to draw the line.
Racism, on the other hand is of course real.
JJ
i’m surprised that scientific american has to argue it at all. what is ‘race’? you can’t measure it objectively, you can’t isolate it in a test tube. . . it’s a social phenomenon, not a biological one, and a pretty arbitrary one at that.
as for skin colour, i think it’s helpful to consider that the ‘original’ homo sapiens skin colour would be dark; the question therefore isn’t ‘why do some people have dark skin,’ but more like ‘why don’t others?’ i don’t think there’s too much disagreement in the anthropologicla community over that - the reasons are many and complex, genotypic and phenotypic, ecologically adaptive and socially selective, and historically contingent.
any examples of groups with darker skin who ‘should’ (geographically) have lighter skin? admittedly i’m not very up-to-date on this research, but i’ve been trying to think and am stumped. . .
-mike
It was either SA or Discover magazine but the conclusion was that race was just a social construct and had no biological basis. But humans are always categorizing everything including other humans into groups so a racial division would have about as much validity as a nationality if someone can define what constitutes race and that seems to be the problem, there is no definition.
JJ
any examples of groups with darker skin who ‘should’ (geographically) have lighter skin? admittedly i’m not very up-to-date on this research, but i’ve been trying to think and am stumped. . .
Yes, there are, but I can’t remember off the top of my head. They don’t constitute a large percentage of the population, but large enough to wonder how their skin got that way…if I remember correctly.
Quoteany examples of groups with darker skin who ‘should’ (geographically) have lighter skin? admittedly i’m not very up-to-date on this research, but i’ve been trying to think and am stumped. . .
Yes, there are, but I can’t remember off the top of my head. They don’t constitute a large percentage of the population, but large enough to wonder how their skin got that way…if I remember correctly.
Peruvians with Inca ancestry living at high altitud with cold climate near Machupichu (Cusco)???
Great book, but not what you want to be reading right before you goto bed. It is dense material, and I found that reading it when tired (i.e. before bed) simply put me to sleep that much faster.
First thing in the AM though its a great, very thought provoking read.
I’ve read Guns, Germs and Steel but not the 3rd Chimpanzee. Fiance has a degree in anthropology so gradually working my way through her book collection and the 3rd Chimp is on my list shortly!
GG&S does not cover skin pigmentation at all, but is devoted to looking at why certain cultures “prevailed” (for want of a better term) over others. I.e. why the Europeans ended up colonising Africa and the Americas rather than the other way around. Without giving too much away, the book effectively debunks any theory that this was down to some innate superiority of the Europeans or white man generally, and argues that it can instead be entirely attributed to factors such as geography, climate and the availability of crops and animals for domestication.
Thoroughly recommend it.
“The funny thing though is if you take a look at the color of the skin, for example, scientists cannot even come up with an agreement why some folks have a black skin (from a scientific reason): is it to protect against the heat?”
The usual argument has nothing to do with heat. Rather, it is that melanin protects against skin cancer in areas of the globe that receive the most sun and where vitamin D production is therefore not a major issue. Closer to the poles, where there is less sun (hence less vitamin D but also less skin cancer), the trade-off favors lighter skin. Of course, it takes time for people to adapt genetically to their environments, so at any point in time there may be populations who have migrated relatively recently from the tropics toward the poles or vice versa; therefore you won’t find a perfect correspondence between geography and skin color.
I’m not suggesting, of course, that racial categories per se are scientifically meaningful.
It just seems to me that the idea of race is an outdated ignorant way to look at people. Everyone is hooked on it and it is really beginning to ware thin on me. The idea that different skin color is important is really dark ages and I am losing sympathy for everyone based on it. The powerful use it to hold people down those held down hold on to it as a badge of honor. Everyone wants it and there is no point to it. Your ex skin color holding you back? Stop believing in it and holding on to it like it matters. Move forward and let the fools hold on to such a dated idea.
It just seems to me that the idea of race is an outdated ignorant way to look at people. Everyone is hooked on it and it is really beginning to ware thin on me. The idea that different skin color is important is really dark ages and I am losing sympathy for everyone based on it. The powerful use it to hold people down those held down hold on to it as a badge of honor. Everyone wants it and there is no point to it. Your ex skin color holding you back? Stop believing in it and holding on to it like it matters. Move forward and let the fools hold on to such a dated idea.
CLAP!CLAP!CLAP!CLAP!CLAP!CLAP!CLAP!CLAP!CLAP!CLAP!CLAP!CLAP!..
While those are both good reads, and I like Jared’s stuff in general, if you really want to read on the issue of race and the abuse of the attempts to define race, you really should dig up Stephen Jay Gould’s “The Mismeasure of Man”.
Even moving out the realm of human biology, there are no really good definitions of anything below the species level (sub-species, races, etc). Often these are observations on some level of clinal variation that, while extending beyond local populations, still really is just nothing more that some range of variation within the global species. We can, for example, distinguish northern and southern races of some vertebrates (birds are a very good example) simply by some basic size variations. However it is well recognized that there can be overlaps between the races, and this is a useful approximation for assigning a specimen to a sub group within a species, but is by no means a definitive diagnostic.
The long and short is we have always been able to quantify differences between populations. However, drawing lines to say what is a population, race, or sub-species is nigh on impossible, and interpreting any significance to those variances is equally fraught with peril.