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The FBI identifies fugitives by photographs, physical features, occupation, nationality, and race. From left to right, the FBI identifies the above as belonging to the following races: White, Black, White (Hispanic), Asian. Top row males, bottom row females.
The term race is used in a wide variety of contexts, with related but often distinct meanings. Its use is often controversial, largely because of the political and sociological implications of different definitions, but also because of disagreements over such issues as whether humans can be meaningfully divided into multiple races.
In biology, some people use race to mean a division within a species. Thus, in certain fields it is used as a synonym for subspecies or, in botany, variety. In the case of honeybees, for instance, it stands as a synonym for subspecies. In this usage, race serves to group members of a species that have, for a period of time, become geographically or genetically isolated from other members of that species, and as a result have diverged genetically and developed certain shared characteristics that differentiate them from the others. Although these characteristics rarely appear in all members of the group, they are more marked in or appear more frequently than in the others.
The analyses of most social scientists conclude that the common social notions of race are social constructs. These definitions of race are derived from customFor an article on the meaning of this term in the field of law, see custom_(law). A custom is also a kind of Motorbike; see Custom (motorcycle) Custom is a common practice among people, especially depending on country, culture, time and religion. The diff, vary between cultures, and are described as imprecise, fluid, or arbitrary. Often these definitions rely on phenotypic characteristics or inferred ancestry. The analysis of human genetic variation also provides insight into human population history and structure. The recent spread of humans from Africa has created a situation where the majority of human genetic variation is found within each human population. However, as a result of physical and cultural isolation of human groups, a significant subset of genetic variation is found between human groups. This variation is highly structured and therefore useful for distinguishing groups and placing individual into groups. Admixture and clinal variation between groups can be confounding to this kind of analysis of human variation. The relationship between social and genetic definitions of race is complex. Phenotypic racial classifications do not necessarily correspond with genotypical groups; some more than others. To the extent that ancestry corresponds to social definitions of race, groups identified by genetics will also correspond with these notions. Whether human population structure warrants the distinction of human 'races' is a matter of debate, with majority opinions varying between disciplines. Some biologists prefer the term populationFor the use of the word population in statistics, see statistical population. In the most common sense of the word, a population is the collection of people—or organisms of a particular species—living in a given geographic area. Populations are studied in to race. Similar reasoning has lead some to describe races as (inbred) extended families.
The remainder of this article reviews debates over the scientific validity of the concept of race in human beings; the historical construction, social functions, and cultural meanings of racial schemata; and the ethicsEthics is a general term for what is often described as the " science of morality". In philosophy, ethical behavior is that which is " good". The Western tradition of ethics is sometimes called moral philosophy . This is one of the three major branches of and politics of the term.
Some people believe that certain characteristics of the species Homo sapiens justify classification of humans into various races. Such characteristics include physical characteristics, cultureThe word culture comes from the Latin root colere (to inhabit, to cultivate, or to honor). In general it refers to human activity; different definitions of culture reflect different theories for understanding, or criteria for valuing, human activity., geographyGeography is the scientific study of the locational and spatial variation in both physical and human phenomena on Earth. The word derives from the Greek words g ("the Earth") and graphein ("to write," as in "to describe"). Geography is also the title of v, religionReligion sometimes used interchangeably with faith, is commonly defined as belief concerning the supernatural, sacred, or divine, and the practices and institutions associated with such belief. Borobudur, a Buddhist stupa built between 750 and 850 Adriaen, languageAs with any complex, emergent concept, language is somewhat resistant to definition; however, most would agree that language is a system of communication or reasoning using representation along with metaphor and some manner of logical grammar. Many langua, nationalityNationalism is an ideology that creates and sustains a nation as a concept of a common identity for groups of humans. Nationalists base nations on various notions of political legitimacy. These can derive from the Romantic theory of " cultural identity",, etc., but do not include contingent factors such as a common history of disease. The practice of dividing humans into races emerged during the Enlightenment as a way of justifying the enslavement and oppression of others who were deemed to be of "inferior" non-white races, and therefore supposedly best fitted for lives of toil under white supervision; to the extent that it made the distance between races seem nearly as broad and insurmountable as that between species, it helped ease unsettling questions about the appropriateness of treating other human beings as if they were mere pack animals. The practice was at that time generally accepted by both the scientific and lay communities.
In the early-to-mid 20th century, many scientists began questioning previously accepted causal relationships between biological and cultural attributes. Some scientists also began questioning the taxonomic validity of race attribution, especially in the decades immediately after the Second World War (in the course of which racialist theories served to justify enormous genocidal crimes; see eugenics and the Holocaust). This questioning gained particular momentum in the 1960s, in the context of the U.S. civil-rights struggle and the emergence of numerous anti-colonial movements worldwide. As new data began to emerge in the 1960s indicating that most human genetic variation was actually within races rather than between them, many scientists came to reject the concept of race as a biological fact altogether, at least as it applies to humans. Nevertheless, the belief that human races exist remains almost universal amongst lay audiences, and like any belief held by a large number of people, is significant in itself regardless of its scientific validity. The concept of race continues to impact people through its effects on social behaviour (see communal reinforcement).
In biology, a race was defined as a recognisable group forming all or part of a monotypic or polytypic species. A monotypic species has no races (this can also be expressed: "a monotypic species has only one race"). Monotypic species can occur in several ways:
A polytypic species thus has two or more races (or, in current parlance, two or more "sub-types"). These are separate groups that are clearly distinct from one another and do not generally interbreed (although there may be a relatively narrow hybridization zone), but which would interbreed freely if given the chance to do so. Note that groups which would not interbreed freely, even if brought together such that they had the opportunity to do so, are not races: they are separate species.
Humans clearly vary considerably – enough to have made early scientists accept the correctness of Carolus Linnaeus' view that humans should be divided into several sub-species. By far the greater part of human genetic variation, however, occurs within "racial" groups and the variation between racial groups accounts for between 5-7% of the total.˛ Nevertheless, although the difference between races is less than 10% of the difference within any particular race, this does not in itself invalidate the suggestion that there might be different races of Homo sapiens sapiens. Indeed, the genetic variation between races is highly structured, so that when many points of variation are considered it is possible to distinguish groups and allocate individuals into groups. Moreover, the rules of biological classification do not set any 'smallest allowable difference' between taxa: any distinct difference is sufficient.
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 a race; the second is the lack of significant gene flow between populations. In the case of human "races", although there has historically been little or no direct gene flow between distantly separated populations such as the aboriginal Australians and black Africans, it is nonetheless incorrect to assume that there has been little gene flow between the various races, as all that is required for it to occur is that locally adjacent populations interbreed, as has typically been the case. In fact, enough such gene flow has occurred throughout human history that the most recent common ancestor of all humans alive today has been estimated as living as recently as 3,500 years ago [1], although this does not necessarily constitute significant gene flow.
In recent centuries there has been a dramatic increase in the amount of gene-flow occurring even between geographically very distant human populations. People began engaging in intercontinentel travel on an ever more regular basis, and today such travel is widespread. As such, interbreeding between previously separated peoples is now not only possible but widespread. Given this change, the lines between races are fading, and have perhaps already been totally removed in some regions, particularly in Latin America and parts of Southern Africa.
Given the way that different human races fade gradually from one to another in many parts of the world, the overwhelming majority of the current generation of cultural anthropologists draw the conclusion that human racial variation is in fact clinal, and that the human species is monotypic. However, this is also true for differences between sub-species, and even species, in other animal populations. Generally, an amount of change sufficient to label two different animal populations as different sub-species is often no longer considered enough to label two different human populations as being of different races.
Of course, the delicacy of this definition has left the issue much in debate, especially among physical anthropologists, for if "clines" lead to large areas of separate near-homogeneity, as they seem to do in places like Kenya, Sweden and China, then the people in these areas seem marked off by delimiters resembling nothing so much as the traditional physiological touchstones of "race". A counter-argument is that what often seems to the naked eye to be a "near-homogenous" population is often nothing of the sort, and indeed, recent evidence indicates that genetic variation occurs in a smoothly gradient fashion even in such regions, with the apparent gaps previously noted turning out to have been merely artifacts of sampling techniques that implicitly presumed the existence of near-homogenous and genetically distinct populations.
Scientists who maintain race as an important biological concept point out that in determining overall relatedness the entire genetic cohorts of groups must be compared, and that when this is done, it is possible to recover the traditional racial groupings, provided one uses enough of the right markers. The caveat to this finding is that one must decide how finely one chooses to distinguish between groups, such that one can determine two "races" (Africans vs. non-Africans), three, four or more. Thus, the number of races discovered by these methods will be arbitrary. Moreover, some of the groups which emerge as "races" under closer scrutiny would hardly be recognized as such in the conventional sense. It is important to keep in mind that it is not necessarily the case that any two given individuals of the same race will be genetically closer than will two people of different races.
Some biologists believe that the tendency to view races as a social construct, or as not biologically significant, is incorrect, and is influenced not by science but by racial politics and political correctness. They claim that researchers on racial differences are often attacked as racists, even if said researchers espouse liberal sociopolitical views and claim to be against racism. A number of books and articles in recent years attempt to rebut what the authors see as biased science. Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele , in Race: The Reality of Human Differences, claim that "racial differences in humans exceed the differences that separate subspecies or even species in such other primates as gorillas and chimpanzees" and hold that "race is a biologically real phenomenon with important consequences". A number of scientists have supported this currently controversial view, including Ralph L. Holloway, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University; Arthur Jensen, University of California-Berkeley; Joseph Carroll, University of Missouri-St. Louis; and Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr., Prof. of Psychology, University of Minnesota.
Historians, anthropologists and social scientists today are apt to describe the notion of race as it applies to human beings as a "social construct", preferring instead to use the concept of "population," which can be given a clear operational definition. The concept of biological race, however, has proved resilient and is still used in day-to-day speech even among those who, when questioned, reject the formal existence of race. This may be a matter of semantics, in that such scientists and laypeople use the word race to mean population, or it may be an effect of the underlying cultural power of the concept of race in racist societies. Whether it be race, population, or some other appellation, a working concept of sub-specific clustering can still be useful, because in the absence of cheap and widespread genetic tests, various gene mutations that have been historically strongly linked to membership of certain human subgroups (see Cystic fibrosis, Lactose intolerance, Tay-Sachs Disease and Sickle cell anemia) are difficult to address without recourse to a category higher than "individual" and lower than "species". Nonetheless, as direct genetic tests for various conditions become ever cheaper, and as detailed haplotype maps and SNP databases become available, there should be an ever-diminishing need to seek recourse in race as a stand-in for the desired information. This is just as well, as the current rate of heightened inter-group mating is steadily reducing the predictive power of race; a telling statistic is that, stereotypes notwithstanding, an overwhelming percentage of babies born with Tay-Sachs in North America nowadays are not from families identifying themselves as Jewish.| Politics | Business | Finance |
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