Race

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For other uses, see Race (disambiguation).

The term race distinguishes a population of humans (or non-humans) from other populations. The most widely used human racial categories are based on visible traits (especially skin color and facial features), genes, and self-identification. Conceptions of race, as well as specific racial groupings, vary by culture and over time and are often controversial, for scientific reasons as well as their impact on social identity and identity politics. Legal definitions, common usage, and scientific meaning can all be conflated, and care must be taken to note the context in which it is used.

Since the 1940s, evolutionary scientists have rejected the view of race according to which a number of finite lists of essential characteristics could be used to determine a like number of races. Many evolutionary and social scientists think common race definitions, or any race definitions pertaining to humans, lack taxonomic rigour and validity. They argue that race definitions are imprecise, arbitrary, derived from custom, and that the races observed vary according to the culture examined. They further maintain that race is best understood as a social construct. Other scientists, however, have argued that this position is motivated more by political than scientific reasons.

Since the 1990s, data and models from genomics and cladistics, and the discovery of ancestry-informative markers have resulted in a revolution in our understanding of human evolution, which has led some to propose a new "lineage" definition of race. These scientists have made arguments that splitting humanity into separate races in this way is valid when races are understood as fuzzy sets, clusters, or extended families. Many scientists believe that when properly used, the division of humanity into races can be valid and useful. Scientific studies such as the HapMap project, which studied four racial groups, are very careful to give an operational definition to the races studied and to describe how the samples are taken.

Contents 1 Origins 1.1 History of the term 1.2 History of race research 1.2.1 17th and 18th century 1.2.2 19th century 2 Modern racial debates 2.1 Race as subspecies 2.2 The rejection of race and the rise of "population" and "cline" 2.3 Summary of different definitions of race 3 Human genetic variation 3.1 Origins of modern humans 3.1.1 Multiregional hypothesis 3.1.2 Out of Africa 3.1.3 Cladistics 3.2 Distribution of variation 3.3 Substructure in the human population 3.4 Physical variation in humans 4 Social interpretations of race 5 Arguments for scientific validity 5.1 Ethnicity as a way of categorizing people 5.2 Ancestry as a way of categorizing people 5.3 Current disagreement across disciplines 6 See also 7 Footnotes 8 Bibliography 9 External links

Origins

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History of the term

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Given visual complex social relationships, humans presumably have always observed and speculated about the physical differences among individuals and groups. But different societies have attributed markedly different meanings to these distinctions. The division of humanity into distinct "races" can be traced as far back as the Ancient Egyptian sacred text the Book of Gates, which identifies four categories that are now conventionally labelled "Egyptians", "Asiatics", "Libyans", and "Nubians". However, such distinctions tended to merge differences defined by features such as skin color, with tribal and national identity. Classical civilizations from Rome to China tended to invest much more importance in family or tribal affiliations than in physical appearance (Dikötter 1992; Goldenberg 2003). Ancient Greek and Roman authors also attempted to explain and categorize visible biological differences between peoples known to them. Such categories often also included fantastical human-like beings that were supposed to exist in far-away lands. Some Roman writers adhered to an environmental determinism in which climate could affect the appearance and character of groups (Isaac 2004). But in many ancient civilizations, individuals with widely varying physical appearances could become full members of a society by growing up within that society or by adopting the society's cultural norms (Snowden 1983; Lewis 1990). Medieval models of race mixed Classical ideas with the notion that humanity as a whole was descended from Shem, Ham and Japheth, the three sons of Noah, producing distinct Semitic (Asian), Hamitic (African), and Japhetic (European) peoples.

At the end of the Reconquista, the Spanish Inquisition persecuted Jews and Muslims, theorizing a limpieza de sangre ("Cleanliness of blood") doctrine. Furthermore, after the discovery of the New World, Bartolomé de Las Casas opposed the conquistadores theories, upheld by Sepúlveda, on the pretended Amerindians's absence of souls.

It wasn't until the 16th century that the word race entered the English language, from the French race - "race, breed, lineage" (which in turn was probably a loan from Italian razza). Meanings of the term in the 16th century included "wines with a characteristic flavour", "people with common occupation", and "generation". The meaning "tribe" or "nation" emerged in the 17th century. The modern meaning, "one of the major divisions of mankind", dates to the late 18th century, but it never became exclusive (cf. continued use of "the human race"). The ultimate origin of the word is unknown; suggestions include Arabic ra'is meaning "head", but also "beginning" or "origin".

In Society Must be Defended (1978-79), Michel Foucault traced the "historical and political discourse" of "race struggle" to the 1688 "Glorious Revolution" in England and Louis XIV's reign in France, during which conflicting political values were ascribed to ancestral ethnicities (Saxon, Norman, Frankish etc). According to him, these debates initated a form of "popular history" based on ethnic identity, as opposed to the classical juridical and philosophical discourse of sovereignty. In England, it was used by Edward Coke and John Lilburne against the monarchy. In France, Boulainvilliers, Nicolas Fréret, and then Sieyès, Augustin Thierry and Cournot reappropriated this discourse. At the end of the 19th century, the notion of "race" was, according to Foucault, incorporated by racists biologists and eugenicists, who gave it the modern sense of "biological race", which was then be integrated to "state racism". Marxists also seized this historical and political discourse, transforming the essentialist biological notion of "race" into the concept of "class struggle."

The English word "race", along with many of the ideas now associated with the term, were products of the European era of exploration (Smedley 1999). As Europeans encountered people from different parts of the world, they speculated about the physical, social, and cultural differences between human groups. The rise of the African slave trade, which gradually displaced an earlier trade in slaves from throughout the world, created a further incentive to categorize human groups to justify the barbarous treatment of African slaves (Meltzer 1993). Drawing on classical sources and on their own internal interactions — for example, the hostility between the English and Irish was a powerful influence on early thinking about the differences between people (Takaki 1993)— Europeans began to sort themselves and others into groups associated with physical appearance and with deeply ingrained behaviors and capacities. A set of "folk beliefs" took hold that linked inherited physical differences between groups to inherited intellectual, behavioral, and moral qualities (Banton 1977). Although similar ideas can be found in other cultures (Lewis 1990; Dikötter 1992), they appear not to have had as much influence on social structures as they did in Europe and the parts of the world colonized by Europeans. However, often brutal conflicts between ethnic groups have existed throughout history and across the world, and racial prejudice against Africans also exists in non-colonised countries such as Japan and China. [1]

History of race research

See From "racial theory" to "racism"

The first scientific attempts to categorize race date from the 17th century, along with the development of European imperialism and colonization around the world. The first post-Classical published classification of humans into distinct races seems to be François Bernier's Nouvelle division de la terre par les différents espèces ou races qui l'habitent ("New division of Earth by the different species or races which inhabit it"), published in 1684.

17th and 18th century

In the 18th century, the differences between human groups became a focus of scientific investigation (Todorov 1993). Initially, scholars focused on cataloging and describing "The Natural Varieties of Mankind," as Johann Friedrich Blumenbach entitled his 1775 text (which established the five major divisions of humans still reflected in some racial classifications). From the 17th through the 19th centuries, the merging of folk beliefs about group differences with scientific explanations of those differences produced what one scholar has called an "ideology of race" (Smedley 1999). According to this ideology, races are primordial, natural, enduring, and distinct. Some groups might be the result of mixture between formerly distinct populations, but careful study can distinguish the ancestral races that had combined to produce admixed groups.

19th century

• Natural Scientists on race: In the 19th century a number of natural scientists wrote on race: Charles Darwin, Alfred Wallace, Francis Galton, Georges Cuvier, James Cowles Pritchard, Louis Agassiz, Charles Pickering, and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. These scientists made three claims about race: first, that races are objective, naturally occurring divisions of humanity; second, that there is a strong relationship between biological races and other human phenomena (such as forms of activity and interpersonal relations and culture, and by extension the relative material success of cultures); third, that race is therefore a valid scientific category that can be used to explain and predict individual and group behavior. Races were distinguished by skin color, facial type, cranial profile and size, texture and color of hair. Moreover, races were almost universally considered to reflect group differences in moral character and intelligence.

Their understanding of race was usually both essentialist (defining something by a list of characteristics) and taxonomic (hierarchical).

• Anthropology. But as the science of anthropology took shape in the 19th century, European and American scientists increasingly sought explanations for the behavioral and cultural differences they attributed to groups (Stanton 1960). For example, using anthropometrics, invented by Francis Galton and Alphonse Bertillon, they measured the shapes and sizes of skulls and related the results to group differences in intelligence or other attributes (Lieberman 2001).

The eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, inspired by Arthur Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-1855), Vacher de Lapouge's "anthroposociology" and Herder's theories, asserted as self-evident the biological inferiority of particular groups (Kevles 1985). In many parts of the world, the idea of race became a way of rigidly dividing groups by use of culture as well as physical appearances (Hannaford 1996). Campaigns of oppression and genocide often used supposed racial differences to motivate inhuman acts against others (Horowitz 2001).

Modern racial debates

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Race as subspecies

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With the advent of the modern synthesis in the early 20th century, biologists developed a new, more rigorous model of race as subspecies. For these biologists, a race is a recognizable group forming all or part of a species. A monotypic species has no races, or rather one race comprising the whole species. Monotypic species can occur in several ways:

• All members of the species are very similar and cannot be sensibly divided into biologically significant subcategories.
• The individuals vary considerably but the variation is essentially random and largely meaningless so far as genetic transmission of these variations is concerned (many plant species fit into this category, which is why horticulturists interested in preserving, say, a particular flower color avoid propagation from seed, and instead use vegetative methods like propagation from cuttings).
• The variation between individuals is noticeable and follows a pattern, but there are no clear dividing lines between separate groups: they fade imperceptibly into one another. Such clinal variation always indicates substantial gene flow between the apparently separate groups that make up the population(s). Populations that have a steady, substantial gene flow between them are likely to represent a monotypic species even when a fair degree of genetic variation is obvious.

A polytypic species has two or more races (or, in current parlance, two or more sub-types). This classification reflects 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. Although different species can sometimes interbreed to a limited extent, the converse is not true. Groups incapable of producing fertile offspring with each other are universally considered distinct species, and not merely different "races" of the same species.

Although this attempt at conceptual precision gained currency with many biologists, especially zoologists, evolutionary scientists have criticized it on a number of fronts.

The rejection of race and the rise of "population" and "cline"

At the beginning of the 20th century, anthropologists questioned, and subsequently abandoned, the claim that biologically distinct races are isomorphic with (related to) distinct linguistic, cultural, and social groups. Then, the rise of population genetics led some mainstream evolutionary scientists in anthropology and biology to question the very validity of race as scientific concept describing an objectively real phenomenon. Those who came to reject the validity of the concept, race, did so for four reasons: empirical, definitional, the availability of alternative concepts, and ethical (Lieberman and Byrne 1993).

The validity of human races is a subject of much debate. The American Anthropological Association, drawing on biological research, states that "The concept of race is a social and cultural construction. . . . Race simply cannot be tested or proven scientifically," and that, "It is clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. The concept of 'race' has no validity . . . in the human species."

The first to challenge the concept of race on empirical grounds were anthropologists Franz Boas, who demonstrated phenotypic plasticity due to environmental factors (Boas 1912) and [2], and Ashley Montagu (1941, 1942), who relied on evidence from genetics. Zoologists Edward O. Wilson and W. Brown then challenged the concept from the perspective of general systematics, and further rejected the claim that "races" were equivalent to "subspecies" (Wilson and Brown 1953). Claude Lévi-Strauss's Race and History (UNESCO, 1952) enforced this cultural relativist thesis, by the famous metaphor of cultures as trains crossing each other in different directions, thus each one seeing the others as immobile while they themselves are progressing.

One of the crucial innovations in reconceptualizing genotypic and phenotypic variation was anthropologist C. Loring Brace's observation that such variations, insofar as they are affected by natural selection, migration, or genetic drift, are distributed along geographic gradations called "clines" (Brace 1964). This point called attention to a problem common to phenotypic-based descriptions of races (for example, those based on hair texture and skin color): they ignore a host of other similarities and difference (for example, blood type) that do not correlate highly with the markers for race. Thus, anthropologist Frank Livingstone's conclusion that, since clines cross racial boundaries, "there are no races, only clines" (Livingstone 1962: 279). In 1964, biologists Paul Ehrlich and Holm pointed out cases where two or more clines are distributed discordantly—for example, melanin is distributed in a decreasing pattern from the equator north and south; frequencies for the haplotype for beta-S hemoglobin, on the other hand, radiate out of specific geographical points in Africa (Ehrlich and Holm 1964). As anthropologists Leonard Lieberman and Fatimah Linda Jackson observe, "Discordant patterns of heterogeneity falsify any description of a population as if it were genotypically or even phenotypically homogeneous" (Lieverman and Jackson 1995).

Finally, geneticist Richard Lewontin, observing that 85 percent of human variation occurs within populations, and not between populations, argued that neither "race" nor "subspecies" was an appropriate or useful way to describe populations (Lewontin 1973). This view is described by its opponents as Lewontin's Fallacy. Some researchers report the variation between racial groups (measured by Sewall Wright's population structure statistic F_ST) accounts for as little as 5% of human genetic variation². However, because of technical limitations of F_ST, many geneticists now believe that low F_ST values do not invalidate the suggestion that there might be different human races (Edwards, 2003). Meanwhile, neo-Marxists such as David Harvey (1982, 1984, 1992) believe that race is a social construct that in reality does not exist, used instead to extenuate class differences.

These empirical challenges to the concept of race forced evolutionary sciences to reconsider their definition of race. Mid-century, anthropologist William Boyd defined race as:

A population which differs significantly from other populations in regard to the frequency of one or more of the genes it possesses. It is an arbitrary matter which, and how many, gene loci we choose to consider as a significant "constellation" (Boyd 1950).

Lieberman and Jackson (1994) have pointed out that "the weakness of this statement is that if one gene can distinguish races then the number of races is as numerous as the number of human couples reproducing." Moreover, anthropologist Stephen Molnar has suggested that the discordance of clines inevitably results in a multiplication of races that renders the concept itself useless (Molnar 1992).

Alongside empirical and conceptual problems with "race" following the Second World War, evolutionary and social scientists were acutely aware of how beliefs about race had been used to justify discrimination, apartheid, slavery, and genocide. This questioning gained momentum in the 1960s during the American Civil Rights Movement and the emergence of numerous anti-colonial movements worldwide.

In the face of these issues, some evolutionary scientists have simply abandoned the concept of race in favor of "population." What distinguishes population from previous groupings of humans by race is that it refers to a breeding population (essential to genetic calculations) and not to a biological taxon. Other evolutionary scientists have abandoned the concept of race in favor of cline (meaning, how the frequency of a trait changes along a geographic gradient). The concepts of population and cline are not, however, mutually exclusive and both are used by many evolutionary scientists.

In the face of this rejection of race by evolutionary scientists, many social scientists have replaced the word race with the word "ethnicity" to refer to self-identifying groups based on beliefs in shared religion, nationality, or race. Moreover, they understood these shared beliefs to mean that religion, nationality, and race itself are social constructs and have no objective basis in the supernatural or natural realm (Gordon 1964). See also the American Anthropological Association's Statement on Race [3].

Summary of different definitions of race

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Biological definitions of race (Long & Kittles, 2003).

Concept	Reference	Definition
Essentialist	Hooton (1926)	"A great division of mankind, characterized as a group by the sharing of a certain combination of features, which have been derived from their common descent, and constitute a vague physical background, usually more or less obscured by individual variations, and realized best in a composite picture."
Taxonomic	Mayr (1969)	"An aggregate of phenotypically similar populations of a species, inhabiting a geographic subdivision of the range of a species, and differing taxonomically from other populations of the species."
Population	Dobzhansky (1970)	"Races are genetically distinct Mendelian populations. They are neither individuals nor particular genotypes, they consist of individuals who differ genetically among themselves."
Lineage	Templeton (1998)	"A subspecies (race) is a distinct evolutionary lineage within a species. This definition requires that a subspecies be genetically differentiated due to barriers to genetic exchange that have persisted for long periods of time; that is, the subspecies must have historical continuity in addition to current genetic differentiation."

The United States government has provided definitions regarding race (see for example Race (U.S. Census)). Racial classification in the U.S. 2000 census was based solely on self-identification, did not pre-suppose disjointedness, and did not include a category "Hispanic," which is considered an ethnicity, rather than a race, by the U.S. Census. On the other hand, the EEOC explicitly defines Hispanics as a separate and distinct "race."<ref>See Employer Information Report EEO-1 and Standard Form 100, Appendix § 4, Race/Ethnic Identification, 1 Empl. Prac. Guide (CCH) § 1881, (1981), 1625.</ref>

Human genetic variation

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Origins of modern humans

see also single-origin hypothesis, multiregional hypothesis.

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Any biological model for race must account for the development of racial differences during human evolution. For much of the 20th century, however, anthropologists relied on an incomplete fossil record for reconstructing human evolution. Their models seldom provided a firm basis for drawing inferences about the origin of races. Modern research in molecular biology, however, has provided evolutionary scientists with a whole new kind of data, which adds considerably to the knowledge of our past.

There has been considerable debate among anthropologists as to the origins of Homo sapiens. About a million years ago Homo erectus migrated out of Africa and into Europe and Asia. The debate hinges on whether Homo erectus evolved into Homo sapiens more or less simultaneously in Africa, Europe, and Asia, or whether Homo sapiens evolved only in Africa, and eventually supplanted Homo erectus in Europe and Asia. Each model suggests different possible scenarios for the evolution of distinct races.

Multiregional hypothesis

Advocates of the first scenario (see Frayer et al. 1993), the multiregional continuity evolution model, cite as evidence anatomical continuity in the fossil record in South Central Europe (Smith 1982), East Asia and Australia (Wolpoff 1993) (anatomical affinity is taken to suggest genetic affinity). They argue that very strong genetic similarities among all humans do not prove recent common ancestry, but rather reflect the interconnectedness of human populations around the world, resulting in relatively constant gene flow (Thorne and Wolpoff 1992). They further argue that this model is consistent with clinal patterns (Wolpoff 1993).

The most important element of this model for theories of race is that it allows a million years for the evolution of Homo sapiens around the world; this is more than enough time for the evolution of different races. Leiberman and Jackson (1995), however, have noted that this model depends on several findings relevant to race: (1) that marked morphological contrasts exist between individuals found at the center and at the perimeter of Middle Pleistocene range of the genus Homo; (2) that many features can be shown to emerge at the edge of that range before they develop at the center; and (3) that these features exhibit great tenacity through time. Regional variations in these features can thus be taken as evidence for long term differences among genus Homo individuals that prefigure different races among present-day Homo sapiens individuals.

Out of Africa

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Information about the history of our species comes from two main sources: the paleoanthropological record and historical inferences based on current genetic differences observed in humans. Although both sources of information are fragmentary, they have been converging in recent years on the same general story.

Since the 1990s, it has become common to use multilocus genotypes to distinguish different human groups and to allocate individuals to groups (Bamshad et al. 2004). These data have led to an examination of the biological validity of races as evolutionary lineages and the description of races in cladistic terms. The technique of multilocus genotyping has been used to determine patterns of human demographic history. Thus, the concept of "race" afforded by these techniques is synonymous with ancestry, broadly understood.

Studies of human genetic variation imply that Africa was the ancestral source of all modern humans, and that Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa and displaced Homo erectus between 140,000 and 290,000 years ago (Cann et al. 1987). Indigenous Australians are believed to be an early out-group that remained isolated. Most other groups, including Europeans, Asians, and Native Americans, were found to be a single related (monophyletic) group resulting from a later out-migration from Africa, which could reasonably be divided into West and East Eurasian groups.

The existing fossil evidence suggests that anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa, within the last ∼200,000 years, from a pre-existing population of humans (Klein 1999). Although it is not easy to define "anatomically modern" in a way that encompasses all living humans and excludes all archaic humans (Lieberman et al. 2002), the generally agreed-upon physical characteristics of anatomical modernity include a high rounded skull, facial retraction, and a light and gracile, as opposed to heavy and robust, skeleton (Lahr 1996). Early fossils with these characteristics have been found in eastern Africa and have been dated to ∼160,000–200,000 years ago (White et al. 2003; McDougall et al. 2005). At that time, the population of anatomically modern humans appears to have been small and localized (Harpending et al. 1998). Much larger populations of archaic humans lived elsewhere in the Old World, including the Neandertals in Europe and an earlier species of humans, Homo erectus, in Asia (Swisher et al. 1994).

Fossils of the earliest anatomically modern humans found outside Africa are from two sites in the Middle East and date to a period of relative global warmth, ∼100,000 years ago, though this region was reinhabited by Neandertals in later millennia as the climate in the northern hemisphere again cooled (Lahr and Foley 1998). Groups of anatomically modern humans appear to have moved outside Africa permanently sometime >60,000 years ago. One of the earliest modern skeletons found outside Africa is Mungo Man, from Australia, and has been dated to ∼42,000 years ago (Bowler et al. 2003), although studies of environmental changes in Australia argue for the presence of modern humans in Australia >55,000 years ago (Miller et al. 1999). To date, the earliest anatomically modern skeleton discovered from Europe comes from the Carpathian Mountains of Romania and is dated to 34,000–36,000 years ago (Trinkaus et al. 2003).

Existing data on human genetic variation support and extend conclusions based on the fossil evidence. African populations exhibit greater genetic diversity than do populations in the rest of the world, implying that humans appeared first in Africa and later colonized Eurasia and the Americas (Tishkoff and Williams 2002; Yu et al. 2002; Tishkoff and Verrelli 2003). The genetic variation seen outside Africa is generally a subset of the variation within Africa, a pattern that would be produced if the migrants from Africa were limited in number and carried just part of African genetic variability with them (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 2003). Patterns of genetic variation suggest an earlier population expansion in Africa followed by a subsequent expansion in non-African populations, and the dates calculated for the expansions generally coincide with the archaeological record (Jorde et al. 1998).

Aspects of the relationship between anatomically modern and archaic humans remain contentious. Studies of mtDNA (Ingman et al. 2000), the Y chromosome (Underhill et al. 2000), portions of the X chromosome (Kaessmann et al. 1999), and many (though not all) autosomal regions (Harpending and Rogers 2000) support the "Out of Africa" account of human history, in which anatomically modern humans appeared first in eastern Africa and then migrated throughout Africa and into the rest of the world, with little or no interbreeding between modern humans and the archaic populations they gradually replaced (Tishkoff et al. 2000; Stringer 2002). However, several groups of researchers cite fossil and genetic evidence to argue for a more complex account. They contend that humans bearing modern traits emerged several times from Africa, over an extended period, and mixed with archaic humans in various parts of the world (Hawks et al. 2000; Eswaran 2002; Templeton 2002; Ziętkiewicz et al. 2003). As a result, they say, autosomal DNA from archaic human populations living outside Africa persists in modern populations, and modern populations in various parts of the world still bear some physical resemblance to the archaic populations that inhabited those regions (Wolpoff et al. 2001).

However, distinguishing possible contributions to the gene pool of modern humans from archaic humans outside Africa is difficult, especially since many autosomal loci coalesce at times preceding the separation of archaic human populations (Pääbo 2003). In addition, studies of mtDNA from archaic and modern humans and extant Y chromosomes suggest that any surviving genetic contributions of archaic humans outside Africa must be small, if they exist at all (Krings et al. 1997; Nordborg 1998; Takahata et al. 2001; Serre et al. 2004). The observation that most genes studied to date coalesce in African populations points toward the importance of Africa as the source of most modern genetic variation, perhaps with some subdivision in the ancestral African population (Satta and Takahata 2002). Sequence data for hundreds of loci from widely distributed worldwide populations eventually may clarify the population processes associated with the appearance of anatomically modern humans (Wall 2000), as well as the amount of gene flow among modern humans since then.

Cladistics

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A phylogenetic tree like the one shown above is usually derived from DNA or protein sequences from populations. Often mitochondrial DNA or Y chromosome sequences are used to study ancient human demographics. These single-locus sources of DNA do not recombine and are almost always inherited from a single parent, with only one known exception in mtDNA (Schwartz and Vissing 2002). Individuals from the various continental groups tend to be more similar to one another than to people from other continents. The tree is rooted in the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans, which is believed to have originated in Africa. Horizontal distance corresponds to two things:

1. Genetic distance. Given below the diagram, the genetic difference between humans and chimps is roughly 2%, or 20 times larger than the variation among modern humans.
2. Temporal remoteness of the most recent common ancestor. Rough estimates are given above the diagram, in millions of years. The mitochondrial most recent common ancestor of modern humans lived roughly 200,000 years ago, latest common ancestors of humans and chimps between four and seven million years ago.

Chimpanzees and humans belong to different genera, indicated in red. Formation of species and subspecies is also indicated, and the formation of "races" is indicated in the green rectangle to the right (note that only a very rough representation of human phylogeny is given). Note that vertical distances are not meaningful in this representation.

Distribution of variation

A thorough description of the differences in patterns of genetic variation between humans and other species awaits additional genetic studies of human populations and nonhuman species. But the data gathered to date suggest that human variation exhibits several distinctive characteristics. First, compared with many other mammalian species, humans are genetically less diverse—a counterintuitive finding, given our large population and worldwide distribution (Li and Sadler 1991; Kaessmann et al. 2001). For example, the chimpanzee subspecies living just in central and western Africa have higher levels of diversity than do humans (Ebersberger et al. 2002; Yu et al. 2003; Fischer et al. 2004).

Two random humans are expected to differ at approximately 1 in 1000 nucleotides, whereas two random chimpanzees differ at 1 in 500 nucleotide pairs. However, with a genome of approximate 3 billion nucleotides, on average two humans differ at approximately 3 million nucleotides. Most of these single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are neutral, but some are functional and influence the phenotypic differences between humans. It is estimated that about 10 million SNPs exist in human populations, where the rarer SNP allele has a frequency of at least 1% (see International HapMap Project).

The distribution of variants within and among human populations also differs from that of many other species. The details of this distribution are impossible to describe succinctly because of the difficulty of defining a "population," the clinal nature of variation, and heterogeneity across the genome (Long and Kittles 2003). In general, however, 5%–15% of genetic variation occurs between large groups living on different continents, with the remaining majority of the variation occurring within such groups (Lewontin 1972; Jorde et al. 2000a; Hinds et al. 2005). This distribution of genetic variation differs from the pattern seen in many other mammalian species, for which existing data suggest greater differentiation between groups (Templeton 1998; Kittles and Weiss 2003).

In the field of population genetics, it is believed that the distribution of neutral polymorphisms among contemporary humans reflects human demographic history.

Our history as a species also has left genetic signals in regional populations. For example, in addition to having higher levels of genetic diversity, populations in Africa tend to have lower amounts of linkage disequilibrium than do populations outside Africa, partly because of the larger size of human populations in Africa over the course of human history and partly because the number of modern humans who left Africa to colonize the rest of the world appears to have been relatively low (Gabriel et al. 2002). In contrast, populations that have undergone dramatic size reductions or rapid expansions in the past and populations formed by the mixture of previously separate ancestral groups can have unusually high levels of linkage disequilibrium (Nordborg and Tavare 2002).

In the field of population genetics, it is believed that the distribution of neutral polymorphisms among contemporary humans reflects human demographic history. It is believed that humans passed through a population bottleneck before a rapid expansion coinciding with migrations out of Africa leading to an African-Eurasian divergence around 100,000 years ago (ca. 5,000 generations), followed by a European-Asian divergence about 40,000 years ago (ca. 2,000 generations).

The rapid expansion of a previously small population has two important effects on the distribution of genetic variation. First, the so-called founder effect occurs when founder populations bring only a subset of the genetic variation from their ancestral population. Second, as founders become more geographically separated, the probability that two individuals from different founder populations will mate becomes smaller. The effect of this assortative mating is to reduce gene flow between geographical groups, and to increase the genetic distance between groups. The expansion of humans from Africa affected the distribution of genetic variation in two other ways. First, smaller (founder) populations experience greater genetic drift because of increased fluctuations in neutral polymorphisms. Second, new polymorphisms that arose in one group were less likely to be transmitted to other groups as gene flow was restricted.

Many other geographic, climatic, and historical factors have contributed to the patterns of human genetic variation seen in the world today. For example, population processes associated with colonization, periods of geographic isolation, socially reinforced endogamy, and natural selection all have affected allele frequencies in certain populations (Jorde et al. 2000b; Bamshad and Wooding 2003). In general, however, the recency of our common ancestry and continual gene flow among human groups have limited genetic differentiation in our species.

Substructure in the human population

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New data on human genetic variation has reignited the debate surrounding race. Most of the controversy surrounds the question of how to interpret these new data, and whether conclusions based on existing data are sound. A large majority of researchers endorse the view that continental groups do not constitute different subspecies. However, other researchers still debate whether evolutionary lineages should rightly be called "races". These questions are particularly pressing for biomedicine, where self-described race is often used as an indicator of ancestry (see race in biomedicine below).

Although the genetic differences among human groups are relatively small, these differences in certain genes such as duffy, ABCC11, SLC24A5, called ancestry-informative markers (AIMs) nevertheless can be used to reliably situate many individuals within broad, geographically based groupings or self-identified race. For example, computer analyses of hundreds of polymorphic loci sampled in globally distributed populations have revealed the existence of genetic clustering that roughly is associated with groups that historically have occupied large continental and subcontinental regions (Rosenberg et al. 2002; Bamshad et al. 2003).

Some commentators have argued that these patterns of variation provide a biological justification for the use of traditional racial categories. They argue that the continental clusterings correspond roughly with the division of human beings into sub-Saharan Africans; Europeans, western Asians, and northern Africans; eastern Asians; Polynesians and other inhabitants of Oceania; and Native Americans (Risch et al. 2002). Other observers disagree, saying that the same data undercut traditional notions of racial groups (King and Motulsky 2002; Calafell 2003; Tishkoff and Kidd 2004). They point out, for example, that major populations considered races or subgroups within races do not necessarily form their own clusters. Thus, samples taken from India and Pakistan affiliate with Europeans or eastern Asians rather than separating into a distinct cluster.

Furthermore, because human genetic variation is clinal, many individuals affiliate with two or more continental groups. Thus, the genetically based "biogeographical ancestry" assigned to any given person generally will be broadly distributed and will be accompanied by sizable uncertainties (Pfaff et al. 2004).

In many parts of the world, groups have mixed in such a way that many individuals have relatively recent ancestors from widely separated regions. Although genetic analyses of large numbers of loci can produce estimates of the percentage of a person's ancestors coming from various continental populations (Shriver et al. 2003; Bamshad et al. 2004), these estimates may assume a false distinctiveness of the parental populations, since human groups have exchanged mates from local to continental scales throughout history (Cavalli-Sforza et al. 1994; Hoerder 2002). Even with large numbers of markers, information for estimating admixture proportions of individuals or groups is limited, and estimates typically will have wide CIs (Pfaff et al. 2004).

Physical variation in humans

The distribution of many physical traits resembles the distribution of genetic variation within and between human populations (American Association of Physical Anthropologists 1996; Keita and Kittles 1997). For example, ∼90% of the variation in human head shapes occurs within every human group, and ∼10% separates groups, with a greater variability of head shape among individuals with recent African ancestors (Relethford 2002).

A prominent exception to the common distribution of physical characteristics within and among groups is skin color. Approximately 10% of the variance in skin color occurs within groups, and ~90% occurs between groups (Relethford 2002). This distribution of skin color and its geographic patterning—with people whose ancestors lived predominantly near the equator having darker skin than those with ancestors who lived predominantly in higher latitudes—indicate that this attribute has been under strong selective pressure. Darker skin appears to be strongly selected for in equatorial regions to prevent sunburn, skin cancer, the photolysis of folate, and damage to sweat glands (Sturm et al. 2001; Rees 2003). A leading hypothesis for the selection of lighter skin in higher latitudes is that it enables the body to form greater amounts of vitamin D, which helps prevent rickets (Jablonski 2004). Evidence for this includes the finding that a substantial portion of the differences of skin color between Europeans and Africans resides in a single gene, SLC24A5 the threonine-111 allele of which was found in 98.7 to 100% among several European samples, while the alanine-111 form was found in 93 to 100% of samples of Africans, East Asians and Indigenous Americans (Lamason et al. 2005). However, the vitamin D hypothesis is not universally accepted (Aoki 2002), and lighter skin in high latitudes may correspond simply to an absence of selection for dark skin (Harding et al. 2000). Melanin which serves as the pigment, is located in the epidermis of the skin, and is based on hereditary gene expression.

Because skin color has been under strong selective pressure, similar skin colors can result from convergent adaptation rather than from genetic relatedness. Sub-Saharan Africans, tribal populations from southern India, and Indigenous Australians have similar skin pigmentation, but genetically they are no more similar than are other widely separated groups. Furthermore, in some parts of the world in which people from different regions have mixed extensively, the connection between skin color and ancestry has been substantially weakened (Parra et al. 2004). In Brazil, for example, skin color is not closely associated with the percentage of recent African ancestors a person has, as estimated from an analysis of genetic variants differing in frequency among continent groups (Parra et al. 2003).

Considerable speculation has surrounded the possible adaptive value of other physical features characteristic of groups, such as the constellation of facial features observed in many eastern and northeastern Asians (Guthrie 1996). However, any given physical characteristic generally is found in multiple groups (Lahr 1996), and demonstrating that environmental selective pressures shaped specific physical features will be difficult, since such features may have resulted from sexual selection for individuals with certain appearances or from genetic drift (Roseman 2004).

Social interpretations of race

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Historians, anthropologists and social scientists often describe human races as a social construct, preferring instead the term population, which can be given a clear operational definition. Even those who reject the formal concept of race, however, still use the word race in day-to-day speech. This may either be a matter of semantics, or an effect of an underlying cultural significance of race in racist societies. Regardless of the name, a working concept of sub-species grouping can be useful, because in the absence of cheap and widespread genetic tests, various race-linked gene mutations (see Cystic fibrosis, Lactose intolerance, Tay-Sachs Disease and Sickle cell anemia) are difficult to address without recourse to a category between "individual" and "species".

In everyday speech, race often describes populations better defined as ethnic groups, often leading to discrepancies between scientific views on race and popular usage of the term. For instance in many parts of the United States, categories such as Hispanic or Latino are viewed to constitute a race, though others see Hispanic as a linguistic and cultural grouping coming from a variety of backgrounds. In Europe, such a distinction, suggesting that South Europeans are not European or white, would seem odd at least or possibly even insulting. In the United States, in what is referred to as the one-drop rule, the term Black subsumes people with a broad range of ancestries under one label, even though many who are termed Black could be more accurately described as white through simple anthropologic or taxonomic method. In much of Europe groups such as Roma and Turks are commonly defined as racially distinct from White Europeans, though these groups could be considered "Caucasian" by old physical anthropological methods which employed finite nose measurements as the standard form of racial classifaction.

Some argue it is preferable when considering biological relations to think in terms of populations, and when considering cultural relations to think in terms of ethnicity, rather than of race. Instead of classing people into one "group", say "Caucasians" or Europeans you have Britons, Frenchmen, Germans, Nords, western Slavs and Celts rather than having a term implying a (possible) ancestory group in the Caucasus which is definitely too distant for any real consideration, and moreover reaching to groups including eastern Slavs, Roma, as well as Georgians, and others who differ notably, both in culture, and to a noteworthy extent in physical appearance, from the aforementioned ethnic groups. There can be as much difference between two ethnicities grouped into a single "race" as there can be between ethnicities grouped (often arbitrarily) into an another "race".

These developments had important consequences. For example, some scientists developed the notion of "population" to take the place of race. This substitution is not simply a matter of exchanging one word for another. Populations are, in a sense, simply statistical clusters that emerge from the choice of variables of interest; there is no preferred set of variables. The "populationist" view does not deny that there are physical differences among peoples; it simply claims that the historical conceptions of "race" are not particularly useful in accounting for these differences scientifically.

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. As such it cannot be a useful analytical concept; rather, the use of the term "race" itself must be analyzed. Moreover, they argue that biology will not explain why or how people use the idea of race: history and social relationships will.

Arguments for scientific validity

Some biologists believe that the view that races are a social construct or not biologically significant is incorrect. They point to the existence of groups determined on the basis of multi-locus genetic analysis as evidence that human population structure does exist and to some extent resembles conventional definitions of race. In most contemporary research, races are defined as evolutionary linages: "a subspecies (race) is a distinct evolutionary lineage within a species. This definition requires that a subspecies be genetically differentiated due to barriers to genetic exchange that have persisted for long periods of time; that is, the subspecies must have historical continuity in addition to current genetic differentiation" Templeton (1998).

Some researchers believe the view that races do not exist is influenced by racial politics and political correctness, not science. They claim that race researchers are often attacked as racists, even if they espouse liberal sociopolitical views and claim to be against racism. Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele, in Race: The Reality of Human Differences, write that "racial differences in humans exceed the differences that separate subspecies or even species in such other primates as gorillas and chimpanzees" (although in line of recent evidence some of this is wrong- human genome is more homogenous than chimpazees: two random humans vary in 1 out of 1000 nucleotides vs. 1 out of 500 for chimpanzees for example) and 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; Joseph Carroll, University of Missouri-St. Louis; and Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr., Professor of Psychology, University of Minnesota.

Other anthropologists and human geneticists argue that race is indeed a valid and valuable concept and that those holding the opposite view allow their social consciences (laudable per se) to confuse and delay accurate interpretations and applications of empirical data. They are not convinced by the substitution of the term "population" for the term "race" because it leads to a potentially harmful imprecision in communication (for example, when one could simply say "Caucasian" one is instead compelled to say something like "an individual of the European or western Asian population", and when that individual doesn't happen to currently reside in western Eurasia one must say "an individual whose ancestors were of the European or western Asian population"). Although the term Caucasian itself identifies a large and culturally diverse population, some "racial" characteristics of this population are quite apparent (such as facial features). As decades pass and populations mix even more, race as a term might become obsolete, but for now it still carries enough historical, cultural and genetic significance for a large fraction of the World population that are yet to become mobile from their ancestral lands. If "races" is too freighted a term for these basic divisions of humanity then, according to these authorities, new, convenient, non-academic terminology free of spurious valuations of superiority and inferiority should be developed and deployed whether social sensitivities are ruffled or not.

Ethnicity as a way of categorizing people

As the problems surrounding the word "race" became increasingly apparent during the 20th century, the word "ethnicity" was promoted as a way of characterizing the differences between groups (Huxley and Haddon 1936; Hutchinson and Smith 1996). Ethnicity typically emphasizes the cultural, socioeconomic, religious, and political qualities of human groups rather than their genetic ancestry. It may encompass language, diet, religion, dress, customs, kinship systems, or historical or territorial identity (Cornell and Hartmann 1998).

However, as a way of understanding human groups, ethnicity also suffers from several shortcomings. First, ascribing an ethnic identity to a group can imply a much greater degree of uniformity than is actually the case. In the United States, the ethnic group "Hispanic or Latino" contains such subgroups as Cuban Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and recent immigrants from Central America (Hayes-Bautista and Chapa 1987). Combining these groups into a single category may serve useful bureaucratic or political ends but does not necessarily result in a better understanding of these groups.

Also, ethnicity, like race, is a malleable concept that can change dramatically in different times or circumstances (Waters 1990; Smelser et al. 2001). Ethnic groups may come into existence and then dissipate as a result of broad historical or social trends. Individuals might change ethnic groups over the course of their lives or identify with more than one group. A researcher, clinician, or government official might assign an ethnicity to an individual quite different from the one that person would acknowledge (Kressin et al. 2003).

Finally, despite attempts to distinguish "ethnicity" from "race," the two terms often are used interchangeably (Oppenheimer 2001). Ethnic groups can share a belief in a common ancestral origin (Cornell and Hartmann 1998), which also can be a defining characteristic of a racial group. Furthermore, ethnic groups tend to promote marriage within the group, which creates an expectation of biological cohesion regardless of whether that cohesion existed in the past.

Ancestry as a way of categorizing people

Image:Rosenberg 1048people 993markers.jpg An alternative to the use of racial or ethnic categories is to categorize individuals in terms of ancestry. Ancestry may be defined geographically (e.g., Asian, sub-Saharan African, or northern European), geopolitically (e.g., Vietnamese, Zambian, or Norwegian), or culturally (e.g., Brahmin, Lemba, or Apache). The definition of ancestry may recognize a single predominant source or multiple sources. Ancestry can be ascribed to an individual by an observer, as was the case with the U.S. census prior to 1960; it can be identified by an individual from a list of possibilities or with use of terms drawn from that person's experience; or it can be calculated from genetic data by use of loci with allele frequencies that differ geographically, as described above. At least among those individuals who participate in biomedical research, genetic estimates of biogeographical ancestry generally agree with self-assessed ancestry (Tang et al. 2005), but in an unknown percentage of cases, they do not (Brodwin 2002; Kaplan 2003).

Genetic data can be used to infer population structure and assign individuals to groups that often correspond with their self-identified geographical ancestry. The inference of population structure from multilocus genotyping depends on the selection of a large number of informative genetic markers. These studies usually find that groups of humans living on the same continent are more similar to one another than to groups living on different continents. Many such studies are criticized for assigning group identity a priori. However, even if group identity is stripped and group identity assigned a posteriori using only genetic data, population structure can still be inferred. For example, using 993 markers, Rosenberg et al. (2005) were able to assign 1,048 individuals from 52 populations around the globe to one of six genetic clusters, which correspond to major geographic regions.

However, in analyses that assign individuals to group it becomes less apparent that self-described racial groups are reliable indicators of ancestry. One cause of the reduced power of the assignment of individuals to groups is admixture. Some racial or ethnic groups, especially Hispanic groups, do not have homogenous ancestry. For example, self-described African Americans tend to have a mix of West African and European ancestry. Shriver et al. (2003) found that on average African Americans have ~80% African ancestry. Likewise, many white Americans have mixed European and African ancestry, where ~30% of whites have less than 90% European ancestry. In this context, it is becoming more commonplace to describe "race" as fractional ancestry. Without the use of genotyping, this has been approximated by the self-described ancestry of an individual's grand-parents.

Nevertheless, recent research indicates that self-described race is a near-perfect indicator of an individual's genetic profile, at least in the United States. Using 326 genetic markers, Tang et al. (2005) identified 4 genetic clusters among 3,636 individuals sampled from 15 locations in the United States, and were able to correctly assign individuals to groups that correspond with their self-described race (white, African American, East Asian, or Hispanic) for all but 5 individuals (an error rate of 0.14%). They conclude that ancient ancestry, which correlates tightly with self-described race and not current residence, is the major determinant of genetic structure in the U.S. population.

Genetic techniques that distinguish ancestry between continents can also be used to describe ancestry within continents. However, the study of intra-continental ancestry may require a greater number of informative markers. Populations from neighboring geographic regions typically share more recent common ancestors. As a result, allele frequencies will be correlated between these groups. This phenomenon is often seen as a cline of allele frequencies. The existence of allelic clines has been offered as evidence that individuals cannot be allocated into genetic clusters (Kittles & Weiss 2003). However, others argue that low levels of differentiation between groups merely make the assignment to groups more difficult, not impossible (Bamshad et al. 2004).

Despite its seemingly objective nature, ancestry also has limitations as a way of categorizing people (Elliott and Brodwin 2002). When asked about the ancestry of their parents and grandparents, many people cannot provide accurate answers. In one series of focus groups in the state of Georgia, 40% of ∼100 respondents said they did not know one or more of their four grandparents well enough to be certain how that person(s) would identify racially (Condit et al. 2003). Misattributed paternity or adoption can separate biogeographical ancestry from socially defined ancestry. Furthermore, the exponentially increasing number of our ancestors makes ancestry a quantitative rather than qualitative trait—5 centuries (or 20 generations) ago, each person had a maximum of >1 million ancestors (Ohno 1996). To complicate matters further, recent analyses suggest that everyone living today has exactly the same set of genealogical ancestors who lived as recently as a few thousand years in the past, although we have received our genetic inheritance in different proportions from those ancestors (Rohde et al. 2004).

Opponents of racial groupings argue that a distinct difference is only one of the two conditions for racial classifiction; the second condition is a lack of significant gene flow between populations. Cultural anthropologists believe humans to be monotypic because they argue races gradually fade into one another in many parts of the world. Although there has historically been little or no gene flow between some human populations such as the aboriginal Australians and black Africans, they argue, one cannot assume there has been little interracial gene flow, as the interbreeding of locally adjacent populations may also produce common traits. Some researchers report enough such gene flow has occurred that the most recent common ancestor of all humans alive today has been estimated as living as recently as 3,500 years ago [4], although critics say this is not necessarily significant gene flow (Rhode et al., 2004). Intercontinental travel has caused increased gene flow between geographically distant human populations. In some regions, this has caused racial lines to fade or perhaps disappear, particularly Latin American and parts of Southern Africa.

The delicacy of this definition has left the issue much in debate, especially among physical anthropologists, for if clines lead to large areas of near-homogeneity, such as 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". Currently, the question of whether human genetic variation is better described as clinal (i.e. no races) or cladistic (i.e. races are real) is largely fading.

The problem arises of distinguishing black Africans as a racial group; it doesn't work because it is a paraphyletic classification. In other words, under a phylogenetic classification, considering black Africans as a single racial group would require one to include every living person on Earth within that single African "race", because the genetic variation of the rest of the world represents essentially a single subtree within that of Africa. Also, it has long been known that groups such as the Khoisan were as different from other sub-Saharan groups as are Europeans and Asians (though even with the Khoisan the distinction is no longer so clearcut, as a large amount of intermarriage with both Europeans and Bantu-language speakers has occurred over the last three centuries).

Rachel Caspari (2003) argued that clades are by definition monophyletic groups (a taxon that includes all descendents of a given ancestor); since races are not monophyletic, they cannot be clades.

In the end, the terms "race," "ethnicity," and "ancestry" all describe just a small part of the complex web of biological and social connections that link individuals and groups to each other.

Current disagreement across disciplines

The result of these developments is that the current literature across different disciplines regarding human variation lacks consensus, though some fields, such as biology, have strong consensus. Some studies use the word race in its previously essentialist taxonomic sense. Many still use the term race, but use it to mean a population, clade, or haplogroup. Others eschew the word race altogether, and use the word population as a less pejorative synonym.

A 1985 survey (Lieberman et al. 1992) asked 1,200 scientists how many disagree with the following proposition: "There are biological races in the species Homo sapiens." The responses were:

• biologists 16%
• developmental psychologists 36%
• physical anthropologists 41%
• cultural anthropologists 53%

The figure for physical anthropologists at PhD granting departments was slightly higher, rising from 41% to 42%, with 50% agreeing.

(This survey did not specify any particular definition of race; it is impossible to say whether those who supported the statement thought of race in taxonomic or population terms.)

In the 19th century, race was a central concept of anthropology. In 1866, James Hunt, the founder of the Anthropological Society of London, declared that anthropology’s primary truth “is the existence of well-marked psychological and moral distinctions in the different races of men.” However, this view became marginalised in the 20th century. Since 1932, college textbooks introducing physical anthropology have increasingly come to reject race as a valid concept: from 1932 to 1976, only seven out of thirty-two rejected race; from 1975 to 1984, thirteen out of thirty-three rejected race; from 1985 to 1993, thirteen out of nineteen rejected race.

Modern supporters of racial invalidity note that the preponderance of evidence suggests that all human beings are descended from a common ancestor. Second, they observe that there are many biological differences between people that are not taken into account by race (for example, blood type). Finally, they point out that oftentimes the genetic differences between members of the same race are greater than the average genetic difference between races. For example, the variation in blood types within specific groups is 85%, but the total variation between groups is only 15% (see the American Anthropological Association's Statement on Race [5]).

Nevertheless, the belief that human races exist remains almost universal amongst lay audiences and, like any widely held belief, is significant regardless of its scientific validity, as observed for example by Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1960s. Moreover, some social and natural scientists argue that new studies in molecular genetics support a nomenclature strongly reminiscent of traditional racial and ethnic terminology.

See also

• BiDil
• Clan
• Human race
• List of races in fantasy fiction and role-playing games
• Master race
• Model Minority
• Political correctness
• Cultural difference
• Population genetics
• Pre-Adamite
• Race (historical definitions)
• Racial stereotypes
• Race and intelligence
• Race (fantasy)
• Race (US Census)
• Race baiting
• Race card
• Racial purity
• Racial discrimination
• Racial realism
• Racial superiority
• Pierre-André Taguieff
• Whiteness studies

Footnotes

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External links

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• Discovery of the human skin color gene SLC24A5
• US Human Genome Project on "Issues of Race"
• Is Race "Real"? - forum organized by the Social Science Research Council, includes a March 2005 op-ed article by A.M. Leroi from the New York Times advocating biological conceptions of race and responses from scholars in a variety of fields.
• Race - The power of an illusion Online companion to California Newsreel's 3-part documentary about race in society, science, and history.
• Steven and Hilary Rose, The Guardian, "Why we should give up on race", 9 April 2005
• Times Online, "Gene tests prove that we are all the same under the skin", 27 October 2004.
• Catchpenny mysteries of ancient Egypt, "What race were the ancient Egyptians?", Larry Orcutt.
• Judy Skatssoon, "New twist on out-of-Africa theory", ABC Science Online, Wednesday, 14 July 2004.
• Michael J. Bamshad, Steve E. Olson "Does Race Exist?", Scientific American, December 2003
• OMB Statistical Directive 15, "Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity", Federal Register, 30 October 1997.
• Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, Joanna Mountain, and Barbara A. Koenig, "The Reification of Race in Health Research"
• Michael Root, "The Use of Race in Medicine as a Proxy for Genetic Differences"
• Richard Dawkins: Race and creation (extract from The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life) - On race, its usage and a theory of how it evolved. (Prospect Magazine October 2004) (see also longer extract here)
• Racial & Ethnic Distribution of ABO Blood Types - bloodbook.com
• Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies
• "Gene Study Identifies 5 Main Human Populations, Linking Them to Geography", Nicholas Wade, NYTimes, December 2002. Covering "Genetic structure of human populations", Feldman et al, Science. - "Self-reported population ancestry likely provides a suitable proxy for genetic ancestry."
• DNA Study published by United Press International showing how 30% of White Americans have at least one Black ancestor
• "The Races of Europe" by Carleton S. Coon - collection of physical anthropolgical data on the indigenous European populations.
• "Race as a Biological Concept" by J. Philippe Rushton
• The Race Concept: A Defense by Michael Levin
• Are White Athletes an Endangered Species? And Why is it Taboo to Talk About It? Discussion of racial differences in athletics
• Resurrecting Racism: The modern attack on black people using phony science. Francisco Gil-White, 2004.

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