Debunking the Race Myth: Biological vs Sociological Perspectives

Race A social concept, but biologically unsupportable!

Is race in our genes or just in our heads? Most of us can see differences in humans: skin color, eye color, hair are obvious. We, and most others in the world, tend to use these traits to categorize people. Morally, many of us understand the ramifications of our use of these categories and the harm they have brought and can bring. We need to understand the difference between what is essentially a sociological view of race rather than a biological view of race. Try some sorting by “race.”

A sociological view of race: Race is used as a means of determining how a person should be related to or treated, either on a personal level or under some aspect of the law. Race is a modern idea; ancient societies did not divide people of physical features, but by language, wealth, status, religion, or class.

A biological view of race: The anatomy of a given racial group is used in comparison with that of other racial groups to investigate how people adapt to environments. It is essentially "value free."

Early Racial Classifications Homer • Homer (fl. 1200 - 850 B.C.) • Iliad and Odyssey acknowledge variability • Aethiopians: People at the eastern and western edges of the • known world • Cubit-men: African (?) pygmies • Herodotus(484?-425? B.C.) • Historiae argues for an environmental cause of variability • between human groups • Egyptians have strong skulls due to exposure • Persian skulls are brittle due to the use of felt hats • Hippocrates(460 - 377 B.C.) • Environmental influences on human variability are noted in • Volume I of Corpus Hippocraticum • Body build and temperament of different peoples are said to • be related to their climate and life style Herodotus Hippocrates

Early Racial Classifications • Aristotle(384-322 B.C.) • Claims environmental causes of physical variation in humans • Wooly hair of Aethiopians due to arid climate • Straight hair of Scythians due to moist air • St. Augustine(354-430) • In De Civitate Dei Contra Paganos he says all men born everywhere, no matter how strange they appear to us, are descended from Adam, i.e., are descended from a single ancestral stock Aristotle St. Augustine

Leonardo da Vinci(1452-1519) • Questioned the environmental hypothesis in accounting for human variation, suggesting an early hereditarian argument based on the power of the mother's seed. • Andreas Vesalius(1514-1564) • Noted a relationship between race and the shape of the skull

Differential Worth: The Beginnings Races are ranked on various criteria judged to assess intelligence or moral standards The rankings are used either to bolster the scala naturae or proto-evolutionary relationships Such rankings are highly subjective and loaded with potential for ethnocentric abuse, with the highest rank always being reserved for the race of the person doing the ranking

18th Century Racial Ideology • Monogenism versus Polygenism • Monogenism: All humans had a single origin from Adam and Eve. • The races are seen as being due to environmentally determined degeneration from Europeans • Polygenism: Different races are descendants of different Adams, separate creations

Carolus Linnaeus, 1707 – 1778 Viewed the task of classification as one of attempting to understand the natural laws of the Scala Naturae (the ladder of nature) Races of Linnaeus Americanus: Red, choleric, erect Europaeus: White, fickle, sanguine, blue-eyed, gentle, governed by laws Asiaticus: Sallow, grave, dignified, avaricious, ruled by opinion Afer: Black, choleric, obstinate, contented, regulated by customs Ferus: Wild man, walks on all fours, hairy Troglodytes: You wouldn't believe it Monstrous: Giants, mutants

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, 1752 - 1840 • German Anatomy Professor • Father of Physical Anthropology • Father of Craniology • Founder of Anthropology in Germany • On the Natural Variety of Mankind (1775) • We owe much of our view of the races to him, but he was probably one of the least racist people of his time. • Advocated Monogenism • Refuted the existence of "wild men" and "troglodytes" of earlier classifications • Proposed a system for classifying humans into five different races based on the shape of the skull • Using a skull from the Caucasus mountains as the perfect European form, he claimed his four other races degenerated from this group • Caucasoid (Europeans), Mongoloid (Asians), American (Native Americans), Ethiopian (Africans), and Malayan (Southeast Asians)

Samuel George Morton,1799 - 1851 • Physician from Philadelphia • Polygenist, convinced of inferiority of African populations • Measured cranial capacity (volume of braincase) to assess differential worth • Very careful technician, published extensive list of measurements of cranial capacities

Morton's Racial Rankings Modified from Gould, S.J. (1981)

Pierre Paul Broca,1824 - 1880 • Founder of French Anthropology • First Society of Anthropology (1859) • First School of Anthropology (1876) • Instigated the study of Craniometry • Attempted to quantify differential worth • Ratio of radius to humerus: a high ratio is ape-like, • hence lower worth. • Found Caucasians scored higher than Hottentots, • Eskimos, and Australians • He discarded the ratio in favor of measures with • whites furthest from the apes • Brain size: bigger is better • Men > Women • Eminent Men > Mediocre Men • Superior races (Caucasian) > Inferior (Other races)

Definitions of Race E.A. Hooton(1926): A race is a great division of mankind, the members of which, though individually varying, are characterized as a group by a certain combination of morphological and metrical features [which ones?], principally non-adaptive, which have been derived from their common descent. Brues(1990): A race is a division of a species which differs from other divisions by the frequency with which certain hereditary traits [which ones?] appear among its members. Mayr(1963): Biological races are noninterbreeding sympatric [in the same area] populations that differ in biological charteristics but not, or scarcely, in morphology. He points out that human races do not experience such limitation of interbreeding Mayr(1963): considers the major divisions of humankind to be subspecies, which are aggregations of local populationsof a species inhabiting geographic subdivisions of the range of the species and differing taxonomically from other populations of the species.

How Many Races?

Failure of the Race Concept The classification [of humans] into races has proved to be a futile exercise for reasons that were already clear to Darwin (Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994) While it is clear that there is only one human species, there are no objective reasons for splitting or lumping at any lower taxonomic level (I.e., subspecies, races, varieties).

Kennewick Man: A Troubling Case of Race in Contemporary Anthropology For all we now know about the first inhabitants of North America, we still have lots of questions, and recent discoveries still have us asking… Major controversy began in 1996 with the discovery of the ‘Ancient One,’ Kennewick Man.

Kennewick Man, or the Ancient One, as the Umatilla nation of Washington calls him Unfortunately James Chatters’s descriptions of him as “Caucasoid” got confused with “Caucasian.”

Is repatriating such remains a ‘crime against science’? Is not repatriating them an echo of the 1890s Moundbuilder myth?

The controversy has lead to a wide range of books… Even novels...

Ethnicity: The emphasis of culture over biology Ethnic groups are formed by virtue of community of language, religion, social institutions, etc., which have the power of uniting human beings of one or several species, races, or varieties and are by no means zoological species (Deniker 1900) When one uses the term 'ethnic group,' the question is immediately raised, 'What does it mean? What does the user have in mind?' And this at once affords an opportunity to discuss the facts and explore the meaning and falsities enshrined in the word 'race' and to explain the problems involved and the facts of the genetic situation as we know them. (Montagu 1962) Ethnicity is a multifactorial concept including, but not limited to, cultural constructs, genetic background, ecological specialization, and self-identification. (After Crews and Bindon 1991)

Race and IQ • The Bell Curve: • A resurgence of Biological Determinism • Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray , 1994 • The IQ of migrants to the U.S. • Non-literate vs. literate comparisons • Genes versus environmental influences • Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 • Sir Cyril Burt • Social Class and Intelligence • Intelligence tracks within British social classes • Monozygotic (identical) twins reared apart • Experiments allegedly show very high heritability for IQ scores (up to 80% of variability due to genes) • Scientific fraud • Can't tell what parts of his research are true, but he greatly increased his sample size without changing any of his correlations--a statistical impossibility.

The Fallacy of Heritability • Heritability is a measure of the degree of genetic determination of a characteristic within a given population • Heritability gives no indication of the genetic basis of differences between populations • e.g., Black versus White differences on IQ scores could be due entirely to environment, in spite of studies (like Burt's) indicating a high heritability of IQ scores within populations

Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: the Fallacy of Race Montague and Livingstone suggested that we can make our race problem go away by not calling a race a race, but by calling it an ethnic group, a complex distinction. A race refers to a group of people who share some biological or anatomical characteristics, whereas an ethnic group is a group of people who share a particular culture. The implication was to substitute discrimination on the basis of cultural differences for discrimination on the basis of racial differences. This approach hasn't solved any problems. Montague and Livingstone said that biological differences are not restricted to particular geographic regions, but are distributed as clines. Clines are gradual transitions in frequency of a trait over space as in ABO Blood Types and skin color.

Skin Color Production Skin color is due primarily to the presence of a pigment called melanin . Both light and dark complexioned people have this pigment. However, two forms are produced—pheomelanin, which is red to yellow in color, and eumelanin, which is dark brown to black. People with light complexioned skin mostly produce pheomelanin, while those with dark colored skin mostly produce eumelanin. To a lesser extent, the color is affected by the presence of fat under the skin and carotene, a reddish-orange pigment in the skin.

Modern concepts of race Races are categories that might be useful in some ways if they simply refer to populations of people who have evolved in adaptation to their environment while remaining slightly or moderately isolated from other populations. • Viewed in this way, the usefulness of race is in examining how people have adapted to their environments. Most anthropologists think a biological concept of race is not harmful, but neutral. • A good example of race being used in an adaptational sense is the analysis of skin color. Probably no other single factor is as important in any treatment of race as skin color. • First, dark skin has been shown to be advantageous near the equator. The reason for this is simply that the dark skin pigment, melanin, protects the deep layers of the skin from the harmful effects of ultraviolet light. For this simple reason, we expect peoples from tropical areas to have darker skin - and they do.

Skin Color continued… D. There are several advantages to having white skin in regions away from the equator, especially in Europe. All are probably contributing factors to the evolution of white skin. 1. Cold injuryIn Northern Europe it gets cold and during glacial times it was terribly cold. White skin is less prone to damage by cold injury, such as frostbite. This was discovered during the Korean war, when it was observed that Black soldiers suffered about 3 times the amount of frostbite as White soldiers. This occurred even though they spent equal amounts of time exposed to the cold, and were all dressed in the same uniforms. 2. Vitamin DVitamin D is produced from cholesterol in the skin when the skin is exposed to ultraviolet light. Not getting enough vitamin d results in an illness called rickets. If you remember, rickets was one of the characteristic diseases of European Classic Neanderthals. The farther away from the equator, the less ultraviolet light is received at the surface of the earth. White skin can produce vitamin D much easier than dark skin, so having white skin helps prevent vitamin D deficiency and rickets. 3. Camouflage or protective colorationNorthern Europe is snowy today and was very snowy during glacial times. Having pale skin might have been advantageous for a hunter, since it would not show up as well against a snowy background

How many races are there? How do you define even a race biologically?

A formal genetic definition says that if you can correctly assign individuals to their correct population with an accuracy of 75% or more, then you have a race. If you can't assign them with 75% accuracy, then you don't have a race. Using the formal definition of race, humanity has been divided into varying numbers of races ranging from 3 to several hundred. Cuvier (the same person who advocated the theory of catastrophism) split humanity into 3 major races: Negroid, Caucasoid, and Mongoloid. In America we give this racial division almost sacred importance. We think it's "natural" or scientifically valid. The point is that there is no racial classification that has any more scientific merit than any other. This is a difference from the sociological concept of race, where racial labels are thought of as having some validity, both to the persons doing the classification and to the people being classified.

Using the biological concept of race, the goal of classifying humanity is now considered a waste of time. • There are some useful reasons to study racial variation, but classification for the sake of classification is not one of them. • Biological scientists use racial labels only for convenience, and define races in terms of a particular goal of a particular study. • Raced-based genetic studies in medicine • This is what is meant by race labels being used for convenience. You use whatever name exists that refers to the group you want to study. • But this is vastly different from using race labels as a justification for behavior toward a group.

The American Anthropological Association (see Anthropology Newsletter, September 1997, page 27) issued a draft statement about race. Whatever the utility of race for examination of adaptive differences in populations, the AAA now considers the harmful nature of a sociological definition of race to have dangers that outweigh the usefulness of any biological definition. Their statement notes that all human variations are capable of interbreeding and do so; they note that any human being is capable of learning cultural traits of another group. They conclude by saying: "...that present-day inequalities between human groups are not consequences of their biological inheritance; rather, these inequalities are products of historical and contemporary social, economic, educational and political circumstances."

Let's do our best to rid ourselves of the idea that race has biological foundations. Only then can we deal with the fact that there are only sociological definitions of race.

I know what it’s like to have a racial identity because I used to be an Indian. I grew up with this idea and people accepted me as an Indian and I believed in the whole concept of race. As a child, being Indian and having race felt shallow and mysterious at first, but it felt real enough. It felt important, too – it wasn’t at all a slight matter to have race. So when I gave up being Indian during the late 1990s, it wasn’t easy to do. But I chose to give it up after I discovered the truth about race. It’s a lie. The whole concept defaces the nature of humanity. Race has more to do with satisfying the human impulse to sort things into convenient classes than with any meaningful biological definition of humankind. And its main purpose is not to comment on humankind, but rather to serve as a means for gathering and wielding social power – mostly the power to dehumanize ourselves and each other. Roger Echo-Hawk, The Magic Children

How do we do dump the concept of race? Just refuse to participate!

Debunking the Race Myth: Biological vs Sociological Perspectives