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In Defense of the Existence of Human Races

Brandon Pilcher

Does any division of humankind lie at the root of more hatred, violence, and

general misery in the world today than race? Not unless its religion or nationality. In the

last five centuries, innumerable lives have been lost or made unbearable because of

racism. Much of American history in particular is saturated with racism, which has

inspired multiple bloody wars, but this moral cancer has caused chaos all over the world,

culminating in the genocides of Germany and Rwanda and the apartheid regimes of

South Africa and Israel. To be sure, our attitudes about race have improved in recent

decades, but as shown by all those imbeciles who question Barack Obamas American

identity because of his Kenyan father, we still have a long way to go.

The devastation that racism has wreaked has understandably made many people

uncomfortable about the topic of race. Few want to be associated with racists. Usually

this manifests in a reticence to discuss the issue at all, but some go farther than that. This

camp has declared that race is nothing more than a figment of our imaginations, a social

construct we have invented to make sense of human physical differences. These people

dont deny that there is variation in human physiognomy and genomes around the world,

but they insist that this variation does not structure into distinct races as popularly

imagined.

This view has become practically the consensus among anthropologists. One

survey taken in 1999 found that between 69 and 80% of anthropologists disagreed with

the statement that our species can be sorted into races (Lieberman 2001). Since


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anthropologists are supposed to be the most qualified authority figures on human

differences, one might be tempted to conclude that they are right, but we must not be so

lazy. Just because a particular opinion is popular among scientists does not necessarily

make it right. In science, what really matters is the quality of the evidence in favor of a

hypothesis, and the evidence supports the idea that races exist inHomo sapiens.

First we must define what constitutes a biological race. According to Alan

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.

One example of an animal species living today with a subspecies structure is the

gray wolf, Canis lupus, which has over 39 of this type of subdivision, including the

Eurasian gray wolf (Canis lupus lupus), the Arctic gray wolf (Canis lupus arctos), and the

domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris). All of these subspecies can interbreed and produce

fertile offspring, but they are still physically and genetically distinct from one another.

Typically, the more genetically diverse a species is, the more subspecies it has.

This raises the question of whether modern humans are genetically diverse enough to be

divided into subspecies, and the traditional answer to this given by anthropologists is no.

They claim that all people living today constitute one subspecies,Homo sapiens sapiens,

and therefore cannot be split into multiple races.


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This classification of modern humanity into a single subspecies has been rendered

obsolete by recent genetic research (Woodley 2010), which has found that the degree of

genetic diversity inHomo sapiens is actually high compared to some other animal species

that taxonomists have traditionally divided into multiple subspecies. Fitting all humanity

into one race while splitting up other animal species into multiple races is unfair and

hypocritical in light of this new data. We are not as homogeneous as the no races

school of thought claims.

Not that this evidence for genetic diversity within the human species is enough to

refute this school. We must also demonstrate that this diversity can be organized into

categories synonymous with the idea of races, and to do that, we have to analyze the

genomes of people from around the world to see if they can be sorted into distinct groups

that we can call races.

Rosenberg et al (2005) have done just that. They sampled the DNA of 1,048

people from 53 populations all around the world and analyzed it using a computer

program called STRUCTURE to see if populations heavily overlapped with each other

(which would invalidate the race concept) or instead formed more or less separate races.

They found the latter result: the genomes of the 53 populations sampled could be

organized into five clusters corresponding with certain geographic regions. Although

they insist that their data should not be used to justify classifying humanity into races, if

one thinks critically about what they have found, one realizes that what they call

clusters is little different from what we would normally call races.


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What are these races Rosenberg and his colleagues found? The clusters revealed

correspond to five geographic regions: Africa, Europe and western Asia, eastern Asia,

Australasia, and the Americas. In light of this, I propose the following names for the

races of humanity:Homo sapiens africanus (Africans),Homo sapiens occidentalis

(Europeans and West Asians, or Occidentals),Homo sapiens orientalis (East Asians, or

Orientals),Homo sapiens australis (Australasians), andHomo sapiens americanus

(Native Americans). These five races have genetically differentiated from each other

thanks to geographic barriers such as oceans, deserts, and mountain ranges. Now, to be

sure, the races do blend in with one another as one travels around the world, but just as

blending between colors does not negate the existence of distinct colors in the first place,

neither does this genetic intermixing at racial boundaries mean that distinct races do not

exist.

That all being said, there are two important disclaimers to be said about races. The

first is that none of these races is physically or genetically homogenous, nor does any one

race have a monopoly on certain physical features. Africans in particular show huge

variation. As physical anthropologist Jean Hiernaux notes in his The People of Africa

(1975):

In sub-Saharan Africa, many anthropological characters show a wide range

of population means or frequencies. In some of them, the whole world

range is covered in the sub-continent. Here live the shortest and the tallest

human populations, the one with the highest and the one with the lowest

nose, the one with the thickest and the one with the thinnest lips in the


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world. In this area, the range of the average nose widths covers 92 per cent

of the world range: only a narrow range of extremely low means are absent

from the African record.

Many Northeast African peoples, such as Ethiopians, Somalis, and northern

Sudanese, have the narrow noses and other facial features stereotypically associated with

the Occidental race, whereas the Bushmen of southern Africa often have epicanthic

eyefolds just like those of Orientals. Similarly, Indians and Australasians can be as dark-

skinned as Africans despite being racially separate. A lot of convergent evolution has

occurred between human races, which is why any analysis of peoples racial affinities

must use a large and comprehensive number of physical or genetic criteria rather than

fixating on a tiny handful of traits like many people do.

The second caveat is that the geographic distribution of races has changed over

time thanks to migrations and invasions. For instance, it is popularly believed that people

of the African race have always been restricted to the lands south of the Sahara Desert,

with North Africa being more Occidental, yet osteological analysis of ancient Egyptian

and Sudanese remains has shown that they were predominantly of the African rather than

Occidental race (Henneberg et al 1989, Keita and Boyce 1996, Keita 2005, Vermeersch

2002). Another, more widely known example is that Native Americans have been

displaced from much of their original territory by European and African invaders

bringing diseases to which they had no immunity. One therefore cannot always assume

that the people living in a given area are completely racially continuous with earlier

inhabitants.


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The fact that races exist in humanity will no doubt be used by racists to justify

their prejudiced assumptions about certain races, but to conclude that the existence of

races in humanity means that these races differ in intellect or morality would be a non

sequitur. The vast majority of racial differences are just physical adaptations to varying

climates and ecosystems; there is no reason to expect that races evolved different levels

of intelligence or goodness, and in fact there is psychological and criminological

evidence that many ethnic differences in intellect and behavior have nothing to do with

race. A favorite racist claim is that Africans are naturally less intelligent than

Occidentals, yet when adjusting for environmental conditions such as poverty rates and

home environments, the difference in IQ scores between African and Occidental children

becomes statistically insignificant (Brooks-Gunn et al 1996). Neither does it appear that

Africans are innately more susceptible to crime; studies have found that socioeconomic

factors, especially poorer and more urban neighborhood conditions, explain African-

Americans higher crime rates relative to Occidental-Americans (Krivo and Peterson

1996, Pope 1995), and one study examining thirty countries (Mukherjee 1999) found that

race was far less important than socioeconomic factors in determining criminality. There

is no evidence that Africans are necessarily any dumber or nastier than Occidentals or

other races no matter how genetically distinct they may be.

The concept of race is not a mere social construct, but reflects a very real genetic

structure within our species. What are socially constructed are our attitudes about how

we should treat people from other races. We should not use race as a pretext for

denigrating, attacking, or oppressing other people any more than we should use sex, hair


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color, or other physical characteristics. Racial differentiation does not mean that we are

not all sentient, feeling, and moral animals. In the end, we are all human.

Works Cited

Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne, Pamela K. Klebanov, and Greg J. Duncan. "Ethnic Differences in

Children's Intelligence Test Scores: Role of Economic Deprivation, Home

Environment, and Maternal Characteristics." Child Development67.2 (1996): 396-

408.

Henneberg, M., M. Kobusiewicz, and R. Schild. "The early Neolithic Qarunian burial

from the northern Fayum Desert (Egypt)." InLate Prehistory of the Nile Basin and

the Sahara, edited by L. Krzyzniak and M. Kobusiewicz, 18196. Poznan, Poland:

Poznan Archaeological Museum, 1989.

Hiernaux, Jean. The People of Africa, 53-54. Encore Editions, 1975.

Lieberman, L. "How Caucasoids Got Such Big Crania and Why They Shrank." Current

Anthropology 42, no. 1 (February 2001): 69-95.

Keita, SOY. "Early Nile Valley Farmers, From El-Badari, Aboriginals or 'European'

Agro-Nostratic Immigrants? Craniometric Affinities Considered With Other

Data." Journal of Black Studies 36, no. 2 (2005): 191-208.

Keita, SOY and A.J. Boyce. The Geographic Origins and Population Relationships of

Early Ancient Egyptians. InEgypt in Africa. Compiled by Theodore Celenko. 23-

4. Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art and Indiana University Press, 1996.

Krivo, L. J., and R. D. Peterson. "Extremely Disadvantaged Neighborhoods and Urban

Crime." Social Forces 75.2 (1996): 619-48.


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Mukherjee, Satyanshu. "Ethnicity and Crime." Trends and Issues in Crime and Criminal

Justice (May 1999)

Pope, John. "Murder linked to dense poverty."New Orleans Times-Picayune 14 June

1995

Rosenberg, Noah A., et al. "Clines, Clusters, and the Effect of Study Design on the

Inference of Human Population Structure."PLoS Genetics 1.6 (2005): 70.

Templeton, Alan R. "Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective."Human

Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective 100.3 (1998): 632650.

Vermeersch, Pierre M.Palaeolithic quarrying sites in Upper and Middle Egypt. Vol. 4 of

Egyptian prehistory monographs. Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press,

2002.

Woodley, Michael A. "Is Homo sapiens polytypic? Human taxonomic diversity and its

implications."Medical Hypotheses 74.1 (2010): 195-201.

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