No Biological Basis For Race, Scientists Say
Distinctions prove to be skin deep
Charles Petit, Chronicle Science Writer
Monday, February 23, 1998
The President's Initiative on Race, designed to attack prejudice by bringing people of
different races together to talk, may have overlooked something.
Namely, that the very concept of race is bogus and has no basis in biology, according
to most scientists.
``This dialogue on race is driving me up the wall,'' said Jefferson Fish, a psychologist
at St. John's University in New York who has written extensively about race in
America. ``Nobody is asking the question, `What is race?' It is a biologically
meaningless category. It is a cultural term that Americans use to describe what a
person's ancestry is.
``But biologically the human species does not have categories. It just has variations
as one travels around the world.''
True, a walk along Market Street or almost any main street in a major U.S. city will
reveal a host of people of various colors and cultures.
Surely, one may suppose,
the American melting pot is brimming with different races and racial mixtures.
Wrong, say a broad coalition of experts.
``The concept of race is a social and cultural construction. . . . Race simply cannot be
tested or proven scientifically,'' according to a policy statement by the American
Anthropological Association. ``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.''
Although few people would mistake a group of Arapahos for Finns, or Malays for
Tutsis, anthropologists can find no clear racial boundaries to show where one
``racial'' group stops and another begins.
Jonathan Marks, a University of California at Berkeley anthropologist, said the only
pattern that shows up consistently is that as one surveys traditional homelands,
``people are similar to those from (areas) geographically nearby and different from
those (who are) far away.'' The bigger the distance, the more different people tend to
look. Conversely, while people don't fit into neat racial cubbyholes, the more closely
related they are, the greater the chances of finding good tissue matches for such
things as bone marrow transplants.
Despite this, many Americans still believe in three great racial groups, a system
developed in Europe and North America in the 18th century.
Under that notion, indigenous residents of France, Iran and Poland, for example, are
all Caucasoids, members of the so-called white race. People from Somalia, Nigeria
and Zimbabwe in Africa are all Negroid, belonging to the black race. Ethnic Chinese,
Koreans, Malays and American Indians are all Mongoloids, variants of the yellow
race.
And people born to, say, ethnic Swedish and Chinese parents are of mixed race.
No way, say scientists, who call such thinking a folk myth.
``We don't even come close to having enough genetic diversity for races, or
subspecies -- not close,'' said Robert Sussman, an anthropologist at Washington
University in St. Louis and editor of a newsletter of the anthropological association
that has taken on race and racism as its yearlong theme.
``It's hard to get across,'' said Sussman. ``The best audience to try to get to is
probably high school and young college students. But even they are steeped in
American folklore, and the folklore is that races really exist.''
One reason race is a myth, the great majority of anthropologists agree, is that there
has not been enough time for much difference to build up between human beings.
By most measures, modern humans arose in Africa less than 200,000 years ago, a
short time by evolutionary time scales. And the migration out of Africa by the
ancestors of today's Europeans, Asians, and North and South Americans took place
less than 100,000 years ago.
Environmental pressure produced different physical appearances, including slightly
different physiques, and Africa has the most human genetic diversity of any
continent.
``But the environment, literally, works only on the surface, changing skin and hair a
little bit,'' said Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, a Stanford University geneticist. ``Underneath,
there has been little change.''
So, although admirable, Clinton's initiative -- by its very name -- reinforces a false
sense that biological races are real, say anthropologists who asked to be on the
president's panel but were turned down.
``If Americans in general understood the history of the concept of race, the
erroneous biological connotations of race, and the cultural and social dimensions of
race, they could better address the initiative's goal of `One America in the 21st
Century,' '' said Mary Margaret Overbey, a lobbyist for the association.
If anything, the president's initiative should have been on racism, say the scientists.
For, even without race, racism can exist as a belief that ancestry is a significant factor
in cultural and behavioral differences among peoples.
Rather than race, scientists like to discuss ``clinal variations,'' or physical types that
may be found in one general area but that fade more or less evenly into other types as
one move about the globe.
Yet even anthropologists admit they use the term ``race'' -- even if they don't really
approve of it -- because so far there is no better term to describe the subtleties of the
human species.
``I use it because for some uses, it works,'' said Dennis Stanford, chairman of
anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
But at best, it is a clumsy term for people like Fish, the St. John's University
psychologist, who is married to a Brazilian.
By standard American usage, he is white because his ancestry is all European, and
she is black because some of her ancestors were African. But she is not really the
color black, rather more of a light brown, with ancestry from many parts of the globe.
In Brazil, people are labeled not by race, but by ``tipo,'' Portuguese for type, and
some families have many tipos. And she is a morena, which means, roughly,
brunette. ``Americans think you can't change race, that it's like changing genes,''
Fish said. ``But my wife can change her race by taking an airplane home.''
Last year, the association urged the government to drop the term race from its
census categories in favor of blurrier, but more useful, terms such as ethnicity that
also reflect culture and the psychological tendency of people to label themselves.
Now, while strict racial categories are not being abandoned altogether, censuses will
permit people to list themselves in several races if they so choose.
Since 1900, 26 different racial categories have been used in various censuses,
including Hindu and Mexican. At the turn of the century in the United States,
Italians, the Irish, and Jews were all thought to be racial groups.
Nearly all college textbooks have long since dropped the idea that humanity can be
neatly, or even sloppily, divided into races.
And a recent survey found that some experts in the 19th century graded humanity
into as many as 300 races. Even current encyclopedias routinely list as many as nine
races (African, American Indian, Asian, Australian, European, Indian, Melanesian,
Micronesian, and Polynesian).
In years past, children of mixed marriages ``were assigned the racial (and legal)
status of the more subordinate parent,'' said Faye Harrison, an anthropologist at the
University of South Carolina.
``That rule, called . . . the `one drop rule' (for one drop of blood), has worked to
classify me as African American, period,'' said Harrison. ``Despite the fact that I, like
most other African Americans I know, have a mixed heritage and mixed `race'
genealogy. But that multicultural or multiracial reality is part of my extended
family's private transcript, not our public identity as blacks, as African Americans.''
Studies show that the ancestry of American blacks is about 70 percent African, with
the rest European and American Indian.
Stanford geneticist Cavalli- Sforza and his colleagues are collecting genes from
traditional peoples all over the world. From them, they can get a good idea how past
populations migrated and intermingled.
The gradients, or rate of change from place to place, ``are all gradual. The idea of
race is not tenable,'' Cavalli-Sforza added. The geographic patterns of some sets of
genes do not match other sets of genes, showing clearly that human populations have
been merging, migrating, and intermarrying from the start.
While some racist groups may believe there once were pure African or Nordic or
other races, genes tell a different story, according to Alan R. Templeton, a biologist at
Washington University in St. Louis.
Still, anthropologists know they have a hard sell.
``Teaching that racial categories lack biological validity can be as much of a
challenge as teaching in the 17th century that the Earth goes around the sun,'' said
Marks.