Do Human Races Exist?

[Mikemikev]

Are there races below the species level in Homo sapiens sapiens? I think there are: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid which can be defined as continental clades or subspecies. What do you think? Do you know of any science literature on the subject?

Edited May 29, 2016 by Mikemikev

[exchemist]

Are there races below the species level in Homo sapiens sapiens? I think there are: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid which can be defined as continental clades or subspecies. What do you think? Do you know of any science literature on the subject?

From what I read there is very little genetic evidence to support these distinctions as being anything very significant. I certainly think the term "sub-species" is not justified, given that there is a complete continuum between the various archetypes you mention. But I have not read a lot about it, I admit.

 

There is a Wiki article here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subspecies  from which I would conclude that these archetypes are not separate subspecies.

[CraigD]

Welcome to hypography, Mike! :) Please feel free to start a topic in the introductions forum to tell us something about yourself.

Are there races below the species level in Homo sapiens sapiens? I think there are: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid which can be defined as continental clades or subspecies. What do you think?

I think this question bears much care in answering, accounting for why it’s difficult to find short, clear, good answers to it from scientific experts.

 

Taking the definition from the Wikipedia article exchemist linked,

A common way to decide is that organisms belonging to different subspecies of the same species are capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring, but they do not usually interbreed in nature due to geographic isolation, sexual selection, or other factors.

it's clear that we could chose to assign populations of H.Sapiens that can be distinguished on sight – for example, by skin tone, hair texture and color, distinct facial shape, average height – to subspecies in any way we find useful, like the examples given in the Wikipedia article of zoological taxonomists assigning Bengal tigers and Siberian tigers to different subspecies.

 

We need to be mindful and careful, though, that these subspecies distinctions are useful primarily in studying differences in how the animals interact and have genetically transmitted traits selected by their habitats. The story told by the distinction between a Begal and Siberian tiger is how the same pool of genes in a population adapted to very different, geographically separated environments. The populations aren’t, in an irreversible genetic sense, different. If we were to move a population of Siberia tigers from far northeast to far southern Asia, in a million years of so it would select traits to look much like a population of Bengal tigers, and vice versa. One might say a species is a pool of genes with the potential to express as a population of a subspecies.

 

Do you know of any science literature on the subject?

There’s a lot of popular science on the subject – this short video by Bill Nye, for example – but I don’t know of much remarkable peer-reviewed literature, and suspect there isn’t much, because the question just isn’t very relevant to scientific work.

 

What little I recall, are like "Race, Ethnicity, and Genomics: Social Classifications as Proxies of Biological Heterogeneity", 2002 by medical anthropologist Morris Foster and medical ethicist Richard Sharp, which cautions that scientists and science advocates should be careful that, in rightly seeking to counter scientifically discredited ideas about the superiority and inferiority or races and the legitimacy of laws banning interracial marriage for medical reasons, they not discard the usefulness of studying and basing medical treatments on the difference between the genetics of human populations segregated “due to geographic isolation, sexual selection, or other factors.” H.Sapiens is a single species, but has been segregated into genetically distinct subpopulations. Studying these differences has and continues to inform valuable anthropological theory, and improve medical diagnosis and treatments.

[fahrquad]

There is only one species of Homo Sapiens surviving.  All other perceived differences are inconsequential. 

[fahrquad]

Genetically speaking, the closest hominid species to us still surviving are the Great Apes. Say hello to your uncle.

 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominidae

[fahrquad]

I saw somewhere that 99.9% of all species that have ever existed are extinct.  This is the image I have seen over the last half-century.

 

[fahrquad]

Throw in  a razor and some clothes, and you have my wife's last family reunion.

 

[fahrquad]

Not that my family is much better looking, it i just harder to get us all in one place, since we are more or less scattered all over the world (or dead), well, still scattered all over the world, I guess.

[HydrogenBond]

The question is do human races exist? The answer is, it is all depends on how science wishes to catalog it. For example, if you look at grass seed, all the different types of grass seed are cataloged, based on many distinct species of grass, with certain parameters optimized for certain conditions. To the laymen, grass may be grass. But to the expert they catalog based on distinctions in the same family of life.  

 

Science under PC pressure, had to change it's cataloging schema for humans and human races, so radical elements don't have a cow, due to being fed misinformation. 

 

All I am saying is, science needs to be consistent, with the cataloging of all forms life, whether it be birds, grass, fish, cows, humans. It should not use different cataloging criteria, to appease irrationality and add confusion. 

 

The Poaceae (English pronunciation: /poʊˈeɪ.siˌiː/^{[citation needed]}) or Gramineae are the large and nearly ubiquitous family of monocotyledonous flowering plants known as grasses. The Poaceae include the cereal grasses, bamboos and the grasses of natural grassland and cultivated lawns (turf) and pasture. Grasses have stems that are hollow except at the nodes and narrow alternate leaves borne in two ranks. The lower part of each leaf encloses the stem, forming a leaf-sheath. With ca 780 genera and around 12,000 species,^[4] Poaceae are the fifth-largest plant family, following the Asteraceae, Orchidaceae, Fabaceae and Rubiaceae.^[5]

 

Picture if science decided, that instead of 12000 species of grass, we will make the cataloging of grass consistent with how PC wishes science catalog humans. Now, there is only one species of grass; grass-manity . This will impact landscape businesses when they randomly use hot weather sunny grass in cold shady spots; grass is grass. 

Edited November 12, 2016 by HydrogenBond

[CraigD]

Science under PC pressure, had to change it's cataloging schema for humans and human races, so radical elements don't have a cow, due to being fed misinformation.

Can you back this claim up with a link or reference, HBond :QuestionM

 

I don’t think it's true

 

There have certainly been great changes in the scientific consensus of the biological significance of human races in the past few centuries, including assertions that some races were distinct subspecies of H Sapiens or even species of Homo. Some of these views were politically very damaging, for example, the view promoted by the German government in the 1930s and ‘40s that all people with “Jewish blood” were a detriment to human society, leading to the attempted genocide of all such people known as the Holocaust.

 

Since the discovery of DNA and techniques to effectively analyze it, though, I know of no credible science that regards the living human races to be genetically significant enough to be considered subspecies.

 

Taxonomologically, the races of human are about as distinct as the breeds of domestic dog. Genetic analysis supports these taxonomies.

 

One might be tempted to conclude day anthropological science has reduced the number of classifications of individual humans by abandoning traditional races, but one could also conclude that it has greatly increased them by genetic genealogy, using the presence of groups of and individual genes to determine the ancestry of individual people. Scientific studies of genes in living human populations have given an unprecedentedly detailed and accurate history of the migration and intermingling of humans over time scales from the deeply prehistoric (around 100000 years ago) to the recent (10 of fewer years ago). In addition to and complementing this, genetic ancestry testing purchased by people interested in their own ancestry has been and continues to be growingly popular and affordable, with about 3,500,000 people now atDNA SNP tested, the results summarized for the customer and kept by the testing companies (the largest Ancestry.com and 23andMe.com).

 

An interesting, though more sociological than biological, data from these genetic ancestry studies is a mapping of self-reported race/ethnicity with genetic analysis results. For example, the Genographic Project, started in 2005 by the US National Geographic society, showed that many people are not actually descenced from the populations they believe they were.

 

The Poaceae (English pronunciation: /poʊˈeɪ.siˌiː/^{[citation needed]}) or Gramineae are the large and nearly ubiquitous family

...

Picture if science decided, that instead of 12000 species of grass, we will make the cataloging of grass consistent with how PC wishes science catalog humans.

You’re making a taxonomological error, HBond, confusing a family (Poaceae) with a species (Homo Sapiens, or modern humans).

 

H. Sapiens is in the Hominidae, or great ape, family, along with 7 other living species including orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos The Poaceae family has about 12000 living species, including wheat, rice, corn, bamboo, cane, lawn grass and various wild and ornamental grasses.

 

Race is an informal taxomological rank, below subspecies.

 

H. Sapiens has only one known living subspecies, us, H. Sapiens Sapiens. Several others are suspected to have existed but be extinct now.

 

A well known genus (one taxonomological step up from species) in the Poaceae family, Triticum Aestivum, wheat, has many species (the number of them is uncertain and varies according to literature, but somewhere around 23, including T. Aestivum Aestivum or common wheat, and T. A. Spelta or hulled wheat.