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The term race describes populations or groups of people distinguished by different sets of characteristics, and beliefs about common ancestry. The most widely used human racial categories are based on visible traits (especially skin color, facial features and hair texture), and self-identification.[1]
Conceptions of race, as well as specific ways of grouping races, vary by culture and over time, and are often controversial for scientific as well as social and political reasons. Many scientists contend that while the features on which racial categorizations are made may be based on genetic factors, the idea of race itself, and actual divisions of persons into groups based on selected hereditary features, are social constructs.[2]
Since the 1940s, some evolutionary scientists have rejected the view of race as a biologically meaningful concept. A majority of evolutionary scientists reject the notion that any definition of race pertaining to humans can have any taxonomic rigour and validity;[3] recently Keita et. al. argued that although "race" is a valid taxonomic concept in other species, it cannot be applied to humans.[4] Mainstream scientists have argued that race definitions are imprecise, arbitrary, derived from custom, have many exceptions, have many gradations, and that the numbers of races observed vary according to the culture examined. They further maintain that "race" as such is best understood as a social construct.
It was not until the 16th century that the word "race" entered into the English language, from the French "race" - "race, breed, lineage" (which in turn was probably a loan from the Italian "razza"). Meanings of the term in the 16th century included "wines with a characteristic flavour", "people with common occupation", and "generation". A meaning of "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".
Given visually 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. For example, the Ancient Egyptian sacred text called Book of Gates identifies four ethnic categories that are now conventionally labeled "Egyptians", "Asiatics", "Libyans", and "Nubians", but such distinctions tended to conflate differences as defined by physical features such as skin tone, with tribal and national identity. Classical civilizations from Rome to China tended to invest much more importance in familial or tribal affiliation than with ones physical appearance (Dikötter 1992; Goldenberg 2003). Ancient Greek and Roman authors also attempted to explain and categorize visible biological differences among peoples known to them. Such categories often also included fantastical human-like beings which 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 became full members of a society by growing up within that society or by adopting that 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.
The word "race", along with many of the ideas now associated with the term, were products of European imperialism and colonization during the age of exploration.(Smedley 1999) As Europeans encountered people from different parts of the world, they speculated about the physical, social, and cultural differences among various human groups. The rise of the Atlantic slave trade, which gradually displaced an earlier trade in slaves from throughout the world, created further incentive to categorize human groups in order to justify the subordination of African slaves.(Meltzer 1993) Drawing on Classical sources and upon 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 upon their social structures as was found 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 today in non-colonised countries such as China and Japan.
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.
According to philosopher Michel Foucault, theories of both racial and class conflict can be traced to 17th century political debates about innate difference between ethnicities. In England radicals such as John Lilburne emphasised conflicts between Saxon and Norman peoples. In France Henri de Boulainvilliers argued that the Germanic Franks possessed a natural right to leadership, in contrast to descendants of the Gauls. In the 18th century, the differences among 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. It was further argued that some groups may be the result of mixture between formerly distinct populations, but that careful study could distinguish the ancestral races that had combined to produce admixed groups.
The 19th century saw attempts to change race from a taxonomic to a biological concept. In the 19th century a number of natural scientists wrote on race: Georges Cuvier, Charles Darwin, Alfred Wallace, Francis Galton, James Cowles Pritchard, Louis Agassiz, Charles Pickering, and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. 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).
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), thus biologizing the notion of "race", as Foucault demonstrated in his historical analysis; 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.
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", 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 culture as well as by physical appearances (Hannaford 1996). Campaigns of oppression and genocide were often motivated by supposed racial differences (Horowitz 2001).
In Charles Darwin's most controversial book, The Descent of Man, he made strong suggestions of racial differences and European superiority. In Darwin's view, stronger tribes of humans always replaced weaker tribes. As savage tribes came in conflict with civilized nations, such as England, the less advanced people were destroyed. The destruction of the weaker peoples seemed desirable to many scientists at the time. It was thought that "fit" people would replace the "unfit" and human evolution would be accelerated.[5] Nevertheless, he also noted the great difficulty naturalists had in trying to decide how many "races" there actually were (Darwin was himself a monogenist on the question of race, believing that all humans were of the same species and finding "race" to be a somewhat arbitrary distinction between groups): <blockquote>Man has been studied more carefully than any other animal, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classed as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory St. Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawfurd), or as sixty- three, according to Burke. This diversity of judgment does not prove that the races ought not to be ranked as species, but it shews that they graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them. </blockquote>
Discussions of race are made more complicated because race research has taken place on at least two scales (global and national) and from the point of view of different research aims. Evolutionary scientists are typically interested in humanity as a whole; and taxonomic racial classifications are often either unhelpful to, or refuted by, studies that focus on the question of global human diversity. Policy-makers and applied professions (such as law-enforcement or medicine), however, are typically concerned only with genetic variation at the national or sub-national scale, and find taxonomic racial categories useful.
These distinctions of research aims and scale can be seen by the example of three major research papers published since 2002: Rosenberg et al. (2002), Serre & Pääbo (2004), and Tang et al. (2005). Both Rosenberg et al. and Serre & Pääbo study global genetic variation, but they arrive at different conclusions. Serre & Pääbo attribute their differing conclusions to experimental design. While Rosenberg et al. studied individuals from populations across the globe without respect to geography, Serre & Pääbo sampled individuals with respect to geography. By sampling individuals from major populations on each continent, Rosenberg et al. find evidence for genetic "clusters" (i.e., races). In contrast, Serre & Pääbo find that with respect to geography human genetic variation is continuous and "clinal". The research interest of Rosenberg et al. is medicine (i.e., epidemiology), whereas the research interest of Serre & Pääbo is human evolution. Tang et al. studied genetic variation within the United States with an interest in whether race/ethnicity or geography is of greater importance to epidemiological research. In contrast to Serre & Pääbo, Tang et al. find that race/ethnicity is of greater importance within the United States. Further recent research[6] correlating self-identified race with population genetic structure[7] echoed the conclusions in Tang. Indeed, the contrasting conclusions between global and national levels of analysis were predicted by Serre & Pääbo:
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:
A polytypic species has two or more races (or, in current parlance, two or more sub-types). These are 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. Note that groups which would not interbreed freely, even if brought together such that they had the opportunity to do so, are not races: they are separate species.
Although this attempt at conceptual precision gained currency with many biologists, especially zoologists, evolutionary scientists have criticized it on a number of fronts.
All human beings now alive are regarded as belonging to the same subspecies: Homo sapiens sapiens.
At the beginning of the 20th century, anthropologists questioned, and eventually abandoned, the claim that biologically distinct races are isomorphic with 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 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 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 animal systematics, and further rejected the claim that "races" were equivalent to "subspecies" (Wilson and Brown 1953).
One of the crucial innovations in reconceptualizing genotypic and phenotypic variation was anthropologist C. Loring Brace's observation that such variations, insofar as it is affected by natural selection, migration, or genetic drift, are distributed along geographic gradations; these gradations are 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" were appropriate or useful ways to describe populations (Lewontin 1973). Some researchers report the variation between racial groups (measured by Sewall Wright's population structure statistic F<sub>ST</sub>) accounts for as little as 5% of human genetic variation<sup>2</sup>.
A. W. F. Edwards claimed in 2003 that such conclusions are unwarranted because the argument ignores the fact that most of the information that distinguishes populations is hidden in the correlation structure of the data and not simply in the variation of the individual factors.[8] While it makes Lewontin's argument unwarranted, Edward's paper does not address the existence or absence of human race, see Lewontin's Fallacy.
Also, it has been argued that the calculation of within group and between group diversity has violated certain assumptions regarding human genetic variation. Calculation of this variation is known as F<sub>ST</sub> and Long and Kittles (2003) have questioned the validity of this reproducible statistic. The first problem is that effective population size is assumed to be equal in the calculation of F<sub>ST</sub>, if population sizes vary, then allele relatedness among alleles will also vary. The second problem is that F<sub>ST</sub> calculation has assumed that each population is evolutionarily independent. Calculation of F<sub>ST</sub> can therefore only be made for the set of populations being observed, and generalisations from specific data sets cannot be applied to the species as a whole.[9]
Long and Kittles tested four models for determining F<sub>ST</sub> and concluded that the model used most often for estimating this statistic is the simplest and worst fitting. Their best fit model was still a poor fit for the observed genetic variation, and calculation of F<sub>ST</sub> for this model can only be made on a population by population basis. They conclude that African populations have the highest level of genetic diversity, with diversity much reduced in populations outside of Africa. They postulate that if an extra-terrestrial alien life form killed the entire human species, but kept a single population which it preserved, the choice of population to keep would greatly effect the level of diversity represented. If an African population were selected then no diversity would be lost, whereas nearly a third of genetic diversity would be lost if a Papuan New Guinea population were chosen. Indeed within population genetic diversity in African populations has been shown to be greater than between population genetic diversity for Asians and Europeans. They conclude that their findings are consistent with the American Association of Physical Anthropologists 1996 statement on race They also state that none of the race concepts they discuss are compatible with their results.[9]
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: 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).
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). So, taking them in isolation would appear to get you nowhere. 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).
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.)
According to Jonathan Marks, By the 1970s, it had become clear that (1)most human differences were cultural; (2) what was not cultural was principally polymorphic - that is to say, found in diverse groups of people at different frequencies; (3) what was not cultural or polymorphic was principlally clinal - that is to say, gradually variable over geography; and (4) what was left - the component of human diversity that was not cultural, polymorphic, or clinalk - was very small.
A consensus consequently developed among anthropologists and geneticisms that race as the previous generation had known it - as largely discrete, geographically distinct, gene pools - did not exist. [10]
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 concerning shared culture and history. 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 U.S. civil rights movement and the emergence of numerous anti-colonial movements worldwide. They thus came to understood these shared beliefs, even when expressed in the language of race or nation, to be social constructs (Gordon 1964).
see also single-origin hypothesis, multiregional hypothesis.
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 an entirely 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.
The multi-regional hypothesis consists of several models of human evolution which all posit that the human races evolved from separate archaic humans over millions of years. Advocates (see Frayer et al. 1993) 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 of phenotypic variation (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, and do not necessarily support the multi-regional model.
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). Most other groups, including Europeans, Oceanians, 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.
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 inherited from a single parent. 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:
Chimpanzees and humans belong to different genera, indicated in Blue. 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, and the points made in the preceding section, insofar as they apply to an "African race", are understood here). Note that vertical distances are not meaningful in this representation. The main characteristic seen on this phylogenetic tree agrees to the relation of the system of the group of human clarified as a rule by the polymorphism of a past protein and the season of DNA of a recent nucleus.
Since the 1980s, there have been indications that human genetic diversity is low as compared to other species that have been studied. For example, two random humans are expected to differ at approximately 1 in 1000 nucleotide pairs, whereas two random chimpanzees differ at 1 in 500 nucleotide pairs. This is interpreted to mean that the human species is relatively young, perhaps too young to evolve subspecies. 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 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).
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). Richard G. Klein, Nicholas Wade and Spencer Wells, among others, have postulated that modern humans did not leave Africa and successfully colonize the rest of the world until as recently as 50,000 years B.P., pushing back the dates for subsequent population splits as well.
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.
Such 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).
Genetic data can be used to infer population structure and assign individuals to groups that often correspond with their self-identified geographical ancestry. Recently, Lynn Jorde and Steven Wooding argued that "Analysis of many loci now yields reasonably accurate estimates of genetic similarity among individuals, rather than populations. Clustering of individuals is correlated with geographic origin or ancestry." [11]
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 377 markers, Rosenberg et al. (2002) were able to assign 1,056 individuals from 52 populations around the globe to one of six genetic clusters, of which five correspond to major geographic regions.
However, in analyses that assign individuals to groups 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. Also, in a survey of college students who self-identified as “white” in a northeastern U.S. university, ~30% of whites had less than 90% European ancestry.[12]
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/ethnicity (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 clustering between continents can also be used to describe clustering within continents. However, the study of intra-continental ancestry may require a greater number of informative markers. Indigenous populations from neighboring geographic regions on average 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). Also, clines and clusters, seemingly discordant perspectives on human genetic diversity may be reconciled. A recent comprehensive study has stated: "At the same time, we find that human genetic diversity consists not only of clines, but also of clusters."[13]
Some researchers have tried to clarify the idea of race by equating it to the biological idea of the clade, but this possible remedy was rejected on two grounds.
Rachel Caspari (2003) argued that clades are by definition monophyletic groups (a taxon that includes all descendants of a given ancestor) since races are not monophyletic, they cannot be clades.
For anthropologists Lieberman and Jackson (1995), however, there are more profound methodological and conceptual problems with using cladistics to support concepts of race. They emphasize that "the molecular and biochemical proponents of this model explicitly use racial categories in their initial grouping of samples". For example, the They argue that however significant the empirical research, these studies use the term race in conceptually sloppy ways. They suggest that the authors of these studies find support for racial distinctions only because they began assuming the validity of race. Indeed, recent research reports evidence for smooth, clinal genetic variation even in regions previously considered racially homogeneous, with the apparent gaps turning out to be artifacts of sampling techniques (Serre & Pääbo 2004). These scientists do not dispute the importance of cladistic research, only its retention of the word race, when reference to populations and clinal gradations are more than adequate to describe the results.
One result of debates over the meaning and validity of the concept "race" is that the current literature across different disciplines regarding human variation lacks consensus, though within some fields, such as biology, there is strong consensus. Some studies use the word race in its early essentialist taxonomic sense. Many others 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 value laden synonym.
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 was completely rejected by the community of social sciences in the second half of the 20th century.
Scientific support for the Caucasoid, Negroid, Mongoloid terminology of racial classification has diminished over the past century. These terms originally denoted skull types and sprang from the technique known as craniofacial anthropometry, but these disciplines have been abandoned by the mainstream scientific community. Today they have only two common uses. They are used in forensic anthropology as an indicator of ethnicity of skeletal remains. And they can be used as euphemisms for making racially based distinctions that are now regarded as being racist and scientifically baseless by mainstream science.
Since 1932, some 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. According to one academic journal entry, where 78 percent of the articles in the 1931 Journal of Physical Anthropology employed these or nearly synonymous terms reflecting a bio-race paradigm, only 36 percent did so in 1965, and just 28 percent did in 1996.[14] The American Anthropological Association, drawing on biological research, currently holds 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".[15]
In an ongoing debate, some geneticists argue that race is neither a meaningful concept nor a useful heuristic device,[16] and even that genetic differences among groups are biologically meaningless,[17] on the grounds that more genetic variation exists within such races than among them, and that racial traits overlap without discrete boundaries.[18] Other geneticists, in contrast, argue that categories of self-identified race/ethnicity or biogeographic ancestry are both valid and useful,[19] that these categories correspond with clusters inferred from multilocus genetic data,[20] and that this correspondence implies that genetic factors might contribute to unexplained phenotypic variation between groups.[21]
In February, 2001, the editors of the medical journal Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine asked authors to no longer use "race" as an explanatory variable and not to use obsolescent terms. Some other peer-reviewed journals, such as the New England Journal of Medicine and the American Journal of Public Health, have made similar endeavours.[22] Furthermore, the National Institutes of Health recently issued a program announcement for grant applications through February 1, 2006, specifically seeking researchers who can investigate and publicize among primary care physicians the detrimental effects on the nation's health of the practice of medical racial profiling using such terms. The program announcement quoted the editors of one journal as saying that, "analysis by race and ethnicity has become an analytical knee-jerk reflex."[23]
The most recent survey, taken in 1985 (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:
In everyday speech, race is often used inconsistently to refer to different kinds of groups. For instance in many parts of the United States, categories such as Hispanic or Latino are viewed to constitute a race, while others view "Hispanic" as referring to an ethnic group. As anthropologists and other evolutionary scientists have shifted away from the language of race to the term population to talk about genetic differences, Historians, anthropologists and social scientists have re-conceptualized the term "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 Stephan Palmie has recently summarized, race "is not a thing but a social relation" [25]; or, in the words of Katya Gibel Mevorach, "a metonym," "a human invention whose criteria for differentiation are neither universal nor fixed but have always been used to manage difference." [26] 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.
Even as the idea of "race" was becoming a powerful organizing principle in many societies, the shortcomings of the concept were apparent. In the Old World, the gradual transition in appearances from one group to adjacent groups emphasized that "one variety of mankind does so sensibly pass into the other, that you cannot mark out the limits between them," as Blumenbach observed in his writings on human variation (Marks 1995, p. 54). In parts of the Americas, the situation was somewhat different. The immigrants to the New World came largely from widely separated regions of the Old World—western and northern Europe, western Africa, and, later, eastern Asia and southern Europe. In the Americas, the immigrant populations began to mix among themselves and with the indigenous inhabitants of the continent. In the United States, for example, most people who self-identify as African American have some European ancestors—in one analysis of genetic markers that have differing frequencies between continents, European ancestry ranged from an estimated 7% for a sample of Jamaicans to ∼23% for a sample of African Americans from New Orleans (Parra et al. 1998). Similarly, many people who identify as European American have some African or Native American ancestors, either through openly interracial marriages or through the gradual inclusion of people with mixed ancestry into the majority population. In a survey of college students who self-identified as white in a northeastern U.S. university, ∼30% were estimated to have less than 90% European ancestry (Shriver et al. 2003).
In the United States since its early history, Native Americans, African-Americans and European-Americans were classified as belonging to different races. For nearly three centuries, the criteria for membership in these groups were similar, comprising a person’s appearance, his fraction of known non-White ancestry, and his social circle.<sup>2</sup> But the criteria for membership in these races diverged in the late 19th century. During Reconstruction, increasing numbers of Americans began to consider anyone with "one drop" of "Black blood" to be Black.<sup>3</sup> By the early 20th century, this notion of invisible blackness was made statutory in many states and widely adopted nationwide.<sup>4</sup> In contrast, Amerindians continue to be defined by a certain percentage of "Indian blood" (called blood quantum) due in large part to American slavery ethics. Finally, for the past century or so, to be White one had to have "pure" White ancestry. (Utterly European-looking Americans of Hispanic or Arab ancestry are exceptions in being seen as White by most Americans despite traces of known African ancestry.)
Efforts to sort the increasingly mixed population of the United States into discrete categories generated many difficulties (Spickard 1992). By the standards used in past censuses, many millions of children born in the United States have belonged to a different race than have one of their biological parents. Efforts to track mixing between groups led to a proliferation of categories (such as "mulatto" and "octoroon") and "blood quantum" distinctions that became increasingly untethered from self-reported ancestry. A person's racial identity can change over time, and self-ascribed race can differ from assigned race (Kressin et al. 2003). Until the 2000 census, Latinos were required to identify with a single race despite the long history of mixing in Latin America; partly as a result of the confusion generated by the distinction, 32.9% (U.S. census records) of Latino respondents in the 2000 census ignored the specified racial categories and checked "some other race". (Mays et al. 2003 claim a figure of 42%)
The difference between how Native American and Black identities are defined today (blood quantum versus one-drop) has demanded explanation. According to anthropologists such as Gerald Sider, the goal of such racial designations was to concentrate power, wealth, privilege and land in the hands of Whites in a society of White hegemony and White privilege (Sider 1996; see also Fields 1990). The differences have little to do with biology and far more to do with the history of racism and specific forms of White supremacy (the social, geopolitical and economic agendas of dominant Whites vis-à-vis subordinate Blacks and Native Americans) especially the different roles Blacks and Amerindians occupied in White-dominated nineteenth-century America. The theory suggests that the blood quantum definition of Native American identity enabled Whites to acquire Amerindian lands, while the one-drop rule of Black identity enabled Whites to preserve their agricultural labor force. The contrast presumably emerged because as peoples transported far from their land and kinship ties on another continent, Black labor was relatively easy to control, thus reducing Blacks to valuable commodities as agricultural laborers. In contrast, Amerindian labor was more difficult to control; moreover, Amerindians occupied large territories that became valuable as agricultural lands, especially with the invention of new technologies such as railroads; thus, the blood quantum definition enhanced White acquisition of Amerindian lands in a doctrine of Manifest Destiny that subjected them to marginalization and multiple episodic localized campaigns of extermination.
The political economy of race had different consequences for the descendants of aboriginal Americans and African slaves. The 19th-century blood quantum rule meant that it was relatively easier for a person of mixed Euro-Amerindian ancestry to be accepted as White. The offspring of only a few generations of intermarriage between Amerindians and Whites likely would not have been considered Amerindian at all—at least not in a legal sense. Amerindians could have treaty rights to land, but because an individual with one Amerindian great-grandparent no longer was classified as Amerindian, they lost any legal claim to Amerindian land. According to the theory, this enabled Whites to acquire Amerindian lands. The irony is that the same individuals who could be denied legal standing because they were "too White" to claim property rights, might still be Amerindian enough to be considered as "breeds," stigmatized for their Native American ancestry.
The 20th-century one-drop rule, on the other hand, made it relatively difficult for anyone of known Black ancestry to be accepted as White. The child of an African-American sharecropper and a White person was considered Black. And, significant in terms of the economics of sharecropping, such a person also would likely be a sharecropper as well, thus adding to the employer's labor force.
In short, this theory suggests that in a 20th-century economy that benefited from sharecropping, it was useful to have as many Blacks as possible. Conversely, in a 19th-century nation bent on westward expansion, it was advantageous to diminish the numbers of those who could claim title to Amerindian lands by simply defining them out of existence.
It must be mentioned, however, that although some scholars of the Jim Crow period agree that the 20th-century notion of invisible Blackness shifted the color line in the direction of paleness, thereby swelling the labor force in response to Southern Blacks' great migration northwards, others (Joel Williamson, C. Vann Woodward, George M. Fredrickson, Stetson Kennedy) see the one-drop rule as a simple consequence of the need to define Whiteness as being pure, thus justifying White-on-Black oppression. In any event, over the centuries when Whites wielded power over both Blacks and Amerindians and widely believed in their inherent superiority over people of color, it is no coincidence that the hardest racial group in which to prove membership was the White one.
In the United States, social and legal conventions developed over time that forced individuals of mixed ancestry into simplified racial categories (Gossett 1997). An example is the "one-drop rule" implemented in some state laws that treated anyone with a single known African American ancestor as black (Davis 2001). The decennial censuses conducted since 1790 in the United States also created an incentive to establish racial categories and fit people into those categories (Nobles 2000). In other countries in the Americas where mixing among groups was more extensive, social categories have tended to be more numerous and fluid, with people moving into or out of categories on the basis of a combination of socioeconomic status, social class, ancestry, and appearance (Mörner 1967).
The term "Hispanic" as an ethnonym emerged in the twentieth century with the rise of migration of laborers from Spanish-speaking countries to the United States; it thus includes people who had been considered racially distinct (Black, White, Amerindian) in their home countries. Today, the word "Latino" is often used as a synonym for "Hispanic". In contrast to "Latino," "Anglo" is now used in a similar way to refer to the descendants of British colonists, and values and practices derived from British culture.
Compared to 19th-century United States, 20th-century Brazil was characterized by a relative absence of sharply defined racial groups. According to anthropologist Marvin Harris (1989) this pattern reflects a different history and different social relations. Basically, race in Brazil was "biologized," but in a way that recognized the difference between ancestry (which determines genotype) and phenotypic differences. There, racial identity was not governed by a rigid descent rule. A Brazilian child was never automatically identified with the racial type of one or both parents, nor were there only a limited number of categories to choose from. Over a dozen racial categories would be recognized in conformity with all the possible combinations of hair color, hair texture, eye color, and skin color. These types grade into each other like the colors of the spectrum, and no one category stands significantly isolated from the rest. That is, race referred to appearance, not heredity.
Through this system of racial identification, parents and children and even brothers and sisters were frequently accepted as representatives of opposite racial types. In a fishing village in the state of Bahia, an investigator showed 100 people pictures of three sisters and asked them to identify the races of each. In only six responses were the sisters identified by the same racial term. Fourteen responses used a different term for each sister (Harris 1964: 57). In another experiment nine portraits were shown to a hundred people. Forty different racial types were elicited (Harris 1964: 58). It was found, in addition, that a given Brazilian might be called by as many as thirteen different terms by other members of the community (Harris 1964: 57). These terms are spread out across practically the entire spectrum of theoretical racial types. A further consequence of the absence of a descent rule was that Brazilians apparently not only disagreed about the racial identity of specific individuals, but they also seemed to be in disagreement about the abstract meaning of the racial terms as defined by words and phrases. For example, 40% of a sample ranked moreno claro ("light" person of primarily European ancestry with dark hair) as a lighter type than mulato claro ("light" person of mixed European and African ancestry), while 60% reversed this order (Harris 1964: 58). A further note of confusion is that one person might employ different racial terms to describe the same person over a short time span (Harris 1964: 59; Goldstein 1999: 566-568).} [For a solid discussion of Brazilian racial terms, see Livio Sansone's Blackness Without Ethnicity (2003) and France Winddance Twine's Racism in a Racial Democracy (1998).] The choice of which racial description to use may vary according to the relationship (be it personal, class-based, or otherwise) between the speaker and the person concerned and moods of the individuals involved (Harris 1964: 59).
So, although the identification of a person by race is far more fluid and flexible in Brazil than in the U.S., there still are racial stereotypes and prejudices. African features have been considered less desirable; Blacks have been considered socially inferior, and Whites superior (Harris 1964: 59-60). These white supremacist values seem to be an obvious legacy of European colonization and the slave-based plantation system (Harris 1964: 54-57). The complexity of racial classifications in Brazil is reflective of the extent of miscegenation in Brazilian society, a society that remains highly, but not strictly, stratified along color lines. Henceforth, the Brazilian narrative of a perfect "post-racist" country, composed of the "cosmic race" celebrated in 1925 by José Vasconcelos, must be met with caution, as sociologist Gilberto Freyre demonstrated in 1933 in Casa Grande e Senzala.
During the Enlightenment, racial classifications were used to justify enslavement of those deemed to be of "inferior", non-White races, and thus supposedly best fitted for lives of toil under White supervision. These classifications made the distance between races seem nearly as broad as that between species, easing unsettling questions about the appropriateness of such treatment of humans. The practice was at the time generally accepted by both scientific and lay communities.
Arthur Gobineau's An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853-1855) was one of the milestones in the new racist discourse, along with Vacher de Lapouge's "anthroposociology." They posited the historical existence of national races such as German and French, branching from basal races supposed to have existed for millennia, such as the Aryan race, and believed political boundaries should mirror these supposed racial ones.
Later, one of Hitler's favorite sayings was, "Politics is applied biology". Hitler's ideas of racial purity led to unprecedented atrocities in Europe. Hitler and others enacted race laws used to persecute and murder millions of Jews, who were seen as a race. Since then, ethnic cleansing has occurred in the Balkans and Rwanda. Ethnic cleansing might be seen as another name for the tribal warfare and mass murder that has afflicted human society for ages, but, in modern times, atrocities have regularly been associated with the attempted use of racial inferiority claims to dehumanize some group. Claiming a scientific basis for negative evaluations can give greater credence to such an ideological agenda.
Racial inequality has been a concern of United States politicians and legislators since the country's founding. In the 19th century most White Americans (including abolitionists) explained racial inequality as an inevitable consequence of biological differences. Since the mid-20th century, political and civic leaders as well as scientists have debated to what extent racial inequality is cultural in origin. Some argue that current inequalities between Blacks and Whites are primarily the result of cultural and historical factors, the result of past racism, of slavery and of segregation, and so could be redressed through such programs as affirmative action and Head Start. Others work to reduce tax funding of remedial programs for minorities. They have based their advocacy on aptitude test data that, according to them, shows that racial ability differences are biological in origin and cannot be leveled even by intensive educational efforts. In electoral politics, many more ethnic minorities have recently won important offices in Western nations than in earlier times, although the highest offices tend to remain in the hands of Whites.
In his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. observed:
Dr. King's hope, expressed in his I Have a Dream speech, was that the civil rights struggle would one day produce a society where people were not "judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
Because of the identification of the concept of race with political oppression, many natural and social scientists today are wary of using race to describe human variation. Others simply find race a less useful system of categorization than some other systems. Still others, however, argue that race is of continuing utility and validity in scientific research notwithstanding the objections raised against it.
Some concepts of race are criticized as being based on mere conventions, traditions, or statistics. The number of racial categories often seems arbitrary since different authorities define different numbers of races. Often unique individual human beings seem to get ignored. The criteria used to divide the human species are also criticized as being arbitrary, and and it is claimed that they often only focus on superficial marker traits such as skin color, geographical range, and thus the traits being used pertain to a very few genes out of a very large human genome. The varying epigenic expressions of the same genes is rarely taken into account.
Main article: Race and intelligence
Researchers have reported differences in the average IQ test scores of various ethnic groups. The interpretation, causes, accuracy and reliability of these differences are highly controversial. Some researchers, such as Arthur Jensen, Richard Herrnstein, and Richard Lynn have argued that such differences are at least partially genetic. Others, for example Thomas Sowell, argue that the differences largely owe to social and economic inequalities. Still others have such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin have argued that categories such as "race" and "intelligence" are cultural constructs that render any attempt to explain such differences (whether genetically or sociologically) meaningless.
The Flynn effect is the rise of average Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test scores, an effect seen in most parts of the world, although at varying rates. Scholars therefore believe that rapid increases in average IQ seen in many places are much too fast to be as a result of changes in brain physiology and more likely as a result of environmental changes. The fact that environment has a significant effect on IQ demolishes the case for the use of IQ data as a source of genetic information[27][28].
Main article: Race in biomedicine
There is an active debate among biomedical researchers about the meaning and importance of race in their research. The primary impetus for considering race in biomedical research is the possibility of improving the prevention and treatment of diseases by predicting hard-to-ascertain factors on the basis of more easily ascertained characteristics. Somehave argued that in the absence of cheap and widespread genetic tests, racial identification is the best way to predict for certain diseases, such as Cystic fibrosis, Lactose intolerance, Tay-Sachs Disease and sickle cell anemia, which are genetically linked and more prevalent in some populations than others. The most well-known examples of genetically-determined disorders that vary in incidence among populations would be sickle cell disease, thalassaemia, and Tay-Sachs disease.
There has been criticism of associating disorders with race. For example, in the United States sickle cell is typically associated with black people, but this trait is also found in people of Mediterranean, Middle Eastern or Indian ancestry[29]. The sickle cell trait offers some resistance to malaria. In regions where malaria is present sickle cell has been positively selected and consequently the proportion of people with it is greater. Therefore, it has been argued that sickle cell should not be associated with a particular race, but rather with having ancestors who lived in a malaria-prone region. Africans living in areas where there is no malaria, such as the East African highlands, have prevalence of sickle cell as low as parts of Northern Europe [30].
Another example of the use of race in medicine is the recent U.S. FDA approval of BiDil, a medication for congestive heart failure targeted at black people in the United States.[31] Several researchers have questioned the scientific basis for arguing the merits of a medication based on race, however. As Stephan Palmie has recently pointed out, black Americans were disproportionately affected by Hurricane Katrina, but for social and not climatological reasons; similarly, certain diseases may disproportionately affect different races, but not for biological reasons. Several researchers have suggested that BiDil was re-designated as a medicine for a race-specific illness because its manufacturer, Nitromed, needed to propose a new use for an existing medication in order to justify an extension of its patent and thus monopoly on the medication [32], not for pharmacological reasons.
Gene flow and intermixture also have an effect on predicting a relationship between race and "race linked disorders". Multiple sclerosis is typically associated with people of European descent and is of low risk to people of African descent. However due to gene flow between the populations, African Americans have elevated levels of MS relative to Africans[33]. Notable African Americans affected by MS include Richard Pryor and Montel Williams. As populations continue to mix, the role of socially constructed races may diminish in identifying diseases.
In an attempt to provide general descriptions that may facilitate the job of law enforcement officers seeking to apprehend suspects, the United States FBI employs the term "race" to summarize the general appearance (skin color, hair texture, eye shape, and other such easily noticed characteristics) of individuals whom they are attempting to apprehend. From the perspective of law enforcement officers, it is generally more important to arrive at a description that will readily suggest the general appearance of an individual than to make a scientifically valid categorization by DNA or other such means. Thus in addition to assigning a wanted individual to a racial category, such a description will include: height, weight, eye color, scars and other distinguishing characteristics, etc. Scotland Yard use a classification based in the ethnic background of British society: W1 (White-British), W2 (White-Irish), W9 (Any other white background); M1 (White and black Caribbean), M2 (White and black African), M3 (White and Asian), M9 (Any other mixed background); A1 (Asian-Indian), A2 (Asian-Pakistani), A3 (Asian-Bangladeshi), A9 (Any other Asian background); B1 (Black Caribbean), B2 (Black African), B3 (Any other black background); O1 (Chinese), O9 (Any other). Some of the characteristics that constitute these groupings are biological and some are learned (cultural, linguistic, etc.) traits that are easily noticeable.
In many countries, the state is legally banned from maintaining data based on race, which often makes the police issue wanted notices to the public that include labels like "dark skin complexion", etc. One of the factors that encourages this kind of circuitous wordings is that there is controversy over the actual relationship between crimes, their assigned punishments, and the division of people into the so called "races," leading officials to try to deemphasize the alleged race of suspects. In the United States, the practice of racial profiling has been ruled to be both unconstitutional and also to constitute a violation of civil rights. There is active debate regarding the cause of a marked correlation between the recorded crimes, punishments meted out, and the country's "racially divided" people. Many consider de facto racial profiling an example of institutional racism in law enforcement. The history of misuse of racial categories to adversely impact one or more groups and/or to offer protection and advantage to another has a clear impact on debate of the legitimate use of known phenotypical or genotypical characteristics tied to the presumed race of both victims and perpetrators by the government.
More recent work in racial taxonomy based on DNA cluster analysis (see Lewontin's Fallacy) has led law enforcement to narrow their search for individuals based on a range of phenotypical characteristics found consistent with DNA evidence [19]. While controversial, DNA analysis has been successful in helping police identify both victims and perpetrators by giving an indication of what phenotypical characteristics to look for and what community the individual may have lived in. For example, in one case phenotypical characteristics suggested that the friends and family of an unidentified victim would be found among the Asian community, but the DNA evidence directed official attention to missing Native Americans, where her true identity was eventually confirmed. [20]. In an attempt to avoid potentially misleading associations suggested by the word "race," this classification is called "biogeographical ancestry" (BGA) [21] , but the terms for the BGA categories are similar to those used as for race. The difference is that ancestry-informative DNA markers identify continent-of-ancestry admixture, not ethnic self-identity, and provide a wide range of phenotypical characteristics such that some people in a biogeographical category will not match the stereotypical image of an individual belonging to the corresponding race. To facilitate the work of officials trying to find individuals based on the evidence of their DNA traces, firms providing the genetic analyses also provide photographs showing a full range of phenotypical characteristics of people in each biogeographical group. Of special interest to officials trying to find individuals on the basis of DNA samples that indicate a diverse genetic background is what range of phenotypical characteristics people with that general mixture of genotypical characteristics may display.
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