DOES RACE EXIST?

The tendency of our species to find tiny differences in physical appearance between different parts of humanity to be terribly important is most peculiar. We are not alone in this of course, in that various other species make use of physical signalling for courtship which excludes those a little different; while other social animals can treat interlopers with hostility. However the extremes to which we can go are alarming - employing racial vilification, declaring people from other parts of the globe to be inferior or even subhuman, and murdering them, occupying their territory and engaging in ethnic cleansing whenever the opportunity presents.

Interspecies difference is in fact very small - all the "races" perform about equally on most physical criteria, a child from one "race" brought up in a family from another is indistinguishable from any other adopted child. Only two countries in the world, USA and Brazil, still distinguish "race" in their census and one wonders why they bother when there are no functional differences, except perhaps to determine eligibility for affirmative action which has been necessitated by past discrimination.

Genetics and a misguided interpretation of Darwinism has led to some particularly abhorrent doctrines such as Nazism. However, as the methodology of genetics has improved it has become apparent that there are no biological subspecies of sapiens. Analyses such as Fitzpatrick (1998) typically show that 85% of the genetic difference in sapiens is between individuals, and about 15% might be traced to "racial" differences. I can confirm that this is about right - as someone who was lived and worked  in may parts of the globe I have long since ceased to be surprised that I meet the same types of people wherever I go.

However society seems to have gone rather overboard while attempting to put the unpleasant past behind us. Online face tests such as PBS convince us that one cannot identify "race" from faces, at least in America. But might we therefore be missing an important insight?

The fact of the matter is that there are key sites on the globe where "difference" reaches a maximum - for a start. West Africa, Northern Europe and East Asia. Almost anyone can distinguish almost everyone who comes from these places - in facial features and skin colour, while experts on bone structure can easily determine the origins of skeletons from each of these regions. If one looks on the map, there are gradients of difference away from these places which look very much like diagrams for parapatric speciation.

When working from the basic assumptions of this series of articles - namely that sapiens broke out of some ancestral homeland and replaced all other homo while breeding with them to some extent, one might wonder whether these particular places are core sites for other homo ssp - so that Europeans look as they do because they bred with Neanderthals, and Asians and Africans with other groups of early humans.

Looking at the above depiction of a neanderthal woman, one might immediately conclude she is a scruffy but attractive European with big brows and jaw. All the racial determinants are present - reddish hair, white skin, blue-green eyes and the big nose. If she is not a European forerunner, than one would have to presume lightning strikes twice - that there is something about this particular location that has caused these characteristics to develop independently twice, and and not in any other place - a tall order.

Personally I would find it ironic if the Europeans' vaunted racial superiority was actually due to admixture from the "nasty, brutish and short" Neanderthals. However, this opinion is not held by the paleoanthropological community, which holds that these various characteristics are due to local founder effects or parallel mutations.