Mispman:
In re archaic humans: not sure what you mean seeing no place. Of course we have archaic genes, we descend from them. Side branches are another question entirely. Evidence, real evidence, not superficial observations, points away from Homo Neandertalis having contributed to present populations. Nothing conclusive, but highly suggestive. No big deal. If you’re talking about Multi Regional hypothesis ( that different varieties of modern morphologies or “races” came from different Homo erectus pops), well MREH is going down the drain. Every piece of substantive evidence points to Out of Africa. Every. Wolpoff is going down in flames. He hopefully will stop clinging to a losing (on the evidence) argument.
In re race: there is no biological basis for race. Period. Your statement that " to say that race is undefinable is to deny the evidence of one’s eyes or to use a racialist’s “definition” as a strawman." is just the start of the problem. To put it in the most stark terms, and I say this to highlight the reason why this is not evidence, the “evidence” before your eyes is the same kind of evidence that led medievals to conclude that maggots spontaneously generate in rotten materials. If that is how we conduct science, well welcome back to alchemy.
Dog breeds is a red herring (1) they are artificially maintained by human breeding programs, not by natural selection (2) dogs snap back to the canine template when they go wild, (e.g. wild mutts). (3) canines are mucho more genetically diverse than humans. Apples and oranges do not shed light on each other.
In regards to the racial discourse, I’ve spent some time studying this and I hope it is not insulting to observe that tour beliefs regarding race reflect the conventional wisdom of the 19th century. They’re really not anything I have not seen before and had I my notes around me I could trace the pedigree of each of the concepts for you. But, they also have nothing to do with reality or what modern population genetics is just beginning to tell us (I personally leave aside Cavalli Sforza because I don’t have a great opinion of his European work). For example, your speculations on the “dark skinned race” of southern Asia — common place wisdom of the last century, well the 19th century actually. This may sound harsh, but I am afraid that is exactly where the ideas are coming from — and sadly most popular ideas about race. Old Victorian superstitions. But then lots of people still believe in literal Creationism, so perhaps I should just get used to it. What modern population genetics tells us is that the “negritos” of south east Asia are not closely related to Africans — except insofar as we are all very, very closely related to Africans, despite genetically trivial but eye catching surface differences. In fact they are most closely related to --if memory serves me here— to more northerly Asians. Their superficial visual identity with Africans (same facial features, hair, skin color etc.) is entirely coincidental and possibly recently developed (in population terms). I’m moving in precisely three days so I shall have to forgo giving full cites, my articles file is in some box somewhere. Jois probably can hook you up (although Jois also likes C-S and I don’t — his work on the ‘populating’ of Europe has been severely criticized by others as putting too much on ambigous genetic evidence. Still he does straight up work so I don’t want to make it sound like he’s not legit. I just don’t like him that much.)
Now, about defining race. Well, the question of skin pigmentation is considerably different from the question of “race”. Skin pigmentation is easy to define, although as the negrito and African example shows, says absolutely nothing about relatedness. “Race” on the other hand is a not very useful abstraction of the distribution of alleles in a few genes.
As far as pigmentation goes, dark skin is selected for in the tropics (helps prevent skin cancer) and apparently some of the ‘african’ features to boot, so it’s likely our common ancestors, who lived in the tropics, were pretty dark and maybe had some ‘africanesque’ features, or a pot-pourri of our modern range of features.
As far as the other stuff, there are not three or four big races. Tere is a single species with a great many populations of fairly minor variations in allelic distribution, some of which were separated from other populations by only partially effective geographic or perhaps geo-social barriers. But the populations differ only in the frequencies of various alleles, there being no alleles fixed within or private to particular “races” (although the PNAS article, the cite still escapes me, claimed in 98 that they had nailed an “African” and “non-African” private allele, but as I said, they failed to sample the likely transitional Africans, weird oversight at best). And the places where frequencies change at one locus are not in general the same places where frequencies change at other loci. You get a big muddle.
Simply put, if there are races, we should be able to point to geographical boundaries between races. I’ll get a little technical, since I just dug up some old cites by accident: Most genetic trees put African mitochondria as paraphyletic (A group is said to be paraphyletic if it consists solely of forms that share a single most recent common ancestor which is included in the group, but does not contain all such forms) to the rest of humanity. If you want to define races as clades (at least mitochondrial clades) then you need several “black” African races -and what are they going to be? Where are the lines going to be drawn- as well as a race including some “black” Africans and everyone else also. In order to find races you have to characterize the boundary, not the core areas.
Try checking out, for a general discussion which includes some comments on problems in Cavalli-Sforza’s approaches: Goodman, Allan. “The Problematics of “Race” in Contemporary Biological Anthropology.” in Biological Anthropology: The State of the Science 1995. Among some things other things to read are Cavalli-Sforza, L Luca; Menozzi, Paolo; & Piazza, Alberto. “Scientific Failure of the Concept of Human Races,” in _The History and Geography of Human Genes. Princeton University Press (Princeton, 1994): 19-20.
In regards to the later, the authors explain how genetic information abundantly proves that there are no distinct “races” in the human species. The number of “races” identified by recent authors who cling to the “race” concept ranges from 3 to 60. “Race” classifications are arrived at without consistent criteria. C-S et al note that there is without question only one human species. All attempts to find smaller groupings within the human species are entirely arbitrary. Gene frequencies vary so greatly within particular populations that they prove useless for distinguishing among geographically defined populations. Even the most isolated human groups carried with their founders diverse sets of genes; large regions of the world are all well known to have experienced many migrations and consequent exchanges of genes. C-S et al conclude “From a scientific point of view, the concept of race has failed to gain any consensus; none is likely, given the gradual variation in existence. It may be objected that the racial stereotypes have a consistency that allows even the layman to classify individuals. However, the major stereotypes, all based on skin color, hair color and form, and facial traits, reflect superficial differences that are not confirmed by deeper analysis. . . .” In other words, alchemical superstitious thinking with no place in a science. Contrary to what many think, race is rejected not because of “political correctness” but because it is baaaaaaaaaaaaaad science. Hell, given the reactions I have seen over the years, on both Left and Right, the politically correct thing is to cling to race no matter what.
Anyways, race as a biological, or scientific concept is useless and positively gets in the way of really understanding our species scientifically. That’s the dispassionate, scientific view. Now the emotional, political view gets all attached to the old superstitions.
In re your statement the “mantra that culture has nothing to do with race seems designed to throw much of human prehistory out with the bathwater” — I have no idea where this comes from. Culture has nothing to do with genes, other than all humanity has a basic template on which to base behavior. You seem to be confusing linguistic-cultural categories (e.g. Bantu or Indo-European) with genetic ones. Other than neighbors are usually closely related for trivial reasons like proximity, there’s no basis for this thinking, which is typically Victorian. Look at Arabic speakers, few of whom actually descend from emmigrants from the Arabian peninsula. Language and culture adoption by otherwise unrelated populations is amply attested to from the earliest historical records to recent times. We humans are malleable characters. To make a vast over-generalization, even in the bloodiest past conquests say in Classical times, women and young children were usually spared and assimilated. Why? Economics — labor and of course, children are malleable. There is no historical or other supportable reason to believe in “Bantu” races or Indo-European ones. Think of the “Mongol” horde — by the time it reached the European world it was composed of a huge mishmash of Turkic, Indic, Mongol etc peoples along for the ride as it were. These visions come straight from old, romantic Victorian histories which unfortunately are more fun than the more prosaic facts supported by archaeological, genetic and linguistic research.
So, rather than “to close one’s eyes to the concept of race removes one of the few tools we have to reconstruct a great deal of human pre-history” to remove race is to open one’s eyes to the less romantic and sweeping but more factual and in my mind more interesting complexity of human prehistory. The sweep of the old Romantic myths is fun but contrary to your statement, prevented or hindered scientific research into understanding our prehistory. E.g. Out of Africa was long opposed because of race, until the genetic evidence just became killer. I could go on and on. I’ll make a rash statement, and say that few concepts have done more to close out eyes to an accurate, scientific reconstruction of prehistory than race.
Boris and others annoyed by my Aryan discourse: Sorry but Aryan is just plain inaccurate and wrong. The confusion of genetics and linguistics is precisely what I write about above. Your models are frankly Victorian and have no place in a scientific understanding of our past. I’m not saying that to be mean, to flame or otherwise disrupt. That’s just the facts — long painfull years becoming conversant with linguistics, genetics etc. (Not a specialist mind you) taught me where the facts lie. I’m just saddened that so many believe these old romantic tales, although they are fun. (By the way, please do lose the “African Tribes” thingy — it’s not very helpful for understanding populations. In fact its plain unhelpful. There are a good number of African populations which do depend on and use milk products. Again, one of the impediments of racial thinking is you miss the detials, which ruin the generalization. I was not talking Botha.
Sorry if this all seems excessively picky and so forth, but I rather think if people are to make progress in the world, we need to have an accurate, scientific understanding of the world. Of course I realize few agree with this.
