Within the human race, how many sub-races are there?
Depends on who you ask. Some people like to say there are basically only three, mongoloid, caucasoid, and negroid. I have an artists reference which (in the section that shows you how to draw faces) has about 20 or so different classifications, such as scandinavian which would be a sub-type of caucasoid above.
I suppose it really depends on how far apart people have to be before you consider them of different lineages. Just think on the topic of evoluition for a while. I remind you that it functions on death. Death of almost everyone before breeding age, many, many possible people lost to miscarriage, childhood illness…
Anywhoo, you can figure this out with dogs, who came about recently, I blief from Northern European wolf stock. They were so useufl that puppies must have been tradced from border to border as fast as people could carry them.
To create a new breed of dog, you start with a couple of dogs with characteristics you like. They’ll be slightly smaller, healthy versions of the wolf. Say you like short hair and long ears. You breed two domestic wolves with the longest ears and the shortest hair you can find.
Here’s the tricky bit - in order to make long ears and short hair, you need to have a couple generations of inbreeding, until you have a large population of long-eared, short-haired idiot dogs. Inbreeding = breeding two animals that share more than 1/8 of a blood.
When you have several generations of dogs, there is enough difference between a randomly chosen two (while still being long-eared and short-haired) that you can let them breed as you will, and you can let them out. Before now, the inbred idiot dogs could not survive iwthout help.
I don’t know how many generations are necessary, but after say 10, you’ve got a very particular set of characteristics that can be guaranteed to stay with its descendents.
The inbreeding part in relation to people may not have been wuite as noticable - if you don’t let your children travel beyong your valley,. then the only people they can breed with are within 1/256 or some other small portion of blood.
THUS, ALL PEOPLE ARE DESCENDED FROM ONE COUPLE!
This has been proven with mitochondrial tests - or rather, that all people are delineated from one woman (speerm don’[t have mitochondria).
People can interbreed just as easily with those from across the polanet as across town.
If your mate is within your species, it’s incest. Perhaps to within a millionth of a blood, but the truth remains.
Interesting, actually - it’s been shown that while children of immediate relations are unhealthy, first cousins can have kids without significant increases in the Drooling Dumbass Syndrome.
Well, according to the architect of the chapel at the U.S. Naval academy at Annapolis, there are eight races. Each one represented by a bust above the…“altar,” or “podium,” or whatever the heck it is at the back of the chapel. I’m a little nearsighted, and I didn’t have my glasses, so I could only make out a bust with the face of a Pharaoh, and one with the face of an American Indian. So there ya’ go.
Everything here said is wrong as pertains to the human species, save maybe that there are a perceived number of races. Genetically speaking we are so closely related across the whole human spectrum that it becomes more than fuzzy and I think you can safely say that race from a biological perspective is a pretty useless term, so much so that the answer would be that there are no races. But I’ll let people with more expertise on the matter answer or link to the miles an miles of answers that they have given in threads in GD, when this thread gets moved to GD, which I would be willing to bet some money on that it will be.
Sparc
Every time the subject has come up, in anthro, biology, humanities, and other classes, I was taught that there’s no biological basis for seperate human races. I remember my anthro teacher stressing this. (Physical anthropology)
Miscomprehension. Search Great Debates on mtDNA Eve for clarifications on mtDNA Eve and Y-Adam.
The remainder of the message is not worthy of comment.
In regards to the genetics of the question, again search Great Debates where you will find cites to the original literature.
Ug, not again!!! There is only one real race, the rest are just however you want to define a race as.
Well, there is the Daytona 500, the Boston Marathon, the Kentucky Derby, and Tour de France. I’m sure there are more I can’t think of right now.
Damn Racist!
Horses, sports cars, marathoners, and bicycles all belong to the same race, Uncle Bill. Differentials in performance–even when factoring in those big thigh quarterhorses of West African lineage
–can easily be explained by socio-cultural determinants.
Do us a goddam favor and research this topic before contributing next time. For more info, check Grienspace’s comments in “Great Debates.”
According to my Encylopedia there are four races of man. Mongoloid, Caucasoid, Negroid, and Malay. It has pictures of bronze busts illustrating these races and several others showing other specific ethnicities. Some of the best photos I have seen illustrating the races were of people all about the same darkness, betraying the notion that is is just skin that is the difference. Still on close examination the 4 categories are pretty arbitrary.
I read one study looked at how the wear patterns on the lower front teeth as an mark of racial subtypes and used these differences to study who was in the new world and when. In that study there were many wear patterns that were found in various groupings all over the Americas. There were several different types all of which in the tradidional catagorization would be mongoloid, as native americans are usually catagorized as a subtype of mongoloid.
The notion of race is very slippery. There are obvious groups of people that share physical characteristics, but these divisions are mutable, and obvous goes out the window when you look at people of mixed races. Any scientific look at race as a product of genes would have to acknowledge some measurable differences. But when we acknowlege that someone is white or black, we don’t take DNA samples. My husband is obviously white. However I have known people that were obviously black whose family had about the same racial make up as my husband’s.
The topic of the existence of human races does not lend itself very well to strictly factual discussions. I’ll move this thread to Great Debates.
Yaaaaarrrrgggghhh. Can we let this one die? Please?
Races are a sociologic division. The number of races depends on which sociologist you ask. Or on how people self-identify themselves. There is little biologic basis to breaking people up into groups based on skin color or facial features (which is what race centers around).
The five races currently recognized are Capoid, Congoid (formerly Negroid), Caucasoid, Australoid, and Mongoloid. Each has subdivisions, and most of us are mixed breeds by this point.
Interestingly, if you do a search for these on Google you hit a very large number of white supremacist sites.
From a genetic standpoint, there is only one. Forensic anthropologists argue that there are three, but they concede that they aren’t talking about “race” in the same sense as biologists do.
From a taxonomic perspective, there’s no such thing as a “sub-race”. All classifications below subspecies (race, morph, abberation, form and variety) are non-ranked, and have no further divisions.
Race, as a taxonomic classification, is also completely arbitrary (in all organisms, not just humans), and does not represent any biological reality.
My understanding is that hair texture and bone structure are the standards used in taxonomic classification as they are the greatest variants between the races. (Skin tone is barely an issue.)
Suppose a black African was taken to live in Russia during the 17th century (as many were), married a fellow black African, and their descendants only married other black Africans living in Russia. Since the sunlight is much less there, and skin tone is based on sunlight exposure, would their descendants be noticeably lighter by now than their relatives who remained in subequatorial Africa?
Everytime this subject comes up, the first reply should contain this link. The page was put together edwino. I’ve posted that link a few times and I always get the feeling that few actually read it.
It’s worth a shot though.
I think it’s just a semantic difference between the words “race” and “population”. There are divisions of populations of the human race, but we’re all of course the same species and by this stage of the game all any of us have is a “majority” genetic code from a particular population. The exception being spokesmodels, of course, who are more closely related to geraniums.
Only in that they would be less tan in whatever degree blacks tan (not much for the darker ones, from what i gather). but if they went out into the sun more, they’d tan back up. Genetics doesn’t move towards goals unless you are actively breeding for them. The only way to get lighter skin (barring albino mutations or whatnot) is to breed into it. Evolution is more of a random chance game that a lucky few win when stresses hit.
That should tell you something…