If the different races had stayed seperated for tens of thousands of more years, would they have evolved into different species?
Now, I know that some on this board don’t believe that there is such a thing as race. I don’t want to hear from them.
What I want to know is if the races had remained apart for tens of thousands of more years, would they have evolved to the point where they were different species, where they couldn’t mate with one another and create offspring.
lmao
In the long term, people of the same race remained apart for long enough, they could evolve into different species. After ten thousand years, the most likely effect would be regional adaptation like a change in skin tone, body mass, hair growth, facial features, and… oh, wait.
Well, we don’t believe in race because there is no such thing as race. However, if different groups of humans had remained isolated from one another for long enough, then what we know of evolution strongly suggests that eventually there would be such a thing as race, and given enough time, there would even be speciation–effective reproductive isolation between different groups within Genus Homo (even if they did later come back into direct geographic contact with each other) . Prolonged geographic isolation is an excellent way to achieve speciation.
Given how well the human species has handled such minor physical differences as do exist among us, I suspect an Earth with multiple species of fully sapient hominids would not be a pretty picture.
The thing is, the “races” never were seperate. The closest thing to reproductive isolation was Australian aborigines, and even in that case there was some interbreeding with various Polynesian groups. So no, an extra ten thousand or two hundred thousand years prior to the introduction of modern transportation technology would have not produced any speciation. The gene pool was being stirred too much for any part of it to get very different from the rest.
This, as it happens, is a large part of why most anthropologists and biologists don’t think that racial categories are worth beans.
Hermann: Maybe, but it would take a looooooooooooooooooong time.
Consider dogs. Consider the (human-created) huge cosmetic variety of dogs: Great Danes and toy poodles, Irish setters and chows, greyhounds and bulldogs.
Now consider the fact that all those different kinds of dogs, which look so different, all still belong to the same species. (And some people say wolves belong to the same species as dogs as well.)
So it takes more than just some cosmetic diffferences and a few thousand years to make a new species. It takes millions of years, and geographic isolation.
MEBuckner: Of course, Earth did have two fully sapient species of hominids living on it for a while. But the situation didn’t last, and the Neanderthals died out. Still, there’s no hard evidence the homo sapiens did anything more than out-compete the Neanderthals.
There is also the uneasy dividing line between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens whose fossils ( at times controversially classified overlap. They may have been separate lines, but more likely represented archaic and more modern populations of Homo sapiens, with the “erectus type” being swamped out gentically over time.
Similarly it is a controversial question whether Neandertal man was a separate species or a subspecies ( not to mention H. ergaster et al ).
Tough :D. Just a word of advice - Such comments invariably attract negative attention. Not from me though - I find it cute, in a touchingly naive way :p.
Anyway, just because someone ( say, ME ) doesn’t believe in “biological races” today, doesn’t mean I they have ruled out their existence throughout history ( in point of fact, given the the rapidity of the the spread of modern H. sapiens and our relatively low level of genetic diversity, I very strongly suspect there probably never were coherent “races” in any classical sense - but anything is possible ).
Short answer is probably, yes - Given enough isolation, speciation is quite possible. Though we are such generalists, I would guess it most likely have to be some weird genetic founder effect, rather than a adaptive radiation. However because of the enormous demonstrated vagility and adaptability of our species ( and our tendency to screw anything that moves ), I sincerely doubt it could ever happen in a natural setting.
I find it rather difficult to assume that there would be no intercontact between the various local races of mankind – the Nordics, the Dinarics, the Celts, the Ugrics, the Fennics, the Mediterranean race, the Punic/Semitic group, the Anatolians, the Urartuans, the Hurrians, the Elamites, the Sumerians, the Mesopotamians proper, the Indus Valley group, the Dravidians, the Indo-Aryans, all seem to have intermingled quite freely.
If, on the other hand, you’re talking about the large groups referred to as the Whites or Caucasians, the Blacks or Negroids, etc., they have no biological validity, being convenient groupings of local races on the basis of selected gross physical characteristics that they have in common. This is rather unfortunate for people who find broad-brush classifications handy for either good or bad purposes, but seems to be the anthropological truth.
Yeah, actually, “had stayed separated” is probably misleading–we’ve probably never really been separated. And geographically isolating a tool-and-language-using species would probably be tough–no matter how seemingly impassable the geographic barriers you throw up, they’re apt to go and invent ocean-going rafts or something. Still, if you could separate a bunch of humans and make them stay separated–say, on interstellar colonies–I see no more reason to think we’re more immune to evolution than any other life-form.
with the human race in THE TIME MACHINE devolving into Eloi & Morlocks?
There’s no such thing as devolving. “Devolve” implies that there’s some sort of direction to evolution, such that one can go backwards. There is no such direction.
Yes, but doctors know that ancestry can be an important factor in disease and health.
The “races don’t exist” folk have their valid points, but the fact remains that cystic fibrosis is most frequently found in people of Northern and Western European ancestry, who are overwhelming fair skinned (i.e. “white”). Sickle cell anemia and related disorders are found most often in people whose ancestors lived where malaria was a major problem, and those folks tend to have dark skin. Those described as “causasian” are are at a higher risk of skin cancer. Those described as “African” are at a higher risk of rickets. Many, if not most, of Asian ancestory are lactose intolerant as adults.
Some of it may even be social in origin - perhaps “black” people in the USA are more prone to high blood pressure because they’re under more stress due to racism. Perhaps “white” females are more prone to eating disorders due to societal pressure on them to achieve a body type physically impossible for most such individuals. Even if some of these divisions aren’t purely biological, the social divisions DO have an impact on an individual and need to be considered at times.
Whether you believe in race or not, if you are ever so unfortunate to need an organ transplant, the new organ will almost certainly come from someone who is of your same “mythical” race.
Humans, for all our genetic similarity to each other, are not a homogenous mass. Certain traits - many of them superficial but not all - tend to travel together. If you don’t like the word “race” maybe you would be more comfortable with “ethnicity” or “ancestry” because who your forebears were does matter, both socially and biologically.
Isolation can result in vast differences in human phenotype, including so-called “races,” but does not seem to have ever resulted in speciation. If you look at the sub-saharan region of the African continent, you’ll find quite a few phenotypes within the same “race” - from the very tall Watusi to the diminuative Pygmies. The Hutu and the Tutsi (the ethnically defined factions in Rwanda’s civil war) identify each other by body type, the Tusti being relatively tall and lithe, the Hutu shorter and stockier.
To a lesser extent, it is still possible to identify European phenotypes. It’s not unusual to say that someone looks Irish or Italian, Scots or Norwegian. However, being aware of the numerous phenotypes found in Africa, is it going too far to imagine that some of the “mythical” European phenotypes may not have always been so mythical? Of course, their physical attributes have become exaggerated through legend, but there definitely may have been “wee folk,” “elves” and “faeries” in the once isolated British Isles as well as “trolls” and “giants” in northern Europe.
Fortunately or unfortunately, there is no way for a group of humans to be so isolated on Planet Earth anymore. Even if some catastrophe managed to throw civilization back to the stone age, because of our knowledge, we wouldn’t be there long enough for any speciation to take place. Even if possible, many related species are able to produce offspring, albeit sterile offspring, and their speciation may have occurred hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years ago.
But ancestry is not “race”. Nor are the other factors you cite. “population clusters” might be more accurate. Occasionally these clusters share similar external features, as well as the features you noted like CF, Sickle Cell, etc. But quite often they don’t. And most populations which are superficially similar and get clustered together as “race” don’t share those common genes with such great frequency. You won’t have much luck with transplants if you consider Bantu and Watusi to be good matches, even if they are the same “race”. Ditto for Koreans and
Formosans.
To me, “race” is about as useful a way of sorting people as height is. OK for a few circumstances, but grossly inapplicable for the majority of others.
Could you elaborate on this, please? I’ve never heard it before.
However, the people who have been at risk from malaria have included Spaniards, Italians, Greeks, and Turks–all of which populations of “Caucasians” have an elevated incidence of Sickle-Cell in the regions where malaria is present. A gene shift in the region between Turkey and Lebanon resulted in a different form of Sickle-Cell spreading across the Middle East, through Northern India, and into China and the Malaysian peninsula (thus affecting “Caucasoid” and “Mongoloid” groups alike.) Adult lactose intolerance, while approaching 100% in several Asian groups, also approaches 90-95% in most African groups and 20-25% in European groups, although the African Fulani have rates in the “European” range of 20-25% and Scandinavians have rates as low as 4%. (I have not found the numbers for the Americas.)
There are certainly regions where specific genetic alleles appear more frequently (or genetic diseases are more prevalent), but they do not tend to map onto the same people who were identified by “race” with any regularity and the biological term for identifiable groups is populations.
While it is possible that, in limited instances, one’s ethnic background may play a role in medical care, it is far more likely to play a role in one’s social standing, based on the chimaera of one’s appearance.
The reference is to the characteristic that various blood types and variations, which are directly related to immediate ancestry, will be more prevalent among people who have a higher degree of intermarriage. Since organ transplants are affected by the matching of blood types to a greater degree than simple blood tranfusions are, efforts are made to seek donors from the same ethnic groups as the recipient on the grounds that there is a greater likelihood of finding a good match. However, this is a different statement than that organ donations only work within perceived ethnicities. (It should be noted that Broomstick did not make the latter claim, only pointing out that the search would lead to a higher likelihood of finding a good match within one’s own ethnic population.)
Well, sure. As has been noted innumerable times before, you won’t find many of the “no race” people disagreeing with that, at least on this board :).
It’s just that as Qadgop pointed out, this isn’t how “race” is traditionally thought of, therefore it is only tangentially germane to the conversation ( jeez do these arguments always circle the same ground or what? 
).
Though it doesn’t invalidate your basic point, I’ll just point out that in this case the above generalization appears to break down with some regularity. By the time the Europeans penetrated the region, what had once been an ethnic identifier had become more a economic class identifier.
Hmmm…Cite? You are saying in effect that there were perhaps once pygmy-sized aborigines in the British Isles? Has there been any fossil evidence that points in that direction?
Transplant matching is more likely to be successful when the donor pool includes people of similar ancestries. The characteristics of blood marrow and blood stem cells tend to be inherited, which is why siblings are often the first checked if you need a kidney or something similar. But it is not an exact correspondance to be sure. So you can refer to the table ( which I’d post if I knew how to do tables ) here labeled Cross Race Probabilities :
http://www.parentsguidecordblood.com/medmotiv.html