Funny that no biologists have used these subspecies definitions, then. Please, list for me the subspecies that actual biologists have assigned Homo sapiens into.
ETA: it should be noted that Coyne also says this:[
](Are there human races? – Why Evolution Is True) which kind of flies in the face of what the race realists are claiming , and basically means Coyne’s “race” isn’t their “race” at all.
First of all, the whole business of labeling subspecies is somewhat subjective. Biologists are often going to disagree, and there is no governing board to make the decision. In fact, that is true for all the taxa except at the “species” level. Secondly, there are few biologists who would divide a species like H. sapiens into subspecies because the phenotypical variations are clinal. Typically, when you have a subspecies designation, there is a natural barrier preventing interbreeding between the populations. Ain’t no such thing for us.
Except where there are barriers e.g. deserts, oceans, mountains etc. Hence the clusters that arise from the type of studies Risch et al describe above or seen here. As Lahn & Ebenstein write:
Ah, now with the “clusters”. We’ve been down this road many times.
Look, we can find “clusters” everywhere. We can find “clusters” in England vs Scotland. But the point is we’re talking about clinal variations in phenotype. We know that there are no natural barriers to gene flow for humans. None. Nada. Zilch. Ain’t no mountain high enough, ain’t no river long enough… There are no cultural barriers or broad distance barriers. And we can’t draw any bright lines anywhere and say people on this side of the line look like “X” and people on the other side look like “Y”. That’s what you need when you set up a scheme for subspecies.
Are you serious? How long do you think the Australian aborigines were separated from other populations? There doesnt have to be zero gene flow. If there was there would be different human species rather than just racial differences.
Several hundred years ago they had been separated for several thousand years. But not for the last few hundred years.
New Zealand is a good example of how quickly populations can change (as are many Native American tribes)- it only took a few hundred years for there to be virtually no full-blooded Maori people left.
Were. As in not now. But even still, 40k years is a very short time in evolutionary terms, and they weren’t really genetically isolated during all that time.
Not a chance. Estimates for sepciation time in large mammals like humans center on about 1M years. And that doesn’t take into account are exceptionally long generation interval. We have existed as a species outside Africa for < 100K years. Even complete isolation for that amount of time would not generate a sepciation event unless there was some unprecedented environmental pressure forcing rapid evolution.
It’s possible that an ancient biologist from another planet might have classified pre-historic populations as subspecies, but there were no real barriers to human migration even 10,000 years ago and it would be pretty futile to create a scheme of subspecies that would have to be constantly monitored and updated as migration patterns changed.
I think a better case can be made for changing the status of Neanderthals to a subspecies of H. sapiens, but that comes down to lumping and splitting. Still, they existed in relative genetic isolation (along with their ancestors) for at least 500k years. They are phenotypically different from us, and there was an effective geographic barrier in place for an extended period of time. When we did encounter each other, there was some interbreeding, but the one population effectively went extinct.
Yes, my point was that total absence of gene flow or lack of interbreeding isn’t required for races or subspecies to arise over time. The neanderthals & perhaps the denisovans maybe an interesting example of a possible sub-species given we interbred with them I guess.