I’m hoping for something resembling a factual answer on this, but since I can foresee either no factual answer existing, or else a big giant debate on the merits of whether or not “race” exists, I thought I’d save the mods the trouble and just stick this in GD. Anywho…
It is commonly argued that “race” is nothing but a social construct, and doesn’t really exist. Okay, if that’s true, then do, for instance, sub-species of dogs really exist? Is there really such thing as a collie, or a dachsund, or a lab?
I figure there are many similarities between the notions of race and sub-species. People of different race look different, just as dogs of different sub-species do. People of different race can breed, just as dogs of different sub-species can (though there are some obvious limitations based on size concerns - pity the dachsund who attracts the attention of an amorous St. Bernard). People of different race are still all easily identifiable as human, just as with dogs of different sub-species (identifiable as dogs, I mean). So, what’s the difference? Or do biologists scoff at the idea of sub-species, too?
Jeff
Well, technically (if you believe in evolution), we are all the same animal, and the idea of different animals and different sub-species is just a construct of society. But there are genetic differences to make one animal different from another, and that’s why a chimpanzee is a different animal and not just a different race.
The division of dogs you referenced are breeds, not sub-species. They are not natural, (which, I believe, is the distinction). They will freely mate with other breeds if permitted (and their characteristics will revert back to a sort of generic “dog” look within just a couple of generations if not bred true).
The whole issue of sub-species (and even species) among biologists is constantly under reconsideration, review, and challenge, so I suspect that getting The Thruth™ is going to be difficult, since even the pros do not fully agree.
But then, as people frely mate with other “breeds” we are all going to have the same characteristics eventually. I recall a time magazine cover with a female face of the future. She had the characteristics of all races merged. It was supposedly what all American’s will look like given enough time and interbreeding.
Worth mentioning: She was a hottie! Things are looking good for mankind it would seem.
As I have mentioned on occassion, in the few race threads I’ve participated in, “race”, as a taxonomic category, is what is known as an “infrasubspecific” category. That is, it exists below the level of sub-species. There are a number of such infrasubspecific categories, including breed, race, morph, form, and a couple others. None of these categories are ranked with respect to one another (that is, all of them are essentially at the same taxonomic level), and none hold any “official” status within any taxonomic scheme.
Which, I might add, is not likely. For the most part, peple across the Earth smply aren’t going to form a homogeneous population. Without coinstant movement and displacement, it ain’t happen’en.
In America, and the other places on Earth where constant immigration is likely, this is closer to the fact. Nevertheless, this will represent the creation of a new race rather the assimilation of all old ones. Moreover, precicely because of immigration and racial neighborhoods, you’ll never see the homogeneity of Honshu, Japan, for instance. In any event, the media in general is about the worst possible source of scientific information. They actuvely distort science and engineering in order to create a story. And this is amplified by the fact that they really don’t understand anytyhing about what they’re writing about.
The idea of “race” is indeed a social construct with a very definite origin. In a nutshell:
The idea of expressing discrimination against groups of people (and thereby defining “that group” as a separate group) is as old as civilization. This may have been done on the basis of color, class, language, which side of the hill people lived on, etc.
The term “race” became applied to this type of discrimination specifically shortly before the American Civil War when ‘science’ was misappropriated to explain why Blacks should not be considered equal to whites. Slavery had become something of a problem in a nation which espoused the notion that “all men are created equal”. Clearly there needed to be some scientific means to disqualify blacks as being “men”. Enter the idea of race – that people are somehow catagorically inferior because of a scientific principle related to the nascent scince of genetics.
It didn’t take long after the Civil War for most serious scientists to discard the notion that blacks and whites are somehow intrinsically different subspecies and that superficial features such as skin colour and hair texture did not coincide with inferior intellect. Unfortunately, many people still haven’t reached that conclusion.
The end result was that the notion of one “race” being superior was dispensed with but the term – which defined a ‘scientific’ idea which did not exist – was not dispensed with. For a century and a half, then, we have been using a disproved principle to refer to one another!
Look up the work of Barbara Jean Fields. She has done some wonderful historical work in this area.
While your post expressed the general outline of what happened, your details need some clarification.
Linnaeus, himself, borrowed the older word “race” to identify sub-categories of humans in his efforts to produce a comprehensive taxonomy of the natural world. He published his description of four “races” in 1758, over 100 years before th U.S. Civil War.
His student, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, created a five-race categorization in 1795. To Blumenbach’s credit, he insisted that there was no ranking of superiority among the races. However, once published, his work was taken up by numerous ethnologists who promptly began to assert Caucasian dominance with rankings of the other groups in a hierarchy of supposed intelligence and civilization.
The post-Blumenbach rankings were, indeed, seized upon by people wishing to justify slavery in the U.S. and some other locations–as well as by those seeking to rationalize European colonial efforts throughout the rest of the world. Unfortunately, “science” did not come to a swift rejection of those categories. They have, indeed, been shown to be arbitrary in composition and inadequate in predictive value, but it was a rather slow process with several hold-outs among different scientific groups continuing even today (e.g., J. Philippe Rushton of the University of Western Ontario ).
I thought sub-species referred to a particularly cheesy line of b-move vampire flicks.
Seriously, though, while I certainly don’t have as much research on theories of human race, I can say something about dogs. Dog breeders are crazy people, who can and will, over the course of 20 years, breed many generations of dogs in the pursuit of an ideal fashion. When a fashion is popular enough, they call it a breed, and will in-breed a family to maintain the fashion to the point of creating some seriously ill animals. Then a new fashion will arise.
In any case, purebred dogs are the result of many crazy humans playing mad scientist in pursuit of random fashions. I don’t think that the resulting dog breeds can beused as scientific evidence of natural characteristics of human animals.
And nothing against purebred dogs… I’ve got my own adored standard poodle snoring on my couch at the moment…
Steven Pinker, in his book the blank slate, The Modern Denial of Human Nature suggests that what is called “race” is a result of in-breeding. In-breeding caused by populations of people being geographically isolated from each other and genetically responding to the separate environments. He suggests the differences which are recognized as “race” – (e.g. skin color, eye shape) - are relatively recent genetic adaptations and so, the genetic differences may not run deep. On the issue of whether genetic differences go deeper that outward appearances he adds that “In theory, some of the varying genes could affect personality or intelligence (though any such differences would at most apply to averages, with vast overlap between the group members.) This is not to say that such genetic differences are expected or that we have evidence for them, only that they are biologically possible.” P.144
Interesting posts, everyone. Thanks for the info. So here’s a related question involving dogs:
If the various breeds of dogs as we know them are the result of human meddling, then to what extent would we see different breeds if humans had never gotten involved? I imagine there would at least be some local variations, but would the “mutt” be pretty much the basic dog form?
Well since dogs were probably bred from wolves, we wouldn’t have any dogs, just wolves ;).
However as tomndeb points out, domestic dogs today allowed to breed indiscriminately do tend over the generations to converge on a sort of standardized mongrel pheontype, which isn’t all that dissimilar to the modern dingo. This seems to play out the same over multiple continents.
And to add to Darwin’s Finch’s comments, an increasing number of taxonomists think the category of sub-species forms no useful function as well and should be pretty much junked, though that is an ongoing internal battle ( the anti-subspecies folks, last I bothered to the follow the arguments back in mid-90’s, seemed to be winning the debate at least in the fields of Ichthyology and Herpetology ).
Can someone explain to me what the meaning of the “generic “dog” look” or “standardized mongrel pheontype” claim is? I would have to think that the results of different dogs breeds interbreeding would be wholly dependent on which dog breeds are doing the breeding and in what numbers. (100 german shepards and a poodle are going to produce a different mixture than 100 poodles and a german shepard.)
So how do you select which dogs to include in the original mix? If you base it on the percentage of the total domesticated dog population, you would be basing it on an artificial distribution, formed wholly by human demand, and there’s no reason to to believe that the mixture should represent anything at all. If you base it on your assesment of what the correct percentage should be, then you’ve biased the result before even starting.
I hope it isn’t too much of a hijack to start talking about squirrels at this point …
IIRC, in England they had little-ish red squirrels. Big gray squirrels somehow came over from Europe and now there aren’t a whole lot of little-ish red ones any more, just medium sized reddish/gray ones and big gray ones. Were the original red ones and gray ones only subspecies, even though they looked so different?
And here in Toronto, we have black squirrels and a few gray ones (identical but for the colour), but I have never seen an in-between one. maybe it’s hard to discern differences on the gray-black scale. But will the noticeably gray ones disappear (they are far outnumbered by the black ones)?
Izzy: You know, I’ve been digging for a solid cite for you, but haven’t come up with one yet. It was always my understanding that, too quote someone else - Domestic breeds, if allowed to reproduce without selection, revert in not many generations more or less to the wild type, as Darwin noted. Feral dogs lose the exquisite features of various breeds and tend to a nondescript brown or blackish medium-sized mongrel type that is about the same the world around. ( a quote from a rather anti-Natural Selection writer named Robert Wesson )
This is certainly the case with feral pigs, which has been documented in the U.S. ( if you want I’ll look for a cite for that ).
However the only thing I have been able to dig up so far on the net is the existence of a “long-term pariah morphotype” associated with so-called “primitive dogs” which exhibit a dingo-like ( as per the description above ) appearance worldwide. However most of that stuff is from breeders speculating on the common origin of these dogs as some sort of persistent genetic superbreed kept by aboriginal peoples around the world. The notion that domestic dogs gone feral dogs will converge on that common body-plan is something I’ve always understood to be the case ( might have learned it in a class at some point ), but I can’t document it just now. But I’ll keep my eyes open for a good cite for you.
You aren’t seeing separate species or sub-species. Just melanistic mutants of the Eastern Grey Squirrel :). It’s a fairly common mutation in certain populations. Like black panthers, which are just melanistic leopards ( i.e. a black squirrel or panther can be found in an otherwise “normal” litter of grey squirrels of spotted leopards ).
Here in the Bay Area of California we have three species of arboreal squirrels. The large, native, pale gray Western Gray Squirrel, which except for the natives section of Strybing Arboretum in Golden Gate Park, you only find in the wild in California, never in suburbs or cities. The smaller, redder and darker gray Eastern Gray Squirrel, which is what I think you are seeing in Toronto, the prototypical “city park squirrel” deliberately introduced into parks all over NA. And in the suburbs we have another introduced “city park squirrel”, the medium-sized ( relative to the first two ), rusty-reddish here ( but highly variable elsewhere, including melanistic individuals ) Fox Squirrel - Also widely introduced throughout NA.
Not sure what the situation is in England, though I suppose I could poke around and try to find out.
Probably mostly more grey squirrels, since this morph seems dominant where you are :).
I’m not precisely sure of the genetics of melanism in squirrels, but here’s an interesting comment on the species: *Some interesting clines occur in both skull size and coat color. There is a decreasing cline southward in skull size, though toothrows and mandible sizes remain the same (possibly due to stabilizing selection on those characters involved in mastication). Also, more black-coated squirrels occur in the north. Studies have shown that black animals have 18% lower heat loss in temperatures below -10 degrees Celcius, along wth a 20% lower basal metabolic rate, and a nonshivering thermogenesis capacity 11% higher than grey morphs. *
I’ll note that I have never seen a black squirrel in San Francisco, but have in NYC. Probably reflective of where the seed populations were originally collected.
Oh and a note on squirrels in Great Britain: Grey and Red Squirrels in Great Britain
American Grey Squirrel introduced into England 1830, 1876, through the 1920’s.
Expanded its population in 1940’s and 1950’s
Today the American Grey squirrel is winning the competition with indigenous red squirrels
