human Races

Races, human, subdivisions of the species homo sapiens. The concept of race provides distinctions that are useful in the scientific study of the human species, its dissemination and adaptation to various environments and conditions throughout the world. It can also provide useful clues and insights for historians and cultural anthropologists into a people's development. Like Darwin's theory of evolution, the concept of race has a history outside of science, in social and political thought and mass psychology. Racism is any ideology which assigns superiority to one group of people and inherent inferiority to others on the basis of certain physical characteristics. Both the scientific concept of race and the ideology of racism have histories.

In the West, by late medieval and modern times, all human beings were considered divisible into people of white, black, or yellow skin. A fundamental distinction was observed among humans based upon a leading physical characteristic. By the 19th century, this elementary classification was filled in with more study and research and the three basic races were held to be Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid. These distinctions were based upon observed physical differences characteristic of each group or race, including skin color, hair, stature, body proportions, skull shape, and facial features. Advances in science have significantly changed the content of the term race. It was discovered that the groupings are more than three and the traits that distinguish peoples are more mutable, or changeable, and more subtle than was formerly known. For example, the study of blood types has revealed not only significant differences among Europeans, Asians, and Africans, but within the group that was classified Negroid, there are significant differences among Australian Aborigines, Micronesians, and Negritos of the Philippines.

Most anthropologists now understand races as geographical and local groups and identify nine instead of three. The nine in the current classification are African, American Indian, Asian, Australian, European, Indian, Melanesian, Micronesian, and Polynesian. The geographical groups are defined by major blood types and genetic groups whereas local races are defined by more restricted gene pools. Examples of local races in Europe are the Basques and Lapps.

Human races develop as a result of evolution and in response to the environment. In addition to the obvious inherited differences, such as melanin or inner eyefolds, modern science has discovered the importance of blood types. In some races, certain blood types are dominant, and certain races are susceptible to particular blood disorders. Africans, for instance, may succumb to sickle cell anemia. But scientists have determined that the same trait in the blood responsible for the anemia also makes Africans relatively immune to malaria, suggesting an inherited trait formed by natural selection and conditioned by a specific environment. Human races are understood as less static and more in flux not only as the result of natural selection, gene mutation, and changes in which genes dominate in a group's gene pool, but also as the result of war, migrations, and intermarriage. Rather than providing any evidence for the notion of superior and inferior groups, scientific study indicates the basis for physical differences among humans and studies the remarkably wide and varied adaptations of a single highly successful species. Ideologies of race, though they claim to be scientific, are not, but they remain potent. Though not unique to the West, ideologies of race have claimed scientific authority in the West beginning with the theories of Joseph Arthur Gobineau in the 19th century and later with Huston Stewart Chamberlain, the anti-Semitism of Nazis, and theories of the inherent racial inferiority of blacks. At bottom, all these theories of race advance the same propositions: that certain peoples are inherently superior and certain others inherently inferior, and that these qualities of superiority or inferiority are inherited, characteristic of an entire group and each of its individual members, and readily identifiable by certain physical traits. Growing and flourishing side by side with advances in modern science and claiming to be grounded in science, theories of race persist in spite of the fact that there is no scientific basis for their claims.

See also: Racism.