RACE DOES NOT EXIST -- EXCEPT WHEN IT DOES

In his review of a recent scientific book on the genetics of race, Paul Gross (University Professor of Life Sciences, emeritus, at the University of Virginia) makes the amusing point that good Leftists everywhere deny the existence of race and then promptly set about using race to give preference to certain individuals ("affirmative action"). So Leftists base passionately held policies on something that does not exist! Sounds typical. A few excerpts from the review:

“Race” is a word used widely and traditionally in biology to identify subpopulations within a species, that is, varieties, extended families, fuzzy subsets of individuals of common descent, sets more or less differentiable one from the other by appearance and/or behavior. It is no surprise that races or recognizable varieties in other species turn out to be distinguishable—although not necessarily easily—at the level of genetics. To put this another way: obvious external differences among the races of a plant or animal species turn out to result from genetic differences, although those can sometimes be subtle. But of course this must be so! For a race or variety to persist in time, its obvious distinguishing traits must be to some significant extent heritable. And if heritable, the traits must reside ultimately in genes (or more likely) in combinations of genes. “Traits” are the products of gene sets —genomes—acting in particular environments over particular life histories.

The book’s title announces that Sarich and Miele recognize human group differences, and that however fuzzy these sets may be, they are still sufficiently stable as biological subpopulations, varieties, extended families, and “races” to be identified as such. Which word one uses doesn’t matter: the physical reality does. They argue that the recognition of group differences, of races, among humans is very ancient, a cognitive capability (i.e., not an invention of capitalism or colonialism, as is claimed by all politically correct commentators), of a piece with other category-making competences we share. The burden of the book’s central scientific sections is that those differences have a highly plausible evolutionary (and therefore genetic, biological) basis. Far from minimizing the significance of group differences, the relatively short history of our species implies that they must have been very strongly selected for in the several different environments in which our ancestors first flourished. None of which, as the authors insist (perhaps in vain) is any excuse for racism or racial discrimination.

It is an effort to define for the general reader, in broadest terms, those features of human genetics and anthropology testifying to a surprisingly recent origin of our lineage, but also to a long interval (before the present) of sufficient geographic separation of human subpopulations to have given rise to the currently recognizable races. The message is the opposite of typology: among the races of man, now that we can move freely over the planet and because we are a single species, able to interbreed, differences will become steadily less marked, the sets fuzzier. Eventually, in a distant future, they will disappear. Barring world-wide catastrophe, the prospects for re-segregation and new raciation are nil. But the differences acquired in our evolutionary history haven’t disappeared yet. I know of no other popular work that makes this scientific case so simply and places it so clearly in social context as Race.

The best summary of its conclusions is.. : Human subpopulations are “races”; they exist. They are familial subdivisions of the one species, Homo sapiens, to which we all belong.