About human races There are obvious biological differences in human beings Two important questions about this fact are 1 which criteria which measurable differences shall we use to set up a typology of races and 2 Assuming we can accurately measure human phenotypical physical variation does this have anything to do with variation in features of human thought or behavior Classification On the question of classification there are historically two very different modes of thinking 1 typological thinking and 2 population thinking Blumenbach s races 1775 Johann Friedrich Blumenbach used the term race to define divisions of the human species He classified humans into five races Caucasian Mongolian Ethiopian American and Malay Blumenbach held that there was but one species of human but he concluded that humans from the Caucasus region of Asia Minor were aesthetically pleasing Blumenbach s race map http tinyurl com oz3h9 Typological thinking Blumenbach classified skulls from around the world by studying detail and selecting a type specimen Typological thinking is still with us today The logical fallacy in typological thinking is a general problem not confined to the labeling of socalled races We see it in the labeling of particular dialects as typical of a language Population thinking The remedy for typological studies about races of humans appeared to be population studies Measure a large numbers of individuals and produce means and distributions This creates ideal types the features of which are found in no individual And the more precise the measures the more categories are proliferated Creating complexity If there are four races based on color black white yellow red and we add one binary feature like hair texture wavy and straight then there are eight races Now add two kinds of crania wide and narrow there are 16 types Sweden 1898 of 45 000 people 11 had all the traits usually included in the so called Nordic race blond hair blue eyes low skin pigmentation dolicocephaly and so on Suppose 20 traits and a criterion that 75 of people have each one By trait 2 75 of 75 is 56 By trait 10 1 34 have 75 of the traits By trait 20 317 people out of 100 000 have all the traits Those are the ideal candidates We impose typologies All typologies are arbitrary in some sense We impose them on nature to make sense out of a welter of information Here are seven historical typologies of humans 1 cephalic index or the ratio between the width and the length of the head 2 the facial index or the ratio of the length to the width of the face 3 the nasal index 4 eye lip and ear shape 5 eye hair and skin color and hair texture 6 stature weight and build and 7 blood groups Race is a social concept But every morphological characteristic has a range of variation a distribution even within so called races Look for example at skin color in the U S Historically the one drop rule defined what it meant to be black for many people Many Mediterranean people have more melanin in their skin than do many American blacks Race is a folkloric concept Race is a folkloric idea that developed in the U S out of the debate over slavery 17th century British used Indian slaves on plantations in Barbados and Jamaica By the late 17th century the Indians had died and Britain began bringing slaves from Africa to the plantations in their Caribbean colonies Recall in the early 18th century the anti slavery movement in Britain was underway Establishing the social concept of race 1854 Types of Mankind published by Josiah Nott a Southern physician and George Glidden the U S consul in Cairo Nine editions before 1900 helped establish the social concept of race Social race becomes law Roger Taney Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court in 1859 in the Dred Scott case Negroes were seen only as property they were never thought of or spoken of except as property and thus were not intended by the framers of the Constitution to be accorded citizenship rights The Negro Taney said is a different order of being Science ratifies social race In the 18th and 19th century the folk idea of race was ratified by science In the 20th century population thinking and genetics seemed to be the answer We would recognize that races are not merely ideal types based on measurements of phenotypic differences but are populations that are identified by a common gene pool and that tend to preserve that gene pool over time Genes are distributed across populations but there are concentrations that is the frequency of particular genes varies greatly and it is this fact which changed thinking about races Just as everyone is unique phenotypically so we are all unique genetically but there are clumps of traits based on genetic frequencies Sophisticated typological thinking And so we wound up with a definition of race that was more sophisticated than those of earlier times but just as flawed Here is the scientific definition of race based on population thinking A race is a human population that is sufficiently inbred to reveal a distinctive genetic composition which is observable in a distinctive combination of physical traits A typology by any other name This is just another way of creating typologies Human variation is continuous with no clear boundaries and race whether based on ideal types or on genetic populations tells us little about a person The variation within races at the individual level are far greater than the variations across the so called races Race as a sociopolitical concept Now we have populations tagged as races with the tagging becoming more and more sociopolitically motivated Biological race does not explain infant mortality among American Indians on the Reservations or among African Americans in the inner cities Biological race does not explain the high rate of breast cancer in African American women or the low life expectancy in African American men Race is ephemeral In Brazil rich people who have dark skin and wiry hair are classified in a higher social race than if they were poor Skin color as a race marker is ephemeral Amazonian Indians are darker than North American Indians are Race language class The concept of race is much like the concept of social class or the concept of English as a language Each implies an aggregate of people who have something in common and in each case diversity among the constituents is put aside So the concept of race in humans is a social not a biological concept There are clumps of physical features that define