No biological basis found for different races

  The rush to decode the human genome, it turns out, also revamped all concepts of the human race—and its so-called races.

“The folk concept of ‘race’ in America is so ingrained as being biologically based and scientific that it is difficult to make people see otherwise,” said Robert Sussman, professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis and editor-in-chief of the journal American Anthropologist.

“We live on the one-drop racial division: If you have one drop of black or Native American blood, you are considered black or Native American, but biology speaks otherwise.”

Biology began speaking otherwise in the fall of 1998, when American Anthropologist published a seminal paper by Alan R. Templeton, a biology professor at Washington University.

The paper showed that, contrary to popular belief, the concept of race has no biological basis.

“Race is a real cultural, political and economic concept in society, but it is not a biological concept, and that, unfortunately, is what many people wrongfully consider to be the essence of race in humans—genetic differences,” Templeton said.

Templeton’s group analyzed DNA from global human populations and showed that, while plenty of genetic variations exist in humans, most of these are individual and not “between-population.” 

So, though the DNA of different populations does vary, it is either not enough or not the right type of difference to define a particular sublineage of humanity from another.

Templeton found that as much as 85 percent of genetic variation was individual variation. The remaining 15 percent that could be traced to “racial” differences is very minor and below the threshold used to recognize race evolutionarily.

The naked eye may easily observe physical differences between peoples, but these traits do not actually represent genetic differences between human populations.

For example, Templeton’s studies showed that there is more genetic similarity between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans than there is between Africans and a subset of north-eastern Australians called Melanesians. Yet, sub-Saharan Africans and Melanesians share physical traits like dark skin, coarse hair texture and facial features. 

“This very objective analysis shows that the possibility of race is not even a close call,” Templeton explained.

The study found that, over time, genes in any one local population are shared by all of humanity throughout time, indicating that human populations have always had a degree of genetic contact with one another.

“By this modern definition for race, there are no races in humanity,” Templeton added.

Further, the inter-connectedness of the human genes also overthrows the idea that humans evolved from a single set of ancestors that migrated to other places and replaced the inhabitants of these places.

“Spreading traits doesn’t require spreading out and killing off all the earlier people. They’re spread by reproducing with people—it’s make love, not war,” Templeton said.

“Since about 1910, anthropologists have been fighting this lack of understanding of what people are really like, how people have migrated and mixed together,” Sussman said, commenting on the Templeton study.

“The race, in the end, is only with yourself.” Even though Einstein didn’t exactly have these results in mind when he said this, his words may have just found new a meaning.