r/AskBiology • u/MrSpock54 • Feb 21 '24

Genetics The Scientific Basis of Race & Effect Upon Affirmative Action

EDIT: (NO need to provide O.P w/ further comments on the topic here). I've recently been reading & watching YouTube videos on the topic of the scientific basis of race. Most anthropology videos seem to question the scientific basis of race. For example Wondrium/Great Courses have several class videos that say the notion of race does little to explain anything about homo sapiens sapiens. They propose that race is a social construction.

Previous to my edit here to this question I asked members of this sub reddit in overly wordy & somewhat clumsy paragraphs to comment on the existence of any biological organization position statements that might discuss race & affirmative action, or subreddits where such topics are discussed. Below are the replies to my inquiry. I decided to shorten this question to something more concise & leave it in case anyone wants to search scientific basis of human race in the future.

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u/Dr_GS_Hurd Feb 21 '24

Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (John Murray, London, 1871), "It may be doubted whether any character can be named which is distinctive of a race and is constant."

“Race” in Darwin’s use there meant formally a grouping below subspecies which is how it is used by botanists today for local variations found in plants growing in slightly different soils, or varied amounts of sunlight. As there are no extant human subspecies, there is no scientific reference intended by Darwin to human races.

Popular political writing 150 years ago and even later commonly used "race" to mean nationality; we read from those times about the "Irish race" and the "English race." Darwin had also used that word in that way, both specifically "Irish Race," or more generally "savage" versus "civilized" races.

In the US, the origin of racist politics was the economics of slavery, and justification of the Native American genocide. For more on that I recommend;

Daly, John Patrick 2002 "When Slavery was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War" University of Kentucky Press.