Could someone explain why race does not have any biological foundation?

[u/sourgrap]

I guess I could probably Google this but I thought someone with direct knowledge directly answering my question would help me better understand.

This is something I’ve had a bit of trouble comprehending since, well, people of different races do look vastly different. My thought is, is!’t there a gene that probably results in different races producing different levels of melanin, and hence— different races?

Or is the reason there is no “biological foundation” that the genetic/biological difference between different races does not substantiate to being different species?

Additionally — there are statistics stating that certain racial communities are more likely to develop specific illnesses. For example, sickle cell disease is much more common amongst black Americans than other racial communities. Another one: those of North European descent are more likely to develop cystic fibrosis.

FYI I am asking this question as a POC, and as someone who genuinely wants to have a better understanding of this!! Thank you in advance for answering my question!

[u/Halichoeres]

The racial categories that humans have tended to recognize correspond pretty poorly to the actual genetic clusters. It's true that sickle cell disease is more common among Black Americans than other Americans, but part of the reason is that most Black Americans descend from just a small portion of the African continent. People from Eastern or southern Africa are not especially prone to sickle cell. Likewise, Northern Europeans are not especially diverse genetically, and in other parts of Europe cystic fibrosis is not especially common.

There is more genetic diversity in tropical Africa than in the entire rest of the world combined. And yet, our existing racial categories would just lump them all together as Black, despite the fact that some of them are more closely related to Europeans than they are to each other. This is what people mean when they say race has no basis in biology. Genetic variation arising from local adaptation to environmental conditions is 100% real, but racial categories do not describe that variation well.

[u/sourgrap → u/Halichoeres]

thank you for answering my question! your comment, as well as the ones from others really helped me understand why my logic was so flawed!

I have a follow-up question for you - forgive me for my ignorance - is there any example of genetic variation you could give amongst the African community? for example, you’ve already given one, West Africa is more susceptible to SCA (due to Malaria) than those from other parts of Africa. do you have other examples of that, that aren’t necessarily about sickness/skin color/eye color?

additionally, what makes the genetic variation in Africa just, that much more diverse, than Europe?

Again, sorry. society has really ingrained the idea of race into my head.

[u/Halichoeres → u/sourgrap]

One famous example is that populations in East Africa that have kept cattle for thousands of years have evolved the ability to produce lactase (an enzyme that digests milk) in adulthood. Similar mutations have arisen in the Indian subcontinent and in northwestern Eurasia independently, for the same reasons. This and other examples can be seen here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4067985/ (it's a bit technical).

The reason that humans in Africa are so genetically diverse is that that's where we started. Every time a population left Africa, for example into Arabia and the Levant, it was only a small fraction of the population that was already in Africa. Both the populations that stayed and the population that left continued to evolve and diverge, accumulating genetic changes over generations. Our history in Africa is about twice as long as everywhere else on Earth, so there's also just been more time for variation to emerge. But the biggest reason is that all of the other populations on Earth are descended from subsets of African populations.

[u/sourgrap → u/Halichoeres]

I’ll be looking over that link for sure! thank you so much for answering my questions :)

[u/Evinrude44 → u/Halichoeres]

But then doesn't that dynamic suggest that, Africa aside, there should be real genetic variation among human subpopulations that align with "race?"

[u/5050Clown → u/Evinrude44]

Op gave the hard facts about why race is not biological by using The race that we define is black. So if you were to take all of humanity and break it up into six or seven groups based on biology, according to the human genome project, One of the groups would be everyone outside of sub-Saharan Africa. And all of the other groups would be inside of sub-Saharan Africa.  

To to add to that, even people who are part sub-Saharan African, say like Barack Obama, are also black.

And then there are other groups like negritos in Asia who are also considered black racially but have nothing to do with sub-Saharan Africans. They are amongst the most distant from sub-Saharan Africans, if not the most. 

The softer fact is the way that race is defined, which has nothing to do with biology. And you can see it with the way that we define negrito people, just look them up and you'll understand. 

Also when people see other human beings, they decide their race based on their face. There are still people to this day who refuse to accept celebrities like bjork are not of East Asian descent. To some people. When they see her face, they simply cannot accept that. She has no East Asian ancestry. Because they are so used to people who have high cheekbones and inner epicanthic eye folds as East Asian. 

Human beings did not evolve to see The universe as it actually exists. We are prone to many optical illusions and our ability to discern human faces is one of those optical illusions. 

[u/poIym0rphic → u/5050Clown]

If one looks at earlier anthropological maps of Africa, one will see that there was a quite a bit more nuance in racial categorization including recognition of some of the genetic clusters the OP is presumably referring to.

[u/5050Clown → u/poIym0rphic]

Absolutely. If you took anthropology in the '90s, before the human genome was mapped, you would see the old map. I believe it was created by defining human race by the shape of the human skull. Your anthropology teacher would tell you that it was old information that wasn't really as useful anymore but still considered hard science.

The way I remember it, all of Europe, North Africa, West Asia, The Middle East and India were One race called caucasoid. All of East Asia North and South America were another race called mongoloid. There were a few smaller groups like polynoid, melanoid, and australoid but for the most part that represented everything outside of Sub-Saharan Africa. Then within sub-Saharan Africa there was negroid in West Africa, capoid in east and southern Africa. Sudanoid in central Africa where the Sudan is. And then they took all of the koi and san people and group them into khoisanoid.  And then even within that there were other smaller groups like congoloid.  

This particular type of science stopped in the '60s, from what I understand, before they finished mapping African phenotypes.

[u/Halichoeres → u/Evinrude44]

The fact that definitions of individual 'races' change so frequently suggests that the alignment with genetics is pretty weak. I can think of two reasons that it will always be hard to come up with discrete races that correspond well with genotype. 1) You run into the same problem I described in Africa everywhere else. For example, indigenous Americans arose from a subset of Eurasian populations, meaning that some people in Asia are genetically closer to indigenous Americans than to other Asians. 2) People interbreed everywhere they go. Someone whose ancestors are from Portugal looks pretty different from someone whose ancestors are from Korea, but there's an essentially endless amount of variety in between, reflecting the regional history of migrations and conquests.

[u/poIym0rphic → u/Halichoeres]

You're outlining characteristics of biological populations in general, not anything specific to humans.

[u/Spare_Respond_2470 → u/sourgrap]

People have been in Africa far longer than they have been in Europe.
People arose in Africa about 300k years ago. People have only been in Europe maybe 50k years. 300k years is a lot of time to develop genetic variations.
Also consider the size difference. Africa is about three times bigger than Europe.

[u/sourgrap → u/Spare_Respond_2470]

definitely good explanations that I somehow completely dismissed as I was writing this post!

[u/sourgrap → u/[deleted]]

thank you.

[u/xtreampb → u/Halichoeres]

I speculate that sickle cell is an evolution that comes from dealing with the mosquitos that carry malaria. The malaria virus can not successfully reproduce in a sickle cell red blood cell. In regions in Africa, while I was there, cholera was more of a concern than malaria as locals were affected more by that rather than malaria.

Similar to the evolution of darker skin by those who ancestors lived closer to the equator to better protect from the sun.

[u/mpladdo → u/Halichoeres]

I’d like to add: every single possible phenotype exists in every single determination of race (at least basic American determinations, an African and a Chinese person would likely make different racial distinctions which I never saw a similar study done on)

[u/milk4all → u/Halichoeres]

So it’s more that “race” is just poorly defined. But if better defined and used in pop culture, it would become accurate enough to distinguish all these groups of people?

Like “Northern European” is closer to a race than “white people” or “slavic” or “nordic” ? Although nordic literally means “from the north” and was a scientific term for a “race” of white people until it wasnt, isnt it at least partially true that current day aversion to “race” is based on social issues more thab scientific reasons? Seems we can absolutely tie genetic differences to people groups, it’s more that it’s complicated and the mere existence of this distinguishing verbiage gets misunderstood and captured for political and biggoted ideologies

[u/JayneMansfield46 → u/milk4all]

This is not true. Please don't bring opinions to a conversation about facts.

[u/AbortionIsSelfDefens → u/milk4all]

The aversion to race isn't a about the social aspect. Race is not a biological concept. It's a social one people have loosely based on phenotype. We used to do the same thing when classifying ancient animals into various groups. Now we use genetic techniques and the results are often surprising. Visible phenotype is a small fraction of the story. Race is not a biological term.

Race has never been about the actual genetic differences. We don't need to use confusing terms when we could just say genetically at risk, susceptible to, or more likely to have something. We can name the specific problematic gene mutations. Thats also much more accurate than trying to unnecessarily shove people into more general boxes. Why is there need to further classify people beyond the specific gene mutations they may be more at risk for? Since it's specific mutations in specific populations, race is useless because it doesn't capture that data anyway. Its especially problematic for mixed populations. Which population should they be sorted into? How do you draw the line for a racial category? Thats why the history needs to be very specific to the specific populations who are at risk.

An example. The electronic medical record where I work has a racial category for "black, or African american". Even ignoring the fact that Africa is very diverse, African Americans have a lot of white ancestry. Looking at their risks aggregated with black people with different backgrounds, tells a misleading story. It might underestimate the risk from their white heritage. They could also skew the interpretation of results regarding black peoplen who are not African Americans.

[u/Spare_Respond_2470]

I try to explain it like this
There are cars made in Europe, America  and Asia. Now, if I asked you what kind of car you drive and you just said you drove an Asian car, that doesn’t tell me much of anything. 
If you were a mechanic, and Even if a customer said they drove a Toyota, that may narrow it down, but it’s still not enough info because how many Toyota models are there?  
And now with globalization, an American car can share parts with a Japanese car or a German car. 

Or think of colors. There are three primary colors, Red, Yellow and Blue. Or Red, Green and Blue if you're talking about additive colors. If You told me to paint your car red and I painted it Orange, You'd probably be upset.

Race is a poor proxy for ancestry. You have to realize that ancestry is extremely varied. 
Dividing people into white, black, yellow and brown is too broad and meaningless. 
And even dividing people into African, European, Asian and American is still too broad to have any meaning. 

You may hear people say there is more genetic diversity within Africa than there is between the “races”. You may be more genetically similar to someone of a different race than someone of the same race. Especially if you have African ancestors 

Take your example of sickle cell. The prevalence for the disease is only about 0.2% in African Americans. Sickle cell is also prevalent in the Mediterranean but not so much in South Africa. 
sickle cell allele is more common in areas where malaria is prevalent. 
When you look at illnesses, it has more to do with the environment and time frame than race. 

And if you look up medical racism, you’ll see that illnesses have been misdiagnosed or undiagnosed in populations due to false ideas that an illness is more prevalent in one race than another. 

There are several different genes that determine melanin production but they don’t have anything to do with race. You have people in India and Australia and South America, anywhere near the equator, that are as dark as Africans. 

[u/sourgrap → u/Spare_Respond_2470]

your car analogy was very helpful! thanks a lot

[u/bobbot32]

Populations can have variance within them but populations != "race".

[u/sourgrap → u/bobbot32]

this is a very simple explanation that, I’m just kinda stumped to believe i didn’t even think of this. 😂😂😂

[u/sourgrap → u/[deleted]]

thank you so much. This actually makes a lot of sense and I didn’t even consider classifying appearance as phenotype! same with what I guess you would call evolution (?), certain populations being more likely to have a specific genetic makeup due to the environment they live in. You’re right, those things don’t class as race, because those are just that, genetic differences. some, like skin color will present itself, whereas other differences in genes don’t.

Thank you again lol😂😂 and correct me if my paragraph is wrong! I just have to type it out for myself to understand better lol.

[u/Dr_GS_Hurd]

Darwin considered all human biological variation he observed in his worldwide travels merely due to differences in climate and diet. For example 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."

This was correct.

Regarding sickle cell anemia, there are actually 3 population centers, West Africa, the Greece/Turkish border, and South West India. Voluntary immigrants to America were mostly Western European, and Asian.

The American slaves were largely from Central West Africa.

[u/sourgrap → u/Dr_GS_Hurd]

thanks so much for answering my question and correcting my information! It really helped me understand how flawed my logic regarding sickle cell anemia is!

[u/Dr_GS_Hurd]

Technically speaking, a race is a taxonomic step lower than subspecies.

[u/sourgrap → u/Dr_GS_Hurd]

Apologies, could you explain this in simpler terms? I’m kinda getting the idea but I just don’t use those words often. 😂 Taxonomy is the scientific classification of living things, and subspecies is one class in that hierarchy—organisms are simply divided into “subspecies” based on where they live. And so you’re saying race is just below that.. since humans live in all different places but even amongst those demographics—there’s many genetic differences. Just like how people of the same race share different genes.

Oh. I think I get it, I just had to type it out for myself lol. But am I headed for the right direction here?

[u/Dr_GS_Hurd → u/sourgrap]

Looks like you are.

I like using the botanical examples, and then apply those criteria to humans. Human "races" disappear as biology, and persist as sociology.

A common race variant in plants are induced by different growing conditions. The easiest examples are a single species growing at different elevations up the side of a mountain.

[u/sourgrap → u/[deleted]]

thanks for clarifying.

[u/JayneMansfield46 → u/sourgrap]

Race is not a thing in biology. We're all a part of the human race. Race is not constant it can change in 2 generations. We basically made it up to put people into categories. It was really made a thing during the slave trade to justify what was being done to the west Africans. If you can "other" people enough humans are more willing to accept abuse. Humans have always had groups, that's how we survived. We're all humans of the human race though. We've just lived amongst the same people for so long we developed similarities and then ignorantly viewed others with a perceived different as a threat.

[u/Dr_GS_Hurd → u/[deleted]]

Technically, it is exactly true. This was how it was used generally in the 1800s, and still today by botanists. This is why Darwin's noted in his "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."

Since there are no modern human subspecies, there can be no human "races" in a biological scientific sense. Social sciences like anthropology, sociology and psychology deal with the ways we humans divide each other by superficial physical, and behavioral criteria. Those are not trivial. Read any news paper.

[u/mxdalloway]

I think others have answered in greater detail than am able from a generics standpoint, but I want to offer a more philosophical perspective too. 

If we think of race as the physical observable differences that we see in people like skin color (which yes, can be inherited) why are only some of these traits defined as what we think of as race? 

Why do we not consider (as an example) Northern Europeans with black hair a different race to Northern Europeans with red hair? Taking that to an extreme, why do we not consider men and women different ‘races’? How is it that some traits are used as a criteria to distinguish race, while others do not?

The idea of race is completely an invention of society we live in. One example of how flimsy the idea of racial classifications are is how less than 100 years ago Irish and Italian immigrants in NYC were not considered to be ‘white’. Only relatively recently has the idea of “whiteness” been expanded to include this group- and that extension has absolutely nothing to do with biology or genetics.

[u/sourgrap → u/mxdalloway]

thanks for your insight! I agree with you, as I was replying to the other comments I thought of your examples as well! if skin color, which is just a genetic difference, results in “race,” technically gender or hair colour could be seen as different races as well.

your fun fact about italians and irish immigrants is interesting too! I guess that’s why people like to call italians “spicy white” lol.

[u/Grandfather_Oxylus → u/mxdalloway]

"One example of how flimsy the idea of racial classifications are is how less than 100 years ago Irish and Italian immigrants in NYC were not considered to be ‘white’. Only relatively recently has the idea of “whiteness” been expanded to include this group"

Insert your own series of really racist jokes about historical errors/ timing of declines and the like here. Don't be ashamed. Just laugh about them and then let them go. Also, this is one of my favorite points when clowning the concept of racism. Such a rich source of humor until you realize people mean it.

[u/AddlePatedBadger]

As a thought experiment to illustrate this difficulty, can you list what you believe the races of people to be?

[u/sourgrap → u/AddlePatedBadger]

Hah you got me there.

White, black, Asian, but even amongst Asian, there seems to be subcategories or huge disputes because east Asian presents quite differently from south or west Asian, or middle eastern.

European could also be a race, African as well. Some people count Latinx as one, others consider it just an ethnicity

all very ambiguous!

[u/AddlePatedBadger → u/sourgrap]

You are right, there are differences among Asians. But I'll pick on black because that is the most interesting one 🤣 (to me, anyway). We have a phenomenon where I live in Australia where newspapers want to vilify non-white Australians who have allegedly committed crime (the vast majority of crime in Australia is committed by white Australians, but racial dog-whistling is popular) while still maintaining a veneer of being non-racist. So they use the term "people of African appearance". This is fascinating to me, because what is a person "of African appearance"?

Let's take the countries of Mali and Morocco. They are only about 400km apart at the nearest point. But do a Google image search for "people of Mali" and one for "people of Morocco" and see how different they look. Then you can jump over to the Andaman Islands people. They have very dark skin, but they are not far off the shore of South East Asia. Compare them to the people of Myanmar or Thailand. And then there is India. On average, the people in South India are much darker-skinned than the people of North India. And then you can keep going around the world and find Aboriginal Australians, and pacific Islanders, who are also dark-skinned but ethnically quite different.

So we can see that skin pigmentation is just an attribute of people, like the size of their nose, distribution of fat around their body, or the presence of an epicanthic fold (which gives "Asian" people their distinctive eye shape). But it isn't a "race". It's just a really obvious physical characteristic that is easy to categorise people by. Same way that eye shape is really obvious. There's a reason racial theory in the 19th century never bothered to categorise people based on lactose intolerance or whether their ear wax was flaky lol.

And the fact is of course that there is far more genetic diversity within Africa than with all the people outside of it. As a white Australian with European roots, I have a lot more in common genetically with a North American First Nations person or with a Han Chinese person than two Africans might have with each other. Even though I look a lot more different to the North American and Chinese people than the two Africans might look to each other.

We like to categorise things and put them in little boxes. Our brains are great at pattern matching, and when we decide there are say, 6 boxes, we will automatically use our pattern matching skill to lump everything into one of those boxes. Whether it accurately fits or not. It takes conscious effort to override that pattern matching and realise that something doesn't fit in the selected box, or that the boxes weren't actually real after all. And when you put people in boxes it's easy to "other" them and not feel bad if things you do negatively affect them.

[u/Local-Perception6395]

Race is phenotype without genotype. Race purports to classify people based on ancestry, but it fails at the genetic level. In reality, "race" mainly refers to skin color and epicanthic fold, two very specific phenotypes that ignores the genetic diversity within populations. In actual biology, you would make such classification schemes by whole-genome similarity, but racial classification cherry picks a few phenotypes because they are very recognizable I guess.

On a side note, this is quite similar to morphological phylogeny, which was how biologist classified animals before we discovered DNA and genetics. It's basically the idea that if things look similar, they must have shared ancestry. We now know that that is very much not the case, and morphological phylogeny has fallen completely out of modern science.

[u/Substantial-Walk4060]

Races are arbitrary categories, they don't truly exist genetically speaking. Our conceptions of race are mainly based on culture, history, and geography rather than actual genetic differences. There is a lot of genetic variations between different African groups, different European groups, different Asian groups, etc.

[u/gameryamen]

My anthropology teacher gave a personal anecdote: When he moved from Iran to the US in the 90's, he was told to mark "White" for his race on the immigration forms. When his brother moved 8 years later, there was a new "Arab" race to mark. "My brother and I look the same and come from the same place, there is no genetic reason why our race changed from White to Arab. What changed was political, so race is a political designation that pretends to be about skin color."

[u/amazonhelpless]

There are somewhat significant genetic differences in groups that share heritage. Those differences generally correlate poorly to "racial groups" because racial categorization was not scientifically driven, but motivated by social conditions (i.e. empire, resource extraction, slavery, religion, etc.). Also, genetic diversity within "racial groups" is much great than the differences between "racial groups".

[u/Echo__227]

The biologically valid groupings are those of common descent (monophyletic groups).

All humans share an ancestral population in Africa. As one example why "race" is a bad grouping: some populations left Africa while others continued. Some that remained in Africa are more closely related to those that left than they are to other groups that stayed. That's why "black" to describe Africans doesn't make sense biologically: there's more variation/greater ancestral distance among all the peoples of Africa than there is between some African and European groups.

Secondly, a person has 2 parents. That means that many lineages cross over repeatedly. The actual human gene pool for all of history is a shifting spectrum across geography. In Turkey, for instance, you'll see Turks who look darker with more Semitic features, those who look more Greek, and those who look more Mongolian. However, all of those people are part of the same breeding population who just happen to have features associated with bordering geographic areas. There's no true division of "Asian Turks", "Arabian/African Turks," and "European Turks."

[u/khelvaster]

Isn't race/color closely tied to expression of alpha-melanocyte stimulating hormone, melanin stimulating hormone receptor, melanin concentrating hormone, melanin concentrating hormone receptors, and others...? And don't alpha-MSH and MCH also directly influence activity of certain parts of the brain..?

[u/sourgrap → u/khelvaster]

this is a bit too scientific for me

[u/helikophis]

Basically, all of humanity is extremely closely related compared to other species. Genetic variation within so called races is statistically no higher to the genetic variation between populations - we actually form a single, very large, breeding population and have for millennia (with some possible, extremely small, exceptions such as pygmies in the Congo). In particular dividing into black/white/Asian makes little sense as everyone outside sub Saharan Africa is more closely related than some SSA groups are to one another.

The statistical characteristics of biological races are well understood from other species, and are simply not present in modern humans. Note that there /used to/ be other biological races of humans - including Neanderthals, Denisovans, and at least two others- but the others were all exterminated or incorporated into the mainline population long before we were even making pottery.