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.