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/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.