ACTIVITY # 5 (PART 1 OF 2) - THE CONCEPT OF RACE

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SUPPLEMENTAL NOTES FOR CHAPTER 5 LECTURE

"There are no races, there are only clines." - Frank Livingston The concept of “race” – There are no such things as human biological “races.” The concept of “race” is only a cultural (or social) construct. There is no gene that determines any so-called “race.” Dividing people into distinct “racial” categories erroneously assumes that people from different population groups are biologically distinct; however, modern genetics proves that there are no biologically distinct populations of humans – and no such thing as human “races.” “Race classification” has been based on phenotypic (physical) characteristics such as skin tone, stature, and eye shape. Modern genetic data has proven that measuring human variation by phenotype is not reliable and is not an accurate representation of genetic similarities or differences. Modern genetics provides us with a very different picture of human variation. Comparisons of human genetic data prove that most human variation (approximately 85%) is actually found within individuals from the same population, rather than individuals from different populations. Modern human genetic studies provide us with evidence to prove that all living people are distantly related and that all living humans trace their ancestry back to the continent of Africa. MtDNA has been used to trace human female lineages and y-chromosome DNA has been used to trace human male lineages back to Africa. Two other data sets also provide us with genetic evidence of modern human ancestry. Indigenous Africans have the most genetic variation of any living populations of humans. The earliest human mutations (genetic markers) trace back to the continent of Africa. All four data sets provide us with evidence that the founding populations of modern humans originated in the continent of Africa.

Terms to know: cline - a gradation of variation in one or more traits spread over geographic regions (i.e., a systematic relation between geographic locations and frequencies of alleles). clinal distribution – a distribution of trait variations that has a continuous gradation across a geographical area. melanin – a pigment that gives skin a darker tone.

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RACE: THE POWER OF AN ILLUSION (PBS) INTERVIEW WITH JONATHAN MARKS (edited transcript) Jonathan Marks is a molecular anthropologist who teaches at the University of North Carolina- Charlotte. He is author of Human Biodiversity and What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee. What are the conventional, popular understandings of race? The folk understanding of race is that there's a small number of basically different kinds of people, perhaps localized to continents: Asians, Africans, Europeans, Australians, Native Americans. But the idea is that there's a small number of basically different flavors of people, perhaps color-coded for your convenience: yellow, white, red, black. That's the common sense understanding of race. This doesn't reflect natural patterns of variation, because of course, the peoples of Africa are exceedingly diverse, the peoples of Asia are exceedingly diverse, and the peoples of Europe, of course, are exceedingly diverse, as well. So it's not that we're reading natural patterns of variation and simply extracting this idea from nature, but what we're doing is we're deciding that certain patterns of variation are less important that others, and certain patterns of variation are more important than others. We decide that the difference between a Norwegian and an Italian is not significant and so we'll place them in the same category. And we decide that the difference between a Persian and a Somali is important; and so we'll place them in different categories. What does genetics tell us about human variation? The modern study of genetic variation, since about the 1970s tells us essentially that people are phenotypically similar to those nearby and they're different from those far away. And that no more tells us that there's three kinds of people than it tells us there are seven, or twelve, or thirty- eight kinds of people. Most genetic variation is encapsulated within any local group - that is to say, all human groups have people that are taller, or shorter, or heavier, or skinnier, or more extroverted or more introverted. So the range of different kinds of people are found within all groups and what genetics was able to do was to put a number on that. About 85% of detectable genetic variation is located within groups. To the extent that there is between-group variation, the majority of between-group variation is local, not racial. And the amount of difference attributable to this large group of people versus that large group of people is only a tiny portion of the total of human variation. What accounts for our patterns of variation? The peoples of east Africa look different from the peoples of western Africa, who look different from the peoples of South Africa. And in fact, the peoples of east Africa look more like the peoples of west Asia, and are genetically more similar to the peoples of west Asia than they are to the peoples of western Africa. Why is that? Because they're closer. And the major variable determining biological similarity and biological difference is geographical proximity. Why? Because people interbreed with one another. And when human groups come into contact with each other, what Cole Porter called "the urge to merge" has invariably expressed itself. It didn't start with Columbus. It's been going on through time immemorial. Neighboring groups always have complex economic and social relationships with their neighbors, and obviously they marry their neighbors and they have complex forms of what anthropologists used to sexistly call "bride exchange." We may hate the people next door, but we're related to them. Why? Because our

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ancestors interbred. Throughout European history we certainly know about all kinds of migrations and invasions and dispersions. We know less about the history of pre-colonial Africa, because we have less preserved in writing, but that certainly doesn't mean that people were just sitting there in one place. Obviously people were migrating and people were moving and the history of populations is a dynamic, flowing continuum. And that's why the patterns that we discovered genetically - the continuity of form, and the continuity of populations from place to place exists - because people are always moving and interbreeding and intermarrying. There's two major kinds of gene flow. One would be a large-scale invasion or migration. The other kind would be population A intermarries with population B, population B intermarries with population C, population C intermarries with population D. And of course, this way genes from here can move a long distance over long periods of time, depending upon the amount of interbreeding that goes on. We know it happens, and it happens everywhere. It happened even in the Pleistocene. Neanderthals had trade routes and where goods flow, obviously genes flow as well. Those traveling salesman jokes were probably there back in the Pleistocene as well. We used to think that human history consisted of population branching and was always divergent. These people moved here and stayed here, and then those people moved over there and stayed over there, and this group moved over there and stayed over there. That's incredibly simplistic because what we know is that human evolution is not constantly divergent, human evolution is reticulated - that is to say, it's like the capillaries in a blood stream. They branch apart, they come back together. These people go over here and they encounter and interbreed with others. What is non-concordance and what does it tell us about race? By non-concordance, what we mean is that different individual traits in the human species don't share the same patterns of variation across geographic space. Skin color for example, varies with latitude. Certain people have brown hair and blue eyes. Other people have blond hair and blue eyes. And even though there's a statistical association of those particular features, they're not invariably expressed with one another. Certainly dark skin is present all over the world in different populations. Indigenous Australians, indigenous peoples of India, indigenous peoples of Africa are all very darkly pigmented even though they're not particularly closely related. And one of the interesting problems with the theory of race is that if you look at the peoples of, for example, the Indian sub-continent, you find people who are darkly pigmented like Africans, have hair like East Asians, and facially resemble Europeans. They live on the continent of Asia. What do you do with these people? Traits are non-concordant because genes are inherited independently of one another to a large extent. We can look at patterns of body parts and patterns of body form, but it's very hard to associate specific genetic patterns with specific body patterns. Interestingly though, we generally find the same geographical patterns whether we look at bodies or whether we look at genes. And that pattern is that most variation is within the group. We don't find large clusters of relatively homogeneous people.

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What are clines? In anthropology we talk about clinal variation. Cline is a term that was devised by the biologist Julian Huxley to represent a geographical gradient in a particular trait across a species. So if you've got a broadly distributed species that has a particular form, whether it's body shape or color - let's say in the north it looks different from the south but they're the same species - you can't really draw a line and say there's two kinds of frogs that have this or that particular form. Instead, the variation is gradual and continuous. What Huxley argued is that we should talk not about discrete racial variation, but about gradual clinal variation. And about 30 years after Huxley proposed the term clines, anthropologists came to recognize that pretty much all variation in the human species is clinal - that is to say, continuous and gradual across geography, and not discrete, not racial. When anthropologist Frank Livingston wrote in the early 1960s "There are no races, there are only clines," what he was doing was summarizing epigrammatically what anthropologists had come to realize since about World War II, with the work of Ashley Montagu: that the human species simply doesn't come patterned the way we thought it came patterned, and that the way we were thinking about natural patterns of human variation was really topsy- turvy.