The historical definition of race, before the development of evolutionary biology, was that of common lineage, a vague concept interchangeable with species, breed?, cultural origin, or characteristic quality. ("The whole race of mankind." --Shakespeare; "Whence the long race of Alban fathers come" --Dryden?
The 19th-century anthropological concept of race was based on morphological characteristics such as skin colour, facial characteristics and amount and type of hair. Though such characteristics have since been shown to have a minimal relationship with any other heritable characteristics, it retains popularity because it is easy to immediately distinguish people based on physical appearance.
Because people of different races can interbreed, this method of classification is weak. (Compare with species.) In other words, racial purity does not have a clear biological meaning.
Some of the 19th-century naturalists and ethnographers who defined the field were [Georges Cuvier]?, Pritchard, Louis Agassiz, [Charles Pickering]? (Races of Man and Their Geographical Distribution, 1848), and [Johann Friedrich Blumenbach]?. Cuvier enumerated three races, Pritchard seven, Agassiz eight, and Pickering eleven. Blumenbach's classification was widely adopted:
Writers in the decades following Blumenbach classified the Malay and American races as branches of the Mongolian, leaving only the Caucasian, Mongolian, and Ethiopian races.
Because individual geography, culture, religion, political association and, above all, heredity can change, racial purity, the concept that wholly distinct racial groupings exist, has little meaning from the perspective of evolutionary biology.
Ethnicity is the concept of race decoupled from national affiliation. For example, ethnic Germans are people who are not citizens of the nation of Germany but who may be considered racially German.
See also:
The following is the old version of this article, which was replaced with the above. This needs to be more carefully included in the above.
A race, in biology, ... biologically accurate definition needed
Because members of different races, by definition, can interbreed, there very often exist individuals that don't clearly belong to any one race. This in no way means that, as some anti-racists claim, races don't exist. On the other hand, term 'racially pure' is difficult to assign a clear biological meaning.
Usually morphological characteristics (like skin colour, facial characteristics and amount and type of hair) is used to divide populations into races, but that's mostly because they're very easy to apply, not because morphology is more important than other characteristics.
One person hopes that the experts on human races--anthropologists, cultural historians--will weigh in on the subject, trying to maintain a neutral point of view, of course.
A race is a competition of speed over distance. A race may be over any distance, and using any means stipulated by the rules of the race. Running a certain distance is the template of racing, but races are often conducted in vehicles, such as boats and cars.
Early records of races are evidient on ancient greek pottery, where running men are depicted vying for first place. There is a chariot? race in the Iliad.
A race and its name are often associated with the place of origin, the means of transport and the distance of the race. As a couple of examples, see the [Paris-Dakar rally]? or the [Athens marathon]?.
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