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.
The concept of race was applied at the same time by such political theorists such as Johann Gottfried von Herder to nationalist theory to develop ethnic nationalism. They posited the historical existence of races such as the German and French race connected to races which have existed for millenia (such as the Aryan? race), which should determine political institutions.
This should eventually develop into an imporant part of this entry, with links to pseudoscience, and the appropriate articles debunking pseudo-scientific and racists theories about humanity.
There is some evidence to support claim that people who identify themselves as "white" are more intelligent than those who identify themselves as "black" and "Hispanic". In U.S. in IQ tests, "black" people got significantly worse results (average 85) than "white" people (average 100), with "Hispanics" somewhere in between. Early studies were (properly) flat-out rejected, as they did not control for the relationship between IQ and one's education level and income. Since higher intelligence certainly is a product of better education and higher income, the lack of a correction for this limited the use of earlier studies. However, some later studies have attempted to make corrections for this; these make the measured IQ gap only slightly smaller; a significant gap does seem to exist. No significant IQ gap was found between "white", "Jewish" and "Asian" people.
Not much research on this topic has been published, because it is assumed by many that the only motivation for such research is racism. Much of the controversial research has been summarized, in great detail, in The Bell Curve, published in 1994 by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray. It immediately attracted much media attention, and was denounced by some as thinly veiled racism. The authors were once publicly denounced as Nazis. http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/hum_diff.html
However, it is less known that following the publication of their work, and the subsequent vilification of the authors, a public statement was circulated by 52 internationally known scholars in support of the research in "The Bell Curve". It was published in The Wall Street Journal, 12/3/94. http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/taboos/wsj_main.html
Since then, many scientists have disputed the evidence presented in The Bell Curve, and have found what they see as serious methodological flaws. A critique the book can be found in the revised and expanded edition of The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould (1996, W. W. Norton and Co.)
Assuming that this gap in IQ (and SAT scores) is real, even when corrected for social and financial differences, it is not clear what the origins of this gap are. Part of this gap may well be genetic; there is no a priori reason to believe that every ethnic group or race as precisely the same genes in all areas of neural development; a small amount of random variation early on may have later crystallized into such differences at later times. Nonetheless, the reader should be cautioned not to assume that all difference are genetic in origin. Scientists have firmly established that most genetic variations in individuals are only a part of the picture of how an individual develops. The environment that a person is brough up in is equally imporant. Further, there are painful social factors involved, such as the high rate drinking, smoking, and illicit drug use during pregnancy of inner-city teenagers. These activities are known to cause measurable mental damage to children born to parents engaging in such activities. Thus, as cities and states work to reduce the amount of smoking, alcoholism and illicit drug use, this may well end in reducing or eliminating much of the IQ and SAT score gaps that are currently being measured. In this case, the gap would be a sumpton of a wider social problem, and not a statement about race at all.
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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