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Terms of estrangement - race and science - Cover Story

Discover, Nov, 1994 by James Shreeve

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The problem with this definition rests in the way patterns of human variation have traditionally been packaged and perceived. In the past, most anthropologists unquestioingly accepted the concept of races as fixed entities or types, each of which was pure and distinct. These types were seen as gigantic genetic bushel baskets into which people could be sorted. Admittedly, the rims of the bushel baskets might not be stiff enough to keep some of their contents from spilling out and mingling with geographically adjacent baskets. In the sixteenth century, European colonialism began flicking genes from one basket into other parts of the world; soon afterward the forced importation of large numbers of Africans into the Americas had a similar effect. But until recent decades, anthropologists believed that no amount of interracial mixing could ever dilute the purity of the racial ideals themselves.

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In the bushel-basket scheme, races are defined by sets of physical characteristics that cluster together with some degree of predictability in particular geographic regions. Asians, for instance, are typically supposed to have "yellow" skin, wide, flat cheekbones, epicanthic folds (those little webs of skin over the corners of the eyes), straight black hair, sparse body hair, and "shovel-shaped" incisor teeth, to name just a few such distinctive traits. And sure enough, if you were to walk down a street in Beijing, stopping every once in a while to peer into people's mouths, you would find a high frequency of these features.

But try the same test in Manila, Tehran, or Irkutsk--all cities in Asia--and your Asian bushel basket begins to fall apart. When we think of an "Asian race," we in fact have in mind people from only one limited part of that vast continent. You could, of course, replace that worn-out, overloaded bushel basket with a selection of smaller baskets, each representing a more localized region and its population. A quick scan through some supposedly Asian traits, though, shows why any number of subcontinental baskets would be hopelessly inadequate for the job. Most inhabitants of the Far East have epicanthic folds on their eyes, for instance--but so do the Khoisan (the "Bushmen") of southern Africa. Shovel-shaped incisors--the term refers to the slightly scooped-out shape of the back side of the front teeth--do indeed show up in Asian and American Indian mouths more often than in other people's, but they also pop up a lot in Sweden, where very few people have coarse, straight black hair, epicanthic folds, or short body stature.

The straightforward biological fact of human variation is that there are no traits that are inherently, inevitably associated with one another. Morphological features do vary from region to region, but they do so independently, not in packaged sets. "I tell my students that I could divide the whole world into two groups: the fat-nose people and the skinny-nose people," says Norm Sauer. "But then I start adding in other traits to consider, like skin color, eye color, stature, blood type, fingerprints, whatever. It doesn't take long before somebody in the class gets the point and says, 'Wait a minute! Pretty soon you're going to have a race with only one person in it.'"

Terms of estrangement - race and science - Cover Story

Discover, Nov, 1994 by James Shreeve

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