Race (classification of human beings)

In biology in general, the term race is used to define groups of common hereditary characteristics into which some animal species are subdivided.

Since the 1940s, evolutionary scientists have rejected the idea of race, according to which a finite number of essential characteristics can be used to determine the number of human groups or human types. Many evolutionary and social scientists believe that the common definition of race (and, in general, any definition of race related to humans) lacks rigor and taxonomic validity. They argue that they are imprecise and arbitrary, and that the races observed vary depending on the culture examined.^{[citation needed]}

Some anthropologists argue that the human species is made up of a single race divided into different ethnic groups which, in turn, are divided into peoples. These anthropological theories appeared in the 1960s, partly as a reaction against pseudoscientific theories related to biological predeterminism that predetermined segregationism and racial discrimination, present at that time in Western countries. The results of the investigations of the anthropologists Franz Boas and Claude Lévi-Strauss also had an influence, which highlighted the ethnocentric tendencies of all cultures. In its declaration The racial question, of 1950, UNESCO recommended replacing the notion of the human race, considered unscientific and confusing, by that of ethnicity, based more on cultural differences (language, religion, customs and others).

In modern anthropology, there is a broad scientific consensus that there are no human races in a biological sense.

Races do not exist, biologically or scientifically. Men by their common origin belong to the same genetic repertoire. The variations we can see are not the result of different genes. If "races" were to be treated, there is only one "race": the human.

José Marín Gonzáles

Survey on disagreement between disciplines

In a debate held in the first decade of the 21st century, some geneticists argue that race is neither a meaningful concept nor a useful heuristic device, since it is based on apparent physical descriptions with no biological foundation. It has been concluded that the attempt to define races somehow implies the existence of a racial purity, illustrated by "type" individuals. Advances in genetics suggest that genetic differences between groups are biologically insignificant, in the sense that there are more genetic variations within groups called races than between them, and that racial traits they overlap without differentiated borders.

In contrast, some geneticists argue that both race and ethnicity self-identity categories are valid and useful, that these categories correspond to certain groups, and that this correspondence implies that genetic factors may contribute to unexplained phenotypic variations between groups.

The most recent survey, conducted in 1985 (Lieberman et al. 1992), asked 1,200 scientists how many did not agree with the following proposition: “There are biological races in species Homo sapiens”. The responses were as follows:

• biologists 16%
• evolutionary psychologists 36%
• physical anthropologists 41%
• cultural anthropologists 53%

These data show that a majority of them did support the concept of biological human races. The figure for physical anthropologists in PhD-granting departments were slightly higher, rising from 41% to 42%, with 50% agreeing.^{[citation needed]}

History of the concept of race

Map collected by Renato Biasutti prior to 1940. It distributes humans according to the tone of their skin (based on the Von Luschan chromatic Scale), considering “native populations”.

Given complex social relationships, it is assumed that human beings have always observed themselves and speculated about physical differences between individuals and groups. But different societies have attached different meanings to such differences.

Ancient Age

The division of humanity into different "races" — although the term did not appear until the 15th century d. C.— is found in the Book of Doors, a sacred text from Ancient Egypt. This writing identifies four categories conventionally labeled as "Egyptians", "Asians", "Libyans", and "Nubians". At the base of this classification, characteristics such as skin color were mixed with tribal or "national" identities.

In the ancient Greco-Roman world environmental determinism was widely accepted. It was first expounded in detail in the treatise attributed to Hippocrates Airs, Waters, Places of the fifth century span> a. C.. Thus, the Asians, who inhabit a warm and southern climate, would be indolent and peaceful, but intelligent, while the Europeans, who live in a cold and northern climate, would be brave and bellicose, but lacking in intelligence. This model was developed by Aristotle in the following century in his Politics, going further than Hippocrates in environmental determinism by pointing out that the ideal environment in which the Greeks lived predisposed them to govern the least favored by nature and that by combining the best qualities of Europeans and Asians they were able to govern all of humanity. However, there are authors of classical antiquity such as Strabo, who do not take environmental theory into account in their description of the towns and their customs.

Middle Ages

Map of T in O of the centuryXV. Following the account of the Bible that humanity comes from the three sons of Noah, above is Asia (inhabited by the semitas, descendants of Sem), down to the left Europe (inhabited by the Japhethites, descendants of Japheth) and down to the right Africa (inhabited by the Shiites, descendants of Cam).

Christianity contributed a new concept, universalism, until then foreign to Antiquity, considering itself the true religion of all humanity. In this way, the division between Greeks/Romans and "barbarians", typical of Antiquity, was replaced by the differentiation between those who already formed part of the Christian community, the baptized, and "those not yet". Christians" (the pagans). A special group was made up of the Jews since they were the cradle of the Christian religion and therefore they were not persecuted, but only "carried away" and not tolerated. The unknown regions of the Earth in the imaginary of the medieval West appeared populated by fabulous beings not destined for salvation.

On the other hand, in medieval Islam the curse of Ham, suitably reworked, was used to justify the slavery of blacks by pointing them out as the descendants of Ham who, according to the biblical story, had mocked his father Noah when He found him drunk and naked, and a furious Noah had cursed Ham's son, Canaan, to be "to his brothers the slave of slaves." In the Bible nothing was said about the color of Ham's skin (actually it was about justifying the slavery of the Canaanites, the great enemies of Israel), but in the III the church father Origen added skin prejudice to the curse by stating that the sons of Ham were doomed to a degrading life marked by darkness (in a spiritual sense). It was the great Arab scholar Al-Tabari who in the X century clearly stated that the curse of Ham had caused the blackening of their skin so their descendants were the blacks who were sentenced to slavery.

15th, 16th and 17th centuries: the birth of the term "race"

The first written confirmation of the word «race» in Spanish is found in the work El Corbacho by the archpriest Alfonso Martínez de Toledo published in 1438.

[...] take two fixed ones, one of a tiller, another one of a digger: believe in a mountain of command and discipline of a husband and move. You will see how the farmer's fixed will still be pleased with village things, such as plowing, digging and bringing wood with beasts; and the digger's fixed will not heal except from running to digging and bringing weapons and squatting and snatching. This procures nature; so you will see it of every day in the logars do byvieres, that the good and of good roots still rretrae do come, and the bliss, of vile root and lineage, as great as it is and much as it has, will never retract synon to the vileza where it descends.

In this work, the archpriest of Talavera uses the word «raza» as a synonym for lineage to indicate that a «labrador» will always be a «labrador» («de vil raza e lineage») and a «cavallero» a «cavallero» » («of good race») regardless of the social context in which they are educated. According to Max Sebastián Hering Torres, from the National University of Colombia, «in this passage it is evident that the term "race" did not pretend anything more than to be a manifestation of origin, that is, of lineage. In principle, the author uses the expression "race" in a neutral way and only by including a positive adjective "good race" or a negative one "vile race", the term obtains an evaluative component. Therefore, the word “race” itself does not contain a flattering or pejorative connotation. Likewise, it is shown that this conception of "race" is accompanied by the imaginary of an immanent and invariable natural ethos of being".

However, the most widespread meaning of the term «raza» in Spanish in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries was not that of a synonym of lineage, but rather that of «blemish» or «defective», «maculate», or lineage. of "impure blood". It comes from the application of the term «race» in other contexts, as stated by the humanist Antonio Nebrija in his Dictionary (1495) when he translates the Latin phrase panni raritas as «raça of the cloth", that is, a rarity or defect in the cloth, an expression widely used by the tailors' guild.

Thus, those who had a lineage without "impurities" had no "race". Agustín Salucio in 1599 wrote a speech contrary to the statutes of blood purity in which in one of its sections he said: "[...] because to have race a Jewish great-great-grandfather is enough, although the other 15 are Christian and noble". In 1611, the philologist Sebastián de Covarrubias in his renowned work Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language defined "race" as "the caste of purebred horses, which are marked with iron so that they are known" and said also that "race in the lineages are taken in bad part, like having some race of Moor, or Jew." Lorenzo Franciosini, possibly inspired by Covarrubias, developed in his book Vocabolario español, y italiano a definition that shows the closeness between «cleanliness» and «race» as follows: «Clean: it is a times used in Spain. Everyone who is an old Christian is because he has no race, no Moorish or Jewish origin ». In 1638 Bartolomé Jiménez Patón wrote: «[...] who are the clean old Christians, without race, blemish, nor descendants, nor fame, nor rumor of it». Max Sebastián Hering Torres concludes that "there is no semantic-ideological link between the term 'race' used in the 16th-17th centuries, with that used in the 18th-20th centuries".

In English it was not until the 16th century that the term race began to be used, which comes from the French race. It is likely that both race and raza are a loanword from Italian -razza-. Meanings of the term in the 16th century included “wines with a characteristic flavour”, “people with a common occupation” and "generation". There is no certainty about the pristine origin of the word, although it is suggested that it could, for example, be derived from the Arabic word “rā's” (رأس), that is, “head”, but also “start” or “origin”.

According to some authors, the word "race", along with many of the ideas associated today with the term, are a product of the European colonialist era. As Europeans came face to face with people from different parts of the world, speculations began about the physical, social and cultural differences between human groups. Many of these reflections were recorded in travel diaries or navigation logs. With the increase in the African slave trade, which came to be incorporated into a pre-existing slave market, there was another incentive to categorize human groups and justify the barbaric treatment of the slaves brought to America. The Europeans began to classify the peoples with whom who came into contact based on physical appearance, behavior, and physical abilities. A set of folklore beliefs held together the inherited physical differences between groups with intellectual, behavioral, and moral qualities. Similar ideas can be found in other cultures.

The first «scientific» classification of humans into different «races» could be the Nouvelle division de la terre par les différents espèces ou races qui l'habitent (“New division of the Earth by the different species or races that inhabit it”), by François Bernier, published in 1684.^{[citation needed]}

18th century

In the 18th century, differences between human groups became the focus of an important branch of scientific inquiry. (Todorov 1993). Initially, scholars concentrated on cataloging and describing humanity's natural varieties. The Natural Varieties of Mankind is the title that Johann Friedrich Blumenbach gave to a text of his, written in 1775. In it, Blumenbach established five broad divisions of humans, which are reflected in certain racial classifications of The last decades. During the 17th to 19th centuries, popular beliefs about group differences mixed with scientific explanations of these differences produced what has been called ideology of race (Smedley, 1999). According to this approach, races are primordial, natural, enduring, and distinct. Some groups may be the result of mixing between different ancient populations, but careful study can distinguish those ancestral races that have combined to produce mixed groups.

19th century

The scientific community of the XIX century witnessed attempts to change the meaning of the word race, from a taxonomic concept to a biological one. In the XIX century some natural scientists wrote on the subject including Georges Cuvier, Charles Darwin, Alfred Wallace, Francis Galton, James Cowles Pritchard, Louis Agassiz, Charles Pickering, and Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. As anthropology took hold during the 19th century, European and American scientists increasingly sought explanations for cultural differences. and of behavior that they attributed to the nature of the groups (Stanton 1960).

These scientists made three claims about race:

• ...first, that races are objective and natural divisions of humanity;
• ...continuing, there is a strong relationship between the biological races and other human phenomena—such as forms of activity and interpersonal relations and culture, and by extension the relative material success of the cultures—so that they biologized the notion of “race”, as also Michel Foucault would in the centuryXX.;
• ...and third, that race is therefore a scientifically valid category that can be used to explain and predict individual and group behaviors. The races were distinguished by skin color, face type, profile and head size, texture and hair color. Furthermore, races were almost universally regarded as a reflection of the group's differences in moral character and intelligence.

The eugenics movement of the late 19th century and early XX, inspired by Essay Concerning the Inequality of Human Races, by Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, or Vacher de Lapouge's “anthropsociology” and the Johann Gottfried von Herder's theories, held the "biological inferiority" of some particular groups (Kevles, 1985). In many parts of the world, the idea of race became a way of rigidly dividing groups by culture. But above all, racial classifications relied on obvious physical differences (Hannaford 1996). Oppression campaigns often resorted to scientific discourse that upheld the supposed inherent inferiority of certain groups by genetic inheritance to legitimize inhumane acts against others, such as genocide (Horowitz, 2001) or ethnicity.

The development of Darwinian evolutionary models (see Charles Darwin) and Mendelian genetics (see Gregor Mendel) drew attention to the scientific validity of both characteristics, and were the basis for a radical reconsideration of the concept of "race& #34;.^{[citation required]}

20th century

In 1976, Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene, in which he postulated his gene-focused theory of evolution, with the concepts of meme and memetics. In 1982, in his book The Extended Phenotype, he stated that phenotypic effects are not limited to the body of an organism, but can extend into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms.^{[ citation required]}

Modern debates

Breed as a subspecies

With the advent of neo-Darwinism in the early 20th century, biologists developed a new and more rigorous model of race as subspecies. For these biologists, a race is a recognizable group that is part of a species. A monotypic species has no races, or rather a race contains the entire species. Monotypic species can be characterized in different ways:

• All members of the species are so similar that they cannot be significantly divided into biologically significant subcategories.
• Individuals vary considerably but the variation is essentially random and unsignificant so it makes the genetic transmission of these variations. Many plant species fit into this category, because the horticulturists, interested in preserving a particular flower color, avoid the propagation from the seed and instead use methods such as the spread by cuts.
• The variation between individuals is important and follows a pattern, but there are no clear dividing lines between separate groups: they are imperceptibly confused with each other. These clinical variations always indicate substantial genetic flows between seemingly separate groups that constitute a population. Populations with sustained and substantial genetic flow are more likely to present monotypical species, even if genetic variation is obvious in sight.

A polytypic species has two or more races (or, in common parlance, two or more subtypes). This classification reflects separate groups that are clearly distinct from one another and do not generally interbreed (although there may be a relatively close zone of hybridization), but could interbreed freely if necessary. Although different species can sometimes interbreed to a limited extent, the reverse is not true. Groups unable to produce fertile offspring with each other are universally considered distinct species, and not merely different "breeds" of the same species.^{[citation needed]}

Although this attempt at conceptual precision has been widespread with many biologists, especially zoologists, evolutionary scientists have criticized it on a number of fronts.^{[citation needed]}

The rejection of race and the rise of population and cline

In the early 20th century, anthropologists questioned, then abandoned, the claim that biologically distinct races are isomorphic regarding different linguistic, cultural and social groups. Then the development of population genetics led some scholars of anthropology and biology, sympathetic to evolutionism, to question the validity of race as a scientific concept that described a real and objective phenomenon. Those who came to reject the validity of the concept of race did so for four reasons: due to empirical evidence, by definition, due to the availability of alternative concepts, and for ethical reasons (Lieberman & Byrne, 1993).

The first to question the concept of race in the empirical field were the anthropologists Franz Boas —who demonstrated phenotypic plasticity due to environmental factors (Boas, 1912)— and Ashley Montagu (1941, 1942), who relied on data produced by genetics. Zoologists Edward O. Wilson and W. Brown also challenged the concept from the perspective of general scientific classification, later rejecting the claim that "race" was equivalent to "subspecies" (Wilson and Brown 1953). In Race and History (Unesco, 1952), Claude Lévi-Strauss imposed proposals stemming from cultural relativism, with the famous metaphor of cultures as trains passing each other in different directions, each looking at each other. the others immobile while they were advancing.

One of the crucial innovations for the new conception of genotypic and phenotypic variations was the observation of the anthropologist C. Loring Brace. He maintained that such variations, insofar as they are affected by natural selection, migration, or genetic drift, are distributed in geographic gradations called "clines" (Brace 1964). This point drew attention to a common problem in phenotype-based descriptions of breeds—considerations of coat texture and skin color—that they ignore a host of other similarities and differences (for example, blood type).) that do not correlate highly with the race markers. Thus, anthropologist Frank Livingstone's conclusion that, since clines cross racial boundaries, "there are no races, only clines" (Livingstone, 1962: 279). In 1964, the biologists Paul Ehrlich and Holm pointed to cases where two or more clines are discordantly distributed—for example, melanin is distributed in a decreasing pattern from north of the equator to the south; the frequencies for the haplotype for hemoglobin beta-S, on the other hand, radiate from specific geographic points in Africa (Ehrlich & Holm, 1964). As anthropologists Leonard Lieberman and Fatimah Linda Jackson observe, “Discordant patterns of heterogeneity falsify any description of a population as being genotypically or even phenotypically homogeneous” (Lieverman & Jackson, 1995).

Finally, geneticist Richard Lewontin, noting that 85 percent of human variation occurs within populations, not between populations, argued that neither "breed" nor "subspecies" were appropriate or useful ways to describe populations (Lewontin, 1973). This view is described by his detractors as the Lewontin fallacy . Some researchers say that variation between racial groups (as measured by Sewall Wright's Population Structure Statistics (F_ST)) accounts for as little as 5% of human genetic variation². However, due to the technical limitations of F_ST, many geneticists today believe that low F_ST values do not invalidate the possibility that different human races may exist (Edwards, 2003). On the other hand, the current scientific consensus is that race is a social construct not based on our biological reality. Neo-Marxists such as David Harvey (1982, 1984, 1992) add that it is used instead to weaken differences between classes.

These empirical questions about the concept of race forced evolutionary science to reconsider its definition of race. William Boyd, a mid-century XX century anthropologist, defined race as:

A population that differs significantly from other populations regarding the frequency of one or more genes it possesses. It is an arbitrary question which, and how many, generate loci choose to consider a meaningful “constellation”.

Boyd:1950

Lieberman and Jackson (1994) have pointed out that “the weakness of this argument is that if a gene can distinguish races then the number of races is as numerous as the number of reproducing human pairs”. In addition, anthropologist Stephen Molnar has suggested that cline mismatch inevitably results in a multiplication of breeds that renders the theoretical richness of the concept useless (Molnar, 1992).

Along with the empirical and conceptual issues of "race" After World War II, evolutionary social scientists were acutely aware of the way in which beliefs about race had served to "legitimize" discrimination, apartheid, slavery, and genocide. This question became central in the 1960s, the time of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the rise of anti-colonialism.

Faced with this problem, some evolutionary scientists simply abandoned the concept of race in favor of population. What distinguishes population from previous groupings of humans by race is that the former refers to a reproducing population—essential point for genetic calculations—and not to a biological taxon. Other evolutionary scientists have abandoned the concept of race in favor of cline—conceived the frequency of a trait changes along a geographic gradient. The concepts of population and cline, however, are not mutually exclusive and are usually used in evolutionary scientific language.

As a corollary to the rejection of race in the field of biological sciences, several social scientists have replaced the term with ethnicity, to refer to self-identified groups based on shared beliefs such as religion, nationality, territory and other categories that are not necessarily biological such as language and customs. Furthermore, they understood that these shared beliefs and behaviors are not constitutive of a race proper but are social constructs that have no objective basis in the natural or supernatural realm (Gordon, 1964).

Recent studies on the Brazilian population indicate that there is no relationship between genes and races.

Summary of term definitions

Physical variation and skin color

The distribution of many physical traits resembles the distribution of genetic variation within human populations among human populations (American Association of Physical Anthropologists 1996; Keita and Kittles 1997). For example, ∼90% of the variation in human head shape occurs within each human group, and ∼10% separate groups, with greater variability in head shape among individuals with recent African ancestors (Relethford 2002).

A prominent exception to the common distribution of physical characteristics within and between groups is skin color. Approximately 10% of the variance in fur color occurs within groups, and ~90% occurs between groups (Relethford 2002). This distribution of skin color and its geographic pattern—with people with ancestors who lived predominantly near the equator having darker skin than those with ancestors who lived predominantly at higher latitudes—indicate that this attribute has been under strong selection pressure. Darker skin appears to be strongly selected for equatorial regions to prevent sunburn, skin cancer, folate photolysis, and sweat gland damage (Sturm et al. 2001; Rees 2003). A leading hypothesis for the selection of a lighter skin color at higher latitudes is that it allows the body to form greater amounts of vitamin D since at those latitudes the ultraviolet rays of the sun are less intense which helps prevent rickets (Jablonski 2004). Evidence for this includes the discovery that a substantial portion of the skin color differences between Europeans and Africans resides in a single gene, SLC24A5 the threonine 111 allele, which was found in between 98.7 and 100% among several samples from Europeans, while the alanine-111 form was found in 93-100% of samples from Africans, East Asians, and Amerindians (Lamason et al. 2005). However, the vitamin D hypothesis is not universally accepted (Aoki 2002), and lighter skin color at higher latitudes may simply correspond to the absence of selection for dark skin (Harding et al. 2000).. Melanin, which serves as pigment, is located in the epidermis of the skin, and is based on hereditary gene expression.

Because fur color has been under strong selection pressure, similar fur colors may result from convergent adaptation rather than genetic relationship. Sub-Saharan Africans, tribal peoples from southern India, and Australian aborigines have similar skin pigmentation, but genetically they are no more similar than other widely separated groups. Furthermore, in some parts of the world where people from different regions have mixed extensively, the connection between skin color and ancestry has been substantially weakened (Parra et al. 2004). In Brazil, for example, skin color is not closely associated with the percentage of recent African ancestry a person has, by estimates from an analysis of genetic variants that differ in frequency between continental groups (Parra et al. 2003).

Considerable speculation has surrounded the possible adaptive value of other group-characteristic physical features, such as the constellation of facial features seen in many East and Northeast Asians (Guthrie 1996). However, any given physical characteristic is generally found in multiple groups (Lahr 1996), and demonstrating that environmental selection pressures shaped specific physical traits will be difficult, as these traits may have resulted from sexual selection of individuals with certain appearances or from genetic drift (Roseman 2004).

Human genetic variation

Cladistics

A phylogenetic tree is usually obtained from DNA or protein sequences of populations. Often mitochondrial DNA or Y chromosome sequences are used to study ancient human populations. These locus-single DNA sources do not recombine and are almost always inherited from a single parent, with the only known exception being mtDNA (Schwartz & Vissing, 2002). Individuals from various continental groups tend to be more similar to each other than to people from other continents. The tree traces its roots to the common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans, believed to have originated in Africa. The horizontal distance corresponds to two things:

1. Genetic distance. Given below the diagram, the genetic difference between humans and chimpanzees is approximately 2 percent, or 20 times larger than the variation between modern humans.
2. Temporary distance of the most recent common ancestor. The approximate estimates given in the upper diagram in millions of years. The most recent common mitochondrial ancestor of modern humans lived about 25 000 years ago, the last common ancestors of humans and chimpanzees between four and seven million years ago.

Chimpanzees and humans belong to different genera, indicated in red. The formation of species and subspecies is also indicated, and the formation of “races” is indicated in the green rectangle on the right (note that only a representative approximation of human phylogeny is given). Note that the vertical distances are not significant in this representation.

Distribution of variation

A thorough description of the differences in patterns of genetic variation between humans and other species awaits further genetic studies of human populations and non-human species. But the data accumulated so far suggests that human variation displays several distinctive features. First, compared to many other mammalian species, humans are less genetically diverse—a counterintuitive finding, given our large population and global distribution (Li & Sadler, 1991; Kaessmann et al., 2001). For example, chimpanzee subspecies that live only in West and Central Africa have higher levels of diversity than humans (Ebersberger et al., 2002; Yu et al., 2003; Fischer et al., 2004).

Two random humans are expected to differ by approximately 1 in 1000 nucleotide pairs, while two random chimpanzees differ by 1 in 500 nucleotide pairs. However, with a genome of approximately 3 billion nucleotides, on average two humans differ by approximately 3 million nucleotides. Most of these single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are neutral, but some are functional and influence phenotypic differences between humans. It is estimated that over 10 million SNPs exist in human populations, where the rarest SNP allele has a frequency of at least 1%.

The distribution of variants within and between human populations also differs from that of many other species. The details of this distribution are impossible to describe succinctly because of the difficulty of defining a "population", the clinal nature of the variation, and the heterogeneity across the genome (Long & Kittles, 2003). In general, however, between 5% and 15% of genetic variation occurs between large groups living on different continents, with the remainder of most variation occurring between these groups (Lewontin, 1972; Jorde et al., 2000a; Hinds et al., 2005). This distribution of genetic variation differs from patterns seen in many other mammalian species, so existing data suggest greater differentiation between groups (Templeton, 1998; Kittles & Weiss, 2003).

Our history as a species has also left genetic traces in regional populations. For example, in addition to having higher levels of genetic diversity, populations in Africa tend to have lower amounts of linkage disequilibrium than populations outside of Africa, in part because of the larger number of human populations in Africa during the course of human history. and partly because the number of modern humans leaving Africa to colonize the rest of the world seems to have been relatively low (Gabriel et al., 2002). In contrast, populations that have experienced dramatic reductions or expansions in size in the past and populations formed by mixing previously separate ancestral groups may have unusually high levels of linkage disequilibrium (Nordborg & Tavare, 2002).

In the field of population genetics, it is believed that the distribution of neutral polymorphisms among contemporary humans reflects human demographic history. Humans are believed to have passed through a population bottleneck before a rapid expansion coinciding with migrations from Africa leading to an African-Eurasian divergence about 100,000 years ago (ca. 5,000 generations), followed by a European-Eurasian divergence. Asiatic about 40,000 years ago (ca. 2,000 generations).

Rapid expansion of a previously small population has two important effects on the distribution of genetic variation. First, the so-called founder effect occurs when founder populations bring back only a subset of the genetic variation of their ancestral population. Second, as the founders become more geographically separated, the probability that two individuals from different founder populations will mate becomes less. The effect of this selective mating is to reduce gene flow between geographic groups, and to increase the genetic distance between groups. The expansion of humans from Africa affected the distribution of genetic variation in two other ways. First, smaller (founder) populations experience greater genetic drift from increased fluctuations in neutral polymorphisms. Second, new polymorphisms appearing in one group were less likely to be transmitted to other groups since gene flow was restricted.

Many other geographic, climatic, and historical factors have contributed to the patterns of human genetic variation observed in the world today. For example, population processes associated with colonization, periods of geographic isolation, socially reinforced inbreeding, and natural selection have all affected allele frequencies in certain populations (Jorde et al., 2000b; Bamshad & Wooding, 2003).. In general, however, the recency of our common ancestry and continued gene flow between human groups has limited genetic differentiation in our species.

Substructure in the human population

New data on human genetic variation has reignited the race debate. Most of the controversy surrounds the question of how to interpret this new data, and whether conclusions based on existing data are sensible. A large majority of researchers support the view that continental groups do not constitute distinct subspecies. However, other researchers continue to debate whether evolutionary lineages should properly be called "races." These questions are particularly urgent for biomedicine, where a properly described race is often used as an indicator of ancestry.

Modern biological evidence from the anthropology textbook Human Species (2003) contradicts earlier theories that groups were more genetically related to other groups. Humans are all related. Mankind divided into African and Eurasian/Oceanic branches. The Eurasian and Oceanic branches are products of this common origin. The Eurasian branch split into the Amerindians and the Greater East Asian branch. The major East Asian branch further divided into East Russians and East Asians. The oceanic branch split into Southeast Asians and Pacific Islanders. According to Human Species (2003), East Asians are generally more genetically similar to South Asians than to Southeast Asians, because the Far East and the Indian subcontinent are members of the Eurasian branch while that Southeast Asians (including South Chinese) are members of the Oceanic branch. More interestingly, Asians have very local genetic clusters within these regions, meaning that different Asian ethnic groups have not historically interbred with one another. Examples of localized genetic clusters include Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and China that form separate genetic clusters from each other.

Although genetic differences between human groups are relatively small, these differences in certain genes (such as duffy, ABCC11, SLC24A5, so-called ancestry-informative markers) can nonetheless be used to reliably place many individuals within a group or group. broad geographically based breed. For example, computer analysis of thousands of samples of abundant polymorphic loci in globally distributed populations has revealed the existence of genetic clusters that are roughly associated with groups that have historically occupied wide continental and subcontinental regions (Rosenberg et al., 2002; Bamshad et al., 2003).

Some commentators have argued that these patterns of variation provide a biological justification for the use of traditional racial categories. They argue that the continental groupings roughly correspond to the division of humans into sub-Saharan Africans; Europeans, West Asians, and North Africans; East Asians; Polynesians and other inhabitants of Oceania; and Amerindians (Risch et al., 2002). Other observers disagree, saying that the data itself undercuts traditional notions of racial groups (King & Motulsky, 2002; Calafell, 2003; Tishkoff & Kidd, 2004). They point out, for example, that the large populations considered races or subgroups within races do not necessarily form their own clusters. Thus, samples taken from India and Pakistan affiliate them with Europeans or East Asians instead of separating them into different clusters.

In addition, because human genetic variation is clinal, many individuals affiliate with two or more continental groups. Thus, the genetically based “biogeographic ancestry” assigned to any given person will generally be widely distributed and accompanied by considerable uncertainties (Pfaff et al., 2004).

In many parts of the world, groups have mixed in such a way that many individuals have relatively recent ancestors from widely separated regions. Although genetic analyzes of large numbers of loci can produce estimates of the percentage of a person's ancestors coming from various continental populations (Shriver et al., 2003; Bamshad et al., 2004), these estimates may misdistinct the parental populations, as human groups have exchanged matings from local to continental scales throughout history (Cavalli-Sforza et al., 1994; Hoerder, 2002). Even with large numbers of tags, the information to estimate the mixing proportions of individuals or groups is limited, and the estimates will typically have large CIs (Pfaff et al., 2004).

For the paternal and maternal genetic lineages of the world, see: [6] and [7]

Origins and evolution of modern humans

Any biological model of race must serve to explain the development of racial differences during human evolution. However, for most of the 20th century anthropologists relied on an incomplete fossil record to reconstruct the process that led to the appearance of Homo sapiens. His models rarely provided a firm basis for his inferences about the origin of races. In contrast, modern research in molecular biology has provided evolutionary scientists with an entirely new type of data, added to improve our understanding of our past.

Throughout history, there has been considerable debate among anthropologists about the origins of Homo sapiens. One million years ago Homo erectus migrated from Africa to Europe and Asia. The debate revolves around the possibility that H. erectus has evolved into H. sapiens more or less simultaneously in Africa, Europe and Asia; or if the H. sapiens evolved only in Africa and eventually replaced Homo erectus, Homo neanderthal, and Denisovans in Europe and Asia. Each model suggests different possible scenarios for the evolution of the different races. However, current genetic evidence supports and reinforces the hypothesis that H. sapiens arose in Africa and from there conquered the world; this is currently the majority view.

Regarding the genetics of the different phenotypes, the latest research indicates that when H. sapiens from Africa, there was later hybridization with other older hominid “races” such as Homo neanderthalensis (1 to 4% Neanderthal genes per person, and of 20% in its sum of the total percentage of genes within the genome of the current population, mainly in Europe); and also hybridization with the Denisovan hominid (the local population that currently lives in Papua New Guinea, in Southeast Asia, owes at least 3% of its genome per person to Denisovan hominids). This hybridization would have brought as a consequence that in the naturally produced human "heterosis", in the case of the inherited Neanderthal genome, it produced changes in the phenotype; as an example skin phenotypes, by including genes involved in environmental adaptations to climates in Europe and Asia. Thus, this hybridization with different ancient human species ("races") would also have played an important role in the phenotypes associated with some "races" in current humans.

Social interpretations

Historians, anthropologists, and social scientists often describe human races as a social construct, preferring instead the term population, which can be given a clear operational definition. Even those who reject the formal concept of race, however, continue to use the word race in everyday speech. This may be a matter of semantics, or an effect of an underlying cultural meaning of race in racist societies. Despite the name, a working concept of subspecies grouping may be useful, because in the absence of cheap and widespread genetic testing, various breed-related genetic mutations (cystic fibrosis, lactose intolerance, Tay-Sachs disease, and sickle cell anemia) are difficult to treat without resorting to a category between “individual” and “species”.

In everyday parlance, race often describes populations better defined as ethnicities, often leading to discrepancies between scientific views of race and popular usage of the term. For example, in many parts of the United States, categories such as Hispanic or Latino are seen as constituting a race, although others view Hispanic as a linguistic and cultural grouping coming from a variety of backgrounds. In Europe, a distinction, to suggest that Southern Europeans are not European or white, will seem strange to say the least or possibly even insulting. In the United States, in what is referred to as the one-drop rule, the term black subsumes people of a wide range of ancestry under one label, although many of those who are called black can be more accurately described as white through a simple anthropological or taxonomic method. In much of Europe groups such as Gypsies and Indians are commonly defined as racially distinct from "white" Europeans, although these groups may be considered "Caucasian" by older physical anthropological methods employing finite nose measurements and the structure of the nose. skull as the standard form of racial classification.

Some argue that it is preferable when considering biological relationships to think in terms of populations, and when considering cultural relationships to think in terms of ethnicity, rather than race. Instead of classifying people into a "group", say "Caucasians" or Europeans you have British, French, German, Norse, West Slavs and Celts rather than have a term implying a (possible) ancestry group in the Caucasus that is definitely too distant for any real consideration, and further reaches groups including East Slavs, Gypsies, as well as Georgians, and others who differ markedly, both in culture, and to a noteworthy extent in physical appearance, from the aforementioned groups. ethnic. There can be as much difference between two ethnic groups grouped in a single “race” as there can be between ethnic groups grouped (often arbitrarily) in another “race”.

These developments had important consequences. For example, some scientists developed the notion of "population" to take the place of race. This substitution is not simply a matter of exchanging one word for another. Populations are, in a sense, simply statistical clusters that arise from the choice of variables of interest; there is no set of preferred variables. The “populationist” vision does not deny that there are physical differences between people; it simply claims that historical conceptions of "race" are not particularly helpful in the importance of these differences scientifically.

Since the 1960s, some anthropologists and anthropology professors have reconceived “race” as a cultural category or social construction, in other words, as a particular way that some people talk about themselves and others. That is why it cannot be a useful analytical concept; rather, the use of the term “race” by itself must be scrutinized. Furthermore, they argue that biology will not explain why or how people use the idea of race: history and social relationships will.

Ethnic and racial diversity in the post-Columbian New World

Even as the idea of “race” was becoming a powerful organizing principle in many societies, the concept's flaws were apparent. In the Ancient World, the gradual transition in appearances from one group to adjacent groups emphasized that "one variety of mankind passes so sensibly into another, that you cannot draw the boundaries between them," as Blumenbach observed in his writings on human variation. (Marks 1995, p. 54). In parts of the Americas, the situation was somewhat different. Immigrants to the New World came in numbers from regions widely separated from the Old World—western and northern Europe, western Africa, and later eastern Asia and southern Europe. In the Americas, immigrant populations began to mix with each other and with the indigenous inhabitants of the continent. In the United States, for example, most people who identify as Black have some European ancestry—in an analysis of genetic marks that have different frequencies between continents, European ancestry ranged from an estimated 7% for a sample of Jamaicans to ∼23% for a sample of African Americans from New Orleans (Parra et al. 1998). Similarly, many people who identify as Euro-American have some African or Native American ancestry, either through overtly interracial marriage or through the gradual inclusion of people of mixed ancestry into the majority of the population. In a survey of white-identified college students at a Northwestern United States university, ∼30% were estimated to be 90% of European ancestry (Shriver et al. 2003)..

In the United States, social and legal conventions developed for a time that forced individuals of mixed ancestry into simplified racial categories (Gossett 1997). An example is the one-drop rule implemented in some state laws that treated anyone with a single known ancestor of African descent as black (Davis 2001). The decadal censuses conducted since 1790 in the United States also created an incentive to establish racial categories and put people into those categories (Nobles 2000). In other countries in the Americas where inter-group mixing was more extensive, social categories have tended to be more numerous and fluid, with people moving from one category to another based on a combination of socioeconomic status, social class, age, etc. ancestry, and appearance (Mörner 1967).

Efforts to sort the growing mixed-race population of the United States into discrete categories have generated many difficulties (Spickard 1992). By the standards used in past censuses, many millions of children born in the United States have been of a different race than one of their biological parents. Efforts to track intergroup interbreeding led to the proliferation of categories (such as “mulatto” and octoroon) and blood quantum distinctions that became increasingly untied from ancestry.. A person's racial identity may change over time, and self-reported race may differ from assigned race (Kressin et al. 2003). Until the 2000 census, Latinos had to identify themselves as a separate race despite the long history of miscegenation in Latin America; Partly as a result of the confusion generated by the distinction, 42% of Latinos surveyed in the 2000 Census ignored the specified categories and checked “some other race” (Mays et al. 2003).

Race in the United States

In the United States since its recent history, Native Americans, African Americans, and Euro-Americans have been classified as belonging to different races. For nearly three centuries, the criteria for membership in these groups were similar, encompassing a person's appearance, their fraction of known non-white ancestry, and their social circle.² But the criteria for being member of these races diverged at the end of the 19th century. During Reconstruction, increasing numbers of Americans began to consider anyone with “a drop” of black “blood” to be black.³ At the turn of the century XX, this notion of invisible blackness was made statutory in many states and widely adopted nationally.⁴ Instead, Amerindians continue to be defined by a certain percentage of “Indian blood” (called blood quantum) due in large part to American slavery ethics. Finally, for the past century, to be white one had to be of "pure" white ancestry. (Thoroughly European-looking Americans of Hispanic or Arab descent are exceptions in being viewed as white by most Americans despite known traces of African descent.)

The difference between how Native American and black identities are defined today (blood quantum versus one-drop) has called for an explanation. According to anthropologists such as Gerald Sider, the goal of these racial designations was to concentrate power, wealth, privilege, and land in the hands of whites in a society of white hegemony and white privilege (Sider 1996; see also Fields 1990).). The differences have little to do with biology and much more to do with the history of racism and specific forms of white supremacy (the social, geopolitical, and economic agenda of dominant whites vis-à-vis subordinate blacks and Americans). natives) especially the different roles that blacks and Amerindians occupied in the 19th century dominated by whites in America. The theory suggests that the blood quantum definition of Native American identity allowed whites to purchase Native American land, while the one-drop rule of black identity allowed whites to preserve their labor force in agriculture. The contrast presumably arose because as people were transported away from their land and kin ties to other continents, black labor was relatively easy to control, thus reducing blacks to valuable commodities as laborers in agriculture.. In contrast, the work of the Amerindians was more difficult to control; In addition, the Amerindians occupied large territories that became valuable as agricultural land, especially with the invention of new technologies such as the railroad; thus, the blood quantum definition elevated the acquisition of Amerindian lands by whites into a doctrine of Manifest Destiny that exposed them to marginalization and multiple episodes of localized extermination campaigns.

The economic policy of the race had different consequences for the descendants of Native Americans and African slaves. The 19th century blood quantum rule meant that it was relatively easier for a person of mixed Euro-Amerindian descent to be accepted as white. The offspring of only a few generations of inbreeding between Amerindians and whites would probably not have been considered Amerindian—at least not in the legal sense. Native Americans could have a treaty of land rights, but because an individual with a Native American great-grandparent was no longer classified as Native American, they lost any legal claim to Native American land. According to the theory, this allowed the whites to acquire Amerindian lands. The irony is that the same individuals who might have been denied legal standing because they were “too white” to claim property rights, might still be Amerindian enough to be considered a “race,” stigmatized by their Native American ancestry.

The one-drop rule of the 20th century, on the other hand, made it relatively difficult for anyone of known black ancestry to be accepted as white. The son of an Afro-descendant harvester and a white person was considered black. And, significant in terms of crop economics, that person would also likely be a harvester, so he was added to the employer's workforce.

In summary, this theory suggests that in the 20th century economy that benefited from harvesters, it was useful to have as many blacks as possible. On the contrary, in the 19th century the nation leaned towards a westward expansion, it was advantageous to decrease the numbers of these who they could claim title to Amerindian lands by simply defining them out of existence.

It should be mentioned, however, that while some Jim Crow period scholars agree that the 20th century notion of invisible blackness shifted the color line in the direction of pallor, thereby inflating the labor force in response to the great northward migration of blacks from the south, others (Joel Williamson, C. Vann Woodward, George M. Fredrickson, Stetson Kennedy) see the one-drop rule as a simple consequence of the need to define whiteness as being pure, thus justifying the oppression of whites over blacks. In any event, during the centuries that whites exercised power over blacks and Amerindians and widely believed in their inherent superiority over people of color, it is not a coincidence that the hardest racial group to prove one's belonging to was whites.

The term “Hispanic” arose in the 20th century with the growth of migration of workers from Spanish-speaking countries towards the United States; therefore they include people who have been considered racially different (blacks, whites, Amerindians) in their countries of birth. Today, the word "Latino" is often used as a synonym for "Hispanic" (the identification of the Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas as "Latin America" was first encouraged by supporters of Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico in 1864 Maximilian was instituted by the French Emperor Napoleon III as a way to spread French influence in the Americas—since French and Spanish both derive from Latin, the French identified Spanish speakers as “Latinos” to emphasize a kinship fictitious with the French, and with the unfulfilled desire to legitimize Maximilian.In contrast to "Latin," "Anglo" is used today in a similar way to refer to the descendants of British colonists, and the values and practices derived from British culture.

Race in Brazil

Compared to the 19th century United States, in the XX Brazil was characterized by a relative absence of firmly defined racial groups. This pattern reflects a different history and different social relationships. Basically, the breed in Brazil was “biologized”, but in a way that recognized the difference between ancestry (which determines genotype) and phenotypic differences. There, racial identity was not governed by a rigid rule of descent. A child of Brazilians was never automatically identified with the race type of one or both parents, nor were there only two categories from which to choose. More than a dozen racial categories would be recognized based on combinations of hair color and texture, eye color, and skin color. These types are classified into any other like the colors of the spectrum, and no category is significantly isolated from the rest. That is, the race referred to appearance and not heredity.

Through this system of racial identification, parents and children, and even brothers and sisters, were often accepted as representatives of opposite racial types. In a fishing village in the state of Bahia, a researcher showed 100 people images of three sisters and asked them to identify the races of each one. In only six responses were sisters identified with the same racial term. Fourteen responses used a different term for each sister. In another experiment nine portraits were shown to one hundred people. Forty different racial types were obtained. It was also found that given a Brazilian, he can be called by up to thirteen different terms by other members of the community. These terms are scattered across practically the entire spectrum of theoretical racial types. An additional consequence of the absence of a descent rule was that Brazilians apparently not only disagreed about the racial identity of specific individuals, but also seemed to disagree about the abstract meaning of racial terms defined by words and phrases.. For example, 40% of a sample classified them as light brown ("light" person of primarily European descent with dark hair) as a lighter type than light mulatto (“light” person of mixed European and African descent), while 60% reversed this order. An additional note of confusion is that a person may use different racial terms to describe the same person for a short period of time. The choice of which racial description to use may vary depending on the personal relationships and character of the individuals involved. The Brazilian census lists one's race according to the preference of the person interviewed. As a consequence, hundreds of races appeared in the census results, ranging from blue (which is blacker than the typical black) to green (which is whiter than the typical white).

Thus, although the identification of a person by race is much more fluid and flexible in Brazil than in the United States, racial stereotypes and prejudices remain. African traits are considered less desirable; blacks have been considered socially inferior, and whites superior. These white supremacist values appear to be an obvious legacy of European colonization and the slave-based plantation system. The complexity of racial classifications in Brazil largely reflects miscegenation in Brazilian society, which remains highly, but not strictly, stratified along with color lines. From now on, the Brazilian myth of a perfectly “post-racist” country, made up of the “cosmic race” celebrated in 1925 by José Vasconcelos, must be taken with caution, as the sociologist Gilberto Freyre demonstrated in 1933 at Casa Grande e Senzala.

Practical uses of “race”

Race in politics and ethics

During the Enlightenment, racial classifications were used to justify the enslavement of those deemed to be "inferior," non-white races, and thus theoretically better suited for a lifetime of hard labor under white supervision. These classifications made the distance between races seem almost as vast as between species, raising troubling questions about the appropriateness of this treatment of humans. The practice was during that time generally accepted by the scientific community.

Arthur de Gobineau's Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (1853-1855) was one of the landmarks in the new racist discourse, along with the “anthropsociology” of Vacher de Lapouge and Johann Gottfried von Herder, who applied race to nationalist theory to develop a militant ethnic nationalism. They proposed the historical existence of national races like the Germans and the French, branching off from fundamental races supposed to have existed for millennia, like the Aryan race, and believed that political boundaries should reflect these supposed races.

Later, one of Hitler's favorite sayings was, "Politics is applied biology." Hitler's ideas of racial purity led to atrocities second only to the genocide against the Ukrainian people during the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin, in which more than 7 million Ukrainians (mostly children, women and the elderly) died of starvation., or the Chinese genocide towards Tibet where since 1950 between 1 and 2 million Tibetans have been murdered: tortured, raped, mutilated, beaten to death, poisoned, etc. Since then, ethnic cleansing has occurred in the Balkans and Rwanda. In a sense, ethnic cleansing is another name for the tribal warfare and mass murder that has afflicted human society for years, but these crimes seem to gain intensity when they believe they have been scientifically sanctioned.

Racial inequality has been a concern of US politicians and lawmakers since the founding of the country. In the 19th century most white Americans (including abolitionists) explained racial inequality as an inevitable consequence of differences biological. Since the mid-20th century, political and civic leaders as well as scientists have debated the extent to which racial inequality is cultural in origin. Some argue that these current inequalities between blacks and whites are primarily cultural and historical, the result of past racism, slavery, and segregation, and can be repaired through programs like affirmative action and Head Start. Others work to reduce tax payments for minority recovery programs. They have based their support on aptitude test data, which they say shows that racial differences in abilities are biological in origin and cannot be leveled out even by intensive pedagogical efforts. In electoral politics, many more ethnic minorities have won top offices in Western nations than ever before, though the top offices tend to remain in the hands of whites.

In his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King observed:

History is the long and tragic account of the fact that privileged groups rarely renounce their privileges voluntarily. Individuals can see moral light and voluntarily leave their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.

Dr. King's hope, expressed in his I Have a Dream speech, was that the fight for human rights will one day produce a society where people will not be “judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of his character”.

Because of the identification of the concept of race with political oppression, many natural and social scientists today are wary of using race to describe human variation. Some, however, hold that race is nonetheless of continuing utility and validity in scientific research. Science and politics frequently take opposite sides in debates related to human intelligence and biomedicine.

Race and intelligence

Researchers have reported significant differences in mean IQ scores on tests across various ethnic groups. The interpretation and causes of these differences have generated various hypotheses, some of which are highly controversial. Some researchers, such as Arthur Jensen, Richard Herrnstein, and Richard Lynn, have argued that these differences are at least partly genetic, however this view is largely discredited and has been widely rejected by scientific and non-scientific media arguably only handcuffed by an extreme minority. Others, like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, see categories like "race" and "intelligence" as cultural constructs that make this kind of research scientifically imperfect. Some others shy away from a definite position, for example Thomas Sowell, avoid the question of the origins of categorization and seek to explain the gap in test scores in terms of social differences that affect how much of the innate abilities any individual person can achieve.. Recent studies indicate a weak relationship between intelligence and genes; which rules out the idea of races or phenotypes with a certain intelligence. Other studies indicate that there is no close connection between personality, character and genetics, suggesting a weak relationship between psychology and genes. Finally, the plasticity of the human brain allows voluntary modifications of the intelligence quotient through various methods such as meditation.

Race in biomedicine

There is an active debate among biomedical researchers about the meaning and importance of race in their research. The main impetus for considering race in biomedical research is the possibility of improving disease prevention and treatment by predicting difficult-to-establish factors on the basis of more easily established characteristics. The best known examples of genetically determined disorders that vary in incidence between ethnic groups would be sickle cell anemia and thalassemia among black and Mediterranean populations and Tay-Sachs disease among people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Some fear that the use of racial labels in biomedical research risks inadvertently exacerbating health disparities, so they suggest alternatives to the use of racial taxonomies.

Race in Law Enforcement in the United States and the United Kingdom

In an attempt to provide general descriptions that can make it easier for police to apprehend suspects, the FBI uses the term “race” to summarize general appearance (skin color, hair texture, eye shape, and other easily observable characteristics) of the individuals they are attempting to detain. From a police perspective, it is generally more important to arrive at a description that will readily suggest an individual's general appearance than it is to make a scientifically valid categorization. Thus, in addition to assigning an individual to a racial category, the description will include: height, weight, eye color, scars, and other distinguishing characteristics, etc. Scotland Yard uses a classification based on the ethnic background of British society: W1 (white British), W2 (white Irish), W9 (any other white origin); M1 (Caribbean black and white), M2 (African black and white), M3 (Asian and white), M9 (any other mixed origin); A1 (Asian-Indian), A2 (Asian-Pakistani), A3 (Asian-Bengali), A9 (any other Asian origin); B1 (Caribbean blacks), B2 (African blacks), B3 (any other black origin); O1 (Chinese), O9 (any other).

In 1975, British police began classifying arrestees according to racial groups which were later replaced by an Identity Code:

• IC1 White
• IC2 From the Mediterranean or Hispanic
• IC3 African/Caribbean
• IC4 Indian/Pakistan/Bangali, or other Asian
• IC5 Chinese/Japanese, or people from Southeast Asia
• IC6 Arab/Egyptian/Magreb
• IC0 Unknown origin

In many countries, it is legally prohibited to keep data based on race, which often makes police issue wanted signs to the public that include labels like “dark complexion”, etc. There is controversy over the true relationship between crimes, their assigned punishments, and the division of people into so-called "races." In the United States, the practice of classifying by race has been ruled unconstitutional and also constitutes a violation of human rights. There is an active debate regarding the cause of a strong correlation between recorded crimes, punishments, and the "racially divided" people of the country. Many consider de facto racial classification an example of institutional racism in law enforcement.

More recent work in racial taxonomy based on DNA cluster analysis has led law enforcement to pursue suspects based on their racial classification derived from their DNA evidence left at the crime scene. DNA analysis, however, has proven successful in identifying personal characters rather than the presumed race of the victim and perpetrators. In an attempt to be less subjective, this classification is called "biogeographic ancestry" rather than "race". ”, but the terms for the BGA categories are the same. The difference is that the informational markers of ancestry in the DNA identify the miscegenation of the ancestry, not the ethnic identity itself. Therefore, they cannot fit into the "races" of the United States. For example, the DNA of an Arab-American, an Afro-descendant, and a Hispanic of precisely the same Afro-European genetic mix would be "racially" indistinguishable.

Race in France

French law however continues to use the term 'race', but prohibits any racial discrimination. In the decree of February 2, 1990, he authorized the databases according to people's racial origins, even on the 1983 law on the rights and obligations of civil servants, which refers only to ethnic origin and not to race.

The classification of human races

Throughout history, from Ancient Egypt to the present day, numerous attempts have been made to carry out scientific classifications of the human races. In the last century, the contributions with the greatest impact belong, among others, to Joseph Deniker, Carleton S. Coon and especially H.V. Vallois in his 1944 book Les races humaines, controversial for its possible political implications in the context of Nazi domination of France.