Anthropological or biological concept of race:
- Anthropological or biological concept of race: As a biological term, race denotes genetically divergent human populations that can be marked by common phenotypes. Among humans, race has no cladistics significance- all human beings belong to the same hominid subspecies, ‘Homo sapiens sapiens’, each differing from other populations in the relative commonness of certain hereditary traits influenced their local environment.
- Hooton (1926) has defined race in essentialist concept as “A great division of mankind, characterised as a group sharing certain combination of features, derived from their common descent, and constitute a vague physical background, usually more or less obscured by individual variations, and realised best in a composite picture.”
- Dobzhansky (1970) has defined race in population concept as “Race are genetically distinct Mendelian populations. They are neither individuals nor particular genotypes; they consist of individuals who differ genetically among themselves.”
- Montagu (1972) has defined race in genetical context as “a population which differs in the frequency of some gene or genes, which actually exchange or capable of exchanging genes across boundaries and separate it from other populations of the species.”
In short, the term ‘race’ is applied to a physically distinctive groups of people, on the basis of their difference from other groups in skin colour, head shape, hair type and physique. Anthropologists take the word ‘race’ in its zoological sense. “If the people of one race may be distinguished by physical markings, then they constitute a race.”
While dealing with the definition of race anthropologists have considered few related facts.
- For example, national, religious, cultural and geographical inhabited human groups should not be confused with racial groups. The Indians or Pakistanis do not form a race, nor do the Persians or the Germans. These are national or religious groups. In the same way the Dravidians do not constitute a specific race, they are linguistic groups. Therefore one should be cautious enough in applying the term race to a particular human group.
- On the other hand, the concept of racial ‘superiority’ or ‘inferiority’ has created various problems in human society. This concept is not based on any scientific or anthropological facts. The scientists and anthropologists have never accepted the misconception related to superiority and inferiority of races.
In anthropological sense, the word ‘race’ should refer to those human populations, who possess well developed, primarily heritable physical differences from other human populations.
CONTROVERSY RELATED TO TERM RACE
- The word race is applied in a variety of ways, various aggressive actions from fist-fights to large scale riots and countrywide civil wars- have stemmed from tension and misunderstanding among various “races”.
- Race science was never just human classification. It presupposed to be a distinctive relationship between “nature” and “culture”, by understanding the differences in the nature and to generate different kinds of persons and the distinctive stage of cultures and civilizations that inhabit the world . Craig Venter and Francis Collins jointly made an announcement of the mapping of human genome in 2000. Upon examining the data from the genome mapping, Venter realised that although the genetic variation with human species is on the order of 1-3% , the types of variations do not support the notion of genetically defined races . Venter stated that ‘Race is a social concept and not a scientific one. There are no bright lines to compare all the sequenced genome on the planet”. When we try to apply science to sort out these social differences, it all falls apart.
- Stephan Palmie’ asserted that race is not a thing but a social relation or in the words of Katya Gibel Mevorach, “a metonym”, “a human invention whose criteria for differentiation are neither universal nor fixed but have always been used to manage difference” . As such, the use of the term “race” must be analysed. Moreover they argue that biology will not explain the reason behind the idea of race.
- The ‘Aryan race’ was supposed to be the group of blond haired, blue eyed, white skinned people, whom Hitler wanted to dominate the world. Technically, Aryans are any people who speak one of the Indo-European languages as Greek, Hindi, Polish, German, Gaelic and English. Aryans speaking these languages have neither blond hair nor blue eyes. On the other hand, Jews do not form a race but a religious group like the Buddhists or the Protestants .
- Another popular belief is that although the races have become “adulterated” through miscegenation (marriage and breeding between different races), even now race mixture is an on going process and as a result the races have got admixture. Hybridization (miscegenation) is one of the factors for race formation and at the same time it plays role in extinction or absorption of racial groups. Therefore, there was never a pure race of man and at present also there is no pure race. The concept of so called ‘pure race is based on wrong facts. Again we do not have evidences to say that race mixture produces bad results from the biological point of view.
- Racial stereotypes persist largely because the skin colour can be recognised and used to classify people and to attribute certain biological factors to all members of a supposed race. In classifying human races most of the anthropologists do not consider the mental characteristics, viz. IQ. Klinberg has very clearly stated that ‘the scientists know no relation between race and psychology’.
- The term ‘race’ has often been used by certain individuals to justify their exploitation of other groups. A blatant example of how racism is linked to inaccurate concepts of race was found in the treatment accorded to American blacks because of a belief in blacks’ inherent (genetic) inferiority to whites. The concept of racial superiority and inferiority is not based on any scientific facts. This racist outlook may be a remnant of slavery days.
- Sometimes, few controversies related to cultural traits and a term race also arises. Cultural traits may be acquired by one in his time but not the racial strains. Certain populations of Northeast India have adopted western culture, but not their physical features. Their cultural traits may mislead one; but not their physical feature. However, admixture at the biological level brings changes in the racial types also. Like cultural traits, racial traits are also changeable. But the cultural traits and the term race is not related on any scientific basis.
MODERN THOUGHT ON RACES – THE ETHNIC GROUPS
- In the first half of the 20th century while racial classifications continued to be generated, a few anthropologists such as Ashley Montagu and biologists such as Julian Huxley opined that it was difficult to use zoological nomenclature for classifying humans into groups. They argued that the classification of humans into races was simply not a productive endeavour to examine human variation. Montagu (1942 a, b) was probably the most vocal opponent of the use of the term race to classify humans. Following Huxley (1865), Deniker (1900), and Huxley and Huddon (1936), Montagu (1942a) adopted the term “ethnic group” as a replacement for “race”, maintaining that the latter term had lost its usefulness for describing human variability. Subsequently, on July 18, 1950, following World War II, UNESCO issued a statement which included both a scientific opposition to race theories and a moral condemnation of racism and thus suggested to replace the term ‘race’ as ‘ethnic group’.
- Montagu (1942a) noted that there were no clear boundaries in the continuous stream of human variation and argued that anthropologists should consider Darwinian natural selection to understand the relationships among human groups and develop a dynamic “genetical theory of race” using concepts such as exogamy, endogamy, hybridization, mutation, selection, isolation and random genetic drift. He stated that race is merely an expression of the process of genetic change within a definite ecologic area with the goal to discover what factors produce the variation and change gene frequencies.
- Washburn (1951) suggested that the physical anthropologists should change their perspective, goals and approaches. The anthropology of the past was one of the techniques of taking careful measurements, computing indices and defining type specimens for static classifications. The new physical anthropology focuses on the mechanisms of evolutionary change and adopts a dynamic perspective. Earlier ways of description and speculative methods were replaced with an emphasis on problems and tests. Washburn’s concept of a “new physical anthropology” was controversial but reflected the changing scientific paradigm in anthropology i.e. the shift that was occurring in racial studies and the study of human variation.
- At the same time, some anthropologists were proposing that the population (breeding unit) should be the basic unit of study of human diversity and adaptation subjected to specific environmental constraints and responded through the evolutionary mechanisms of mutation, gene flow, genetic drift and natural selection. As these populations adapted to these particular environments, they came to manifest traits (measured by allele frequency differences) that were unique. Thus, races could be viewed as episodes in the evolutionary process (Hulse, 1962) and were not static, fixed entities but dynamic units that constantly changed. One could also study the relationship between cultural and biological diversity and this, as Thieme (1952) states, is the anthropological perspective of combining cultural and physical anthropology.
THE NON-EXISTENCE OF THE RACES – THE CLINES
- Livingstone (1962) in his article “On the non-existence of human races” pointed out that the static typological notion of races was simply not compatible with the dynamic concept of natural selection. He did not deny the differences among populations but argued that these differences did not match races. As an alternative to this static approach, he suggested that research should focus on geographical variation of single traits, or what was called “clinal variation.” In other words, “there are no races, there were only clines”. If the goal of anthropological research was to explain the genetic variation among populations, then the racial approach was simply not adequate.
- Brace (1964) advocated for the study of individual traits, stating that races, and even populations, were not adequate for study of human diversity. The distribution of individual traits and the selective pressures modifying them should be focused. Thus, clines replaced races as the units of study for many anthropologists during the 1960s and 1970s.
CAUSES OF BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY
Race is a biological consequence and as such explains practically nothing. The collective unit of evolution is the population where all the forces of biological diversity such as mutation, natural selection, genetic drift and hybridization operate.
The process of evolution may be very slow but to a large extent depends on mutations where new genes are introduced into human populations. The evolutionary forces of mutation and selection go hand-in-hand, and the chances of survival of new mutant gene in the population will depend upon the kind of selective advantage it confers on its fertility rate. In spite of the elimination of a large number of mutant alleles, a considerable number are “selected for” by natural selection and overtime become established in a population with an appreciable frequency (= 1%), leading to the condition of genetic polymorphism.
In addition to mutation and selection, a force that substantially contributes to biological diversity in a population is genetic drift (or simply drift), a statistical process of pure chance devoid of any biological consideration. In a large population, changes in allele frequencies due to drift (sampling error) in gamete transmission are small from one generation to another, but the cumulative effect over many generations may be substantial. In the case of human populations derived from a small number of individuals the drift may be extreme, resulting in the phenomenon known as the “founder effect”. Because of sampling errors, the allele frequencies at various loci are likely to differ in the founders from those in the population from which they are derived. Thus, for example, if one of the founders of a new colony happened to carry an allele with very low frequency in the parental population, the subsequent expansion of the colony will result in a disproportionately high frequency for that allele in the new population. Indeed, there are instances in human history where such extreme cases of genetic drift have occurred (Roberts, 1968).
A similar drift phenomenon, but without migration, occurs when a population goes through “bottleneck”. Epidemics, wars, natural calamities, and unfavourable climatic, nutritional and morbidity conditions may cause a population to be drastically reduced in number. The survivors reconstitute a new population, but random effects might have considerably altered its allelic frequency during the “bottleneck” and in the successive generations also. The possibility cannot be ruled out as some of the allelic differences seen among the contemporary ethnic groups of human populations are the result of such “founder effects” and “bottlenecks” from time to time.
The present distributions of racial variations in man can be explained through hybridization, a process by which genes from one population may be brought into another population, thereby changing the frequency of alleles in the hybrid population. Hybridization is expressed as an admixture of genes from two parent populations in a descendent hybrid population. Two comparatively recent and most important human examples of hybrid (mixed) populations are the ‘mulatto’ (a Negro x White cross) mainly in South Africa and North America and ‘mestizo’ (an American Indian x White cross) mainly in South America.