According to this Wikipedia article on Race, the problem is that "race" isn't a very scientific way to break a population down for study.
The "populationist" view does not deny that there are physical differences among people; it simply insists that "race" is not useful in analyzing these differences scientifically. Take one of the most obvious physical markers of race, for example – skin color. It is true that the color of people's skin varies. It does not vary according to culture. All people whose ancestors lived in the tropics -- whether in South America, Africa, or Asia, have dark skin. This is because the tropics receive a lot of sunlight, and people with light skin would suffer from excess vitamin D levels; they can sunburn too easily, are more susceptible to disease, and less efficient at sweating. Dark skin is more advantageous. Light skin is found in temperate zones, where it prevented rickets due to inadequate vitamin D. But skin is only one phenotypic trait. Many things play a role in skin color -- exposure to sunlight, ultraviolet radiation, amount of clothing. Many traits are determined by non-genetic factors (as Boas' study of height showed). Moreover, specific traits are not necessarily connected to one another – biological traits such as skin color, hair type, and facial features do not vary together. Finally, the natural distribution of human phenotypes exhibits gradual trends of difference across geographic zones, not the categorical differences of race. Consequently, there are many peoples (like the San of S. W. Africa, or the people of northern India) who have phenotypes that do not neatly fit into the standard race categories. In short, attempts to construct biological racial classifications have been largely overthrown because genetic and phenotypic traits do not vary together over time.
I found the article because I was looking up something on the KhoiSan... the Bushmen of the Kalahari. See, I remember an uncle of mine (a South African, but of the decent, crazy sort) telling me that the Bushmen should be classified as a different subspecies because they had a different number of bones in their skull. I think it was the cranial bones that fuse together sometime in infancy. Anyway, I can't find squat on this online as yet.
Closest is this thing on spine anatomy:
Racial differences: the human sacrum is characterized by its great breadth in comparison to its length. The proportion is expressed by the following equation: sacral index = breadth x 100/ length. The average sacral index in British males is 112; in the female, 116. Sacra in which the index is above 100 are platyhieric, as in Europeans, Negroes, Polynesians; those under 100 are dolichohieric, as in Australians, Bushmen, Andamanese (Turner, 1886).
I keep running into sites debunking Darwin, and they're drowning out what I want. |
