Genetics and the Origins of Race

Attempts to establish a biological basis for classifying human races into definable groups, arranged hierarchically from most advanced to least advanced, have a long and sordid history. From the days of the Spanish Inquisition, to the colonization of North and South America, the beginnings of the slave trade, to more recent claims about inborn racial differences in intelligence and personality, racists have tried to find biological differences that would separate the various races and provide a justification for social and economic exploitation. Biologically, races have been equated with subspecies as defined in the general biological literature. But the evidence from modern, molecular genetics, indicates that humans do not form the same kinds of distinguishable sub-groups common to other animal, especially mammalian, species. Biologically, human populations are 99% similar genetically, and the various visible characteristics that have traditionally been used to distinguish one “race” from another, do not correlate with any other characters of importance. Humans have evolved as a single lineage with many local populations that have always been in reproductive contact with each other. Thus, human sub-populations have not diverged to the extent that is found in other species, such as chimpanzees.