Racial taxonomy

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's five races

Racial taxonomy is the systematic categorisation of races.

Early taxonomies

Tree diagram showing genetic relations between different Amerindian populations according to a 2007 study. The tree diagram also shows that populations with similar genetics tend to have similar languages.

Note that two persons can be in complete agreement regarding the human (or mammal) taxonomic hierarchy but still count very different number of races (or mammal taxonomic groups) simply by looking at different levels of the hierarchy. If arguing that this "proves" the non-existence of different human races, then the same argument can be used to "prove" the non-existence of different mammal taxonomic groups (such as different mammal species).

Classifications of race had appeared as early as ancient Egypt and Greece, for example as illustrated in the Egyptian Book of Gates (13th century BC) which depicts different racial types. Carleton Coon in the opening of his Origin of Races (1962) pointed out that "literate people of the ancient world were well aware that mankind was divided into a number of clearly differentiated races". However, these ancient race taxonomies were limited by the severe lack of geographical knowledge held at the time.

Scholar Nicholas Hudson (1996) stated that "In classical and Medieval literature, the major term in ethnographic descriptions was gens—a Latin word that is usually translated as “people” or “nation.” Significantly, gens connotes a common ancestry or stock (hence its etymological link with genero, to beget or produce), reflecting an ancient way of understanding a nation not as a social or political unit, but as a group of people linked by origin. Gens was therefore close in meaning to “race,” understood in the traditional sense of “lineage” or “extraction.” Yet the belief that humanity is divided into only four or five main “races,” as was claimed in the eighteenth century, represented a significant enlargement of the ancient idea of gens."

Andrew Hamilton in his article "Taxonomic Approaches to Races" (2008) wrote that "This pre-modern European conception of human groups, assuming Hudson is correct, resembled contemporary second-order classifications such as populations, local races, or subraces rather than first-order groupings like subspecies, geographic, continental, or major races."

Also many non-European areas made distinctions between different groups of human and ascribed different physical and mental characteristics to different groups. Examples include China, Egypt, India and Islamic areas. Prehistoric paintings have been seen as evidence for that such group distinctions were made also in prehistory.

Morphological taxonomies

More complete racial taxonomy only thus emerged as geographical knowledge expanded, and the most parts of the world became mapped. As anthropologist Alice M. Brues (1990) wrote that "By the end of the eighteenth century, knowledge of the appearance of various peoples of the world was fairly complete. At this time European scholars began to speculate on these racial differences..."

This was also the time when taxonomy started to be studied as a modern science. This among other things demanded reliable measurements. The taxonomies largely relied on morphology (form/structure, comparative anatomy). Morphological characteristics could be easily and reliable measured unlike physiological, mental or genetic characteristics which were difficult or impossible to measure at this time. This reliance on morphology was nothing unique for human taxonomy but applied to taxonomy in general at this time. Morphological characteristics used in human taxonomy included pigmentation, hair form and skeletal form.

Carolus Linnaeus, the pioneer of zoological taxonomy, divided Homo Sapiens into four major races (subspecies) in his Systema Naturae (1735): Homo Europaeus (Europeans), Homo Afer (Sub-Saharan Africans), Homo Asiaticus (Asians), and Homo Americanus (Native Americans). These classification was based on both morphological features and argued differences in temperament and psychology. More generally, it has been argued that Linnaeus's system for classification of organisms, primarily based on morphological differences, has undergone surprisingly little change in the times following it despite the appearance of genetic measurements.

Blumenbach in his The Natural Varieties of Mankind (1781) added a "Malayan" race, after South-East Asia had become extensively mapped. His five proposed races include: Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, Malayan. It should be pointed out that areas such as Australia and Oceania were not mapped until the 1770's. In 1770, James Cook mapped the east coast of Australia, which he named New South Wales and claimed for Great Britain. This explains why racial typology at the stage did not include an Australoid racial taxon.

Georges Cuvier (1817) was the first to propose the well-known categorization having three main races which he called Caucasian, Mongolian, and Ethiopian. This has been seen as rudimentary, also by some who have used it for simplicity such as J. Philippe Rushton, and other classifications have often divided these major races into more minor races. See also the next sections regarding genetic evidence supporting both views.

When blood group data become available it was used for racial classifications which were consistent with those based on morphology.

Much of the research was done within the field of anthropology. One explanation for this is that it was anthropologists who traveled to and made detailed ethnographic studies of different peoples. Such studies also included descriptions of morphological characteristics.

Genetic taxonomies

During recent decades, taxonomy in general has been revolutionized by the appearance of increasingly detailed genetic studies. The same has occurred for human taxonomy. This genetic research is today usually not done by anthropologists. Researchers today often avoid using the politically sensitive word "race" and instead use terms such as "population" in order to avoid accusations of racism.

Race/population taxonomies during the twentieth century by Carleton Coon, Garn, and Birdsell (1950), Baker (1974), Nei and Roychoudhury (1993), and Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza (1994) have been largely similar, regardless of if using classical anthropological or, more recently, genetic methods. The last taxonomy is also the one used by Richard Lynn in his book Race Differences in Intelligence. It consists of (1) Bushmen and Pygmies; (2) sub-Saharan Africans; (3) South Asians and North Africans; (4) Europeans; (5) East Asians; (6) Arctic Peoples; (7) Native American Indians; (8) Southeast Asians; (9) Pacific Islanders; and (10) the Australian Aborigines and the Aboriginal New Guineans.

Both genetic and morphological research have also found support for a more general division into three major groups corresponding to certain geographic regions: Western Eurasia and North Africa (in traditional anthropological literature called Caucasoids), Eastern Eurasia (Mongoloids) and Sub-Saharan Africa (Negroids). Oceania (Australoids) och sometimes the Americas (Amerindians) have received similar support. This corresponds to major geographic barriers that made contact between different groups difficult (Oceans, Sahara, and the Himalayas (and the deserts and the mountain ranges bordering on the Himalayas)).

Besides morphology, genetic taxonomies have also been argued to be supported by factors such as linguistic taxonomies, linguistic history, archeological evidence, and cultural properties.

Racial hierarchies

Larger groups can be subdivided into smaller groups. For example, East Asians can be subdivided into groups such as Koreans and Japanese. Various names have been used for the different levels in this hierarchy such as "major races", "geographic races", or "continental races" for larger groups and "local races" or "breeding populations" for smaller groups. Such nested hierarchies are typical of taxonomies in general with different species being organized in increasingly larger groups such as genera and families.

Biologists have sometimes disagreed on this species hierarchy and it has been modified as new evidence was uncovered. The same applies to racial taxonomy and the racial hierarchy.

The tree diagrams to the right demonstrate such racial hierarchies. Note that one can count few or many different groups depending on which level in the tree that is examined. This is one explanation for why different researchers have sometimes stated different number of races.

Races have in turn been divided further. Such lower levels have been given names such as peoples, tribes, clans, and ultimately families.

Gene Study Identifies 5 Main Human Populations (2002)

Scientists studying the DNA of 52 human groups from around the world have concluded that people belong to five principal groups corresponding to the major geographical regions of the world: Africa, Europe, Asia, Melanesia and the Americas. The study, based on scans of the whole human genome, is the most thorough to look for patterns corresponding to major geographical regions. These regions broadly correspond with popular notions of race, the researchers said in interviews. The researchers did not analyze genes but rather short segments of DNA known as markers, similar to those used in DNA fingerprinting tests, that have no apparent function in the body. What this study says is that if you look at enough markers you can identify the geographic region a person comes from, said Dr. Kenneth Kidd of Yale University, an author of the report. The issue of race and ethnicity has forced itself to biomedical researchers' attention because human populations have different patterns of disease, and advances in decoding DNA have made it possible to try and correlate disease with genetics. The study, published today in Science, finds that self-reported population ancestry likely provides a suitable proxy for genetic ancestry. In other words, someone saying he is of European ancestry will have genetic similarities to other Europeans. Using self-reported ancestry is less expensive and less intrusive said Dr. Marcus Feldman of Stanford University, the senior author of the study. Rather than analyzing a person's DNA, a doctor could simply ask his race or continent of origin and gain useful information about their genetic make-up. Several scientific journal editors have said references to race should be avoided. But a leading population geneticist, Dr. Neil Risch of Stanford University, argued recently that race was a valid area of medical research because it reflects the genetic differences that arose on each continent [...] Some diseases are much commoner among some ethnic groups than others. Sickle cell anemia is common among Africans, while hemochromatosis, an iron metabolism disorder, occurs in 7.5 percent of Swedes. It can therefore be useful for a doctor to consider a patient's race in diagnosing disease. Researchers seeking the genetic variants that cause such diseases must take race into account because a mixed population may confound their studies. The new medical interest in race and genetics has left many sociologists and anthropologists beating a different drum in their assertions that race is a cultural idea, not a biological one. The American Sociological Association, for instance, said in a recent statement that race is a social construct and warned of the danger of contributing to the popular conception of race as biological. [...] But Dr. Troy Duster, a sociologist at New York University and chairman of the committee that wrote the sociologists' statement on race, said it was meant to talk about the sociological implications of classifying people by race and was not intended to discuss the genetics. Sociologists don't have the competence to go there, he said.

See also

• Racialism
• Racial awareness
• List of racial theorists
• List of racialist thinkers
• Arguments regarding the existence of races

Gallery

• 

  Tree diagram showing genetic relations between different mammal populations.

• 

  Tree diagram showing genetic relations between different major human populations according to a 1994 study.

• 

  Genetic distance map showing on 18 human populations. They group into the previously mentioned five major races.