Critics will fault this paper for constraining “race” to only the five groups acknowledged by the U.S. Census. But such criticisms only illustrate the subjective, sociocultural construction of the categories humans define as race. While definitions and perceptions of racial categories vary person to person, culture to culture, and throughout time, dog breeds are strictly defined in their breed standards. For example, here is the Portuguese Water Dog (Fig. 4):

“General Appearance: Known for centuries along Portugal’s coast, this seafaring breed was prized by fishermen for a spirited, yet obedient nature, and a robust, medium build that allowed for a full day’s work in and out of the water. The Portuguese Water Dog is a swimmer and diver of exceptional ability and stamina, who aided his master at sea by retrieving broken nets, herding schools of fish, and carrying messages between boats and to shore. He is a loyal companion and alert guard. This highly intelligent utilitarian breed is distinguished by two coat types, either curly or wavy; an impressive head of considerable breadth and well proportioned mass; a ruggedly built, well-knit body; and a powerful, thickly based tail, carried gallantly or used purposefully as a rudder. The Portuguese Water Dog provides an indelible impression of strength, spirit, and soundness.”

All AKC breed standards include physical and behavioral traits, and describe an ideal condition. Written by “parent clubs,” dog breed standards describe the champion individual within a given breed. But, within the hierarchical framework of the Great Chain of Being, the earliest descriptions of human “varieties” emphasized not the champion individual but the champion race (Brace 2005). For physician and anatomist J. F. Blumenbach, Georgians or “Caucasians” represented “the closest approximation of God’s intent for human form, and other human populations…departed from that manifestation of the ideal” (Brace 2005, p. 46). Eventually Blumenbach’s favorite race became “white.” Recently some leading scientists and scholars published a statement titled “Taking Race Out of Human Genetics” that included: “Phasing out racial terminology in biological sciences would send an important message to scientists and the public alike: historical racial categories that are treated as natural and infused with notions of superiority and inferiority have no place in biology” (Yudell et al. 2016). In that piece the authors challenge researchers to consider a paradox first noted by Dobzhansky (1962): while race can be a tool to elucidate human genetic diversity, it is a blunt implement that does a poor job of explaining actual relationships between ancestry and genetics. Yudell and colleagues charge researchers and scientific societies to think critically about, and to justify their use of, particular categories to describe human diversity.

Careful consideration of the terminology used in biomedical studies forces both scientists and the public to more clearly understand the questions being asked and the variables used to do so. For example, in some cases using “race” as a variable may be important, especially when exploring how social discrimination, structural racism, and other socially determined factors may be responsible for health disparities. In other cases using “race” may simply obscure important variation within these socially-defined categories that can have significant medical implications (Yudell et al. 2016). The goal is not to ignore patterns of human biological or genetic diversity, but rather to identify new methods to explore these patterns that do not reproduce the harm caused when human biological variation is treated as a mere synonym for racial categories built on the hierarchical organization of people. “Race” is the ranking of biological variation, and whether one race is superior to another is not a scientific or biological issue, which is perhaps why claims of racial superiority or inferiority are so often countered with denunciation of race as a meaningful biological concept and with assertions that its significance is social (Smith 2018).

American history provides more context for the social construction of “race.” On the contemporaneity of the establishment of the AKC and the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty, both in the mid 1880s, Harrington (2009) writes how, “the embrace of purebred dogs coincided with the scorning of immigrants,” and, “at the height of nineteenth-century immigration, when Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, and other so-called ‘races’ kept arriving, a purebred dog was not a mongrel, much as someone born in the United States—read a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant—was not an immigrant.” Harrington further writes how, “this growing popularity of purebred dogs coincided with a revival of nativism, the movement of ‘pure’ Americans of the 1840s and 1850s,” and likens the “Fitter Family” eugenics contests of the 1930s to AKC dog shows which had become tradition (Harrington 2009). About that time, in 1924, the state of Virginia passed the “Racial Integrity Act,” also known as a law against miscegenation (etymologically referring to the mixing of biologically distinct taxa), which prohibited marriages between whites and nonwhites with few exceptions. The rhetoric that swayed the Virginia legislators was steeped in the race-breed analogy, particularly with the concept of “mongrelization.” The arguments in favor of anti-miscegenation laws appealed to, and yet also misrepresented, the biological and genetic sciences for support of what were clearly racist political views fearing the disappearance of the white race (Lombardo 1987). Likewise, current arguments that appeal to science to push the “reality” of biologically-based human race, or “race realism,” are key to white supremacist politics.

In resisting the scientifically historical idea of race where separate human groups were ranked hierarchically, C. Loring Brace famously called race “a four-letter word.” This complex sociocultural-historical understanding of race (as opposed to significantly biologically based) is shared across anthropology and beyond and is understood to be a driving force of sociocultural, health, education, economic, and political inequality and inequity. Emphasizing the sociocultural construction of race in no way diminishes the reality of race as a powerful phenomenon. As Torres and Colón (2015) write, “human biological diversity does not have to be in opposition to constructivist notions of race. Rather, racial experience is emphasized as an embodied experience that is as real and as valid as biological variation.” Racism can have damaging consequences on human health and well-being (Gravlee 2009; Gravlee et al. 2009; Sims et al. 2012; Boulter et al. 2015; Quinlan et al. 2016). Yudell et al. (2016) wrote that they “acknowledge that using race as a political or social category to study racism and its biological effects, although fraught with challenges, remains necessary. Such research is important to understand how structural inequities and discrimination produce health disparities in socioculturally defined groups.”

Both Haldane’s question and the pop culture comparison of human races to dog breeds needle at the debate occurring outside of anthropology, and largely outside of academia, over the biological basis for race. These discussions are heavily influenced by the historical conception in science, biology, and anthropology of “race” as being synonymous with (or an acceptable term for) variation in human biology at the group or population level, but that view no longer holds. Within contemporary anthropology there is near consensus that “race” is more of a social construct and, thus, a sociocultural concept than it is a biological concept. According to a survey by Wagner et al. (2017), the majority of professional anthropologist respondents (totaling 3286) disagreed with the following statements: “The human population may be subdivided into biological races” (86% disagreed); “Racial categories are determined by biology” (88% disagreed); “Genetic differences between racial groups explain most behavioral differences between individuals of different races” (95% disagreed); “Most anthropologists believe that humans may be subdivided into biological races” (85% disagreed). Here is a glance at the orientation within that anthropological majority:

“There is a lot of confusion over what we mean when we say race is a ‘construction.’ Much of the problem involves the fact that in order to rebut scientific racism publicly, we are often obliged to accept the dichotomy of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ that we now realize to be an oversimplification. But since that dichotomy remains a fixture of popular science, and of public discourse, we often have to say, ‘No, it’s the opposite; it’s culture’—when we would really like to say something rather more nuanced. To a first approximation, then, we mean that, unlike a naively regarded fact of nature, which is presumably there to be observed and transparently understood, race is a product of history; and although it is often associated with variation in biological form, it is inherited according to cultural, not biological, rules. And thus, rather than seeing race as a simple product of nature, it is better understood as a product of “nature/culture,” the ascription of arbitrary cultural meaning to patterns of human diversity, often in defiance of the biological patterns themselves.” (Marks 2017; p. 28)

“Not being a formal scientific concept, a human race is largely not accessible to the scientist. It can only be grasped through the humanities: historically, experientially, politically. […] Race is not difference—because all human groups differ from each other, as do all human beings. Race involves imposing some cultural patterns upon human differences.” (Marks 2017; p. 106)

“The contribution of anthropology…is to acknowledge the impossibility of studying humans as if we were not ourselves human and to reconceptualize the project as necessarily a biocultural one, infused with cultural values of greater or lesser transparency, but no less scientific for it. […] The act of articulating and examining the basic assumptions that go into the production of knowledge is often called reflexivity and is one of the hallmarks of contemporary anthropology.” (Marks 2012b; p. 96)

“People’s imposition of racial categories on, not to mention racist treatment of, each other is a culturally determined and ultimately somewhat arbitrary attempt to make sense of our species’ variation in categorical terms. Troubles arise when social predilections lead us to mistake cultural facts for biological ones and vice versa.”(Weiss and Fullerton 2005; p. 167)

“Race is a sense-making system imposed upon the facts of difference. Races are not merely human divisions, they are politically salient human divisions. All classifications exist to serve a purpose; the purpose of a racial classification is to naturalize human differences—that is, to establish important categories and make their distinctions appear to be rooted in nature, rather than in history or politics.” (Marks 2010; p. 271)

The Portuguese Water Dog demonstrates how entire AKC dog breeds are painted with personalities, like “strength, spirit, and soundness,” that individual humans do not even necessarily share with their immediate family members. Yet, dog breeding standards influence assumptions about hard-wired behavior characterizing and differentiating human groups. The jump from clustered physical variation to the assertion of superior and inferior, biologically-based behavioral variation at the group level is the crux of the matter. It is why Haldane’s question is so much more than an academic curiosity and why the pop culture analogy equating race with breed demands refutation.

Arguments in support of the biological basis or “reality” of race are often thinly veiled arguments for a significantly genetic basis behind perceived behavioral differences between races (Sussman 2014). Though it is decades old, the “logic” of this argument or line of thinking, particularly when it relies on the dog breed analogy, is easily gleaned from social media: If one can tell a Dalmatian from a Mastiff and one can tell a person of one race from another race just by looking at them, and if behavior is bred into dogs to a degree that distinguishes breeds too, then genetically-based behavior also distinguishes human races and, thus, a person’s intelligence or criminality (etc.) can be predicted by their ancestry.

From this mistaken perspective, the notion of race as a social construct is seen as absurd and so is down-playing the biological basis for race, because to do so is to be willfully stupid, ignorantly anti-science, or brainwashed by a politically correct denial of reality. (Hence, the “race realists” who talk of taking the “red pill,” an allusion to the film The Matrix where a person frees himself from living a false reality.) Consequences of that false framework include support for eugenics (past, present, and future), racial segregation of schools, justifying status quo institutional oppression, white nationalism, white supremacy, other forms of racism, and defunding social, environmental, economic, and health programs that counter racism’s effects.

When present, this “logic” of the race-breed analogy is not always boiled down to one sentence, like that above. For example, in their influential book “Race: The Reality of Human Differences” Sarich and Miele (2004) advance the race-breed analogy throughout. First, they establish that medical approaches to both human and dog disease share similarities; individual dogs and humans can be sensitive to different drugs and this is sometimes due to inherited genetic variants, which means that the risk varies between dog breeds and between human races. Then, they ease into a discussion of an experiment where a scientist noted individual behavioral differences among several puppies of different breeds. They quote this scientist to have said, “A breed of dog is a construct zoologically and genetically equivalent to a race of man.” This leads the authors into an enthusiastic discussion of observed behavioral differences among human babies of different races, which is immediately followed by acceptance of the genetic basis for the racial differences in IQ made famous by The Bell Curve. These pages are then capped by a definition of races as “populations, or groups of populations, within a species, that are separated geographically from other such populations or groups of populations and distinguishable from them on the basis of heritable features” (Sarich and Miele 2004; p. 207) which may sound like a neutral, objective, and scientific approach to classifying human variation except that their book wielding the race-breed analogy betrays otherwise.

The false “logic” about ancestry, race, and human behavior breaks down when one questions the assumptions. First of all, as we have shown, the dog breed-human race analogy is not biologically sound—it assumes race as a natural biological category of humans, a priori. Second and inextricably related, the analogy denies sociocultural context, both past and present. What is more, it includes unquestioned and largely unfounded assumptions about genetically-determined and predictable human behavior.

Scientists are still discovering whether and how dog behaviors are breed-specific and, when they are, how heritable they are. To be clear, a trait’s heritability is an estimation of how much of its variation in a population is determined by genetic variation in that population; heritability is not synonymous with its determination or predictability in an individual based on that individual’s DNA. There is much known but also much more to learn about what else influences behavioral variation among dogs like weaning age, diet, and other conditions during development. A recent meta-analysis of the heritability of dog behavior concluded that not only are breed standards poorly aligned with the actual behaviors of the breeds they aim to define, but they describe behaviors with little genetic component in the first place (Hradecka et al. 2015). While dog behavior does develop out of inherited (as well as environmental) influences, “breed standards are largely unsubstantiated, for most breeds that have been studied” (Mehrkam and Wynne 2014). These meta studies emphasize that variable behavior within breeds is often overlooked. They also highlight how difficult it is to operationalize behaviors like aggression and intelligence and how difficult it is to measure and compare intelligence in dogs; some dogs solve problems thanks to their relatively heightened senses of smell, while for others it is thanks to their higher energy that keeps them active long enough to solve the problem by chance (Mehrkam and Wynne 2014). Right now, blanket, authoritative and popular claims like “it is obvious that breed differences in behavior are both real and important in magnitude,” (Scott and Fuller 1965) supports more stereotyping than the existing evidence deserves.

In the zeitgeist, scientific enthusiasm for genetics has encouraged genetic essentialism, which is the tendency to consider genetic outcomes to be immutable and determined, to prioritize the influence of genes on complex outcomes, to view groups with shared genetic heritage as homogeneous and discrete, and to view genetic outcomes as the most natural and even to be the most morally acceptable (Dar-Nimrod and Heine 2011). This view is encouraged by the frequent confusion of the deceptively complicated scientific concept of “heritable” traits and their mistaken translation into being “genetically determined” rather than being polygenic, context dependent, environmentally influenced, and unpredictable in individuals due to their probabilistic nature. Genetic essentialism, where genes are synonymous with essence, is fertile ground for beliefs that meaningful, distinctive individual behaviors have a predictive individual biological basis even in the absence of any identified genes. Variation in human behavior has its roots in both complex genetic and non-genetic factors. Claims that such factors, or their interactions, map neatly onto geographically and socially constructed human groups and can be used to predict behavioral traits associated with such groups, or of an individual member of a group, are not scientifically supported. As Sussman (2014) said about the one behavioral trait that is usually the focus of these discussions, “The idea of a unitary purely genetically based intelligence and of biologically distinct races among humans is as outdated scientifically as the ideas that the earth is flat or that it was created in 4004 B.C.” (p. 305)

Finally, Darwin’s scenario for the evolution of human intelligence in Descent of Man (1871) pitted human groups against one another, with natural selection ratcheting up intelligence in the dominant groups through time. Hierarchical ranking of human races is also inherently competitive, which is just one reason why outdated and overly simplistic conceptions of evolutionary biology have historically paired with racism, and still do. Within this racist framework, hindsight paints the dominant group as the more genetically intelligent and naturally selected one, justifying its dominance with perceived biological superiority. While it is true that natural selection occurs differently in different lineages and populations, it is no longer dogma (> 150 years since Darwin) that natural selection causes divergence due to competition between populations. In many cases, perpetual mutation and drift are enough to explain evolutionary divergence (Hedges et al. 2015).

In a contemporary discussion among philosophers about the biological (also termed “scientific”) basis for “race,” there are claims that clustered human variation demonstrates the reality of a biological concept of race, and that, further, this supposed reality neither encourages nor partners with racism (Hardimon 2012; Kaplan and Winther 2014). These are carefully worded discussions—based on past and present mainstream evolutionary biology—with one major exception: by insisting that “race” applies to patterns of observable human biological variation, these discussions ignore the sociocultural meaning of race, its historical context, and its political consequences like social and economic inequality. They suppose that “race” is eligible for human taxonomy, but mainstream American culture shows otherwise. “Race” has evolved into a concept that supersedes biology and therefore it cannot also apply as a strictly biological concept. After a racist history of science and a racist history of knowledge production generally, we know that “race” does not exist without racism. As McLean (2019) has described it, there are “co-constructive relationships between historically contingent political processes and the biology of humans.” “Race” is, in its essence, about human bias and always has been. If, hypothetically, race was ever to succeed as a wholly objective and neutral biological concept for humans, it lost its chance because so much racist science led us to this socially constructed state of “race” today. About that racist science Zack (2010) writes, “There is a self-revised scientific history of ideas of race, but that is not the same thing as a scientific foundation. The need for such a foundation or some intellectual justification for the enslavement of Africans and the oppression and exploitation of indigenous peoples during the period of European colonization and its subsequent racisms—without question motivated belief in human races [as real and important, biologically differentiated types of humans].” (p. 880)