Raff: ” it became apparent that human genetic variation does not divide humans into a few discrete groups….”

Ok, but what did early racialists actually argue?

Blumenbach (1795): “Thus too there is with this that insensible transition by which as we saw the other varieties also run together”

Darwin (1871): “But the most weighty of all the arguments against treating the races of man as distinct species, is that they graduate into each other, independently in many cases, as far as we can judge, of their having intercrossed”

Also, there is a non sequitur embedded here. One doesn’t need sharp boundaries to divide individuals into discrete populations. Rather, in absence of sharp boundaries more individuals will fall in an undefined region (e.g., zones of intergradation). …

Raff: “These observations have led the majority of physical anthropologists, human biologists, and human geneticists”

A while back, I looked through all of the published surveys which asked a variant of the question, “Do human biological races exist?” These surveys were mostly from the U.S, and Western Europe and didn’t include China and Russia, countries in which the reality of human races is overwhelmingly accepted. About 50% said “no”, 10% were undecided, and 40% said “yes”. The reasons given for rejecting races were silly, though: more variation within races, gene flow between populations, no pure races, etc. Clearly what was being rejected was not a typical concept of race, modern or historic (keep in mind that early pre-Darwinian racialists, being monogenists, believed that races (as opposed to species) were different inbred lineages of Adam, only several thousand years separated).

Raff: “Racial groupings differ from culture to culture. For example, although in the United States Chinese and Japanese peoples are usually viewed as one “race””

So, race is a polyseme and the different concepts lend themselves to different classification schemes. But Wade is dealing with a typical biological race concept in which races are understood to be subspecific natural populations (here “natural population” is an analogue of “natural classification” which is juxtaposed with “artificial classification”. So given this biological concept….

The last point touches upon a central problem with this critique. Either there are biologically valid concepts of race or there are not. But Raff wishes to have it both ways, so she can say that there are no races because there is no scientifically viable definition of them and because there are viable definitions of race and human populations don’t qualify as races by these. Well, which is it?

I can think of four prominent biological race concepts off of the top of my head: cladistic, evolutionary, population, and ecotypic. They are biological races seen from the perspective of different biological research programs. For a discussion of the former two, see the following defenses: Andreasen, R. O. (2004). The cladistic race concept: a defense; Hardimon, M. O. (2012). T he Idea of a Scientific Concept of Race. To note, the population genetic concept does not purport to be a taxonomic unit, but rather a conceptual tool for understanding human biological variation. This concept refers to breeding populations (sometimes also confusingly called genetic populations) retrospectively understood.

The evolutionary race concept is Mayr’s evolutionary — as in evolutionary taxonomy –based one; when formally recognized, that is, when given a trinomen, these are called zoological subspecies or “geographic races” (Mayr and Ashlock, 1991) (not to be confused with Mayr’s “microgeographic racees” or with geographically delineated races in general). While only Mayr’s formally recognized races (zoological subspecies) are taxonomic units, his lesser races are nonetheless biological units — in the sense that “demes”, “morphs”, “clines” or other taxonomically unrecognized biological constructs are — they are subspecific natural populations which simply have not differentiated enough to warrant, for pragmatic reasons, being assigned a trinomen. I simply can’t see how one can grant the taxonomic validity of formally recognized races without also granting the biological validity of non-formally recognize ones — as if races that failed to meet the vague conventional subspecies qualifying criteria couldn’t be thought about. This consideration brings to mind Kant’s reply, when his race concept was challenged on the grounds that it didn’t describe a formal taxonomic unit: “The fact that this word does not occur in the description of nature [i.e., in Taxonomy] (but instead of it that of variety), cannot prevent the observer of nature from finding it necessary with respect to natural history.”

The final concept is the ecotypic one: King and Stansfield (1990): “A phenotypically and/or geographically distinctive subspecific group, composed of individuals inhabiting a defined geographical and/or ecological region, and possessing characteristic phenotypic and gene frequencies that distinguish it from other such groups. The number of racial groups that one wishes to recognize within a species is usually arbitrary but suitable for the purposes under investigation” I find this conception to be somewhat vague (e.g., “Can forms be ecotypes?”). but apparently ecologists find it useful.

The point here is that there are a bunch of viable well vetted biological race concepts — in addition to bio-anthropological ones. They differ mainly in the way that species concepts differ (e.g., genetic species versus ecospecies), but they are related in that they generally — I don’t know about ecotypes — describe populations where members are arranged by genealogical and/or genotypic relationship, where what is of interest is overall similarity not just similarity in specific genetic characters such a specific chromosomes e.g., as in the male morph.

We need not worry about all these concepts though and their various operationalizations, since Wade focuses on the population genetic ones, which is very similar to Mayr’s evolutionary one in that the matter of concern is relative geneotypic similarity. Now, either “genetic populations” represent a viable biological construct or not. They obviously do — granted, the operationalizations are all over the place. And either these genetic populations can reasonably be labeled races or not. Again, they obviously can on a number of accounts. So we have our scientifically valid, viable race concept, which allows us to discuss human races. Now, with this as our basis, we can better examine your critique.

Raff: “To begin with, Wade can’t provide a clear definition of “race.” He tries to rely instead on loose associations rather than definitive characteristics”

Ok, but population genetic and evolutionary races are defined in terms of overall genetic similarity, not in terms of “definitive” characteristics. The situation is similar to that of twins. Twins are define by their coefficient of relatedness; this relatedness conditions character similarity; this character similarity can be used to diagnose twin status, but it doesn’t define it. Alternatively, ducks have wings; but they are not ducks because they have wings; rather, they have wings because they are of the duck lineage which has been subject to such and such evolutionary pressure. .

Raff: “With such a shifty, casual footing, it’s no surprise that Wade’s conclusions are unsound. He can’t keep the number of races straight:”

Ok, but everyone recognizes the nested nature of “genetic populations”. To quote Aulchenko (2010) again: “One can see that this definition is quantitative and rather flexible (if not to say arbitrary): what we call a “populations” depends on the choice of the threshold for the “much-higher” probability. Actually, what you define as “the same” genetic population depends in large part on the scope and aims of your study. In human genetics literature you may find references to a particularly genetically isolated populations, populations of some countries (e.g., “German population”, “population of United Kingdom”), European, Caucasoid or even general human population. Defining a population is about deciding on some probability threshold.

If you look at the old taxonomies, you will see that races will be prefixed with terms like “primary” or “major” or “continental” for this reason. This surely isn’t a novel point (see for example: Coon and Garn’s (1955): ” On the Number of Races of Mankind.”) Generally, you can’t determine a true number of races or a true classification because there is no way to determine a “true” level of genetic relatedness; you can only determine a specific number and a specific classification given a pre-selected grain of genetic focus. This, of course, holds for all natural populations. The shifty biologists talk about x kingdoms, y classes, z species — they classify Sailer as an animal then a mammal then a primate — they can’t keep there natural populations straight! Madness.

Raff: “He uses terms like “major race”, “race”, “subrace”, “group”, or “population,” but doesn’t provide any serious, objective ways to distinguish between these terms for arbitrary groupings of people arbitrary groups”

Except, cluster analysis.

Because, in biology, arbitrary groupings are ones that don’t indicate evolutionary relationship, thus overall genotypic similarity. Mayr and Ashlock (1991): “classification based on convenient and conspicuous diagnostic characters without attention to characters indicating [evolutionary] relationship; often a classification based on a single arbitrarily chosen character instead of an evaluation of the totality of characters.”