The End of Race

[Butters]

Hi. Just wondering what the general consensus on race is. Obviously humans enjoy categorising things, and sometimes that means forcing things into a category that they don't necessarily fit in to. This seems to happen quite a lot with race, whereby we use a lot of generalisations in physical appearance and place of birth to define a person's race. It seems likely that in the future, with travel becoming so much faster than previously, and people not necessarily living in the same country or continent they were born in that these lines will only blur even more.

 

My question is this; how long do you think it would take before the concept of assigining somebody a race is irrelevant, assuming that the current rise in inter-racial relationships increases steadily (although not exponentially). Or do you think that there will always be some distinction between the people of the world, and if so is this because of genetic reasons or social and political reasons?

[Mr Skeptic]

Well with both the genetics and culture mingling, it is only a matter of time before race becomes meaningless. It will simply continue the trend of decreasing significance, although where it will become officially "insignificant" is hard to say. Also, there is a little resistance to the mingling, since people tend to marry people of their own race, and also tend to prefer people of their own race (even when not blatantly biased).

 

I'd guess about 100 years to irrelevance of race, within the US.

[PhDwannabe]

As much as I want to write 5000 words on this, I'll give you the serious cliffs notes version:

 

Race is currently widely thought in the human (biological and social) sciences to be sort of a junk construct, biologically speaking. It's often called a "social construct," which sounds sort of maddening, because you think, "umm... black people have black kids... that doesn't seem like a social construct to me." Well, that is the case. Skin color is most certainly pretty damn heritable. But here's the big question: who decided that skin color is this thing called race?

 

Race as a construct would really only have meaning if it was a bunch of traits that hung together fairly consistently, like the traits associated with dog breeds (more or less) or other subspecies do. If skin color were really consistently associated with height, cephalic index, nose-to-face ratio, breast shape, eye color, hair color, hair type, earwax type, earlobe attachment, blood type, not to mention a million other traits that are less conveniently Mendelian, and often hidden from us... then race might be worth categorizing. Unfortunately, that sort of thing isn't borne out. There's a series of maps--I think it's in Erlich's Human Natures--that demonstrates this pretty well. Overlay a map of skin shade onto a world map of cephalic index, for even a chunk of the globe (we've forgotten about this stuff as part of "race," but you'd have heard about it a hundred years ago, when anthropometry was a little more, uhh, "in"). You'll quickly see that, although there's some correspondence in some regions, most of the iso-lines don't line up. Plenty of groups with similar skin shade have wildly different cephalic indices. More empirical data give results even more dramatic than this simple visual inspection. In short: the traits don't hang together, so the construct seems to be largely based on a single--somewhat arbitrary--trait: skin color. We could've just as easily picked cephalic index, but historically, we didn't, because skin color happens to be so visually salient. There are plenty of studies that do find correlations between traits, but often it's an issue of sampling--if they'd have sampled some remote tribe in central Russia, they'd have seen that they share a bunch of weird mutations with Moroccan Berbers and a handful of Native Americans from the Yucatan.

 

This isn't to say that what we call "race" isn't important. As a social construct, it's extremely important. In most of the western world, we define both this person and this person as "black"--this should tell you how obsessed we are with creating simple categories for things--round holes/square pegs be damned! This categorization has, as I'm sure I don't really need to mention, massive consequences for how people are treated and experience society. From a research standpoint, race is also an important variable, but it's a proxy variable--simply, it stands for lots of other things. It often signifies--is highly correlated with--cultural beliefs, national and personal history, parenting styles, diet, dress, personality characteristics, standard of living, interaction with medicine, etc. It's like phone and motor vehicle ownership in 1936--it didn't mean much on its own, but it was a serious proxy for socioeconomic status and political orientation.

 

Once you realize that race as we typically define it is pretty much just a proxy, a lot of what it tells you makes a lot more sense. One of the things that makes race look pretty legit as a biological construct is the consistent finding that different races seem to metabolize a lot of drugs fairly differently. Well, guess what--pull back that curtain and you see that something very different is going on. Here's a quote from one of my favorite pieces of literature (Chaudry, Neelam, Duddu, & Husain, 2008) from my graduate education thus far:

 

Diet has been found to alter the pharmacokinetic properties of drugs.

 

Since dietary habits tend to differ across ethnic groups, it could

 

potentially exert significant effects on the response to various psy-

 

chotropic medications. It was shown that a steady diet consisting of

 

charbroiled beef could reduce peak phenacetin plasma levels by 78%

 

(Conney et al., 1976). Grapefruit juice has been found to inhibit

 

CYPIA2 and CYP3A4, with resultant increase in the blood levels of

 

substrates of these enzymes, for example, nefazodone and buspirone

 

(Lilja et al., 1998). A diet rich in cruciferous vegetables (such as a

 

cabbage, broccoli and brussels sprouts) and aromatic hydrocarbons

 

has been found to induce the activity of CYPIA2 by indole-3-

 

carbinol, thus reducing the blood levels of many antidepressants and

 

neuroleptics (Jefferson, 1998). It has also been noted that a diet rich

 

in carbohydrates inhibits the activity of CYP 1A2, whereas a protein-

 

rich diet stimulates the same. The latter probably explains why south

 

Asians living in Asia had slower metabolism of CYP 1A2 substrates

 

than those living in the UK who had adapted to a protein-rich diet

 

(Alvares et al., 1976).

 

 

 

Pretty nuts, eh? It's mostly diet and other lifestyle factors. Kind of a clarion call to make sure you don't test your new drugs on a bunch of white guys. Anyway, I could go on and on, but I think that more or less gets my point across. Race, as I'm personally fond of saying about so many things in the social sciences, is a little more real than a unicorn, and a little less real than a duck.

[CharonY]

Well, those specific markers can also be genetic. Only that population boundaries drawn around these do not necessarily correspond to"traditional" ethnic groups, but rather follows mating history, of course.

[Dan6541]

How long it will take depends on where in the world you live. Here in Australia, it's a very multicultural society. In my class we have a couple of Greeks, an Italian, a Asians, Israelis, and a couple of Indians, so over here race will become less and less important relatively quickly. In places like China it will take a lot longer.

 

It's impossible for me to put a figure on it, but I think it will be a very long time before race it totally irrelevant because of how deeply imbedded some cultures are. I'm no expert but I think in places like China and India there will remain a distinct "race" for a very long time.

[CylonHybrid]

There is no biological definition of race. Its a purely social designation. All people are almost identical at the genetic level.

The only term in biology is species and two species exist if one can't interbreed with the other or the children of the mating are infertile. In fact the genetalia and otehr sex organs ar under extreme selection pressures for just this reason, to promote speciation.

[Debruit]

Your question is really more sociological than genetic, because some cultures and sub-cultures have a bias known as positive assortative mating - mating of like with like. However, in any environment where people of differerent races freely interect there will always be interracial mating. In many societies this is not the case however, in fact most non-Western societies are still very racially homogenous. As globalisation increases I imagine this will gradually change but until then the idea of race will always exist, particularly in nationalistic societies with low immigration.

 

As far as the scientific basis for race, I will play devil's advocate and say that there is in fact a scientific distinction between races. Haplotypes in DNA are grouped by race, but evidence for any significant racial differences in the DNA other than obvious morphological traits and non-coding hypervariable regions is scant. There is no such thing as a pure race and variation of individual factors within a population is higher than between populations. This does not mean that correlation between factors cannot be used for ethnic grouping.

Edited November 30, 2010 by Debruit

[TonyMcC]

As the song says "Stir it for a hundred years or more, turn out coffee coloured people by the score".