The Human Genome Project has shown that people of different races/nationalities can have more similarities in DNA than 2 people of the same race/nationality. Appearance is 0.01% of DNA. So, from an academic perspective it's not useful to divide humans into races. The same holds for race-based nationalism, which is simply unfounded in the scientific view. It comes into play with social concepts and processes.

BTW. I had to fill out a form the other day, where I was asked for my race. I left this empty because I really don't know - and as a German post war child I think in the categories of humans and non-humans.

Dear Michael,

interesting post. I share your opinion, that the DNA differences don´t depend on "race". So I agree with your behaviour, distinguishing human ond non-humans.

PS: sometimes the humans are less human than the human non-humans (elephants, apes,monkeys...). ;-)

Almost all colonial categories to describe and divide people are irrelevant in post-colonial era.

I have a hunch that the different races may have had different origins. Perhaps we are the descendants of 3 or 4 "Adams" and "Eves", well interbred and mixed to form what we know as homo sapiens today - therefore not easily discernible, except for some minor (racial) differences.

I simply don't have enough information yet (about 30 papers or so) to fully support such a hypothesis. Our ability to do genetic screening so easily nowadays will show us a better picture as the database grows and we can come up theories that better fit the data. Whatever the result, one should not be biased and call it racist, even if it turns out that we may be the offspring of more than one species. Either way, we are so well mixed, it cannot have any relevance anymore. In "A Short History of Nearly Everything" Bill Bryson mentions that everybody alive today are likely to be related to Shakespeare.

The bottom line is that race and racism is just plain stupid, coming from a country that has a history, and still is making history (e.g. affirmative action protecting a majority and black economic empowerment), with it's racial policies.

My feeling is everybody should be allowed to compete on equal basis (one cannot make a wrongs right with more wrongs) - some will excel naturally while others won't, regardless of race i.e. the old 20/80 law.

One if the problems with how we think about the original human "Adam" or "Eve" from an evolutionary perspective is that it promotes the idea of a single moment moment or generation that marked the divide between pre-human and human. This idea does not fit with evidence or common sense. There must have been gradual changes over time. However, since growing populations and changing evironmental conditions (e.g., drought, ice-age) forced populations to divide and move to new locations that became somewhat isolated from each other, these isolated groups developed their own genetic identities. We once thought that Neanderthals were an entirely separate group that never interbred with modern humans, but we now know that there was considerable interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans, so that most humans living outside Africa today carry 1% to 4% Neanderthal genes (my own DNA shows 2.7%). In the US, about 50 million "Whites" carry some African Genes from withing the most recent 10 generations and the average "African-American" carries about 18% "European Ancestry" Many "African Americans" have more than 50% European ancestry. Latinos are even more mixed. So race has been culturally determined more than genetically. In the newer generations of Americans the social stigma and sometimes legal prohibitions against interbreeding are mostly gone and mixing is becoming even more common. So race is mostly in the eye of the holder.

I'm with Michael, but a bit less refined. I consider myself a primate; on a good day, Homo sapiens. I have no idea what "race" is supposed to mean. As a scientist, I believe variables should be kept separate, including biological traits, cultural traits, ethnic identity, and institutional matters like nationality. Each of these is uniquely complex.

While I agree completely that there should be no stigma attached to racial identification, my question is more related to whether the notion of defining racial membership is misleading. For example, many Americans who are defined as African-American have as much or more European "White" ancestry as African, and 20-30% of Americans who define themselves as white have some African heritage in the previous 400 years. In addition, those defined as Hispanics are not listed as members of either groups although both African and European genetic heritage would place many of them as members of both groups. So my point is that these racial identities are more culturally defined than genetically defined. In my view, whether a scientist identified herself or himself as African American should not have much to do with being chosen for a NASA mission to space. We can measure bone density easily and simply use that as a criterion. While mean bone density may be higher for African Americans than for European Americans or Asian Americans, the standard deviations for all these groups show significant overlap. So while there would be more African Americans at the higher end of the distribution of the combined group, there would be some on the lower side of the distribution. So choosing on the basis of race rather than bone density or other desired characteristics independent of race might result in a poor choice. In addition East Africans and West Africans appear to differ substantially on bone mass and bone density, so grouping them together for bone density or otehr genetic characteristics would be quite misleading.

@Dick,

your arguements are the reason why I don´t use the term race for humans. What shall such a classification express. I don´t mean the prejudices, these show a lot from the applier!