| Abstract: | Responds to M. J. Zyphur's (see record 2006-01690-012) comments on the original article by A. Smedley and B. D. Smedley (see record 2005-00117-003). Race, as people live and understand it, inhabits a dimension of reality that transcends biology and cannot be reduced to genes, chromosomes, or even phenotypes. A biological or genetic view of race cannot encompass the lived social reality of race, nor does it represent biogenetic variations in human populations very well (Marks, 1995). As Zyphur notes, biogenetic variations in the human species were produced by evolutionary forces as different groups interacted with and underwent adaptation to the natural environments encountered in their migrations. The result was a pattern of variation that should be familiar to everyone: People with dark skin coloring remained adapted to tropical environments (with some internal variations resulting from amounts of tree cover, land elevation, rainfall, etc.). Peoples of tropical lands thus resemble one another in their varying shades of dark skin color and often curly or frizzy hair (known as polytopicity). Some of the darkest skins are found not in Africa but in India, Sri Lanka, Melanesia, and Northern Australia, as anyone who watched the news coverage of the recent tsunami would readily recognize. Groups migrating beyond the tropical areas gradually lost genes for dark skin as they adapted to cooler climates with less sunlight. Geneticists have shown that just as no two individuals are genetically alike (except for identical twins), no two human groups are precisely alike, even when they derive from a common ancestral population. Biogenetic variation has continued to increase as individuals once widely separated meet and mate. Quite apart from the controversy over races as biological taxa, the idea of race as it is known and lived in American society is composed of social values and meanings imposed on this biological variation over the past three or four centuries. As a social construct, race refers to an ideology. Since the 18th century, Americans and many other people in the world have been conditioned to believe that race as biology is the main source of human identities. As Americans have come into contact with peoples around the world, confusion has inevitably ensued, because U.S. racial categories do not necessarily apply in other countries. Given the complexity of the human genome and the history of (continuous) intermixtures, I doubt if it will ever be possible to correlate our genes with our racial (i.e., social) identities. Nor can I imagine at this point why anyone should want to do so. What service to society or science will this fulfill? Social constructs have their own complex dynamics and are vulnerable to change, just as is any other cultural phenomenon. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
