Traditional racial categories convey almost no useful genetic information about adaptive variation

Evidence

Before moving on, it’s worth highlighting a point about genes and race. Anthropologists have long argued that race is not a biological concept. What we mean by this is that the racial categories developed historically by Europeans—such as Caucasian, Negroid, and Mongoloid—do not convey or contain much, if any, useful genetic information, aside from capturing something of the migration patterns of ancient peoples. 16 Detailed studies of the genome, including the research highlighted above, has only served to further underline this point. As we saw, skin-color genes are heavily influenced by a combination of UV radiation and diet, because they effect vitamin D and folate. This means that people in New Guinea and Africa are both very dark skinned despite being from opposite ends of our species’ family tree. And very light-skinned Europeans are evolutionarily recent, being mostly a product of agriculture at high latitudes. Other genes have quite different distributions for distinct reasons. … Nothing. Traditional racial categories just don’t tell us anything about this important variation. In fact, the processes I’ve described above actually make classical racial categories even less informative, since they operate in diverse and nonconcordant ways within races to make local groups less similar (e.g., lactase persistent and nonpersistent Africans) while at the same time making different continental races more similar (e.g., amylase genes in Japanese and Americans). The current evidence indicates that natural selection operates in diverse ways on scales much smaller than races and simultaneously on different continents. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 314

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s earlier anti-race-science work and to the lactase/amylase cases from earlier in this book and from sources like the skin-color vitamin D account. — connects to: Racial categories capture only 7% of human genetic variation — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 315; Ancient notions of race as biology do not match reality — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 901; Genetic differences within racial groups exceed differences between groups — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 1179
• SEED: Could anchor an accessible piece on why adaptive genetic variation cuts across rather than along folk-racial lines.

Broader Connections

• Racial categories capture only 7% of human genetic variation #corroborates (0.82) — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success, 315
• Genetic differences within racial groups exceed differences between groups #corroborates (0.80) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1179
• Ancient notions of race as biology do not match reality #corroborates (0.78) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 901