posted
Taken from the book “The Concept of Race”, Editor: Ashley Montague
From Chapter IX, “Taxonomy and Variation in Modern Man by Nigel Barnicot
p. 215-216
“One semantic point is perhaps worth noting because it has sometimes led to confusion. If a race, or whatever term we may prefer to use, is defined by certain characteristics, then the word racial should only be applied to those characteristics which contribute to the definition. It may be that races, so defined, will be found to differ in various other physical characters but these may add nothing to the definition and may indeed contradict it if their distributions do not correspond to those of the defining characters. A related error is to speak of racial differences when we really mean genetical differences. While it is true that racial differences should be genetical, all genetical differences between populations should not be called racial because they may not all contribute to the definition of groups.
p.221-222
“One result of the urge to classify mankind into discrete racial groups has been a tendency to think of the later phase of human evolution as consisting exclusively of migrations and intermixtures between such groups. It has often been supposed that at some time in the past the human species consisted of more isolated and more clearly differentiated groups and that this simple primeval pattern of variation has been obscured by subsequent movement and hybridization. It its extreme form this trend culminated in the concept of “pure races.” The view that earlier populations were substantially less variable than many modern ones of comparable scale has been questioned by many population geneticists and receives little to no support from the study of prehistoric skeletal material. The only sense in which the notion of pure races seems to have any reality is that some populations have been more isolated than others and that gene exchange with other populations has been relatively small at least in the recent past. That genetical differentiation between the populations of major geographical regions could only have occurred if gene flow between them was to some extent restricted is an acceptable proposition. It is also true that the growth of populations and development in the means of transport has led to more intermixing, but the intergradations which we find on the map are not necessarily due to this process alone. It may be, for example , that the gradation reflects the action of graded selective forces on populations that were relatively static. The idea of a race as a discrete unit characterized by a particular complex of physical attributes is harmful if it leads to typological thinking, that is to the conception of an idealized type in which all these characteristics are combined. This way of thinking deflects attention from the essential variability of populations and from the fact that the characters by which the race is defined are usually independent in inheritance and probably to a large extent independent in their responses to selection.”
Posts: 2600 | From: Vicksburg | Registered: Feb 2006
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The part about typological thinking is the best part because it proves that discrete extreme types were never the norm in the prehistoric fossil record.
Posts: 2600 | From: Vicksburg | Registered: Feb 2006
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In another thread I pointed out the parodox of suggesting that modern phenotypes are necessarily -mixed- while ancient phenotypes are supposed to be generalised and thus pre-date the elements from which 'mixed' types were supposed to derive in the first place.
Race typologies are highly contrived.
Posts: 15202 | Registered: Jun 2004
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posted
That is true, I agree. That book I got that from was basically Ashley Montague taking shots at Coon, along with Brace and Hiernaux. Much of racial typological thinking has been undermined by genetics.
Posts: 2600 | From: Vicksburg | Registered: Feb 2006
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posted
Just think, proto-Negroids, Caucasoids, Mongoloids, Australoids, ie, traditional races o-called , don't exist in the fossil record so how can modern populations be derived forms of something that doesn't exist?
Posts: 2600 | From: Vicksburg | Registered: Feb 2006
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quote:Originally posted by Rigaud: Just think, proto-Negroids, Caucasoids, Mongoloids, Australoids, ie, traditional races o-called , don't exist in the fossil record so how can modern populations be derived forms of something that doesn't exist?
True enough, but preponderance of "affinities" to contemporary groups do exist in the fossil record - this is just but one aspect of multidisciplinary approach to determining CONTINUITY from antiquity to contemporary times. E.g.;
The Paleoamerican morphological pattern is more generalized and can be seen today among Africans, Australians, and Melanesians. - Neves et al.
Even without Neves et al.'s use of the aforementioned anti-scientific constructs, we understand the above, in relation to contemporary groups.
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