The study of race from a scientific perspective has always been controversial.
In the 19
th century, studies of skull structure were used
to “prove” that different races were at different rungs on the
evolutionary ladder – the “inferior” races being more ape-like.
Some scientists believed that Africans were a missing link between apes and “true” (i.e. European) humans; this resulted in
Africans being placed in zoos.
In
The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen J. Gould contends that the
results of some of these studies were falsified to fit with society’s
preconceived notions of white racial superiority.
Today, we know that it is impossible to distinguish physical
differences between races because race cannot be defined scientifically.
Tens of thousand of years of human migration and interbreeding
throughout the world means that it is impossible to divide humanity into
a few genetically distinct “races”. Studies of the human genome prove
this.
A recent genetic study
has revealed that three hunter-gatherer populations in Africa show
evidence of interbreeding with an unknown group of hominin that diverged
from humans and Neanderthals between 20,000 and 80,000 years ago,
further evidence that when it comes to sex, humans don’t always stick to
their own kind.
There are small, genetically isolated human populations in which
certain medical conditions and diseases are more prevalent than in the
general human population, but these groups are usually thought of as
being too small to be considered separate races.
Race is, in fact, a concept that is defined by culture, and racial
definitions vary from culture to culture. Definitions of race differ
according to culture.
A person who is considered mixed race in one culture may be thought
of as black, white or Asian in another. This can be very important when
laws treat people defined as mixed race differently than people defined
as being purely of one race.
“Hispanic” is a racial term used in the United States to categorize
people with a wide variety of genetic backgrounds whose ancestors spent
some time in Latin America.
In America, people of South Asian (Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi)
ancestry have sometimes been classified legally as Asian and at other
times as white.
Having been born in America myself, I was raised to think of South
Asians as white; the Asian race consists of people whose ancestors are
from East Asia. (Yes, Americans do realize that the Indian subcontinent
is part of Asia.)
When I moved to the UK, I was surprised to find that people from South Asia are considered non-white.
Because today’s scientists realize that race cannot be defined
scientifically, they no longer study the differences between races or
attempt to create a hierarchy of races.
Now, scientists are examining our attitudes toward race and trying to understand how and why these attitudes develop.
Evolutionary biologists looking at race focus on the human tendency
to form large social groups and to divide human beings between members
of one’s own group and outsiders (us vs. them).
They look at antecedents to racism in other primates. A
2011 study
shows that macaques spend a longer time looking at photos of unfamiliar
macaques than at photos of macaques in their social group. The
researchers who performed this study interpreted the results as meaning
that the macaque subjects viewed the strange macaques as more
threatening than the macaques that they knew well.
Chimpanzees take the tendency to prefer members of their own group to
outsiders to extremes; male chimpanzees within a troop will sometimes
form a coalition that works together to attack and kill members of
another group.
Nevertheless, even if humans have inherited a tendency toward racism, we are not necessarily destined to be racist.
Studies examining the
neurobiological bases for racism in humans
have found that when someone looks at a photo of a member of another
race, activity increases in the amygdala, which is associated with fear
and with learning to be afraid of things. (Racism can be encouraged by
social conditioning.)
However, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) are also activated.
The ACC is associated with error detection and dealing with conflicting information; it is activated during the
Stroop test.
The ACC may be activated when people are presented with photos of
members of other races because they experience conflict between an
instinctive or learned fear of people who are different and the
knowledge that they should treat all people equally.
The DLPFC is believed to play a part in regulating behavior. While
the amygdala may be signaling someone to behave negatively toward a
member of another race, the DLFPC prevents them from acting on that
behavior.
Thus, our human brains allow us to overcome our primate racism.
Implicit Association Test
The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is supposed to determine whether
people have racist feelings, and if they do, how intense these feelings
are.
During the IAT, subjects separate words (such as “happy” or
“disgusted”) into positive and negative categories by clicking on one of
two keys on a computer keyboard.
At the same time, they click on the same two keys to separate photos of human faces into two racial groups.
Test results seem to show that the majority of people are inherently
racist, as they are more likely to associate negative words with members
of the group that they do not identify with.
Before I took the IAT online myself, I was warned that it was likely
that I would discover that I was at least slightly racist, and if I
couldn’t deal with it, I shouldn’t take the test.
In fact, my results showed that I have no preference for one race over the other. – Apparently, this is unusual.
One flaw in the test is that it may actually prime people to identify a particular race with good or bad qualities.
When I took the test (which was designed for Americans and identified
people as either European-American or African-American), I first had
to click on one key if I either read a “good” word or saw a photo of a
European-American and click on another key if I read a “bad” word or
saw a picture of an African-American.
Although the categories are later switched – African-Americans and
good words get one key, while European-Americans and bad words get
another – by that time the test may have already primed the subject to
associate African-Americans with negative qualities and
European-Americans with positive ones.
Some studies have shown that
changing the names of the racial categories on the IAT can affect the outcome of the IAT.
Additionally, people who score as very racist on the IAT often show no signs of racist behavior.
Exclamation points are useful for communicating emphasis! But where did this punctuation mark come from?!
"Five
Star!" the book review gushes, but deep down, you wonder whether
it's real. Welcome to the world of fake book review service, where enthusiastic
reviews are bought and sold like any other two-bit market commodity.
What
happens when a crime is committed and the suspect blames it on an
identical twin? The fact that they look alike throws a monkey wrench
into eyewitness accounts, and their DNA is identical, too. Often such
cases -and there are plenty of real-life cases- end up with no one
convicted. But that might change with new advanced chemical tests that
delve even further into a twins genetic makeup.
Quick:
what do ants and the Internet have in common? A Stanford ant biologist
and a computer scientist came up with the answer:
