Re: Morphological and Genetic Races in Humans

["Ken Kinman" <kinman@hotmail.com>]

    Perhaps it would make people less resistant to the idea if we called 
them large population groups rather than races.
    Whatever you call them, geographical isolation has caused 
morphologically distinct populations to develop during human history.  
Australian Aborigines being perhaps the most isolated are one of the 
clearest examples of this.  These are populational differences, not just 
individual variation, even in Eurasia where there has been much more 
intergradation between adjacent populations (especially when things like 
glaciations weren't preventing mobility).  Of course, the mobility of 
humanity today has increasingly made intergradation more of a geographically 
diffuse phenomenon, rather than a regional one (and particular diffuse in 
countries like the United States, as compared to countries like China, which 
are not "melting pots" to any significant degree).
    But getting back to ring species, the much more glaring example of 
Neanderthals indicates much longer periods of isolation, and even if 
"modern" Europeans didn't interbreed with European Neanderthals, it could 
have been due to a ring species phenomenon of sorts where divergent 
populations had become so distinct that they couldn't (or wouldn't) 
interbreed to any significant extent.  Just another example of the fuzziness 
of species boundaries in space and time, but the species category is 
obviously very useful in spite of the taxonomic problems it sometimes 
causes.
    Even if the biological species concept doesn't work all the time, it 
works enough of the time to be useful.  This seems better to me than a 
phylogenetic species concept that might effectively do the equivalent of 
separating off Australian Aborigines as a separate species just because they 
can be morphologically distinguished from other humans (not that I think any 
cladists are going to risk taking it that far for humans, but you get the 
idea).
               -------Ken

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