Genetic Concepts of Race and Ethnicity
Before 1800, a person's race was often synonymous with his ethnicity, national citizenship, or religion. When contemporaries spoke of the "Irish race," they did not use "race" to indicate appearance or skin pigmentation. This cultural and ethnic concept of race persisted until the 19th century, but the foundation of the concept was challenged by European's contact through colonialism with native peoples. The enslavement of Africans--and slavery in the Americas-- also began to alter how Europeans viewed race.
The appearance of Darwinism changed western philosophical framework by introducing into society a scientific worldview of evolution and progress. At the same time, the nations of Western Europe were expanding their colonial territories into Asia and Africa. Not surprisingly, many began to evaluate the exotic cultures they encountered through the lens of this new scientific thinking. Darwin himself was opposed to the concept of "type" when describing man. Nevertheless, some social theorists misappropriated Darwinism's reliance on the concept of "survival of the fittest," or natural selection, as a justification for cultural and racial hierarchy. The Social Darwinists made popular the concept of "scientific racism". In their models, the different races demonstrated varying levels of adaptiveness. Simply, some races were entitled to hold dominion over others-- a philosophical justification for imperialism.
The discovery of the laws of heredity and modern genetics prompted another philosophical shift in how men defined race. The introduction of genetics solidified a new perception of race as strictly a biological function. Different races possessed different sets of traits--and were thought by some to even be variant species. Scientists began to study remains of various peoples in order to examine the comparative physiology of race.
The principles of social Darwinism later fused with genetic theory in the study of Eugenics, the attempt to achieve racial purity by deleting perceived negative traits in a given population. The eugenics movement, like Social Darwinism, espoused the notion of a racial hierarchy, however eugenicists thought that hierarchy could be manipulated by selective breeding. In Nazi Germany, eugenics was the underlying philosophy that dictated policies such as the institutionalization and forced sterilization of the mentally ill. They imposed stringent laws on marriage and reproduction in the belief that intermarriage with other ethnicities would dilute the Aryan gene pool. Like earlier theorists, eugenicists conflated ethnic identity with race, despite their reliance on scientific rhetoric. The eugenics movement was widely discredited after World War II and the Holocaust. Mathematics related to population genetics now shows how errant the eugenic concepts of allele or trait deletion was, and that the eugenics movement--in addition to it other cruelties--was scientifically doomed from the outset.
Modern genetic research, including work with gene sequences, has redirected scientific thinking on the concept of race. Research involving comparing DNA sequences of people with different skin color demonstrated the relative homogeny of human genes. Humans share 94% of their DNA sequences in common. Conventionally constructed "racial groups" only differ in about 6% of their genes. There is often greater variation found persons of the same race, who share few physical characteristics (e.g. one man is short, the other tall.) Similarly, skin color (like eye and hair color, or any other inheritable characteristic) results from the expression of dominant gene. The process is nothing novel, or unique to a specific race.
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