This year, my family’s Christmas celebration was held at a co-housing community in Saugerties where my aunt and uncle live. Jason is constantly ribbing on my family (or at least my mother’s side) for being stereotypical liberals, so naturally the location didn’t help. In most families, religion and politics are subjects of conversation to be avoided at all costs. In my family, politics is pretty much the only thing to talk about. It’s a pretty safe topic of discussion, since everyone voted for Gore—except for the few who voted for Nader. But if there’s one thing that defines my mother’s side of the family more than liberalism, it’s creativity. My mother is in a folk band, my cousin is a folk singer, my other cousin is a classical violinist and also an orchestra conductor, my uncle is a poet, my other uncle is a photographer, he and his wife (my aunt) also play folk music, my sister is an actress, I’m a writer, my grandmother was a poet, and after she died we uncovered a book of Russian poems copied by my great-grandmother in gorgeous calligraphy with exquisite pen-and-ink drawings of flowers. Basically what I’m saying is, we have a history.

We’re also Ashkenazi Jews, which according to the usual stereotype, is supposed to make us good at math, accounting, banking, etc. For the record, I don’t think there’s been a single math class since sixth grade that I haven’t failed. And I came dangerously close to failing most of the ones I took from third grade to fifth grade. Basically, I can add and subtract and do basic multiplication and division and everything else is witchcraft. I’m speaking only for myself, of course: my sister (a different sister from the actress) has always been excellent in math, even to the point of getting a degree in engineering. I don’t know how my other family members are in math. It seems impossible to escape the conclusion that they are better at math than I am, if only because most manic-depressive chimpanzees are better at math than I am. But if my hyper-artistic family is also filled to the brim with math wizards, certainly no one’s mentioned it to me. And no one is an accountant or a banker, though Enron and the World Bank have historically figured prominently in family discussions.

That my family doesn’t perfectly fit racial stereotypes should come as no surprise to anyone who isn’t a racist, or a Jew wanting to get laid. (”Hey baby, guess what my IQ is?”) After all, among biologists, there’s a question of whether race even exists—and the general consensus is that it doesn’t. Which brings us to the title of this post. It’s a famous quote from anthropologist Frank Livingstone, and a fun little catchphrase that you can recite for a laugh at cocktail parties attended by social science-minded people named Klein. (Get it? Cline? Klein? I’ll be here all night, folks!) It’s also a reminder to keep away from the oversimplified, bigoted concepts of yesteryear and instead acknowledge the dizzying array of human diversity.

Although Livingstone wrote that aphorism in 1962, it is hardly a new idea. As early as 1914, W.E.B. DuBois wrote, “In fact it is generally recognized today that no scientific definition of race is possible. Differences, and striking differences, there are between men and groups of men, but they fade into each other so insensibly that we can only indicate the main divisions of men in broad outlines. As Von Luschan says, ‘The question of the number of human races has quite lost its raison d’etre and has become a subject rather of philosophic speculation rather than of scientific research. It is of no more importance now to know how many human races there are than to know how many angels can dance on the point of a needle.’ “¹

So why doesn’t race exist, why do so many people think it does exist, and what is a cline, anyway? The purpose of this article is to introduce the idea in a simple, easy-to-understand way for those who, like me, don’t have degrees in anything.

Let us begin with a clear understanding of what it means for a biologist to call something ‘a race.’ For biologists, ‘race’ is a technical term with a technical meaning: subspecies. Populations within a species are baptized ‘subspecies’ (that is, races) if we can find a biological discontinuity—an identifiable genetic boundary. Entine claims that humanity can be divided into races as biologists understand the term; indeed, according to him, it has been demonstrated by modern biology that there are three races: ‘white,’ ‘black,’ and ‘yellow.’ Therefore, his first task should be to show us that biological discontinuities exist within the human species; that is, that we can demonstrate a clear line of genetic demarcation, for example, between ‘blacks’ and ‘whites.’²

Anthropologist C. Loring Brace explains that there is no clear line of genetic demarcation:

I would suggest that there are very few who, of their own experience, have actually perceived at first hand the nature of human variation. What we know of the characteristics of the various regions of the world we have largely gained vicariously and in misleadingly spotty fashion. Pictures and the television camera tell us that the people of Oslo in Norway, Cairo in Egypt, and Nairobi in Kenya look very different. And when we actually meet natives of those separate places, which can indeed happen, we can see representations of those differences at first hand. But if one were to walk up beside the Nile from Cairo, across the Tropic of Cancer to Khartoum in the Sudan and on to Nairobi, there would be no visible boundary between one people and another. The same thing would be true if one were to walk north from Cairo, through the Caucasus, and on up into Russia, eventually swinging west across the northern end of the Baltic Sea to Scandinavia. The people at any adjacent stops along the way look like one another more than they look like anyone else since, after all, they are related to one another. As a rule, the boy marries the girl next door throughout the whole world, but next door goes on without stop from one region to another.

We realize that in the extremes of our transit—Moscow to Nairobi, perhaps—there is a major but gradual change in skin color from what we euphemistically call white to black, and that this is related to the latitudinal difference in the intensity of the ultraviolet component of sunlight. What we do not see, however, is the myriad other traits that are distributed in a fashion quite unrelated to the intensity of ultraviolet radiation. Where skin color is concerned, all the northern populations of the Old World are lighter than the long-term inhabitants near the equator. Although Europeans and Chinese are obviously different, in skin color they are closer to each other than either is to equatorial Africans. But if we test the distribution of the widely known ABO blood-group system, then Europeans and Africans are closer to each other than either is to Chinese.

Then if we take that scourge sickle-cell anemia, so often thought of as an African disease, we discover that, while it does reach high frequencies in some parts of sub-Saharan Africa, it did not originate there. Its distribution includes southern Italy, the eastern Mediterranean, parts of the Middle East, and over into India. In fact, it represents a kind of adaptation that aids survival in the face of a particular kind of malaria, and wherever that malaria is a prominent threat, sickle-cell anemia tends to occur in higher frequencies. It would appear that the gene that controls that trait was introduced to sub-Saharan Africa by traders from those parts of the Middle East where it had arisen in conjunction with the conditions created by the early development of agriculture.

Every time we plot the distribution of a trait possessing a survival value that is greater under some circumstances than under others, it will have a different pattern of geographical variation, and no two such patterns will coincide. Nose form, tooth size, relative arm and leg length, and a whole series of other traits are distributed each in accordance with its particular controlling selective force. The gradient of the distribution of each is called a “cline” and those clines are completely independent of one another. This is what lies behind the aphorism, “There are no races, there are only clines.” Yes, we can recognize people from a given area. What we are seeing, however, is a pattern of features derived from common ancestry in the area in question, and these are largely without different survival value. To the extent that the people in a given region look more like one another than they look like people from other regions, this can be regarded as “family resemblance writ large.” And as we have seen, each region grades without break into the one next door.³

To underline the fact that the clines are independent of each other, we often see cases of blondness popping up in Aboriginal Australian children—without any evidence of admixture from Europeans and without any other traits that we usually consider uniquely European.

And in the case of genuine admixture, with someone who let’s say has one European parent and one African parent, which race she belongs to changes depending on where she is. In America, because of the “one drop” rule solidified in Jim Crow laws, she would be considered black. In Brazil, where over a dozen racial categories are recognized and have more to do with appearance than heredity, she could be identified as a member of any number of different racial groups. No one knows for sure what makes a “race” or who belongs to which race; everyone has a different definition, which just goes to show how arbitrary the division is.

And, as Jonathan Marks points out,

Dividing human populations into a small number of discrete groups results in associations of populations and divisions between populations that are arbitrary, not natural. Africa, for example, is home to tall, thin people in Kenya (Nilotic), short people in Zaire (Pygmies), and peoples in Southern Africa who are sufficiently different from our physical stereotypes of Africans (i.e., West Africans) as to have caused an earlier generation to speculate on whether they had some southeast Asian ancestry (Hiernaux, 1974). As far as we know, all are biologically different, all are indigenously African, and to establish a single category (African/Black/Negroid) to encompass them all reflects an arbitrary decision about human diversity, one that is not at all dictated by nature.⁴

Race is becoming an issue in medical research, but the arbitrary nature of our racial distinctions may actually hurt research—and society—more than it helps:

For example, according to Richard Cooper, a professor of medicine at Loyola University in Chicago, talking about black people having a gene that predisposes them to some disorder or another “feeds a social process” that is deeply negative. As he observes, black Americans suffer more from high blood pressure than white Americans. “We don’t know why, but everyone says it is genetic. But if you look around the world, by far the highest hypertension rates are in Poland, Finland and Russia. Much higher than black Americans. The average difference in blood pressure between blacks and whites is about 4mm of mercury, the difference between whites in the US and Russia is about 20mm. No one has ever said that these white people are genetically predisposed to hypertension: it must be their diet. But when they talk about blacks, it has to be genetics. That, in a nutshell, is the whole problem with this whole way of thinking.”

So the definition of race applied to every other species is different than the one applied to our species. Any primitivist will recognize that as an extension of our usual assumption that humans are above all natural laws. We’re animals just like any other, and there’s no reason to exclude ourselves from our own biological observations. Further, the definition of race as applied to humans lumps together incredibly diverse genetic groups, while dividing groups that actually have much in common. There is no biological trait that isn’t found in several—or sometimes all—of the arbitrary racial categories. And to top it all off, the concept of race is heavily intertwined with slavery, eugenics, and discrimination of all kinds. It’s a useless idea, both biologically and socially. So why should we have anything to do with it?

Links:
Does Race Exist? NOVA Online presents the opposing positions of two anthropologists.
Race: The Power of an Illusion An online companion to a PBS documentary series of the same name.
Is Race “Real”? A web forum organized by the Social Science Research Council.
RaceSci History of race in science.