Tag Archives: ecotypes

April 15, 2012, 6:17 am

Playing With Fire: Race (Part 2)

Racial differences are as real, and as trivial, as differences between those who can and cannot roll their tongues. (Flickr/CC user glenngould's mom, apparently, can.)

As the Stones might have sung, but didn’t: “Don’t play with race ’cause you’re playin’ with fire …” In an earlier post, I played with fire, kicked a hornet’s nest, obtained a dragon tattoo—whatever—when I argued that it may be politically correct but it’s also downright silly to deny the biological existence of what are loosely (but accurately) called different human “races.”

There is no simple answer to the seemingly simple question: How many human races are there? It depends on how finely-grained you choose to analyze the data (and data there are). “Splitters” have identified more than 30; “lumpers,” no more …

April 9, 2012, 8:03 am

Race (Part 1)

By David Barash

Trayvon Martin

Here’s a delicate subject, especially given the nationwide anguish over what appears to have been the cold-blooded, racially lubricated if not racially motivated murder of Trayvon Martin: race itself. More specifically and more delicately: whether race is a “socio-cultural construct.” My response, and one that may well disappoint and annoy many readers, regardless of their ideology (but perhaps especially my fellow travelers on the left): It is and it isn’t, but mostly isn’t. That is to say, an objective, science-based look at the subject and at its use in other contexts requires us to conclude that race is both socially constructed and biologically “real,” but probably more the latter than the former.

Of course, in the old days of racist pseudoscience, it was universally …