Traditionally, biological anthropologists have been the scientists that studied the nature of human racial variation. Until 50 years ago, the study of modern human biological variation focused on describing and classifying human races, which were viewed as static entities. About 50 years ago, evolutionary thinking influenced the bioanthropological focus on human races; study of their evolutionary dynamics and the significance of physical variation predominated. Scientists began seriously questioning the validity of biological races among humanity in the 1980s; by the mid 1990s most anthropologists and some professionals in other social and behavioral sciences had concluded that the biological concept of race had no scientific validity when applied to living Homo sapiens. Rather, human races are now understood to be social constructs. Cross-cultural views of race reveal no common cognitive framework to a consideration of human races and human racial variation. The criteria by which individuals are assigned to a particular racial category differ widely across cultures. Some cultures have relatively complex cognitive systems of reckoning races and others like our own, relatively simple ones. Thus, the modern anthropological view of human "races" represents an important pedagogical challenge to social and behavioral scientists.

Physical or biological anthropology, as it is most frequently known today, is the branch of anthropology that provides a bridge between the social and behavioral sciences and the natural sciences. Biological anthropology focuses on the physical characteristics of humanity and our primate relatives today and into the remote past, from a biocultural viewpoint and within an evolutionary framework. One major focus of modern biological anthropology is on the patterns of biological variation within the human species today: human population biology. People are incredibly variable biologically. Typically, the external biological characteristics are hereditarily influenced and the hundreds of internal biochemical characteristics are genetically determined. The external features are the ones that people tend to associate with racial variation and use to categorize individuals into one or another race. In reality, the internal qualities are many more and many-fold more variable than those observable with the eye.

A scientific interest in racial variation, as far as western society is concerned, dates to the time of the ancient Greeks, who associated racial characteristics with the environment. Today, we know that many human biological characteristics are environmentally influenced.

Linneaus (1806) was the first scientist to classify humanity into different types. In the mid 1700s he sorted Homo sapiens into a few finite categories, which were stereotyped phenotypically and behaviorally. For example, he described the European type as fair and brawny, blue eyed, inventive, and governed by laws; the Asian type was sooty, black eyed, melancholic, haughty, and governed by opinion.

Johann Blumenbach (1795), later in the 18^th century, coined the term Caucasian, after a skull from the Caucasus Mountains of central Eurasia. He described the skull as perfectly formed and Europeans came to be called Caucasians because they were thought to be descendents of the "perfect" people from the Caucasus area. As the unknown world was explored and different indigenous people encountered, naturalists, the scientists of the time, described their physical characteristics and classified different populations as to their relatedness. This typological approach, description and classification, was to be a focus of biological anthropology for a century and a half, even into the genetic age, the 20^th century. Races were described in terms of their biological patterns or norms and modern humanity was classified in terms of the number of races and how they were biologically related to one another. Some naturalists recognized a handful of racial categories, while others put the number at considerably more.

During the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century, the scientific literature on human races was filled with such schemes; often they were subtly, and sometimes overtly, racist. Populations were viewed in terms of their external phenotypic characteristics; arguments involved how many races existed, and how they were related to one another. There was no interest in the significance of the biological variation within Homo sapiens. Racial characteristics and human races themselves were viewed as static entities. Primary emphasis was put on norms and modes, usually of externally visible physical characteristics--on types; individual biological variation within groups was not considered, nor typically was biochemical or serological variation. Biological variation within a population, manifest in any human group, was ignored.

That perspective persisted into the 1940s, after evolutionary theory had become accepted as the underlying cause of biological variation in living things, and well after biological anthropologists began to focus on genetic variation among modern human populations. Biological anthropologists were slow to adopt evolution as the fundamental paradigm for their science. Today evolution is the theoretical foundation upon which all of biological anthropology rests.

Coon, Garn, and Birdsell (1950) infused evolutionary thinking into the consideration of human races by biological anthropologists in the early 1950s. While their work contained the traditional classification of human races, it was the first to view biological variations and human populations as dynamic entities. It was also the first to consider human races in terms of the evolutionary significance of global patterns of biological variation. Human races were understood to be populations that change in terms of their biological patterns and those patterns were understood to be the result of adaptation, among other evolutionary processes. Hulse’s (1962) classic paper, Race as an Evolutionary Episode, reflected the new way that biological anthropologists viewed human races.

That is the basic fabric of human population biology today. Patterns of human biological variation across populations are viewed with evolutionary and biocultural lenses. Patterns of cultural variation, ecological parameters, and hereditary qualities result in the fact that people differ biological, both within and among populations.

Today most anthropologists and biological anthropologists have concluded that the biological concept of race has little if any scientific validity and use when applied to modern Homo sapiens. Ashley Montagu (1942), in the 1940s, was the first to question the scientific validity of human races in his classic work, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. In the 1960s, Frank Livingstone (1964) wrote another oft-cited piece with the same thesis. He suggested that a more legitimate and fruitful approach to understanding contemporary human biological variation was to focus, rather than on differences between and among populations, on patterns of biological variation across space. Such an approach would yield greater insight into the adaptive significance of human biological variation because environmental parameters that drive natural selection vary systematically across geographic space.

Still, from the 1960s through the 1970s and into the 1980s in some cases, most anthropology departments in the United States featured courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, usually with the title something like Human Races. While much of the subject matter covered in those courses is still in the curriculum, courses with the word race in the title have virtually disappeared today.

In 1982, Littlefield and colleagues reported on a survey of anthropology textbooks over many years with regard to how the subject of human races had been treated. Their work showed a paradigm shift from the early through the late 1970s. By the early 1980s most texts contained sections supporting the position of this essay, that human races are not a biological reality. The opposite was true of texts published a decade earlier.

During the mid-1990s, the American Anthropological Association and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists adopted formal position statements regarding human biological variation. Both statements eschewed the notion that human races were legitimate biological divisions of modern humanity.

In 1995, Jonathan Marks published Human Biodiversity, to date the most complete work summarizing the history of science’s treatment of the concept of human races, and current thinking regarding human biological variation. Almost all anthropologists and biological anthropologists today subscribe to the views professed by Dr. Marks. Human races are understood to be social constructs—products of the human mind’s indelible wont to classify phenomena into some meaningful semblance of order.

The reason the biological concept of races is not valid and is of little if any use when applied to modern humanity is simple. It is not possible, with reproducible consistency acceptable to scientists, to classify even a majority of humans into an agreed upon finite number of races. Our biological variation is simply not consistent across space, partly because of prehistoric and historic migrations. Such migrations were often culturally mediated through such institutions as slavery and conquest; they resulted in considerable admixture, often between groups that were quite different in their patterns of biological variation. These circumstances spread far back into our past and because they have been taking place for so many millenia, the net result is an extremely muddled pattern of human biological diversity across geographical space today. We in the United States are just unable to see and grasp it, because the biological variation observable to us in our everyday lives is relatively finite, at least in most cities.

The inconsistency inherent in classifying modern humanity into races can be easily described. Cognitively and operationally, in the United States, there is a category termed Hispanic. Into it Cubans, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans are lumped. However, in Cuba almost half the population has significant African ancestry and much of the portion of the population that might be considered as "white" has some African ancestry. There is no Amerindian ancestry in the gene pool of modern Cuba. Cuban aborigines became extinct at the hand of the Spanish not long after colonization (Perez, 1995). In Mexico, by contrast, the gene pool typically has little African ancestry (Lisker et al., 1995). It is predominantly Spanish and Amerindian in composition. In Puerto Rico, the gene pool is constituted of significant amounts of Spanish, Amerindian, and African ancestry (Thieme, 1959). Yet Cubans, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans are considered as part of the Hispanic "race" because they share many common cultural patterns. Race is obviously not the same as culture.

Because race applied to living humanity is a social construct, it varies widely from society to society. As an example, the American social construct of race includes a finite number of categories, something in the order of a half dozen or so at most. In Brazil, the classification is even more complicated. Kottak (2000) found more than three dozen terms of "racial" description in a small Brazilian village of less than a thousand residents. In Brazil, "race" is a function of biological ancestry and socioeconomic parameters. That is to an extent the case in Cuba today, where only four categories are recognized: blancos, mulattos, negros (persons of virtually exclusive African ancestry—not many at all), and Chinese, the only significant ethnic minority on the island (de la Fuente, 1995).

Americans today may have begun to realize the difficulties inherent in their consideration of race. The prelude to the 2000 census featured considerable attention on the difficulty of classifying our residents into the traditional finite categories. This may in part be due to our increasingly heterogeneous population and also in part to a growing realization that race is a social construct and therefore quite a subjective enterprise. Indeed, the September 18, 2000 issue of Newsweek magazine’s cover story was on "Redefining Race in America". The feature included a number of different segments speaking to one or another aspect relevant to race in the U.S. Major themes were the biological heterogeneity of Americans today and the difficulty with pigeonholing individuals with regard to biological ancestry (Campo-Flores et al., 2000). Hopefully, our nation’s focus on the difficulties inherent in our traditional consideration of human races today will not diminish as the first decade of the new millennium passes and a new census comes upon us in the year 2010.

All of this presents quite a challenge to post-secondary faculty whose teaching includes units on the nature of human biological variation. For by the time students reach university classrooms, the traditional view of the reality of human races has become indelibly ensconced in their cognitive maps, often irrevocably so. Thus, education as to the reality of human races as social constructs having no biological validity needs to occur earlier in the developmental cycle and educational process. Units on the reality of human races as social constructs, and not as biologically real categories, should be directed at preadolescents whose cognitive maps have not yet become lithified.

Blumenbach, J. F. (1795) De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa, Editio 3. Gottingae: Vandenhoek et Ruprecht.

Campo-Flores, A., V. Smith, K. Breslau, A. Samuels, and L. Clementson (2000) "The New Face of Race," Newsweek, Sept. 18:38-41.

Coon, C. S., S. M. Garn and J. B. Birdsell (1950) Races: A Study of the Problems of

Race Formation in Man. Springfield, IL: C. C. Thomas.

de la Fuente, A. (1995) "Race and Inequality in Cuba, 1899-1981," Journal of Contemporary History, 30: 131-168.

Hulse, F. S. (1962) "Race as an Evolutionary Episode," American Anthropologist, 64:929-943.

Kottak, C. (2000) Anthropology: The Exploration of Human Diversity, 8^th ed. Boston:McGraw-Hill.

Linneaus, C. (1806) Systema Natura (English). London: Lackington, Allen, and Co.

Lisker, R, E. Ramirez, C. Gonzalez-Villalpando, and M. P. Stern (1995) "Racial Admixture in a Mestizo Population from Mexico City," American Journal of Human Biology, 7:213-216.

Littlefield, A., L. Lieberman and L. T. Reynolds (1982) "Redefining Race: The PotentialDemise of a Concept in Physical Anthropology," Current Anthropology, 23: 641-656.

Livingstone, F. B. (1964) "On the Non-Existence of Human Races," In The Concept ofRace, edited by M. F. A. Montagu. New York: Free Press. Pp. 46-60.

Marks, J. M. (1995) "Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History," New York: Aldine deGruyter.

Montagu, M. F. A. (1942) Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. New York: Coumbia University Press.

Perez, L. A. (1995) Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution, 2^nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

Thieme, F. P. (1959) The Puerto Rican Population: A Study in Human Biology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.