Summary: no we were separated geographically too little

No, the term race is unscientific: the men have not been geographically isolated for long enough to create distinct genetic strains. Man is always in constant motion and variety continue to dilute one another. As demonstrated by the geneticist Luca Cavalli-Sforza, who demolished the biological basis of the concept of race, civilizations are not closed structures and isolated.

common genes. The genetic similarity of mankind is the result of the commonality of recent ancestors and migration, which resulted in unions and exchanges of genes between individuals from different geographical areas. The physical characteristics of certain predominant populations rely instead on a very small number of genes and were selected by the environmental conditions.

Racism vs. science. Geneticist Richard Lewontin was the first to deny without a doubt the myth of the existence of different human races. Yet, when asked if he believed in the race, his answer was: "Of course, there are the races." But then indicate in his head and added, "all of them are here." He was referring, of course, to our imagination: the only "place" where the superficial differences between different human populations are taken more seriously. So why in the face of evidence so overwhelming we still struggle to abandon this prejudice?

Historical reasons. Born to political needs in the post-colonial world, has always been discussed in every discipline and constantly subjected to the investigation of science, the idea that the human species is divided into races, understood as groups within our species, each with distinct physical traits and well-defined behavior, it has never been in any way demonstrated by scientific instruments. But it has impossible to eradicate from our minds, still an overwhelming majority within the scientific community (and beyond) agrees that it is a lie. The fault, so to speak, could be of our cultural and evolutionary history; apparently, a legacy with roots too deep to eradicate them with the power of reason.

Useless catalogs. The differences, obvious and undeniable, between human groups that populate different areas of the world date back to the dawn of our species; the idea that these physical differences, the result of adaptations to the environment, INVOLVE also deep psychological and behavioral differences, to the point of being able to distinguish (and order) the different populations in the world, was born at the end of the fifteenth century, when colonialism led Western man, and his domain needs, in every corner of the world. Within two centuries, the greatest anthropologists of the time began to scramble to catalog the alleged races, and to invent a valid and universal criterion to distinguish between them. Result? Nothing at all.

While the scientific community debated on nothing, the idea of "race" had already become the most powerful engine of the new colonial economy. The treatment of deported people of Africa in the United States to reduce them to slavery, for example, was the direct result of their belonging to another race, considered intellectually inferior. In the eighteenth century, intellectuals from around the world appealed to the so-called naturae scale, the natural order (hierarchy) of all living species, and put the people of Africa one step below ours.

The strengthening of these stereotypes in popular culture, thanks to the clever propaganda of the whole intellectual class of the time, eventually led to the laws (US and UK in particular) against mixed marriages.

Crutches no scientific foundation. The anthropometry, the study and cataloging of the measures and proportions of the human body, became the scientific crutch to lean on every race could be defined by a specific set of numbers and statistics, an idea that kept not consider changes between one generation and the next, and that eliminated in toto from the speech the obvious variability within the same "race".

It was enough to repeat studies with an eye to these details to understand how anthropometry was based on nothing: in the early twentieth century, Franz Boas published studies showing how many differences there were between one generation and another of the same "race" and how even the average values of certain parameters modificassero with the passing of generations. Then came the turning point: the rediscovery of Mendelian inheritance laws began the search for purely hereditary genetic traits useful to distinguish the races together. But genetics also failed to find correlations between races and genes.

the same genes. Today we know well our DNA we realize that our differences are nothing but nuances, in genetic terms. A separate us from other human beings there is a small percentage of the genome on average, every person is biochemically similar to every other man on the planet to 99.5%, a percentage varying according to the distance. In addition, "any population keeps inside almost 90% of the genetic variability (ie, all of the different gene variants) of our species'; that's why establish boundaries is a pointless exercise.

Nor is the objection of those who likens the alleged human races to those of dogs or horses: "Those races are much more distinct from each other than they are human ones. All breeds of dogs, in particular, have been selected to make them, so to speak, "homozygous" with respect to certain genes, which are present only in that race and define "while among human genetic variability is greater. The races, therefore, there are really only in our heads: to distinguish and divide is human habit that goes back, historically, at least to the Athenians of the fifth century, that classified the world into "Greek" and "barbarians." The bipolar vision of "us and them" is common to many cultures, and is a psychological reality which some say has deep roots in our evolutionary history.

According to this view, the idea of race has its embryo among hunters-gatherers: "A society in which it is essential to immediately classify someone who you do not know, as an ally or adversary." This shows that, as hard wants us to believe that, who is the racist is above all fear.

From Focus