Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 20, 1995 TAG: 9502210024
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: ATLANTA LENGTH: Medium
Scientists should abandon it, they said.
Their controversial conclusion grows out of a more precise understanding of the underlying genetics of the human species and how surface distinctions of skin color, hair and facial features, which may loom so large in daily life, have nothing to do with the basic biology of human differences.
``Biologically, we are saying in essence that race is no longer a valid scientific distinction,'' said Solomon H. Katz, a University of Pennsylvania anthropologist.
The researchers spoke before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which is meeting this week in Atlanta.
``Race is a social construct derived mainly from perceptions conditioned by events of recorded history, and it has no basic biological reality,'' said C. Loring Brace, a biological anthropologist at the University of Michigan. ``Curiously enough, the idea comes very close to being of American manufacture.''
The researchers were acting, in part, to correct a legacy of misconceptions about the biology of race, in which earlier generations of researchers provided the raw material for spurious claims of racial superiority. ``They liked to concoct a biological basis for mistreating people,'' said Brown University anthropologist John Ladd.
The work discussed Sunday draws on a new ability to reconstruct the genetic evolution of humankind and a new appreciation for how humanity developed genetic diversity as it spread around the globe.
With the precise tools of molecular biology, scientists can peer past superficial human characteristics to explore more powerful, underlying genetic unities and differences, which are making old racial categories look increasingly arbitrary and irrelevant, the experts said.
``The old biological definitions of race were based on what people looked like,'' said Joseph L. Graves Jr., an evolutionary biologist at Arizona State University West. ``Now that we have better ways of looking at race ... We could construct races based on what type of fingerprints people have, or on what kind of blood type they have, and that would be just as legitimate.''
Rarely have Americans been so concerned about their ethnic and racial distinctions - in the last U.S. census, people claimed membership in some 300 racial or ethnic groups - nor have so many anthropologists been so willing to reject race as a biological category.
One survey by Central Michigan University says more than half of all cultural and physical anthropologists no longer embrace race as a useful scientific definition.
by CNB