Top Highlights

• But the differences in skin and hair that are so obvious when we look at people of other races are really a trick played on our intuitions. Racial differences are largely adaptations to climate. Skin pigment was a sunscreen for the tropics, eyelid folds were goggles for the tundra. The parts of the body that face the elements are also the parts tha...
• Working in opposition to the adaptation to local climates, which makes groups different on the skin, is an evolutionary force that makes neighboring groups similar inside. Rare genes can offer immunity to endemic diseases, so they get sucked into one group from a neighboring group like ink on a blotter, even if members of one group mate with member...
• Nowadays it is popular to say that races do not exist but are purely social constructions. Though that is certainly true of bureaucratic pigeonholes such as “colored,” “Hispanic,” “Asian/Pacific Islander,” and the one-drop rule for being “black,” it is an overstatement when it comes to human differences in general.
• The biological anthropologist Vincent Sarich points out that a race is just a very large and partly inbred family. Some racial distinctions thus may have a degree of biological reality, even though they are not exact boundaries between fixed categories.
• In theory, some of the varying genes could affect personality or intelligence (though any such differences would at most apply to averages, with vast overlap between the group members). This is not to say that such genetic differences are expected or that we have evidence for them, only that they are biologically possible.