by John Young
Even as some deny the reality of race as an objectively definable and sociologically important reflection of underlying physical realities, new studies continue to refute the notion of race being merely a “social construct.”
Nicholas Wade reports in the International Herald Tribune, based upon a number of studies world-wide, that humans spread globally, but evolved locally.
Mr. Wade reports:
“People have continued to evolve since leaving the ancestral homeland in northeastern Africa some 50,000 years ago, both through the random process known as genetic drift and through natural selection. The genome bears many fingerprints in places where natural selection has recently remolded the human clay, researchers have found, as people in the various continents adapted to new diseases, climates, diets and, perhaps, behavioral demands.
A striking feature of many of these changes is that they are local. The genes under selective pressure found in one continent-based population or race are mostly different from those that occur in the others.”Mr. Wade then goes on to document cases of both convergent and divergent evolution where, interestingly, different groups of people have developed similar traits (such as lactose tolerance and light skin tone) through changes in different gene loci.
The bottom line is that while many researchers are uncomfortable using the term “race,” it does, in fact, exist. As the author reports:
“A genomic survey of world populations by Dr. Feldman, Noah Rosenberg and colleagues in 2002 showed that people clustered genetically on the basis of small differences in DNA into five groups that correspond to the five continent-based populations: Africans, Australian aborigines, East Asians, American Indians and Caucasians …”
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/26/healthscience/26human.php