Re: What Are the Race Deniers Denying?

(frank@clark.net)
22 Oct 1996 01:06:04 GMT

In article <54fpph$a9m@pelican.unf.edu>,
Ron Kephart <rkephart@osprey.unf.edu> wrote:
>hegeman@wchat.on.ca (Toby Cockcroft) wrote:
>
>> What are the race deniers denying is your question and the answer is the
>> whole notion of 'race'.
>
>Let me come in here with one important qualification to the above.
>We, as anthropologists, are denying that it is possible to
>organize the present world-wide population of Homo sapiens sapiens
>into discrete "racial" categories in any scientific and biologically
>meaningful way.

[snip the rest]

Now if you'll just tell me what you mean by "meaningful," you'll have
answered the original question, "What are the race deniers denying?"
Remember now, that I'd like a definition of race that is not effectively
equivalent to species, and I'd also like to have some examples of species
that can be clearly demarcated into races, other examples of species that
clearly cannot, and then where man is situated along the continuum.

Or you could argue that the whole concept of subspecies is spurious, but
then you have the problem of explaining how new species emerge from the
entire species as a whole. Or so it seems.

Frank

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