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Re: Identifying Race
Ronald Kephart (rkephart@OSPREY.UNF.EDU)
Wed, 21 Aug 1996 21:14:52 -0400
In message <19960821224341.AAA24601@LOCALNAME> Robert Snower writes:
> This sounds good to me, except words like "cline" make it less lucid, and I
> can't see that "transition" has much to do with it. Aren't you simply
> arriving at a purely biological concept of "race" [snip]?
No. Clines (as I understand them) do not set up "racial" categories at all.
What they do is describe variation of traits, such as, say, skin color or blood
groups, in terms of increasing or decreasing frequencies. You look at the
clinal distribution of a trait, and then you look for ways of explaining the
distribution. You're NOT looking for a way to group people into races.
Ron Kephart
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