Ask the Scholars
Interviews from 2003
Though there is no single gene or trait that divides people into races, are there sets of traits attributable to genetic differences among modern racial groupings? Can't you look at overall genetic patterns and estimate of what somebody's race is?
Biological Anthropologist
Basically with enough variables, one can divide almost any sample into subsamples. An example of this is that with a few skull measurements, one can do a pretty good job of separating skulls of 18th-century white Americans from 19th-century white Americans. You can't do it with a single variable, of course, but with a combination of variables, statistically, with more and more variables you'll do better and better and better in dividing individuals into the groups in which they're purpor...
Microbiologist and Bioethicist
The concept of race involves not only differences between different races, but similarities within any one race. Although we can use characteristics, genetic or otherwise, to make statistical distinctions between groups of people, such distinctions can be misleading because they do not capture what people generally mean when they talk about "race." This is because within any group defined by those statistics, there is more genetic difference than similarity; we cannot use race defined st...
Molecular Anthropologist
One of the fascinating things that's come out of genetics in the last ten or fifteen years, is the discovery that human beings don't have much genetic variation. As Pilar was saying, we are apparently a young species. And if you compare the genetic diversity in a group of chimpanzees with the genetic diversity among humans all over the world, what you find is that chimpanzees are very much more diverse from one another than humans are, in spite of the fact that chimpanzees all look alike...
