Racial Differences May Be Nonexistent.

• Position: Brief Article

Race doesn't matter. In fact, it does not even exist in humans, maintains Alan R. Templeton, an evolutionary and population biologist at Washington University in St. Louis (Mo.), who has analyzed DNA from global human populations that reveal the patterns of human evolution over the past 1,000,000 years. It shows that, while there is plenty of genetic variation in humans, most is individual variation.

"Race is a real cultural, political, and economic concept in society, but it is not a biological concept, and that unfortunately is what many people wrongfully consider to be the essence of race in humans--genetic differences."

He argues that there is more genetic similarity between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans and between Europeans and Melanesians, inhabitants of islands northeast of Australia, than there is between Africans and Melanesians. Yet, sub-Saharan Africans and Melanesians share dark skin, hair texture, and cranial-facial features, traits commonly used to classify people into races. According to Templeton, this example shows that "racial traits" are grossly incompatible with overall genetic differences between human populations.

His analysis gives impetus to the trellis model of evolutionary lineages, as opposed to the candelabra model, still popular among many anthropologists. The candelabra model generally holds that humanity first evolved in Africa and then spread out of Africa into different populations in Europe and Asia. Picture a candelabra, then imagine three distinct populations emerging from a single stem, each of them separate genetic entities that have not mixed genes, and...