Science And Race

The concept of humanity’s being divisible into different races has no scientific validity. This has always been the case, even before the advent of rapid global travel enabled the further mixing of people from different parts of the world. The characteristics we focus on when categorizing others as different from us—skin color, facial features, hair texture—are found on a continuum of variation that confounds distinction.

It is discontinuity that allows taxonomists and conservation biologists to differentiate between two races within a species of bird or within a species of frog, and…