video
Episode
Is Race Real?
Race is obviously real—historically, socially, politically. What about biologically? We explore biological facts about race and their implications. What’s the relationship between color and race? Are human races subspecies of homo sapiens? Is race a “natural kind?” How to form a coherent theory of race?
Contributors
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Race – a sensitive subject. Race generates heat. It’s often hard to see light. Saying anything about race seems, in essence, to be making a claim about biology. Whether the claim takes race as real and “this or that” follows from “race being real”, or race as not real, and “this or that” follows from “race being not real”. There are, of course, biological facts about race.But there are also non-biological factors about race – historical realities, social conditions, political conflicts. How to Integrate and Interpret the facts and factors to form a coherent theory of race. It’s a challenge for philosophy. I put the sensitive challenge to philosophers of biology. Can they think clearly, analytically, dispassionately, about race? Is race real? I’m Robert Lawrence Kuhn, and Closer To Truth is my journey to find out. Certainly, race is real in social and political contexts. In basic biology, not so certain. What are the possibilities, the options? What are alternative ways to think about the reality of race? I begin with a Philosopher of Science who specializes in theories of classification with direct application to race – Quayshawn Spencer. Quayshawn, the concept of race is obviously sensitive in society. But I tell you, I have to start with one of the greatest statements I’ve ever read from a philosopher in one of your papers that you said, “Everybody has been wrong about race, including me.”
- Quayshawn Spencer
- Right. So, there’s three big views on what race is, at least when we talk about race as ordinarily understood. Race is a biological thing, it’s real. It’s a biological thing, it’s not real. It’s a non-biological thing, and it’s real. I started off arguing that race is a biological thing and real, but then I realized that the empirical data wasn’t going to support that kind of view. And then I tried to move over to its biological, and it’s not real. And I said, “Hm, the empirical data doesn’t support that either.” And what I realized was my framework for thinking about race was the problem. And that framework was what I call it monist framework, which is that there’s a single answer to the question about whether race is biological or whether it’s real. And a pluralist framework is what I ended up adopting, and that rejects that there’s a single correct answer. There’s multiple equally correct answers, depending on context.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- So, what I’d also like to understand is your intellectual history with race and specifically as a philosopher.
- Quayshawn Spencer
- I graduated from high school in Nashville, Tennessee in the second to last class of the court-ordered desegregation movement. And so, we had a – a very unusual mix of like racially mix of students. And so, it wasn’t uncommon for me to see high academic achievement because this was one of those Stuyvesant-level sort of academic magnet schools. But then came around my – my sophomore year, and we all took the PSATs, and then there was a distribution of the white students having higher scores than the Black students. And I was like, “Oh, that’s weird because I know my boy just – just knocked out calculus”, right? And then in the same year, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein published The Bell Curve, which had a very interesting explanation for the stubborn gaps in intelligence test scores between whites and Blacks in this country. And of course, their explanation was that there’s some level of genetic underpinning. Now, I didn’t like that sort of explanation, but I was a big science nerd. I was planning on becoming specifically a biochemist, but then I picked up philosophy in college. And in the course, we focus on sort of the – the epistemic limits of science. And the big book that was the focus of the course was The Bell Curve. I said, “I’ve got to take this course”. And so, in that course, I really saw the power of philosophy, and philosophy of science in particular, to give, you know, constructive critiques of science. The professor was Richard Boyd, who, at the time, was becoming one of the world’s leading natural kind theorists. And he threw out this question in the course. He said, “Well, look, were – in that book of The Bell Curve, were they even using race’s natural classification and natural kind?” So, this is roughly a – a distinction between the real legitimate kinds that you can do successful science with versus ones that would lead you down a dead end. You know, you could find statistically significant results and disparities between groups in a lot of ways. So, if you wanted to, say, study the distribution of sickle cell disease in the American population and you sample by political party, you can actually find statistical differences. Like there turns out to be a lot of Democrats that end up, you know, dying or suffering from sickle cell disease. But then that’s really a misleading way of studying that subject because the underlying groups aren’t natural groups to be studying that kind of thing. That correlation is accidental. So, you want to use natural classification to get that non-accidental stable correlation to get science off the ground and doing what it should be doing. And so, that – that question he threw out, it’s like are these racial groups really natural classifications for biology or genetics just stuck with me. And I wasn’t really satisfied with the answers that some philosophers were giving, which was we know race, it’s not a biological sort of division. And I’m just looking around. It’s like well, I could swear these are biological traits. We can talk about skin color and ancestry. I was just really curious that this was the – the dogma, sort of, in academia, the social constructions. And so, I wasn’t really convinced by that sort of position. But at the same time, I didn’t like Herrnstein and Murray’s position. So I was stuck. So somebody needs to address this. I’m, you know, fairly interested and skilled in this sort of stuff. So I’ll do it. So I originally got into philosophy.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Quayshawn offers three views of race: biological and real, biological and not real, non-biological and real. To compare these views, he recruits the theory of natural kinds – how to categorize things in the world as they actually are, not how we might like them to be or how we might construct them to be. The obvious question: is race a “natural kind”? Can different races be distinguished sufficiently such that each race should be considered a proper natural kind? The test is largely quantitative. So, I speak with a computational biologist, an expert on genealogical and genetic ancestry – Joshua Swamidass.
- Josh Swamidass
- When you ask questions like is race real, depending on what you mean by race, it can be real or not. If we think about it as like a deep, intrinsic biological concept that’s like sharply defined in nature, and it tells us a great deal about a person’s capacities intelligence-wise and where they fit into society. That type of understanding of race we know is just not true. It doesn’t actually work biologically. That’s a bit of a surprise, actually, because that’s not how it really works for other species. Other species really do seem to have these divisions. I can explain in chimpanzees too where you can see this. If you look at them genetically, you can see that there are probably like maybe four to five races of chimpanzees. There’s very big differences too between these different groups. Even though they’re very, very similar to one another, there ends up being very deep genetic differences built into it. That’s just not what happened with humans. We’re really a common family genealogically, and we share a common fate genetically as well. The differences that we see end up being really skin-deep. If we understand race in a thin way, not this biologically thick determinative way, but as a loose, messy reference to different fairly recent continental ancestry, then there is some legitimacy to it, but it doesn’t tell us nearly as much as our instincts tell us it would.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Well, there are differences in terms of, for example, in healthcare, how different diseases or different pharmaceuticals might affect different races differently. If you consider race as a category, you might be able to improve the healthcare.
- Josh Swamidass
- That’s a great example of where there’s some sort of reality to race, and we can parse out what that is. First of all, race as a social category is a real thing.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Oh yeah. Yeah.
- Josh Swamidass
- And those socioeconomic factors have a huge impact on things like healthcare. So, even though it doesn’t work in this biologically tight definition, it still becomes really valuable to think about. The other way it becomes important is that these loose definitions of race sometimes have a weak correlation with particular genetic or biological determinants. So, if you only study, for example, white people, you’re going to be focusing on a particular genetic background that will have, usually, and almost every variant we see, you’ll see it in every single race. So, it’s not cleanly divided that way, but it just won’t be a common variant. So, among Ashkenazi Jews, there’s certain proclivities for Tay-Sachs disease. But what genetics is really enabling us to do is just talk about that with higher precision that’s no longer at the group level, but now talking about who actually has that particular genetic change and who doesn’t. So, if you don’t actually have that mutation then you don’t have to live as an Ashkenazi Jew in that sense, in a good way, right? But if you do and you’re not Ashkenazi Jew, you still have to worry about it. So, that’s an example of how there’s not a perfect correspondence. If we can think about them as like maybe loose bags where you might see different types of diversity, then actually race can be a legitimate way to think about it. If we want to think about it as a group of people we need to treat identically the same, even though they have very different genetics, that becomes a problem. Yeah, so, it’s one of those things.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Joshua argues that superficial racial differences are, quite literally, just skin deep, and that the real determinants of race are genetic. And genetically, humans worldwide are remarkably homogeneous, irrespective of outward appearances. The philosophical meaning of this biological fact is unambiguous: race, biologically, is a “thin” designator, but one that can provide helpful guidelines, for example, for customized healthcare. Yet, frankly, we are conditioned to take race as real, and it is hard to break our conditioning. It is hard not to be influenced by in-your-face appearances. After all, skin color is generally the first thing we notice. I pursue this dichotomy between genetic homogeneity and dermatological pigmentation with an evolutionary biologist who became a philosophy of biology – Massimo Pigliucci.
- Massimo Pigliucci
- From a biological perspective, human races don’t actually exist. They do, of course, exist as human constructs, and the kind of human construct that actually has very much practical effects, as we all know. At a political level, a social level, at a personal level. So, just to say that they don’t – the human races don’t exist biologically doesn’t mean that they’re not important. In biology, the term race has a very specific meaning. It means that a species that had races is subdivided into local populations that are genetically differentiated. Some of which are, in fact, different enough that may be incipient species. Now, in human beings, that is simply not the case. It’s not the case because of the way the human population is constructed and because of the way in which human beings actually function as animals. We’re very social. We migrate quite a bit, and basic population genetics theory will tell you that human migration is sufficient to essentially erase any major distinctions between local populations.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Where is race in the biological universe existing?
- Massimo Pigliucci
- Where it exists, it essentially is synonymous with subspecies.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Subspecies, okay.
- Massimo Pigliucci
- The overwhelming majority of genetic variation within the human species is within populations, not across populations, which is the pattern you expect when there are no races. This is not to say that there are no genetic differences between human populations. There are. There are some human populations that have, as we all know geographical populations, that have different skin colors, for instance. Why is it that skin color is the most obvious example of this? Well, because if you live near the equator, it is adaptive to have a darker skin. The history of human races from a biological perspective is particularly telling because people have actually identified anywhere between a minimum of two or three and a maximum of several dozen human species.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Several dozen.
- Massimo Pigliucci
- Massimo does not equivocate. From a biological perspective, human races do not exist. There are no subspecies of human beings, and the reason is the mobility and interbreeding of human populations. And while obvious differences in appearance, especially in skin color, may seem to mark deep distinctions among humans, it is illusion. Nothing fundamental is going on beneath the surface. Even so, those differences in skin color, which have generated so much tragic human history, should be explained. Can a philosopher’s scalpel, as it were, tease apart interwoven strands of biology and culture that constitute contemporary concepts of race? I ask a philosopher of social science and biology, who privileges scientific above all ways to know truths –
- Alex Rosenberg
- The concept of species is itself a vexed one, which doesn’t have the kind of grip on the nature of reality that say the chemical concept of element has. Species is just a term of art, of instrumental use among biologists. And race itself is another word which is equally groundless as a concept that has a grip on reality as opposed to a simply useful heuristic. And in that connection, what we, as consumers of biology, have learned is that molecular biology and evolutionary molecular biology teaches us that there’s almost no scope, in explanation of interesting features of human populations that require or even adduce the concept of race. What we’ve learned from particularly the sequencing of Neanderthal genes and human genes across the planet is the remarkable homogeneity of human genetic inheritance. So, for example, take skin color. We understand well exactly why people have the skin colors they do. And it has nothing to do with racial origins and everything to do with adaptation for the production of vitamin D on the part of females and adaptation for the minimization of the production of too much folic acid among males. So, in every human society, the males are darker than the females. The general basic color level of the skin is, itself, the result of finetuning for the absorption of vitamin D. In the Atlas Mountains in the middle of Africa where there’s a great deal of cloud coverage, there’s strong selection for the whiteness of skin and the skin color difference has nothing to do with racial origins and everything to do with local adaptations. So, all humans are related to one woman who lived about 150,000 years ago in Africa called, naturally, African Eve. She’s the only one that had an unbroken sequence of female offspring until now. So, that our mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited only in the females, enables us to trace all of us back to a single origin in Southern Africa about 150,000 years ago. So, this is, you know, what we understand now, scientifically, about the non-existence of races as a serious biological category.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Alex has skin color, the historic emblem of race, as but local adaptations, collapsing the historic foundation of race as a biological category. This conclusion feels right; I have no reason to resist except for Quayshawn Spencer’s idea of “Racial Pluralism”. Why won’t he come out unequivocally that race is not real? He says he anchors his analysis on natural kinds. I need to go back to Quayshawn and pursue.
- Quayshawn Spencer
- So, yeah, you have to have a standard for biological reality, what’s a real biological class. And so, from there, I developed a theory that ended up being kind of in between the two extremes in philosophy of science. So, one extreme is natural kinds are really grounded in something objective in the world. This is existing independently of the scientists studying it. And the other is it’s the exact opposite of that and grounded just in a sort of our – our conceptual cognitive.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Imposed.
- Quayshawn Spencer
- And so, I thought, really, what was really useful about natural classifications wasn’t the ontological status of the properties that essentially constructed the kinds, but it was the sort of work the kinds get done in the science. And that allowed me to develop what I call the theory of genuine kinds, and that’s roughly a kind or entity that’s epistemically useful and justified in a well-ordered scientific research program.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- Then how does that apply to race?
- Quayshawn Spencer
- Well, then if you are trying to make the case that race is biologically grounded then you’re going to need to point out a biological research program. Is it population genetics? Is it classical genetics or molecular genetics now? Is it phylogenetic systematics, right? So, I went searching, to try to see if there was any sort of biological grounding for racial classification. I first started in systematics because there’s been a long history of classifying and using the term race to classify organisms. They were strong attempts, but they still fell short of being genuine classifications in their own research program. So, for example, a cladistic race attempts that races are monophyletic groups of breeding populations in well-defined species. And then you just look to see if homo sapiens satisfies that, it does. And then you would identify the races as monophyletic groups of breeding populations in species. So far, so good. Now, in the literature, some people kind of attack this view by saying well, we don’t really have monophyletic groups of breeding populations in species. But we do, it’s just that they are not going to generate these sort of clean, separated trees. So, that, I don’t think is the problem. The problem comes in how the term is defined because breeding populations don’t have to be genealogical groups. And so, if you’re actually trying to classify organisms in that – with that definition, you could be systematically misleading yourself, getting generalizations that are accidental. So, I couldn’t find anything that was working in taxonomy. So, at that point, I was a biological anti-realist. I said well, well you gave it a shot. You know, it doesn’t look like it’s going to work. And I actually was working on a book called No Space for Race, and it was going to be a defense of biological anti-realism. I got a fellowship to go back to my place where I got my PhD, Stanford, and I bumped into a population geneticist, Noah Rosenberg, who had just produced some relevant research from population, human population genetics. And that just completely flipped my position, and it looked so convincing that I became a biological realist. And I said well, okay. So the problem was you’re not going to find race as a genuine classification in taxonomy, but maybe in population genetics. And the strategy that I took was more along the lines of well, we have ordinary discourse, namely the federal government’s racial groups, which are whites, Blacks, Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, and Asians. And the essence of those groups, I was arguing, just are five continental populations that population geneticists have identified and have been studying since early 2000s. So, it was kind of a more subtle argument showing that there’s a biological grounding for some ordinary sort of races. But the problem was the diversity of our discourse on race. That result wasn’t working for some groups, like Hispanics. There is no biological population that corresponds to that group. All this is about your culture, right? Your Hispanic culture. And so, I said well, I’m not going to be able to – to defend biological realism. I already gave up biological anti-realism. So I’m really just marching down the list. And then two friends of mine said you know what? You’re probably a pluralist. And, you know, so I explored that idea. That maybe there’s more than one thing that race is and more than one reality status. I ended up siding with the more than one thing that race is. The essence.
- Robert Lawrence Kuhn
- It would seem ironic that while woven into our social fabric, race were not real. Well, what do we mean by “real”? Take the three views: biological and real, biological and not real, not biological and real. Of this I’m sure: Race is ideal terrain for philosophy of biology. And excavating the terrain is for philosophers of biology. Races in humans do not exist while races in Chimpanzees do exist, but differences in healthcare among human groups are real and relevant. Races where they exist in the animal kingdom, are synonymous with subspecies. But human subspecies do not exist. Human races have no biological essence. Races do exist, of course, as human constructs. Skin color, supposedly that neon sign of race, has nothing to do with race and everything to do with adaptation. Whether race is real depends on whether race is a natural kind. And to conclude that race has more than one “reality status” is to embrace racial pluralism. For me, race goes beyond biological appraisal and social structure. Race, what it is, and race, what we make of it, reflects what it means to be human. We need do better. That’s Closer To Truth.