Race: conceptual history

Abstract

Race has been a core concept throughout the history of biological anthropology. Sometimes termed the biological race concept or the Western race concept, it developed as part of the taxonomy associated with the natural history tradition, defining large continental geographic groups—for example, Asians, Africans, Europeans, Americans (i.e., Native Americans)—as subspecies of Homo sapiens : that is, as “races” in the biological sense. As taxonomy, the race concept is typological and carries phylogenetic assumptions about the causes of geographic variation. Race is often conflated with geographic variation, influencing understandings of biological diversity. Although largely rejected by biological anthropologists today, the race concept continues to play an important role in biological anthropology because of its relationship to social race categories and the primacy of racial thinking, which influences the interpretation of human variation.