Are Asians, Africans, and Caucasians the only true races?

Question

I was told this by someone, and she basically said Asians, Africans, and Caucasians are the actual races (used scientifically) Like all ethnicity's and other "races" fall into these 3 general races, for example:

Asians (Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, etc)

Caucasians (Hispanics, Latinos, Arabics, Europeans)

Africans (Africans, Aboriginals, etc)

There is also scientific name for each race, I just forgot them.

Anyway, is this true?

Answer 1

Well, Ryan,

Read carefully the post of our new member, one..."大長今".

This is your "best answer" and I suspect this individual will be getting many such responses.

"大長今" has given you reasons why the old concept of race is now considered..."old hat" and can readily be abandoned as the bad science it was.

This is the beauty of science really; it benefits from the ability to improve its findings as knowledge increases. This is called the scientific method, embrace it, apply it, benefit from it.

One race, Homo Sapien Sapien, our species evolved as we are from our ancestors just like all other life on the planet. If we go back far enough in time your great, (to the 17th power), that's a guess, grandfather, and mine, was a trilobite.

Answer 2

Race is not strictly a "social construct" as the politically correct would have you believe.  Actually we have begun to tailor methods of medical treatment to Haplogroup, which is a bit more specific than race & perhaps a better indicator as how to diagnose a problem. However, race is used to make quick ballpark decision on how to diagnose a medical problem.  

The three races are indeed Asian, African & Caucasian but  skin color is a minor difference & probably should not be used as much as it is.  However, one seldoms suspects sickle cell trait as the cause of a European or Asian's problems, even though they may display the same symptom.

Some medicines simply do not work on most Africans & others work much better on Africans than they do on Europeans.  The same may be said of some Asians.

Answer 3

There no real genetic races as thier is not genetic conclusions for the existance of race.  By defination of race as being physically different then there would be hundreds of races.  Each ethnic group is fundamentaly different from each other in both culture and physical appearence.

In africa, you cannot say that the northern pastorialist are racially linked to the Masai, nor the Masai racially linked to the !Kang.  In asia, East Asian have smaller eyes and lighter complexion then southeast asian, and even southeast asian have differences amongst them.  Scandanavians have more green eyes and brown hair then those of the Slavic people.  There is no conclusive race!

Answer 4

When genetic data from a lot of people was fed into a computer and told to split them into two groups, it split them into sub Saharan Africans and everyone else. (Rosenberg study) When told to split people into three groups it split them into sub Saharan Africans, Europeans and Asians. When asked to split into four groups it added the Aborigines, and at five the native Americans. So if I computer could tell them apart, I'd have to say race couldn't really be a social construct as some people claim. About 4% of the human specific DNA creates racial differences, and a lot of the other DNA has widely varying rates between populations, so it's easy to distinguish between races on a genetic level even if you aren't using the 4%.

So it depends where you draw the lines really, as native Americans are so closely related to Asians that they are hard to tell apart. The only certain thing you can say is that Africans are the most genetically separate, and Asians are related to everyone else. Africans are actually the most genetically distant people from the Australian Aborigines there are, don't let the skin colour fool you.

Names vary, but if you just go by the continent of ancestry you'll be okay mostly.

Africoid/*******

European/Caucasiod

Asian or Mongoloid

Australoid

Indigenous/native American

Answer 5

well, she's right but i'm not too sure i'd use the word, 'true'. the scientific terms for each are *******, Caucasoid, Mongoloid. the three parts of human growth and progress seems to have been traced to the three parts of the world although this could change at any time. and a note of caution:  be careful with those subgroups. on earth, things are divided into two groups: organic and inorganic. from there, the three sub-groups are animal, vegetable or mineral. after that, things get very sticky. native americans/mexicans/south americans are all NATIVE but not original americans. therefore, some may align themselves to other groups. not all africans are dark skinned. not all asians have that extra fold on their eyes. see? in today's world, so much mix-matching , inter-racial babies things just ain't what they appear to be, etc. get it? got it? good!

Answer 6

Race is a social construct, not a biological reality.  There are some physical differences in people that come from different regions of the world, such as skin color.  But 'race' is not really used scientifically anymore because it doesn't make much sense.  There is more genetic diversity WITHIN one 'race' than between 'races'.  Additionally, there is more genetic diversity found within Africa than in the whole world combined.  So no, the person who told you about the three true races is not correct.

Answer 7

I do get tired answering this stupid ?

There is only one human race. We are here for a while on earth and we become extinct. There is no form of evolution which can jump the species barrier, and so we cannot have "evolved" from some relative of a Chimpanzee. No, I am not a Creationist either.

Answer 8

Not really. Races are a social (cultural) construct. There is no real scientific evidence to support a strict division of human groups. For instance, between Europe and Asia, there is a gradual switch between those so-called races (Caucasians > Asians). Many classifications have been attempted. The first classifications were to a great extent motivated by euro-centric racism. To make a long story short, no classification could really match reality. None of them could fit everybody in without raising doubt.