How many races of humans are there?

Question

My government teacher said there were only 3- mongoloid, caucazoid, and *******. Sorry for spelling

Answer 1

There are no races.  The myth of race has been disregarded scientifically for some time now.  Race is a term of convenience for some people to classify others, but it has no scientific meaning.

As proof I would point out that there is more genetic diversity between two random persons from the same town in Africa than there is between an Arab and an Eskimo.  This is because of the relatively small number of people who left Africa and relatively recent date of this event, compared with the long period of human evolution.

Answer 2

none or one.  Really the only thing that makes us different is skin color.  Then there are different shapes of eyes, sizes of lips, color of hair, etc.  But none of these makes us different enough to classify people into groups or races.....that's like saying 'human' is a term like 'feline' and within 'feline' there are different types such as domesticated cats, tigers, lions, cheetah's......but you can't take humans and group our differences like that.  A house cat and a leopard can't reproduce, therefore they are a different animal.  A white person and a black person CAN reproduce so there is no difference between the two other than the way they look on the outside.  They are not different races or 'types' of people, they are just simply people.  Classifying people into different races is dumb.  where do you draw the line? everybody is unique.

Answer 3

We should have learned this in High School or at the very least, college.

There is one human race...get used to it.

Answer 4

They aren't completely separate, they blend together at the edges, like red changing into orange and yellow in a rainbow. But... there are some major groupings.

Africoid, from Sub Saharan Africa.

Mongoloid, from East Asia.

Caucasoid, mostly Europe, but also into Pakistan, India and North Africa.

Australoid, Australia and some islands, and Southern India

Native Americans are are a mix of mostly Mongoloid, with some ancient European, and Australoid mixed in. A lot of varying ethnic groups are a blend of two or more ancient populations (races).

The Australoids are the most genetically different to Africans, even though they look alike. Europeans are Africans closest relatives, but Europeans are still much more closely related to the Mongoloids. The Aborigines seperated from the Africans a d**n long time ago. Appearance isn't a perfect guide to racial affiliations

You get blond Mongols, and black 'Caucasian' Ethiopians , as an example of how we blend at the edges. Also, Ainu are Mongoloid genetically, but look Caucasian.

A large computer was given DNA samples from random people, and it seperated them into their ethnic groups. You can also determine someones ancestry, and the rough location their recent ancestors came from by a DNA test. It was heavily pushed in America that race 'didn't exist' in the eighties and nineties, as the result of some now debunked genetic research (Lewontins Fallacy), but later genetic research has shown it to be incorrect, and we vary quite a bit more than we were lead to believe. Race as a concept is still used by biologists and anthropolgists. The usual defintion is 'a population that shares certain characteristics, and that usually breeds within itself'. It does not mean species or sub species, as a lot of people believe.

To believe we are all essentially indistinguishable from each other as groups (races) is just ignorant.

http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/001313....

http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Hammonds...

http://www.world-science.net/othernews/0...

http://www.dnawitness.net/cs.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewontin's_...

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Pregnancy...

http://www.obv.org.uk/index.php?option=c...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200...

http://www.sciam.com/podcast/episode.cfm...

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news

Answer 5

None.

There is no clear division of race.

Physically its impossible because features between races vary too drastically. To classify as race. There are some Adricans with more European features than some

Europeans.

Biologically/Genetically there is not enough difference to classify race. Aboriginals from Australia appear as though they are part of the "black" race but gentically Africans are closer to Europeans than they are native Australians.

Really race is just social ...essentially ignorance.