Why is the history of a concept like race relevent to understanding it's current scientific usefulness?

Question

Why is the history of a concept like race relevent to understanding it's current scientific usefulness?

Answer 1

the history of race is based on many social misconceptions, so scientifically it is useless. As long as we understand this, we can be more careful about how we view "race" and science together.

Answer 2

The concept "race" has NO scientific usefullness.

The only relevance it has is to understanding history, sociology, and such. That is, it's relevance is entirely in he social sciences, as it's a concept with no physical basis, but is completely social.

Answer 3

Race is a really difficult topic.  The above poster was right: race is far too vaguely defined to be of much scientific use.  However, it still obviously affects society, so it's of use to anthropology and other sciences that touch on human society.

For a concept like race, most of the emotion behind it is because of history.  Blacks and whites don't automatically fear and mistrust one another; those problems are due to what happened in the past.  They're due, in part, to white notions of superiority and even scientists jumping on the racist bandwagon.  You can't possibly hope to understand even Barack Obama's presidential campaign without understanding America's conceptions of race and how they've changed over the years.  It'd be even harder to get the race riots we've seen or the difficulties black people still face in improving their situations.

These things also help us understand why people even still consider race a useful scientific idea.  It's not; study after study has shown that there aren't any real, significant differences between the races.  We've also learned, through archaeology, history, and genetics, that no race is as "pure" as the n***s would like to think.  We're a bunch of mutts, basically.  But, despite this, people still insist that there's some sort of correlation between race and pretty much anything- intelligence, personality, trustworthiness- and that this connection is genetic.

Any science that touches on humans, be it anthropology or medicine, has to deal with its practitioners' socialization.  No one's free from ethnocentrism, but understanding your own culture and your own history certainly helps.