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The concept of race has its roots in Christian Nationalist views of "inferior" people
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this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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I mean… not really. Neanderthals were a distinct species and were far more genetically distinct than any modern human populations are from each other. There isn’t any scientifically valid definition of race that remotely resembles its use in common parlance. Certainly different cultures exist. But we don’t define race by culture exactly. Different physical traits exist as well, but they often overlap between different races, so they don’t completely define race either.
Race is an artificial amalgam of different concepts used to rank people hierarchically. It isn’t real in any physical sense, but only exists as an idea to justify stratifications on society.
The comment I'm replying to is not merely opinion, by the way; it's the widely shared consensus in modern biology and anthropology.
Neanderthals weren't a distinct species otherwise we couldn't have interbred with them.
Nah, species do interbreed. That they can't is a myth
Whether some populations breed true "in the wild" defines species. In the real world this is seriously muddy, but that's beside the point.
Some people have argued they were a subspecies instead for this reason. But I didn’t want to get into that because it doesn’t change the overall picture. Whatever you want to call them, they’re far more distinct than human races today. Races aren’t distinct enough to be labeled at any taxonomic level that’s used to describe distinct taxonomic groups within non-human species. This didn’t stop early racist thinkers from trying, but the picture has become clear after more than a century of scientific research on the topic
But yeah the difference between species and subspecies can be a bit fuzzy as well. We used to define species such that they couldn’t interbreed, but then we learned that lots of clearly distinct species can interbreed too.
In some cases, species can be maintained by natural selection rather than reproductive barriers. A classic example is oak trees. Many oak species can easily cross with their close relatives and do so very frequently. However, since each species is adapted to a different ecological niche, the hybrids end up in ecological no-mans land, doing worse than either pure parent in their respective habitats. Because of this, they rarely reach maturity or contribute much to the gene pool, and the species remain distinct.
However, in some very specific environments they can, and this has been very important for oak evolution since it allows entire clusters of species to occasionally share genes, aiding in their evolution. This is thought to be one reason why oaks have adapted to almost every temperate treed environment in North America.