Race and Evolution

by Stephen Sanderson

But Cartmill makes a truly shocking statement. He notes that proponents of biological race associate it with geographical regions; race differences evolved in different regions as adaptations to specific features of the natural environment and the challenges these features presented. But race cannot be associated with geography because different “races” are found in the same geographical region. “Blacks,” “whites,” “Asian-Americans,” and “Amerindians,” for example, are all found in North America, and as a result “definitions of races as geographically delimited populations marked by distinctive phenotypes cannot correspond to any current reality.”26 What sophistry! No serious scholar could possibly make such a foolish argument, and thus it has to be taken as deliberate deception. Those who define races as biologically distinct populations associated with particular geographical regions obviously mean that race differences arose in the distant past as adaptations to particular regions! The fact that different races may today be found in the same geographical region is clearly the result of human migrations, many of which are relatively recent. As a professor at an elite university, Cartmill would most certainly know this—indeed, an ordinary high school student would know it—which is why I call his argument a deliberate deception.

J