Race is a socially constructed concept, not a biological one. It is a result of people’s desire to classify. People seem to be natural classifiers: they try to find order in the natural world. This proclivity may reflect, in part, what Gardner has referred to as “naturalistic intelligence,” as discussed earlier. Any set of observations of course can be categorized in multiple ways. People impose

categorization and classification Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical schemes that make sense to them and, in some cases, that favor their particular, often nonsclentific, goals. If one looks at geographic patterns in the distribution of traits, one will find numerous and diverse attributes that correlate with geography. In general, nearby populations tend to be more similar and geographically distant populations tend to be more dissimilar. This pattern is similar to common ideas of socially defined races but is more complex.43 A characteristic that is adaptive in one place, such as heterozygosity for sickle-cell anemia, may be Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical adaptive in one place (Africa) and maladaptive in another (the US).

Similarly, preferences for food with high fat content might have been adaptive in times of food scarcity, but today can lead to obesity. One could select any of a number of traits that are associated with geographic patterns and find correlations with other related traits. But such associations do not imply causation. Yet, some people Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical have looked at differences in socially defined races as somehow causative of group differences in IQ. Sometimes, people make the inferences they do to justify existing social stratifications or to create new ones. Over the millennia, peoples who migrated changed both as a result of chance factors and as a result of adaptation to their environments in various ways. What is “good,” from an evolutionary point of view, would depend on the adaptations that needed to be made in a given time and place. For example, our ancestors in Africa were in all likelihood dark-skinned because dark skin provided superior protection against the particular challenges of the African environments in which

they lived, most notably, the challenges of ultraviolet Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical and other harmful forms of radiation. Socially constructed CDK inhibitor review judgments as to how to classify people are typically offered on the basis Resminostat of factors that have no relation to the original reasons that people came to look one way or another. There is nothing special about skin color that gives it unique status to serve as a basis for differentiating humans into so-called races. Any two groups of people that differ in one way are likely to differ in a cluster of ways. For example, as observed by Marks, geneticists have discovered that 54% of people who have designated themselves as Hebrew priests, many of whom have the surname Cohen, have a certain pattern of two genes on the Y chromosome.44 In contrast, only 33% of Jews who do not view themselves as priests have this pattern.