Over my shoulder: Race and Geography

From The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography by Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen:

    Maps of “race” no longer have any legitimate place in global geography texts. For even as Carleton Coon was elaborating his contorted racial taxonomy, Ashley Montagu was demolishing the biological basis of race as a concept. Montagu and like-minded scholars advanced three powerful arguments. First, all identified racial characteristics are biologically superficial, and in no way challenge the fundamental biological unity of humankind. Second, any given racial attribute tends to mutate gradually as one traverses the landscape; distinct transitions from one  “racial group” to another are almost never encountered. (While racialist theory ascribes this phenomenon to  “racial mixing,”  “pure races” have never been isolated.) Third, and most compelling from the geographic point of view, each racial characteristic has its own distributional patterns. The global map of skin color, for example, bears little resemblance to the map of hair form or the map of head shape. One can thus map races only if one selects one particular trait as more essential than others. (The 1963 Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, regards hair texture as the prime racial determinant.) Yet no real evidence can be offered to show why the selection of such an isolated trait is not entirely arbitrary.
    Nor is any firmer basis for racial categories to be found under the skin. The most rigorous investigation to date of global genetic patterns—L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Paulo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza's massive History and Geography of Human Genes—finds that racial categories are genetically meaningless. The authors conclude that while one can identify  “‘clusters of populations’ exhibiting genetic similarities,” such clusters cannot be “identified with races.” In fact, their painstaking genetic mapping and multivariate analysis fairly demolish the familiar “races of humanity.” For example, the northern Chinese are shown to be more closely related to northern Europeans than they are to southern Chinese. And Africans, far from forming a uniform race, actually show more genetic diversity than do all the world's non-African peoples put together.
    In a word, while race is indisputably an important cultural construct, it fails as a natural category on biogeographical grounds. The presumed correspondence between the distribution of racial traits simply does not exist. Only by abandoning the doctrine of geographical concordance—the belief that a wide array of unrelated features should correspond to their spatial patterns—can we begin to ascertain the macrogeography of human life.

(p. 122-3)

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