This chapter traces some of the lines of descent that race has followed since Darwin’s Origin of Species. Far from his work putting an end to the Species Question (whether human races constituted separate and unchanging species), race flourished not only in “social Darwinism” and eugenics, but also in various academic disciplines, law, social policy, and everyday life. The chapter discusses how race served as an organizing concept within natural history and remained such in the emerging sciences of life: in biology and sociology; in critical race theory’s uncritical use of scientific evidence that challenges racial categories; and in the way Darwin’s intervention into “the truth of race” remains central to notions of diaspora, homeland, identity, and the structural racialism of everyday life, even as his work is invoked to naturalize stereotyped racial phenotypes and to support racialized technologies, especially in robotics and applications of artificial intelligence.

No review of human evolution can afford to ignore the ‘race’ issue, as it has played a central role in history and politics, especially in the United States. Although most people equate ‘race’ with skin color, this chapter explains the fact that skin color is an adaptive cline. It also reviews other elements of anatomical variation, demonstrating the clearly adaptive nature of traits such as skin tone, lung capacity, and body size and shape. One important observation in this context is the fact that modern human diversity is very low compared to the ape species: a result of our relatively recent common origins in Africa between only 100,000 to 50,000 years ago and the patterns of gene flow between populations. However, as the latter half of this book deals with history, this chapter also reviews the history of eugenics and the application of racial typology, starting with the Egyptian Book of Gates, through Blumenbach, and into the Victorian era. Finally, it emphasizes the political purposes to which racial typology has been employed, particularly through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the context of European colonialism.

Our young and originally tropical species Homo sapiens has spread, in an amazingly short period of time, to occupy more areas of our planet than any other animal species has ever contrived to do. Human beings reside on all five continents, and in virtually every environment that those continents have to offer.

Like every one of the many millions of other organisms with which we share our planet, the species Homo sapiens is the product of a long evolutionary history. The first very simple cellular organisms spontaneously arose on Earth close to four billion years ago, and their descendants have since diversified to give us forms as different as streptococci, roses, sponges, anteaters, and ourselves.

A description of some of the methods used in racial genetics and genomics is essential if we are to understand why claims have been made that modern genomics establishes the existence of race.

As scientific knowledge increased, the outward physical variation of humans on this planet posed a mystery to natural historians, and begged explanation. Why were there so many different “kinds” of people on the planet? If scientists could understand how this variation worked in nature, then perhaps, the reasoning went, we could understand why people appear different.

Why do some researchers care so much about race in their experimental designs? It is easy to understand why a racist forced by inherent bias would take this approach. But why would a nonracist biologist insist on doing racial science? As far as we can tell, there are two major reasons for this: medical expediency and the discovery of the genetic basis of complex traits. We would suggest that the first of these is a red herring, and the second a brick wall.

Research prior to human genomics opened several doors to race-focused research, but the availability of genomes was a game-changer. As we pointed out in Chapter 4, there is nothing inherently wrong in using racial or ethnic boundaries as research tools for trying to discover biological patterns within the human species – if they are justified.

A big part of the story of our species, and of how variation is apportioned within it, involves how our ancestors spread over the globe. After all, if we had simply stayed in our place of origin in Africa and not ventured out, there would be no question that we are a single entity. That is because if our species had been restricted to a single location (as many others are), two things would have ensured that differentiation into separate entities would not have occurred.

Humans have been roaming around the planet since the very beginning, encountering other humans in the process and doubtless forming opinions about them. And since human beings seem to have an innate urge to classify everything – doing which, after all, lies at the core of our way of mentally organizing and understanding the world around us – there is little doubt that, from the earliest days, our symbolic forebears categorized each other in some way.

As the nineteenth century dawned, the idea that species might not forever remain as the Creator had made them was no longer unthinkable. At one end of the range of possibilities was Buffon’s limited notion of within-species change; at the other was Lamarck’s vision of lineages transforming themselves through inner impulse.

Neuroanthropology is an interdisciplinary approach to studying human variation that integrates brain and cognitive sciences with anthropology and uses theoretically and biologically informed ethnography to examine specific problems at the intersection of brain and culture. This chapter shows how, for instance, the theoretical construct, habitus, can be integrated with accounts of human development and brain enculturation to better understand the internalization of social structures, including how socialization produces both diversity as well as shared outcomes. We also show how ideas from computational neuroscience, such as work on prediction errors and the free energy principle, can augment the understanding of cultural consensus and consonance, or how culture is at once shared and individual. The overarching goal of neuroanthropology is to bolster biocultural exploration of individual enculturation and ground social theory in a more accurate account of individual neurobiology in order to encourage a broader, multidisciplinary study of human cultural variation.