Why Biological Race Isn't Real

In this video, I debunk the myth of "race realism" - the white supremacist idea that culturally-defined races are actual biological entities that can be used to separate people into discrete clusters. This was the notion of race that was held by the Buffalo shooter in 2022 that murdered 10 black people at a Tops supermarket. Despite biologists recognizing that race is a social and cultural construct for over 40 years, much of the general public still thinks that there exists real biological differences between races. I explain why these differences simply don't exist.

Excellent articles for further reading:

[CreationMyths]

August 2024 update: Watch out, here come the edgelords!

Y’all want some of the chicken nuggets my kids are having for lunch? Juice box or milk?

[flagermusen]

This is one long demonstration of the continuum fallacy. Just because there is a gradient between Red and Blue and you can not entirely say where blue ends and red begins, as well as there being colors in between, that does not mean that red and blue are not distinct colors. Red is measurable not the same color as blue, and they have qualitative differences. At least take a course in logic. The same goes for racial groups or what is more accurately described as human subspecies. Humans who can interbreed, but who have evolved in separate geography and environments and thus have developed different phenotypes with distinct traits, appearance (like skin color) and cognitive abilities. "Race" is merely a heuristic for this very real biological subspeciation.

[Anaximander]

Hancock has convinced me that there aren't any actual biological races. Runners of East African ancestry don't dominate long distance running and sprinters of West African ancestry don't dominate short distance races, etc. I'm just imaginating this when I watch sports. I'm glad he cleared that up for me.

[Homo_sAPEien]

1:45 Race is not necessarily related to ancestry? So are you saying I could identify as black if I wanted to??

[fat]

So you took one of the most genetically diverse places in the world (New York) and compared it to the genetic differences between the continents to say humans are the same race??

[AceofDlamonds]

Yes Africa is a huge continent, with huge genetic diversity. But I find this talking point in particular disingenuous.
North Africans cluster with Europeans (West Eurasians) as you later mention. The Horn of Africa is a heavily mixed region. Khoisan people are some of the oldest living populations. And pygmy people still exist in Central Africa. How much of the genetic diversity is contributed to by these distinct groups??
The some "Europeans" are more similar to "Asians" some "Africans" are more similar to "Europeans" sounds like lazy wordgames because parts of what we call "Africa" and "Asia" have populations that are far closer connected to "Europe proper" than other populations or races.

[thefingthinkingemoji]

13:10 This entire argument supports racial divisions in human. According to you, geographical environment led to a genetic difference that is not superficial and which can be observed with the naked eye, that is textbook speciation. Were humans animals or not treated with kiddy gloves this would be used to argue for species/subspecies divisions.

[jhxpskz]

As a person who has had the chance to travel and discover different cultures, I often find this obsession here in the US with race to be so outdated, backwater.

[romulusmars]

Could you do this for dogs, wolves, and coyotes because I have a feeling a bunch of animals are about to be a single species with no way to sub divide

[shahreyar]

Someone answers this: how can any human be mixed race when race doesn't exist? Society proliferates nonsense; people can have parents with diverse phenotypes or cultural backgrounds. But not diverse racial history. Because race doesn't exist as a biological category!!! So when people say mixed race, they are often more healthy because they are hybrids. That's also a lie; distantly related people of any sort, whether they look similar or not, will, in fact, have a healthier genetic pool. You can have two cousins that look vastly different to human eyes "racially", but that doesn't mean if they have kids, they won't code for recessive genetic traits. So yeah.. someone please dismantle the idea of race and the divisions it creates already. im bored and tired. especially in the US

[clarencepsaila]

wait...Mongolia is poor but Mongolians have a high IQ

[ghevisartor]

is the same framework used to classify animals races and species used for humans? if so does this yield the result that there are is one human race?

[lolary]

Somali and Ethiopian people use to be considered a subset group under the White or Caucasoid race because of their skull shape, phenotype and facial features. Somali and Ethiopian people don't look like your stereotypical African because of their facial features. Somali and Ethiopian people were viewed as superior to Black people at one point. Race was not determined by skin complexion and during that time it was your culture, ethnicity and ethnic background that was used to determine your race.

[dontcensormebro]

At 9:28, I would not doubt that the true variation is contiguous, but the prescence of those three colors is still undeniable. Yes, there are no set start or endpoints, but the fact that the red is seperable from the blue and green and purple and yellow is once again, undeniable.

In other words, groupings may be arbritarily seperated, but the seperations themselves are still very real. If you seperated short people, average people, and tall people, you would get the same thing.

What is a "short person"? 4'5"? 5'0"? 5'9"? 5'11? It's hard to exactly pinpoint, but it's certainly real.

[garyrolen]

Honest question.

If genetic race isn't real, then why do i understand the genetic race of the suspect and victims when you say white and black?

Aron ra covered this subject several years ago. He used the word cline. Perhaps race isn't the correct word, but in modern language the word race is used in place of the less known word cline to denote very real differences.

Further could two Scottish people produce a black baby or two Koreans produce a white baby?

[emk]

Followed link from Gutsick Gibbon to see your analysis. Glad I did; thanks!

[ryanm]

Thanks for making this. I knew race was a social and legal construct, not a scientific one, and this helped me understand why.
I think it's nice to know we're so closely connected to one another, like a big family. We should care for each other more, like family.

[frankslade]

Are you saying if I offered you a million dollars to identify which of two people was referred to as "asian" and which "white" that you would not be able to do so, that it would be 50/50? Genuine question.

[awrfs]

Honest questions that I feel need to be answered in order to actually debunk biological race:
If biological race is *not* real...
How come you can identify where someone comes from based on their DNA?
How come certain ethnic groups have genetic traits that distinguish them from others?
How come you can tell an African albino person from an Asian albino person from a European albino person?
How come if two people: one from, say, Iceland, and the other from Namibia had a child together, both parents would be ethnically distant enough from the child that neither could be bone marrow donors?
How come the same African groups that under perform on IQ tests in their home countries due to "socio-economic factors" also under perform if they grew up and were raised in migrant households in Europe, where strong social programs are in place to directly negate economic injustice?

[joejohnoptimus]

Good video, but I have some objections:

@3:12 "Race is not a concept used in Biology anymore".
- Obviously true when referring to the antiquated, cartoonish concepts of legacy human races. However, plenty of examples of scientists in modern times utilizing nuanced contexts of subspecies. At the very least, there have been recent pushes advocating for its place in the overall taxonomy (which I don't necessarily agree with).

As for the 2nd definition presented ...
@ 3:42 "Under this definition, pi between must always be greater than pi within"
- I'm not familiar with this definitional criteria. The one I'm familiar with using pairwise fst AMOVA seems to just stipulate that two populations with sharp genetic boundaries are considered to be different races simply if 25% or more (arbitrary threshold) of the genetic variability that they collectively share is found as between population differences (NCBI).

Overall, I think a much better (and needed) approach to this video would start by addressing the underlying question: "Is biological subspecies even possible, for any organism?" Do you acknowledge that its even possible? I'm assuming so based off the definitions you provided (or else you wouldn't have used them). Some experts argue that subspecies is not even logically possible as an ontological entity. But then again, they also admit that some of the other Taxonomy levels (family, order, genus, , etc ..) are not distinct ontological entities either, yet the scientific community still uses them as a matter of practicality and usefulness. This is probably the biggest flaw with the whole "social construct" argument typically thrown around.