[danieltillett]

Race is not biological as it is just a historical classification based on some "skin deep” observations of physical appearance.

What is biological is that different people from around the world are genetically more similar to their neighbours than people more distant and people with a similar genetic background tend to look similar.

What is more interesting is not race, but that different human populations around the world are different species that can produce fertile offspring. There are four known living human species; sub-Saharan Africans, Euro/Asians, Melanesian/Australian Aborigines, and African pygmies (there might be some more human species in Africa, but we lack the fossil DNA data to know this). Each one of these different species is a hybrid between ancient sub-Saharan African’s and one of the other homo species that lived on the planet before 50,000 years ago [0].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_humans

[burtness]

> sub-Saharan Africans, Euro/Asians, Melanesian/Australian Aborigines, and African pygmies

These groups are not considered different species or subspecies of human (homo sapiens sapiens). There are homo sapiens subspecies, but all except sapiens are extinct.

[danieltillett]

No they are not. They just bred with the dominant sub-saharan African species. I am a member of one of the non-dead hybrid species having approximately 2.5% Homo neanderthalensis ancestry.

[to3m]

Yes, your first 2 paragraphs clarify it a bit. Thanks.

As for races vs species, that well has been so thoroughly poisoned that I for one refuse to drink from it. But, you know... you do you.

[danieltillett]

Races are biologically meaningless, but species are a real things. Lions and tigers are different species of the genus Panthera, they can mate and have fertile offspring.

I think where people get worked up is thinking because there are different species of humans living on the planet that one must be better (or worse) than the other. Nobody with a clue would say that lions are better cats than tigers, just different. The different humans species are the same.

The other thing that makes things more complex is all living humans are predominantly sub-Saharan African (90% to 100%). If you had a large cat population that was 95% lion and 5% tiger you would most likely not even notice it was not a pride of lions. It would still be a different species, and the average member of this population would be different to the average lion, but the differences would be relatively subtle.