Hey there everybody on the internet, Trace Dominguez here for TestTube Plus. This is a show where we take really big science topics, we talk about them for a whole week, and we break them down into smaller science topics, so hopefully we can all understand them a little better. This is more of a video podcast style show, so make sure you put on your headphones.
Maybe put me on in the background if you want. That's just fine. I've got my notes here.
And this week we are talking about humans and where we came from and maybe even where we're going. But today might be a contentious episode because we're talking entirely, this whole episode, about race. Race is a construct. First off, sociology 101, race is not real.
In biology, there is no race. You can't look at the DNA of someone and be like, that person is this race. Because races don't really exist. They're social contracts.
They're social constructs. Today, we see race, but it's really just an adaptation to various parts of our planet. Race is not real, but ethnicity is real.
Again, Sociology 101. Basically, when we think of race... we think of a variety of different things. And you're going to think of a different thing depending on what country you live in and what culture you may have grown up in.
In America, we have a very specific context for race. Much of our racial discussions are black versus white. But that has to do more with our history, especially the Civil War and the legacy of slavery. But prior to that, before the Civil War, there was an Irish race. They weren't just considered another group of white people.
And in fact, the aristocracy in the UK or in Britain thought of them as a different and lower race than themselves, even though they both looked the same if you were to, say, drop them in the middle of the United States today. Cromwell helped cement that by murdering and slaughtering a lot of Irish people that is still remembered in Ireland today and a big point of their history. Americans likely wouldn't get the context for a racial divide in India or Japan, just as Australia or Nigeria or Brazil might not understand a racial divide of another country. These are social constructions that we build around ourselves. It's part of human nature.
We see patterns and we see shapes. It's called periodoilia where we enjoy seeing faces and clouds and on toast. Those things are the way the human brain works and that also extends to categorizing humans into different groups. But there's no genetic basis for race, like I said earlier. It's all part of our cultural experience.
Wide or thin or tall or bumpy noses, those are all things that are created by our genes. If you don't know what genes are, you can watch our episodes about genetics. There's a lot of them and they are really cool.
Make sure you check those out. There's also differences in, say, hair, which is a big thing in some cultural experiences. For example, kinked hair, straight hair, curly hair, red hair, blonde hair, brown hair.
All of that is different in our genetics, but it shows up in every different racial group because we're all human, homo sapiens. Eye color, body shape, skull shape, all of this is genetically based and so broad that you cannot attribute it to a specific different species or race of things. We are all the same.
We are all the same. We boil this all down to skin color a lot, which... That's just a big nope. That makes no sense at all. Skin color alone is many different genes all working together.
Race is a social contract that we all sign. We don't have to assign it. We don't have to sign that contract, but we do.
The American Anthropological Association, they released a statement essentially saying there is no difference in races around the world in everything they've ever looked at. Along all anthropological lines, there is no racial difference. They're all homo sapiens.
And in fact, here's a quote. Differences among the racial categories were projected to their greatest extreme when the argument was posed that Africans, Indians, and Europeans were separate species, with Africans the least human and closer taxonomically to apes. They disagreed with that. Eugenics, which was very popular in ancient Greece and with Europeans throughout history, they were trying to prove that they were the most superior race of humans. But there is no different race of humans.
We're all the same. Bill Nye put it really well. He's one of my heroes. Love you, Bill.
There's no such thing as a purebred dog, he said. There's no such thing as a purebred dog, he said. The Chihuahua and the Great Dane are both dogs.
And if you breed them together, you get, you know, I don't know, something else. But it's still a dog at the end of the day. You can take that thing that you bred, you know, the Chihuahua Dane, and mix it with a corgi. And while you would think of these as purebred animals, they're all just genetic kind of adaptations over time that we've bred into them.
I don't know what a corgi and a chihuahua dane would look like, but man, I bet you it's adorable. And it's the same with humans. We created these differences.
They don't naturally occur. The world around us pushed humans into looking a certain way or acting a certain way or shaping themselves a certain way based on our environment. A mix of genetics, of nature versus nurture, if you will.
On the other hand, ethnicity is very real. Ethnicity is a social group that has a common national or cultural tradition. Now that sounds much more accurate.
If you have different races, they're really different ethnicities. It's not about skin color, it's not about face shape, it's not about intelligence, it's about shared experiences. We are all homo sapiens, but we all have different cultural experiences, different physical and cultural religious. And we use these different physical, cultural, and religious ways to cordon ourselves off.
But really, we're all human. It's pretty simple. So there you have it. If you missed our previous episode yesterday, which tracks down how humans got from the very earliest human all the way to what you're seeing before you today, click here now for that episode. And as always, make sure you subscribe to TestTube Plus so you can get all of our videos all week this week, all week next week, and so on and so on.
Thank you for watching. We'll see you tomorrow.