Abstract
IN his Friday Evening Discourse at the Royal Institution on March 27, Prof. Julian Huxley discussed “The Race Problem”. It is obvious that different geographical groups of the human species differ inherently from each other; the term race is commonly employed to denote such a distinguishable group. Various difficulties crop up, however, as regards its usage in practice. First, characteristics which have no genetic basis, but are national, cultural, linguistic, etc., have been erroneously ascribed to races. For example, there cannot exist such a thing as an ‘Aryan race’, since the term Aryan concerns language; again, the main obvious differences between, say, the English, the French and the Germans, are not genetic but of national and cultural origin. Secondly, modern genetics has shown that after a cross, all possible combinations of the genes concerned will be produced, and will then continue to recur. In the absence of selection, no even approximately uniform blend will be formed. Thirdly, man is such a mobile organism that migration and intercrossing between different groups has been occurring on a large scale since before the dawn of history. Accordingly, nothing approximating to a pure race now exists, with the possible exception of a few remote and primitive tribes. Race is normally used of man in the same sense as race or subspecies of animals—that is, with an evolutionary implication. At best, it may be legitimately used of the hypothetical major groups (for example, black, white and yellow) into which we deduce that our species early became differentiated, and which may be called primary races; and of the equally hypothetical subgroups apparently produced by later differentiation (for example, Nordic, Alpine or Mediterranean), which may be called secondary races.
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The Race Problem. Nature 137, 570–571 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/137570c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/137570c0