vimothy
yurp
I'd say 'category' is putting it too strongly, as categories tend to be discrete, well-defined and mutually exclusive. Racial variation in humans doesn't usually have sharp cut-offs* - millennia of interbreeding and migration have put paid to that. For example, many people in North Africa and parts of the Arabian peninsula are of mixed Arab and African descent, and even within the 'indigenous' white Northern-European population of Britain, there is a mixture of Germanic, Celtic and pre-Celtic gene markers. This is of course without taking account individual mixed-race people whose parents come from different ethnic groups.
Ok, fair enough. I'm certainly no scientist. I do think that your point about interbreeding and migration is pretty obvious, though.
EDIT for the EDIT:
On the subject of genetic variation, it has been shown pretty conclusively that humans have far less variation than do other species of primates: you could analyse the DNA of any two people in the world selected at random and they will show much greater similarity than would two chimps taken from breeding populations just a few hundred miles apart.
It's interesting, but is it relevant?
Apologies for the terrible mixed metaphor.
Last edited: