| Are human races biologically real or are they merely a misguided result of the human propensity to divide the world into different sorts of things? The history of the race debate consists of two opposing answers to this question. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, biological realism was the dominant view. Races were assumed to be biologically objective categories that exist independently of human classifying activities. Today, however, the trend is to reject the biological reality of race in favor of the view that races are social constructs. At work here is the assumption that biological realism and social constructivism are incompatible. I oppose the trend and the assumption by arguing that cladism---a philosophical school of classification that individuates taxa by appeal to common ancestry---provides a new way to define race biologically. Moreover, I show that current work in human evolution supports this account and offers a new way to think about the biological reality of race.; Many theorists think of biological races as static categories. From the non-existence of current races, they argue that biological races are, and always have been, illusions that we have projected on the world. Application of the cladistic concept, however, shows that human biological races are dynamic categories; races once existed, but they are on their way out. Second, because biological concepts of race are used repeatedly to justify belief in racial superiority, many have come to associate a defense of the biological reality of race with racism. Although this reaction is understandable, I maintain that these concepts need not go hand in hand, and that the cladistic concept in specific, lends no support to claims about biological superiority. Finally, although the cladistic view is incompatible with the standard formulation of race constructivism, there is a weaker formulation that can coexist with cladism. |
