I found the detail with which the AAPA and AAA described their stance on race was immensely rich, and all the reading all the more interesting for it.  The section that stood out the most for me was section 7 of the AAPA’s statement on race, where they said that as a consequence of constant human migration, “we are adapted to many of the Earth’s environments in general but none in particular.”  This quote provided me with another reason for that what makes humans distinct is our being not fixed to a certain environment as many animals are. It makes me wonder, are their animals which have migrated to a similar degree to humans while remaining part of one species?  Also, the following statement by the authors of the AAPA’a paper that “for many millennia, human progress has been based on culture and not on genetic improvement,” filled me with a sense of wonder at the power of human culture and whatever makes it possible. It seems amazing that we can build for ourselves, in a single lifetime, a better fittedness to our environment; we have practically expedited evolution by making survival – the necessary outcome for the proliferation of humanity – an explicit project in our creation of a human generated environment.  

I’ve always been interested in identity, or what makes things things, and if our rational accounts of their thingness can remain rational as we investigate them.  The question of what it means for us to fit into the category of “human” is not answered completely, and what this week has shown me again, is that we can shuffle things in between categories even if that categorizational system does not represent reality, as with race.  this seems to imply that no category that we have, by nature of it being a category, must actually contain distinct individuals; while we have the category black white, ect. most criterion which we use to distinguish between them disintegrate in the face of very common cases.  What if other categories are like this? I do not know, but wouldn’t it be interesting if this same failure occurs at the level of self and other?

If I was to explain the non-existence of race, I would state that if we describe a race as a genetically homogeneous population, then they do not exist; in fact there is more biological variation within populations than between populations.   Further, if we with to claim that a race is stable, then we must wholly overlook the effects of genetic variation, and evolution. The set of phenotypic qualities among people will necessarily vary over time, either to such a degree that some relevant racial distinctions may disappear, and new biological differences may crop up.  As well as this, if one was to claim that races are grounded in polygenistic origins, or by the degeneration of groups from an ideal human type, then I would reply with the extensive migration and interbreeding of humans over the course of our history. This interbreeding would annihilate the distinction produced by a different origination for people, and would equally remove all peoples from some ideal human.  Basically, when I come to explaining something to another, I would attempt to address the feasible world views which could crop up for them, and show how they fit the data we have surrounding our world in contradictory ways.