How is the race of a child determined

How Is Race Determined on Birth Certificates?

Although the question of how race is defined on vital records such as birth certificates and death certificates in the US is pretty straightforward, its answer is quite complex.

In order to properly explain the way race is determined on a US birth certificate, we must first go over a few details:

A citizen’s birth details are recorded on their Certificate of Live Birth when their birth is registered by the hospital. The questionnaire is filled, in part, by the new parents, who state the mother’s race and the father’s race, based upon self-identification.

The medical information required in the form is filled out by hospital personnel that attended the child’s birth and then submitted to legally register the baby’s birth. A US birth certificate is then issued by the vital records office.

Does a Birth Certificate Contain Racial Information?

Birth certificates contain information about the citizen, their parents, place, and date of birth, and more, depending on the type of birth certificate copy issued**.

The Standard Certificate of Live Birth contains racial information of the baby’s parents, as stated by each of them. This racial data is used for demographic, and statistical purposes.

Up until 1999, individuals could only mark one box in terms of heritage, which, as expected, posed not only a dilemma but also inaccuracies when citizens of mixed racial backgrounds filled out a form.

“Am I black or white if my mother is African American and my father is white?”

It is easy to imagine all the variations of this question that may go through an individual’s mind when their parents are of different races.

In the last decades, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) expanded its race/ethnicity codes to allow multiple-box-checking for racial data. For the first time in Census 2000, people were offered the choice to self-identify with more than one race. This option continued to be available in the 2010 Census, and 2020 Census. From then on, citizens who identify with multiple race categories have been allowed the option to provide multiple races in response to the race question.

What Are Race Categories?

Race categories are the options presently available to define a citizen’s race in the United States, based on self-identification —not genetics.

The 5 categories for data on race in the US are:

American Indian or Alaska Native
Asian
Black or African American
Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander
White

The US Census Bureau adheres to the 1997 Office of Management and Budget (OMB) standards on race and ethnicity. These parameters guide the Census Bureau in classifying responses to race information.

As per the OMB, each racial category is defined as follows:

American Indian or Alaska Native, when someone has origins in any of the original peoples of the following, and who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment:

North America
Central America
South America

Asian, if a person has origins in any of the original peoples of:

The Far East
Southeast Asia
The Indian subcontinent, including Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam

Black or African American, when people have origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa.

Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, when a person has origins in any of the original peoples of:

Hawaii
Guam
Samoa
Other Pacific Islands

White, if an individual has origins in any of the original peoples of:

Europe
The Middle East
North Africa

How To Correct Race on a Birth Certificate

Citizens whose race is stated incorrectly on their birth certificate have the option to correct the error on their birth certificate. The first step in any kind of birth certificate amendment is to order a birth certificate replacement.You can easily order a certified long-form copy of a birth certificate to verify the race stated on the vital record.

Order your birth certificate copy

Once you have your birth certificate delivered at home, you will need to submit it with the necessary documents as proof —this varies from one state to another — and a birth certificate amendment form **at the State Department of Health Statistics.

Race and Ethnicity Computation for Birth Certificates

The way race and ethnicity has evolved over the years as reflected in the National Vital Statistics Reports. Racial data has now been extended to include specific Hispanic groups, such as:

Central American
Cuban
Dominican
Mexican
Puerto Rican
South American
Unknown Hispanic

Texas birth certificates, in particular, have experienced major changes made in 2005 to reflect the way mothers' and fathers' races were allowed to be compiled as multiple races.

Race and ethnicity are expressed separately on all birth and death certificates issued in the State of Texas. Race information is given by the parents before a birth certificate is issued. The child’s race/ethnicity is not filled out when registering their birth, instead, it is calculated based on the parents’ self-stated race and Hispanic origin status of the mother.

The Texas Department of State Health Services, Vital Statistics Unit classifies citizens based on their self-reported race and ethnicity information, as follows:

Race/Ethnicity Computation for Texas Birth Certificates

Race reported by parents	Mother’s Hispanic origin	Child’s race computed as
White	Non-Hispanic, not classifiable	White
Black	Non-Hispanic, not classifiable	Black
Any single race, or multiple races	Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, other	Hispanic
Asian, American Indian, or Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian, or Other Pacific Islander, other, blank, or unknown	Non-Hispanic, not classifiable	Other/Unknown

Source (Texas Department of State Health Services): https://www. dshs.texas.gov/about-DSHS.shtm

Source (National Center for Biotechnology Information): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3922476/

Racial and Ethnic Composition of the Child Population

Publication Date:

December 13, 2018

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Publication Date:

December 13, 2018

The Child Trends databank of indicators related to child and youth well-being is no longer being updated so that we can focus on data tools and products core to the work of policymakers and other stakeholders, such as:

State Level Data for Understanding Child Welfare in the United States,
Black students and students with disabilities remain more likely to receive out-of-school suspensions, despite overall declines,
Twitter Analysis Can Help Practitioners, Policymakers, and Researchers better understand topics relevant to American Indian/Alaska Native youth, and
Mapping the Link between Life Expectancy and Educational Opportunity,

Additionally, we have a forthcoming interactive tool on childhood poverty we expect to release in late 2021.

Trends in the racial and ethnic composition of the U.S. child population

From 1980 to 1999, the proportion of non-Hispanic white children in the U.S. population fell from 74 to 63 percent. From 2000 to 2010, the percentage of children who were non-Hispanic white only (following the classification system first used in the 2000 decennial census, in which respondents were given the option of identifying multiple race categories) declined from 61 to 54 percent. This proportion continued to decrease through 2016, reaching 51 percent, and is projected to fall slightly further by 2020, to 50 percent.

The percentage of the child population that is non-Hispanic black has stayed relatively constant since 1980, at about 15 percent; this figure is expected to decline only slightly further by 2020, to 14 percent (Appendix 1).

The proportion of children who are ethnically Hispanic has grown steadily, from 9 percent in 1980 to 25 percent in 2016, and is projected to reach 26 percent in 2020 (Appendix 1). However, because of changes in the categories for race/ethnicity used by the Census Bureau, estimates for 2000 and later years are not directly comparable with earlier estimates. In 2010, 68 percent of Hispanic children were of Mexican origin, which was 16 percent of the total child population. Nine percent of Hispanic children in the United States were of Puerto Rican origin, 6 percent were of Central American origin (mainly Salvadoran, at 2.5 percent, and Guatemalan, at 1.6 percent), and 4 percent were of South American origin (the largest group being Colombian, at 1.2 percent). Other large Hispanic groups include children of Dominican and Cuban origin (each accounting for 2 percent of Hispanic children) (Appendix 3).

The proportion of non-Hispanic Asian and Pacific Islander children has grown steadily over the past few decades, from 2.0 percent of the child population in 1980 to 5.1 percent in 2016; however, estimates before and after 2000 are not directly comparable (Appendix 1). Among children who are Asian alone, the largest origin groups in 2010 were Asian Indian (21 percent of Asian children), Chinese (20 percent), Filipino (15 percent), Vietnamese (12 percent), and Korean (9 percent). About 6 percent of children who were Asian alone were of mixed ancestry (Appendix 3).

The percentage of the U.S. child population that is non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native remained relatively constant from 1980 to 2016, at around 1 percent (Appendix 1).

In 2016, non-Hispanic children of more than one race constituted roughly 4.2 percent of the total U.S. child population, an increase of 2 percentage points from the 2000 census (Appendix 1). Among all children identified as being of more than one race (including Hispanic children), the majority (4.4 percent of all children) were white combined with one other race, with 1.7 percent identified as white and black, 1.1 percent identified as white and Asian, and 0.6 percent as white and American Indian or Alaska Native (Appendix 2).

Other estimates

State and local estimates

State-level child population estimates by race and Hispanic origin from 2000 through 2016 are available at http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/103-child-population-by-race?loc=1&loct=2.

Estimates from the American Community Survey are available for states, counties, congressional districts, metropolitan areas, cities, and census tracts at http://factfinder2.census.gov/.

Data and appendices

Data source

• Data for 1980-2016 and projections: Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics. (2017). America’s children: Key national indicators of well-being, 2017 [Tables POP1 and POP3]. Washington, DC: Author. Retrieved from http://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/tables.asp.
• Data on multiple races and ethnicities: U.S. Census Bureau. (2011). 2000 & 2010 Census Summary File 2 [Table QT-P1]. Retrieved from https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index. xhtml.

Raw data source

All estimates in Appendix 1 are from the Census Bureau’s Population Projections and Estimates Branch, based on models that draw on many data sources.
All estimates in Appendices 2 and 3 are from the 2000 and 2010 Decennial Censuses.
• 2000 Census: http://www.census.gov/main/www/cen2000.html.
• 2010 Census: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial-census/decade.2010.html.

Appendices

Appendix 1. Percentage of Children Under Age 18, by Race and Hispanic Origin: Selected Years, 1980-2016, and Projections, 2020-2050

Appendix 2. Number and Percentage of Single- and Multi-Race Children Under Age 18: 2000 & 2010

Appendix 3. Number and Percentage of Children Under Age 18 with Asian or Hispanic Origins, by Country of Origin: 2010

Background

Citation

Child Trends. (2018). Racial and Ethnic Composition of the Child Population. Retrieved from https://www. childtrends.org/indicators/racial-and-ethnic-composition-of-the-child-population.

“The main mistake is to assume that the races are very different”: column by Stanislav Drobyshevsky

Stanislav Drobyshevsky

Anthropologist, Candidate of Biological Sciences, Associate Professor of the Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Biology, Lomonosov Moscow State University. Lomonosov, scientific editor of the scientific and educational portal Antropogenez.ru.

What is a race

People in different parts of the planet differ from each other. And not only by skin color, but also by a host of other indicators. Differences can be divided into two categories: biological and social.

Social means language, religion, way of life, songs and dances, way of dressing, furnishing a home, and so on. The totality of all social factors is called ethnos. The most important determinant of ethnicity is self-determination: to which ethnic group a person considers himself to belong, to which he belongs. (It is also important whether other representatives of the ethnic group agree with this, but this is another question.)

The biological part is our genes and how they are realized in a particular environment. Biological traits can be congenital or acquired. For example, a hole in the ear from an earring is a biological sign, but it does not depend on genes in any way: a newborn will never have a hole, no matter how much his parents make holes in their ears. A small proportion of innate biological traits are racial traits.

It should be understood that not all innate biological traits are racial. Each person has one head, two arms and one spleen. These are genetic traits, but not racial ones, because populations do not differ in this regard.

A race is a set of racial traits and their variability in a given population. These features have developed historically in a certain territory and distinguish a particular group of people from neighboring ones.

Racial genetic traits occupy only thousandths of a percent of the entire genome. We differ from chimpanzees by only 2% of genes, and races differ from each other by much less.

How racial differences manifest themselves

Genetics are ambiguous, and the environment also affects this. Let's take the same skin color. There are genes that determine it, but there are also external conditions. A light-skinned person can tan, and a dark-skinned person can turn pale. However, how much you can turn pale and dark is also genetically determined. No matter how much I sunbathe, I will not be able to achieve the skin color of a person from Central Africa. And no matter how pale the inhabitant of central Africa may be, he will not turn pale to my state.

For most racial traits, differences between even the most extreme variants are scanty. For example, in terms of head and face size, the biggest differences between races are 1-2 millimeters. Two brothers may be more different than one of them from another race.

But there is a subtlety: a race is determined by a combination of features not of a particular person, but of a population. Describing a race, we do not say that it has such and such a skin color and head size. We say that the skin color is from such and such to such and such, with such an average value, and the dimensions of the head are from such and such a minimum to such and such a maximum.

The main mistake is to think that the races are very different. It's not like that at all.

What else does race influence, besides appearance

External signs are easy to determine, but studying them as racial is not very correct - they are very dependent on the environment. Ideally, one should look at the genome, but scientists do not yet know which parts of the genome determine race.

Nevertheless, racial characteristics also affect physiology. For example, skin color depends on the production of melanin, while related melanin molecules are also involved in nervous activity. There are medicines that work on people of one race and do not work on members of another. Propensity to certain diseases and resistance to infections also differ between races.

The stumbling block is the question of the level of intelligence. In order for intellectual abilities to be counted as a racial trait, it must be proved that they are precisely dependent on genetics and clearly differ in different races.

Theoretically, natural selection for intelligence should have been present in our ancestors. But the problem is that this must be proven, and we do not yet have a single measure for the level of intelligence.

Of course, at the population level, there are definitely differences in mental abilities. It is always possible to find a group of people in which, on average, the level of intelligence will be higher or lower than in the neighboring group. The question is how significant these differences will be.

Besides, it's pointless to count the average level of intelligence in a group - it's like the average temperature in a hospital. There is a very large individual variation: in any group of people we will find a complete fool, something in between and a genius.

How the division into races happened

Settlement from Africa

The species Homo sapiens appeared in Africa, and although they were certainly black, broad-nosed, curly and thick-lipped people, they cannot be called Negroids in the modern version.

Approximately 55,000 years ago, people began to move. Along the way, they mixed with Neanderthals and Denisovans and settled around the planet: they quickly reached Australia and both Americas.

Reconstruction of early human migrations / wikimedia.org

People found themselves in completely new conditions: in the cold of Eurasia, North America and Greenland, in mountains, deserts and forests. Contacts between groups that settled on different continents have practically disappeared. And each of these populations had its own microevolution. This was racialization.

However, the ancient people who lived by hunting and gathering did not form stable racial complexes. They lived in small groups and chose partners from those who lived further away to avoid inbreeding.

More or less stable races could develop only in conditions of isolation: on the Andaman Islands, in Australia, South Africa. But basically it was racial instability - Upper Paleolithic polymorphism, as the great Soviet anthropologist Viktor Valerianovich Bunak called these processes.

The role of the productive economy

Approximately 10,000 years ago, in some parts of the world, people began to raise sheep, goats, cows, pigs and grow wheat, rye, lentils, soybeans - whatever they had.

Populations that have switched to agriculture have grown dramatically in numbers. Growing food is labor-intensive, but, unlike hunting and gathering, it guarantees food: you can store grain in a storage pit and eat it all winter.

The increased groups of people began to settle again. The first to do this were the inhabitants of the Middle East - the territory of present-day Israel, Jordan, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Iraq. They moved towards North Africa, North India and Europe. Along the way, these ancestors of the Caucasians displaced the natives - hunters and gatherers - and partly mixed with them. In different areas, this percentage of displacement and mixing was not the same. For example, farmers were expelled from Southern Europe 90% local hunters and gatherers. So the modern population of this region are the descendants of those same settlers from the Middle East.

In the North, cows and pigs did not survive, grain did not grow well, because the breeds and varieties were not yet adapted to the cold climate. So the migration of farmers in this direction was slow - as varieties and breeds adapted to harsh conditions appeared. 90% of the modern population of Scandinavia are the descendants of hunters and gatherers from Central Europe, who, under the onslaught of farmers, moved to the North.

Similar stories happened in Asia and Africa. But in some places, global settlement could not occur for geographical reasons. For example, in America, agriculture arose twice or even more: in Central, South America and, perhaps, even in North. There are geographical barriers between these centers of economic development, and although populations in different parts of America have reached a high level of development, they could not settle far. Therefore, the North American and South American populations were not racially unified as they were in Eurasia and Africa, and the American Indian race is very heterogeneous.

Crossbreeding

Crossbreeding is getting offspring from mixing different ethnic groups and races. This effect of race formation has existed at all times, since the era of Australopithecus. But the closer to modernity, the more people move and the more important miscegenation takes on. Its effect depends on the number and proportions of interbreeding populations. For example, in North America the ratio was 2 to 98, where 2 are Indians and 98 are Caucasians. That is, miscegenation had practically no effect on the population: there were too few Indians and they were quickly exterminated. And in Central South America, Europeans who arrived actively took indigenous women as wives. Therefore, the mixture of Portuguese and Indians was in a proportion of almost 50 to 50, and this is how modern Latin Americans turned out.

Crossbreeding is still creating new races right before our eyes. Genetics is a tricky science in which everything happens not very linearly. Therefore, when different groups are mixed, their racial characteristics are not averaged - as a result, something new is obtained, sometimes even surpassing the parental variants in severity. As a rule, there is a strong diversity in the first generations of mestizos. And after a while, the result can “settle down” - and this is how a new race will turn out.

Why races change

Every race changes. If modern Caucasians are compared with those that were in the XIV century, then there will be differences between them. Many signs have time to change for a variety of reasons.

1. Adaptation

Some traits change because they are useful or harmful under given conditions. The same skin color in different conditions is not equally useful. In sunny climates close to the equator, there is a lot of ultraviolet radiation, which in large quantities can damage DNA and cause mutations. The incidence of skin cancer in light-skinned people in tropical countries is thousands of times greater than in dark-skinned people, so a dark color turns out to be beneficial. Melanin protects the deep layers of the skin from ultraviolet radiation, and no mutations occur.

However, dark skin color can be harmful in northern conditions, because we need a certain amount of ultraviolet light in order for vitamin D to be released in the body. This means that in northern countries it is more profitable to have fair skin. But, for example, the Eskimos live where half a year is night, and half a year is day. In addition, they are constantly in warm clothes. Then it is generally not clear which skin color is more profitable. Under such conditions, it can be anything, and vitamin D can be obtained from food: for example, from fish or venison. (By the way, in the tropics, vitamin D comes from grubs and tree beetles.)

There are not very many such adaptive traits in humans. For example, a wide nose, thick lips, a long oral cavity, a narrow long skull are signs characteristic of the inhabitants of the tropics, with them the body cools more easily. In the north, on the contrary: a narrow nose, short jaws, thin lips and a more stocky build, so as not to lose heat and warm up quickly.

2. Sexual selection

This is a selection based on external parameters that partners and female partners like or dislike. One of the few such signs that can also be attributed to racial ones is the growth of a beard and mustache. There are races in which it is strong (Ainu, Caucasians), weak (Mongoloids) and medium (Negroids). This suggests that the female ancestors of the Ainu and Caucasians liked bearded men, while the female ancestors of the Japanese and Chinese did not.

3. Founder and bottleneck effects

The founder effect occurs when a small group separates from a large group and moves into new territory. In such a situation, the specific features of an individual person become very significant: the individual characteristics of those who moved - the founders - are transmitted to their descendants.

The bottleneck effect has the same effect, only it occurs during cataclysms. There was a large group of people, then something bad happened to them: a famine, an epidemic, a war. Most of them died, and those who, by chance, survived, carried their signs further.

Most of the world's population at all times lived in small groups and moved in the same way. So these founder and bottleneck effects have always had a significant impact on our evolution.

How many races there are in the world

It depends on what you count as races. The division into large races takes place at school: these are Caucasoids, Mongoloids, Negroids, Americanoids and Australoids. There are few races, which nevertheless differ significantly from the rest, and there may be up to 200 of them. These include, for example, the Kuril race (Ainu) and the South African Bushmen.

There is also a difficulty in learning the material. For example, there are several hundred islands in Indonesia, and each island may have its own race, but they have hardly been studied. If we explored the whole of Indonesia, Central and South America, Central Africa, then we would find another n-th number of races, about which nothing is known now, because anthropologists simply did not get to them.

Classification of human races according to VV Bunak / Great Russian Encyclopedia

The main problem with counting races is that they do not have clear boundaries. There is a wonderful story on this subject, which is described by Miklouho-Maclay. A certain Italian, inspired by the example of a Russian ethnographer and anthropologist, decided to move to an island in Melanesia, to the Papuans. Local residents immediately robbed him, beat him and wanted to kill him. In the end, he survived, because he was saved and sheltered by a kind old man. The Italian lived on this island for several years and, of course, became a little wild.

One day a European ship arrived on the island. The Papuans gladly went to him in boats and began to trade. Sailors from the ship noticed that one person in the boat behaves differently from the rest: he does not sell anything and only looks plaintively. It turned out that this is the same Italian who was simply afraid to raise his voice so as not to anger the Papuans. The sailors eventually lifted him on board and rescued him.

The feature of this story is that the Europeans could not distinguish the Italian from the Papuans by their appearance when he was sitting naked in the same boat as they were.

There are essentially no boundaries between races, there are a lot of intermediate populations. Where to draw the line and how many of them can be, say, between Caucasoids and Mongoloids? You can single out one, or three or 25. As many borders we come up with, there will be as many of them, because you can go from village to village and observe changes.

What Science Says About Race Mixing

Everything we have talked about so far does not refer to modern times, but to eras when people mostly lived in small groups. Now 70% of the people on the planet live in big cities. And one of the main problems of race science is the existence of modern metapopulations. The fact is that the population of a large city cannot be called a population. Someone comes, someone leaves, someone seems to live here, but will not enter into a marriage - because he came to work, and there is already a family in his native country. Therefore, it is completely incomprehensible how to analyze the racial composition of modern cities.

This movement towards a new way of life has been going on for the last couple of centuries. What racial implications it will have is unclear. There is a theory that all people will mix until homogeneous and become the same. I do not believe in this, because the conditions on the planet are different, transport is still not ideal, and besides, there is social isolation: religious, political, linguistic.

In order for everyone to mix evenly, you need the same climate, the ability to get to any point on the Earth at any time and complete mutual understanding.

I believe there will be new race variants. Some will appear, some will dissolve in others. It is all the more sad that now this is little studied, although many modern research methods have appeared, including genetics. But in the West, racial studies are prohibited for reasons of political correctness, and Russian scientists do not have the financial means to ride around the world. But we are trying.

How races disappear

There is a wonderful island of Tasmania, it is located a little south of Australia. Ancient people got there about 20,000 years ago. For almost 18,000 years, the island was isolated even from Australia, which itself was isolated from the rest of the world. And the Tasmanian race arose in Tasmania.

A group of Tasmanians / kulturologia.ru

In the 19th century, the British came to the island. In those days, they used the new open lands in two ways: to exile prisoners there or to raise sheep. Tasmania, in principle, was excellent for both, but for sheep it is still more. And for some 30 years, the British almost completely exterminated the Tasmanians, the race disappeared. A pure example of genocide.

There is another option, when one race dissolves into another. For example, the Ainu lived well on the Kuril Islands, until the Japanese came from the south, from the territory of Korea, and began to displace them. By the 18th-19th centuries, nothing remained of the Ainu in most of Japan, although it is believed that they influenced the culture: there are borrowings from the Ainu language in Japanese toponyms.

The Ainu partly dissolved into the Russians, partly into the Japanese. Although there are still Ainu settlements, there is no chance of preserving the ethnic group. It is gradually disappearing, and the only thing that keeps it afloat so far is the racial prejudice of the Japanese, who are not very willing to mix with the Ainu.

0001

Do races really exist, and is it possible to draw clear boundaries between different human populations? Disputes about this have long ceased to be only scientific and moved into the political and social sphere. However, only a scientific approach allows you to keep your cool. "Lenta.ru" found out whether racial science is a science and whether geneticists can determine a person's race by DNA.

Scientists have long been faced with the question of which genes are responsible for human facial features. An ordinary person can easily distinguish a European from an Australian native by external differences, but a geneticist will face significant problems: there is no gene that would belong only to Asians or only to representatives of the Negroid race. That is why many Western anthropologists tend to consider the very concept of "race" outdated and inapplicable in modern science. The socio-political issue also intervenes. People far from science consider the division of humanity into distinct subgroups bordering on racism. Although many studies show that there are no and cannot be clear boundaries between individual human populations, one cannot but admit that there are large groups of people on Earth that differ in a set of features.

Related materials:

According to Russian anthropologists, in particular Stanislav Drobyshevsky, modern racial science (not to be confused with racology - a pseudoscientific concept about the superiority of some races over others) is experiencing a crisis caused by the fashion for political correctness. Prestigious journals publish articles by scientists who have a vague idea of the current level of development of this direction in science. They criticize 19th-century racial science and suggest revising its provisions, not knowing that they are essentially reinventing the wheel. So, in February 2016, Science published an article in which the authors refute the existence of races on the basis that there are no clear differences between them. Instead of the concept of "race" they propose to operate with the term "population".

In the US, a large percentage of married couples are people of different races

Photo: Emily Tan / Flickr

What is called race in modern science? A race is a group of populations that has an inherent set of inherited biological traits only and has formed in a certain geographical region. No serious racialist would say that there are Asian genes or Negroid genes, that some races are more "advanced" than others. Since the very definition of "race" already includes the concept of "population", the proposal of the authors of the article in Science to replace one with the other looks strange. Most likely, such a desire is dictated by the same motives that were guided by anti-racist Elizabeth Martinez, who proposed renaming Negroids into Kongoids.

The fears of zealous supporters of tolerance and political correctness can be dispelled: one of the main provisions of modern racial science is that humanity is a single biological species, and a particular race, according to some scientists, cannot even be considered a variety of Homo sapiens. There are no biologically determined obstacles to the creation of fertile offspring in a Caucasian and Mongoloid pair. Metis - the offspring of people from populations belonging to different ethnic groups and races - do not suffer from mental disorders, increased morbidity or mortality. Some of those who, due to ignorance of biology, are afraid of miscegenation point to the Pygmies (Negrilli), a short African people. The logic is this: if a European and a pygmy have a common child, he will also be a dwarf. However, the short stature of the pygmies is precisely the result of the lack of miscegenation and the isolation of their area of \u200b\u200bresidence. A significant proportion of the population of Central Africa is mestizo negrilli and negroids of normal growth.

Negroids can also have fair hair

Photo: Graham Crumb / Flickr

However, interracial marriages do not improve the health of offspring (heterosis). The fact is that the appearance of hereditary diseases contributes to the homozygous state. It occurs when two identical copies of the same gene are present in cells. If these copies are defective—in other words, they have a deleterious mutation—the person will suffer from a genetic disease. If the organism is heterozygous, then the damaged gene will be compensated by the work of a working copy. In such a large group of populations as a race, the frequency of homozygotes is already quite low, and their proportion is a few percent.

There is one nuance regarding the impact of miscegenation on children. The fact is that some racial traits are adaptive to the environment in which a given population of people developed. For example, the dark skin color, rich in melanin, in Negroids is an adaptation against intense solar radiation in the equatorial latitudes of the Earth. Mestizos of Caucasians and Negroids are distinguished by lighter skin tones, which increases their exposure to ultraviolet radiation. Therefore, the offspring of white and black people living in Africa may be more at risk of developing skin cancer.

Thus, if we can talk about the harmful consequences of interracial marriages, then only in the aspect that the offspring may not be adapted to the environmental conditions in which they will live.

Modern science, however, denies the adaptability of many racial traits. It is believed that a random set of characteristic external features has become entrenched and widespread in the population. According to one version, this happened as a result of the emergence of agricultural crops, due to which individual populations of people dramatically increased their size. Social and technological factors, not biological ones, came to the fore. At the same time, small groups of people remained who were not included in the large races, such as American Indians or Australian Aborigines. They turned out to be more subject to natural selection and other mechanisms of biological evolution.

Blond hair is considered one of the clear maladaptive racial traits. This trait has arisen several times independently in different human populations: Europeans, Australian Aborigines, Caucasian peoples, and other populations. The characteristic fold at the inner corner of the eye in Mongoloids - the epicanthus - most likely does not give its owners any advantages either. The opinion that it protects the eyes from dust or wind in severe cold conditions has not been scientifically confirmed. Many peoples without epicanthus lived in such an environment for centuries, and some groups of Mongoloids lived in temperate and subtropical zones.

Uyghurs are descendants of Europeans and Chinese

Photo: Gusjer / Flickr

Research into racial traits and the genes that cause them continues. For example, Chinese scientists recently published a preprint of an article in the bioRxiv repository that describes the results of a search for genetic factors that determine the characteristic facial features of Europeans and Chinese. A genome-wide association search was performed to link certain phenotypic traits to genomic variants. The object of the study was the Uighurs, a small people who mostly live in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in China. It originated from intermarriages between Europeans and East Asians. The faces of the Uyghurs represent a continuous spectrum of changes from pronounced European features to Asian ones. A total of 694 representatives of the people.

The results identified six genes whose variants are responsible for various physical features, including the distance between the corners of the eye, the shape of the mouth, cheeks and nose, roundness of the face and snub nose. Scientists have developed a computer model that allows gene variations to predict what a face will look like. According to the researchers, the model will help to determine, for example, the appearance of a potential criminal by blood tests.

Research like this gives added strength to the assertion that no genes can be found that accurately determine what race a person belongs to. It is possible to find a set of genetic traits characteristic of a population. That is why scientists can be considered the main anti-racists, since they demonstrate to the public the whole pointlessness of racial theories.