By the end of this paper, readers will understand how the assumption that human races are the same as dog breeds is a racist strategy for justifying social, political, and economic inequality.ĭogs factored greatly into Darwin’s conception of evolution (Townshend 2009) and he specifically pondered the similarities of human races and dog breeds in The Descent of Man ( 1871). Our demonstration complements the vast body of existing knowledge about how human “races” differ in fundamental sociocultural, historical, and political ways from categories of nonhuman animals. Groups of humans that are culturally labeled as “races” differ in population structure, genotype–phenotype relationships, and phenotypic diversity from breeds of dogs in unsurprising ways, given how artificial selection has shaped the evolution of dogs, not humans. Speaking to everyone without expert levels of familiarity with this material, we investigate whether the dog breed analogy for human race stands up to biology. Here we answer Haldane’s question in an effort to improve the public understanding of human biological variation and “race”-two phenomena that are not synonymous. The analogy comparing human races to dog breeds is not only widespread in history and pop culture, but also sounds like scientific justification for eschewing the social construction of race, or for holding racist beliefs about human nature.
Haldane posed a question to anthropologists: “Are the biological differences between human groups comparable with those between groups of domestic animals such as greyhounds and bulldogs…?” It reads as if it were posted on social media today.
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