Can race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization(pnas.org)
pnas.org
Can race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization
http://www.pnas.org/content/98/26/15387.full
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"Although selection would plausibly have favored neurocomputational machinery that automatically encodes an individual's sex and age, 'race' is a very implausible candidate for a conceptual primitive to have been built into our evolved cognitive machinery. During our evolutionary history, our ancestors would have inhabited a social world in which registering the sex and life-history stage of an individual would have enabled a large variety of useful probabilistic inferences about that individual. In contrast, ancestral hunter-gatherers traveled primarily by foot and, consequently, residential moves of greater than 40 miles would have been rare (16). Given the breeding structure inherent in such a world, the typical individual would almost never have encountered people sampled from populations genetically distant enough to qualify as belonging to a different 'race' (even assuming that such a term is applicable to a nonpolytypic species such as humans, in which the overwhelming preponderance of genetic variation is within population and not between population, and at most geographically graded rather than sharply bounded) (17, 18)."