[Taxacom] Race and taxonomy

[Don.Colless at csiro.au]

"Race", as a taxonomic category, seems to have disappeared - no doubt because of its relative uselessness vis-a-vis 'subspecies".  Nonetheless it persists, and no doubt will continue to persist, in popular speech. We are these days (especially) surrounded by many folk from many lands. And for purposes of reference, we find it useful to be able to differentiate them as, say, Chinese, or African, or European, or others according to our skills in recognition. And we may call them "races" without (in most cases) any implied attributes other than geographic origin. As a boy in Australia - in the 1920-30's - the latter was not so; but it seems to me that such "racism" has become quite uncommon these days. Having once lived in Asia for many years, it now my hobby to try to guess the ethnic origins of people around me -  and I feel no embarrassment in asking them. Indeed, I celebrate our modern, remarkable multinationality.

Donald H. Colless
CSIRO Div of Entomology
GPO Box 1700
Canberra 2601
don.colless at csiro.au
tuz li munz est miens envirun

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Frank.Krell at dmns.org wrote:
> As a Commissioner, I agree that us zoo-nomenclators are brilliant since
> race is not in our Code. However, if we look in Torre-Bueno's Glossary
> of Entomology (I have the 1989 edition at hand), race is synonym to
> subspecies.

* and a corollary of Wilson & Brown's 1954 debunking of the classical
subspecies concept was that there were no human subspecies or "races,"
and therefore racism was a non-concept, since it referenced a
non-category. As an undergraduate I once saw Bill Brown's wonderful
slide show of human diversity, answering in the negative the question:
"Can you classify these into a small number of uniform kinds?"

fred schueler.
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        RR#2 Bishops Mills, Ontario, Canada K0G 1T0
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       (613)258-3107 <bckcdb at istar.ca> http://pinicola.ca
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