This question is, in fact, an example of how a seemingly obvious thesis (which scientists have proven in vain for more than two centuries) not only persists, persistent, widely accepted and rooted, but can have terrible and cruel consequences – inciting wars, social and economic divisions, pogroms and monstrous mass slaughter – without being completely accurate.
It is possible that it not only surprises you, but also slightly annoys you, so you have already attributed it to the “political correctness” of modern researchers, but it is really not a political thing, but a genetic thing. The irony is that the racial division that “blood” inspired so many ideologies was denied precisely by “blood” and hereditary material. Human genes, in fact, stubbornly refuse to show any racial diversity (as is clearly seen in other animals).
Today, by the way, the generally accepted point of view is that race is, above all, a social construct. According to the definition from “Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Society” by Richard Schaefer, a race is a group of human beings with similar physical and social characteristics that society generally considers different from other groups.
This becomes clearer if we look at today’s Brazil, where a uniform mutual mixture of people of African, European and American origin has “created” entirely new groups. On the other hand, there is a well-known story about the historical (artificial) division of the inhabitants of the Congo in the Great Lakes region into members of the Hutu and Tutsi races. The division was introduced by the colonial rulers, the Belgians, and it not only became a social reality, but during the conflict in Rwanda it caused one of the most monstrous genocides in human history.
The idea and subsequent search for the biological basis of race began at the end of the 17th century, with the works of the French physician François Bernier. As Europe becomes familiar with the rest of the planet at that time, the increasing interest of science in the inhabitants of the new worlds and the issue of race will begin. One of the most influential biologists of all time, Carl Linnaeus, who founded taxonomy and classified all the living world, will divide people in 1735 into four races according to the “continental” key – Europaeus, Asiaticus, Americanus and Afer, so that each of them is assigned a temperament (where Europeans are active and curious and Africans are lazy and carefree).
Although it seems obvious that one can certainly taxonomically separate the indigenous population in Scandinavia from that in Central Africa, further research will show that all humans are not only part of the same species but also of the same subspecies Homo Sapiens Sapines.
Meanwhile, anthropological research from the late 19th and early 20th centuries (which implied that racial differences were present in genes even though it could not be verified) led to unfathomable horrors. Among other things, in Nazi Germany they served for the adoption of the so-called Nuremberg racial laws, the persecution and extermination of Jews, Slavs, Roma and other “inferior races”.
It has been shown, however, that differences between groups of people are not based on genetics at all. No matter how many attempts were made to find them before (and after) the deciphering of the human genome, it is now beyond doubt that the genes that determine race simply do not exist. This was clearly pointed out in 1972 by Richard Lewontin, a revolutionary American biologist, mathematician and evolutionist, who determined that as much as 90 percent of genetic variability is found within one “race”.
The variability among individuals in the human species, all that diversity in complexion, height, strength, and constitution, is so great that it is impossible to really determine a common genetic basis for any group that we would call a human race. Man is therefore a real celebration of evolution – seven billion people today make up the entire universe of biological diversity. And there is no reason to share it.
An illustration depicting the various peoples of Asia was printed in the famous Nordic Family Book, a traditional Swedish encyclopedia published from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. Similar illustrations indicating racial characteristics were an integral part of practically all encyclopedias and textbooks of anthropology everywhere in the world at that time.
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