How many human races are there in the world?

Question

Hi

As race and religion are such hot topics at the moment. Does anyone have any ideas as to how many races there are in the world? I know, however, I would be very interested to see what people think.

Cheers

Wow! A couple of people answered three, and indeed there is. Anyone know what they are called?

Answer 1

There are three races.Mongoloid,Caucasoid and Negroid.Most people,however,confuse race with ethnicity so don't realize that white Westerners ,Indians,Pakistanis and people fom the middle east belong to the same race,Caucasoid,whereas native Americans and people from the Far East belong to the Mongoloid race.As for how many ethnic groups there are,I doubt if anyone could give us an answer to that.

Answer 2

The term race is an outmoded concept. Most anthropologists would prefer that you use the term ethnicity. And our understanding of the human genome has progressed to the point that we now know that nearly all the variation in the human species can be found within the remotest tribe of humans in the world. In other words, there are no significant genetic differences between groups of humans anywhere. The differences that people characterize as "racial" are superficial characteristics such as skin color. Other differences among so-called racial groups are more cultural than genetic. So there is only one race, the human race.

Answer 3

There is only one human race.... that’s being a human.
It's not just Americans but most people all around the world especially the third world countries are so obsessed with this whole race concept.

Religion is something that we believe in. If one really believe in something that person will definitely respect what others believe in too. So for that person no matter how different each others beliefs are he/she will consider that there is only one religion.

Answer 4

One human race.

Race is an ambiguous concept. The reality is that whatever characteristics you choose to use to differentiate individuals within a species (e.g. skin color, hair color, height, etc.) there is a fairly continuous spectrum of individuals. Imagine all the people in the world lined up according to the darkness of their skin. There's no obvious point where one person is "black" and the person right next to them is not. Same thing with defining "tall", if 6'6" is tall is 6'5.999"? Then what about 5'5.998"? Whatever number you choose to call "tall" is arbitrary.

Human beings evolved in Africa and about 50,000 years ago some began to leave Africa and migrate to much of the rest of the world. A variety of natural forces (e.g. climate) and artificial forces (e.g. sexual selection) caused minor differences to evolve in different parts of the world.

Answer 5

It depends on what your definition of "race" is. If you consider it to be the base phenotype (that is, visible set of characteristics), then there are 8 races. There are the Asiatic, Nordic, Caucasian, African, Middle Eastern, Polynesian, Innuit and Hispanic races. Each of these groups of people have distinctive characteristics.

Answer 6

There is only one human race in the world.

Answer 7

Only one race of humans, until we mutate or something. Religion is a different matter, there are 20 or so major religions and uncounted masses of minor religions.

EDIT: Ah, I see, you're taking that route. Technically, there isn't a 100% agreed upon answer to that question.

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From Wikipedia-
These empirical challenges to the concept of race forced evolutionary sciences to reconsider their definition of race. Mid-century, anthropologist William Boyd defined race as:

A population which differs significantly from other populations in regard to the frequency of one or more of the genes it possesses. It is an arbitrary matter which, and how many, gene loci we choose to consider as a significant "constellation" (Boyd 1950).

Lieberman and Jackson (1994) have pointed out that "the weakness of this statement is that if one gene can distinguish races then the number of races is as numerous as the number of human couples reproducing." Moreover, anthropologist Stephen Molnar has suggested that the discordance of clines inevitably results in a multiplication of races that renders the concept itself useless (Molnar 1992).

Alongside empirical and conceptual problems with "race" following the Second World War, evolutionary and social scientists were acutely aware of how beliefs about race had been used to justify discrimination, apartheid, slavery, and genocide. This questioning gained momentum in the 1960s during the American Civil Rights Movement and the emergence of numerous anti-colonial movements worldwide.

In the face of these issues, some evolutionary scientists have simply abandoned the concept of race in favor of "population." What distinguishes population from previous groupings of humans by race is that it refers to a breeding population (essential to genetic calculations) and not to a biological taxon. Other evolutionary scientists have abandoned the concept of race in favor of cline (meaning, how the frequency of a trait changes along a geographic gradient). The concepts of population and cline are not, however, mutually exclusive and both are used by many evolutionary scientists.

In the face of this rejection of race by some evolutionary scientists, many social scientists have replaced the word race with the word "ethnicity" to refer to self-identifying groups based on beliefs in shared religion, nationality, or race. Moreover, they understood these shared beliefs to mean that religion, nationality, and race itself are social constructs and have no objective basis in the supernatural or natural realm (Gordon 1964). See also the American Anthropological Association's Statement on Race

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_races
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Cheers to you as well, good to see a scholastic question for once.

Answer 8

There be only ONE human race in the world.

Answer 9

In the only world we know of theres only one human race.......this question is pathetic

Answer 10

There is one human race in the world : Homo Sapiens. Homo Sapiens comprises three racial groups : Caucasian , Negro and Mongolian.