460 DISCUSSION 



Dr. J. S. Huxley. 



Race in common anthropological usage has two main connotations. One 

 is community of descent, the other is distinctness from other races. In 

 general biology, the term is used mainly of geographically or physiologically 

 isolated groups within a species ; and, although the term has now been 

 largely abandoned in favour of subspecies, the implication is that human 

 races are of the same nature. 



Further, anthropological use of the term dates from the time when it was 

 believed that inheritance was of the blending type ; if this were so, a mixed 

 population would speedily approximate to a characteristic uniform type. 

 This assumption has been shown to be incorrect by the establishment of 

 the Mendelian basis of inheritance. After crossing, recombinations of every 

 possible kind will continue to appear indefinitely unless some are eliminated 

 by selection. 



Again, the assumption that man's evolution has been by separation into 

 discrete isolated units is incorrect, since migration arid crossing have been 

 operative for tens of thousands of years ; so, whereas the evolution of most 

 animal types is divergent, that of man may be called reticulate. 



As a result, it is probably impossible to give a scientific definition of race 

 as applied to man, since the term has connotations which do not apply in 

 the human species . Some less question-begging term should be found . The 

 immediate task before physical anthropology is to define human groups in 

 terms of measurable characters and the correlations between them, on the 

 basis of Mendelian genetics. 



Dr. G. M. MORANT. 



A broad distinction may be made between two kinds of definitions of 

 race in man, and when considering these in relation to genetics our concern 

 is rather with the implications than with the wording of the definitions. 



Those of the first kind accord with what may be called the classical theory 

 of race, and this is generally discredited to-day. It is supposed, according 

 to this older type of theory, that after the crossing of groups of families of 

 different origins for several generations the original elements which entered 

 into the constitution of a particular population cannot be distinguished, 

 and hence that such a population must be treated as a single group and com- 

 pared as such, and undivided, with other similarly constituted groups. If 

 no general agreement was reached regarding the definition of race, this was 

 largely due to the difficulty of deciding on the stage of subdivision of the 

 total species which could be used most conveniently to distinguish groups 

 which might be called races. According to this first view, the descent of 

 races, and hence the course of human evolution, can only be revealed by the 

 direct evidence of the actual remains of the ancestral populations, and hence 

 it encourages the study of skeletal material. 



The alternative type of theory, which is now generally accredited in one 

 form or another, had been mooted by some anthropologists before modern 

 genetical theories were established, but these have since been supposed to 

 support and justify it. According to this second view, populations of the 

 kind considered are never mixed uniformly, but there is a general tendency 

 for ancestral types to occur in every generation, though not constantly in 

 the same family lines. It is claimed that these types can be recognised in 

 individuals, and this admits the possibility of discovering the racial com- 

 ponents of a population solely from a study of its living representatives at 

 one particular time. 



