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Graves says, “Many people think race consists of differences in physical appearance—things like eye shape, skin tone, or hair type. They also think a person’s physical appearance is an indicator of other traits, such as intelligence, or likeliness to commit crime or suffer from a particular disease.”
But to a biologist, a race is a subdivision of the human species that can be consistently defined either by a set of physical characteristics or differences in gene frequencies between populations. “So race in a biologist’s sense usually refers to a subspecies,” says Graves. “And subspecies are actually groups on the way to forming new species.”
He continues, “Race is simply not a level of biological division that we find in anatomically modern humans. There are no human subspecies living today. So there’s no scientific support for human races in the biological sense.”