Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vogl Bam here. If you've ever watched a police procedural, you've probably heard a description of a suspect that goes something like this. The suspect is a six ft pound Caucasian male wearing a white T shirt, jeans, and so on. But what does Caucasian really mean. It's easy, of course, to equit Caucasian with white, but that one word Caucasian touches on issues much deeper than skin color.
It kindles questions of race and the very origin of humans. It even exposes the topic of whether race exists outside of our own weird minds. Spoiler, in humans, no genetic basis exists to separate our species into races. We spoke with Joseph Graves, a professor of nanoengineering and the intern dean at the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering in Greensboro, North Carolina. He said, there's no scientific justification for use
of the term Caucasian. It's actually a nineteenth century anthropological idea that was based around a false conception that the origin of the human species was in the Caucus Mountains. The Caucus Mountains run from the Black Sea to the west to the Caspian Sea on the east, in an area that's considered by many as the crossroads between Eastern Europe and Western Asia. These mountain ranges, two of them, the Greater and Lesser, are due east of Italy, due
north of Iraq, and due west of India. The southern tip of Russia lies to the north of the Caucus Mountains. To the immediate south as Georgia, a former Soviet republic, This is where Caucasians, true Caucasians call home. People from Georgia, Russia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia hail from that area. But Caucasians, as first identified by German anthropologist Jonan Frederick Blumenbach, and as some still think of the group today, lay claim to a
lot more real estate than that. In sevente in the third edition of his book titled On the Natural Varieties of Mankind, Blumenbach, building on work by Swedish scientist Carolus Linnaeus and others, used the word Caucasian to describe one of his five races of man. He determined each through scientific methods like the measuring of skulls, and tied each
to distinct geographic regions. Caucasians were, as Bloombach presented them, the white race, and included people not only from the Caucus region, but also those from Europe, Northern India, and parts of northern Africa. The other groups Bloombach identified tied loosely to skin color were Malaysian, Ethiopian, Native American, and Mongolian.
Though Bloommbuch found that the quote many varieties of man are as present known to be one and the same species, his work nonetheless was seen as giving scientific credence to the concept of biological race. Over the years, that notion has been abused in order to separate groups of people, often by skin color, and to declare, through some bastardization
of science, the superiority of one race over others. Also, years after bloom Back, scientists found that the earliest humans didn't come from the Caucus, but from Africa in modern day Ethiopia. Classifying humans into races, whatever blooming Box intentions, continues today. The term Caucasian is still rolled out occasionally, and not only on TV police dramas. The Graves said, I was just at a conference here in Minnesota where a researcher from South Africa kept referring to herself and
others in her country as Caucasians. I think it is very very much a white supremacist, racist ideology. I think it has to do with euro Centric racial ideology. People wish to hold onto the special designation exemplified by this
term Caucasian beyond Caucasian. The U. S Census Bureau has its own definition of race quote a person's self identification with one or more social groups, and it asks respondents to choose from its own categories white, Black, or African American, Asian, American, Indian, and Alaska Native, Native, Hawaiian, and other Pacific islander. The census allows those survey to choose some other race as well.
The Census bureaus definition of race that it's self identified and based on social groups is different than blooming box and that it's notably social, not sig sientific, and it supports the now widely accepted finding that race is not something that's supported by science. Genetically speaking, someone can't be of the white race, or the Caucasian race, or the Mongolian race. We are of one species, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute, humans are identical in genetic makeup.
Gordon Hodson, a professor of psychology at Canada's Brock University, explained in psychology today, scientists generally do not recognize races as biologically meaningful. Yet scientists, including me, discuss race and describe the racial composition of our samples. To be clear, I am not advocating that we ignore race. In fact, there are many dangers in ignoring races a social topic. Race is real, but race is socially real, not biologically real.
Yet the term Caucasian, despite its problems, has proven stubbornly resilient. Some people perceive it as being more scientific or dispassionate than saying white, even though the exact opposite is true. Based on the words origin from a provenly incorrect hypothesis and later used to perpetuate prejudice. In two thousand four, Graves wrote a book called The Race Myth. Why we
pretend race exists in America? From the introduction quote, we must recognize that the underlying biological diversity of the human species cannot be artificially apportioned into races because races are simply not biologically justified. If we can understand that all allegiance to racism is ideological, not scientific. Then we may be able to silence the bigots once and for all. Today's episode was written by John Donovan and produced by Tyler Clang. The brain Stuff is a production of iHeart
Radio as how Stuff Works. For more on this and lots of other social topics, visit our home planet has Stuff Works dot com and for more podcasts. For my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.