Cowboy Bob wrote: “If I remember correctly, the different races are about 99.84% genetically identical. (Maybe even a little less). If this is true, then wouldn’t the Neanderthals be considered a “race” if they existed today?”
I’ve read studies that place the genetic distance between distinct populations at between 0.1% and 0.2% for some of the more distantly related, like Bantu-speakers in West Africa and Austral Aborigines(Cavalli-Sforza), and I’ve seen a few that estimate much higher - in the range of 0.2% to 0.5% if memory serves.
To put genetic distance into perspective, as multi-cellular organisms that share a huge number of common traits like skin, hair, bones, brains, lungs, kidneys, livers, stomachs, veins and arteries, red blood and oxygen based respiration, mitochondria and cytoplasm, etc., creatures like humans and mice share a hell of a lot of the same biological building blocks. Since the basic physical makeup of the creatures are so similar, much of the “blueprint” for these organisms is going to be identical. Hence, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that most mammals share about 95% or so of the genome.
They may have different numbers of chromosomes, but most of the day-to-day functions of respiration, metabolism, meiosis and the like are virtually identical between mammals. It doesn’t take much genetic variation to radically change the appearance and physical form of an organism, sometimes a change in just one out of 3-billion basepairs results in an organism visibly and radically different. Just switching one key A to G, for example, is responsible for achondroplasia.
The huge range of variation you see between mice and men is down to a few percentage points of the genome. Fractions of a percent separate species. How much genetic difference do you imagine exist between animals we have classified as different species? What genetic distance separates a poodle from a wolf?
I wonder how an impartial observer, say an archaeologist 50,000 years in the future looking back on our world, might classify different human populations.
From Wikipedia: Race is an artificial construct that means what ever we want it to mean:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(classification_of_human_beings)
Race is a classification system used to categorize humans into large and distinct populations or groups by anatomical, cultural, ethnic, genetic, geographical, historical, linguistic, religious, and/or social affiliation.