

Can race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization - tokenadult
http://www.pnas.org/content/98/26/15387.full

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tokenadult
"Although selection would plausibly have favored neurocomputational machinery
that automatically encodes an individual's sex and age, 'race' is a very
implausible candidate for a conceptual primitive to have been built into our
evolved cognitive machinery. During our evolutionary history, our ancestors
would have inhabited a social world in which registering the sex and life-
history stage of an individual would have enabled a large variety of useful
probabilistic inferences about that individual. In contrast, ancestral hunter-
gatherers traveled primarily by foot and, consequently, residential moves of
greater than 40 miles would have been rare (16). Given the breeding structure
inherent in such a world, the typical individual would almost never have
encountered people sampled from populations genetically distant enough to
qualify as belonging to a different 'race' (even assuming that such a term is
applicable to a nonpolytypic species such as humans, in which the overwhelming
preponderance of genetic variation is within population and not between
population, and at most geographically graded rather than sharply bounded)
(17, 18)."

