Sunday 16 February 2020

‘Human Races’ Do Not Exist!

For more than a century man has been fooled by a myth, that people of different ‘races’ exist. Not true say scientists at the annual meeting of the German Zoological Society (DZG2019) held September 10-13, 2019, where they endorsed the 5-page ‘Jena Declaration’. In short:
  • Racism created races.
  • All people are one human species.
  • There is no biological (genetic) basis for race.
'Among the 3.2 billion base pairs in the human genome, there is no fixed difference that separates, for example, Africans from non-Africans. ... not even a single base pair. ... The light skin colour of modern-day northern Europeans goes back less than 5000 years.'

I was very glad to read this because my Doukhobor ancestors instilled in me the notion that all people are brothers and sisters, not divided by ‘races’. It always bothered me that so much persecution, war and death were caused by racial prejudice and hatred.

In the mid-1960s, my first job as an anthropologist was to study First Nations in Saskatchewan. The native locals called me the ‘camera man’ who insisted that he was ‘neither black nor white’.

It was historically significant that the ‘Jena Declaration’ was endorsed at Jena University, Germany, 100 years after the death of its most famous zoology professor Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) who co-founded scientific racism, which led to eugenics, antisemitism, involuntary sterilizations, racial wars, the racial policy of Nazi Germany, xenophobia, apartheid, forced labor (including slavery), etc. Haeckel divided human beings into 10 races, and believed Negroes were savages doomed to extinction and that Whites were the most civilised. He is now declared wrong. Will racism stop?

The English Jena Declaration was copied at the Max Planck Institute for the science of human history. Here is the German text : Jenaer Erklärung (Jena Declaration), which links to the English.

The science for the Declaration was presented in 2 papers published in German last year. The images are educational, and you can translate the text online.

This Republished

Koozma J. Tarasoff. 'Jena Declaration: The Concept of Race Is the Result of Racism, Not Its Prerequisite', Featured Research Paper, Transcend Media Service, March 23, 2020. — Jena Declaration add, and links back to this blog.

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More
  • 'Race'. Featured Research Paper, Transcend Media Service, March 23, 2020. — Enhanced from Peter Wade, Audrey Smedley and Yasuko I. Takezawa, 'Race: Human', Encyclopedia Britannica.
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