A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON THE RACE DEBATE

In the ongoing debate concerning the nature of human racial categories , there is a trend to reject the biological reality of race in favour of the view that races are social constructs. At work here is the assu mption that biological reality and social constructivism are incompati ble. I oppose the trend and the assumption by arguing that cladism, in conjunction with current work in human evolution, provides a new way to define race biologically. Defining race in this way makes sense whe n compared to the developments in other areas of systematic biology, w here shared history has largely replaced morphological similarity as t he foundation of a natural biological classification. Surprisingly, it turns out that cladistic races and social constructivism are compatib le. I discuss a number of lessons about the way human biological races have been conceptualized.