Biological Conceptions of Race 471subspecies in plants and insects — this is not how scientists in general typically
think of human race. By and large biologists and anthropologists — whether they
defend or deny the biological reality of human race — have either assumed one
of three types of definitions. They have either assumed that human races ought
to be defined by appeal to race-specific essences, that they ought to be defined as
groups of geographically localized individuals with a number of phenotypic and
genetic properties in common, or that they ought to be defined, at least in part,
as lineages. As we have already seen, Pigliucci and Kaplan maintain that their
account is importantly different from each of these conceptions of race. These
factors, taken in conjunction with the worries expressed above about the relation
between ‘race’ and ‘ecotype’ in everyday discourse, leaves them open to the demand
for an explanation as to why one ought to suppose that human races are ecotypes.
A final difficulty with Pigliucci’s and Kaplan’s ecological race concept is that
it lacks development. Although there are certainly adaptive differences among
distinct human populations, it is not clear when and under what conditions such
differences constitute different ecotypic races. Does each adaptive difference con-
stitute its own racial division, or do only certain adaptive differences — or certain
sets of adaptive differences — count? Since ancestry and geographic location are
two ideas commonly associated with race, one might be tempted to rely on these
factors in an effort to explain which adaptations are the racial ones. Yet, because
Pigliucci and Kaplan argue that there is and always has been too much gene flow
for human races to be distinct lineages, they cannot use phylogeny to answer this
question. Likewise, due to some of the ways in which their account differs from the
geographical race concept, they cannot rely on geographic location for an answer.
To further complicate matters, let us recall that Pigliucci and Kaplan maintain
that human ecotypic races can, and often will, deviate significantly from folk racial
categories. This statement, in conjunction with their claim that that ecotypic races
can be named on the basis of very few characteristics, leaves the reader wondering
how many ecological races there are and which groups constitute ecological races.
In fact, when one recalls that a single population can belong to more than one
ecotypic race, it appears that the number of races could be very large indeed. At
the extreme, it is possible that each individual or population could belong to its
own ecotypic race — thus trivializing the concept of race.
I have just discussed several issues that must be addressed before one can rea-
sonably conclude that human ecotypic races exist. Let us now turn to some phy-
logenetic conceptions of race. Recall that although there are a number of different
phylogenetic conceptions of race, all of them assume that races ought to be de-
fined, at least in part, as reasonably reproductively isolated breeding populations.
Robin Andreasen [1998; 2000; 2004; 2005] and Philip Kitcher [1999] have indepen-
dently defended somewhat different phylogenetic conceptions of race. After briefly
discussing each, I will defend both against some of the central objections advanced
against the idea that races are phylogenetic units.
Andreasen has advanced and defended a view that she calls ‘the cladistic race
concept’. Cladistics is a branch of systematic biology that, with reference to a well-