Odd question about races

[Junghalli]

It's sometimes been stated that if present technological trends in mass transit and sociology continued and the world remained industrialized for sufficient centuries or millenia the logical result would be that there would be no more distinct races. Eventually practically everyone would be more-or-less a mix of everything, as people ceased to spend most of their lives in one area of the planet and interbred freely within their deme (which in this scenario would be basically the whole human species).

Now this prediction is obviously not 100% reliable, but setting that aside, if this happened what would the resulting "blended" humanity look like in terms of physical features? Let's suggest two scenarios:

(1) Start with present demographics. Chinese and Indians are about 1/6 of the planetary population each, whites, blacks, and Hispanics (white + Native American + meztizo) are maybe another 1/6 each give or take a few hundred million, and the remainder are probably mostly South Asians and Middle Easterners with some other races along with some minor groups like Polynesians and Australian Aborigines/New Guineas which are probably too small to matter all that much in the formulation. Yeah, I know this is probably an oversimplification of the real numbers, but let's go with it. Give sufficient centuries or millenia in an environment with rapid ultra-cheap global transit and minimal "miscegenation" taboos.

(2) Same as above, only this time we assume humans are evenly distributed across the inhabited areas of the planet in terms of population density.

I suspect in the first example you might get people who have kind of a medium build, medium-brown skin, usually straight dark hair and brown eyes but with the occassional other eye color and hair type cropping up here and there (after all, the genes are still there, it's just that they're more-or-less drops in the ocean and in some cases recessive), and maybe a certain amount of Asian features like eye folds in some people.

The second scenario I think you'd probably get something but similar, but maybe no Asian features, a little more blue eyed and ginger, blond, or bown-haired people, and maybe slightly darker.

Does that sound about right to you? I'm mostly just curious but has some relevance to a postapocalyptic story I might write (no, if you're wondering the blending happens before The End, not after).

[Samuel]

You mean flatlanders? I think Niven covered this already. Also, why wouldn't genetic engineering effect the outcome? At the very least, I can image people insuring that hair color is nice and diversified.

[Mr Bean]

Before we breed diversity out of humanity we will be able to craft it back in with genetic engineering. And any diaspora of humanity(Say sleeper ships or generation ships on the way to newly discovered habitable planets) there hammered byalien suns on alien soil humanity will evolved to their local conditions and diversity will be preserved.

[Junghalli]

Also, why wouldn't genetic engineering effect the outcome? At the very least, I can image people insuring that hair color is nice and diversified.

It probably would. In fact, the idea of the setting is that it's sort of a Paleolithic fantasy-type world, but based on hard science, and the various races are genemodded humans that managed to survive and become viable species.

Actually just to clear something up, this is a setting with two apocalypses. One that destroyed our modern civilization, and a second one that destroyed the successor technological civilization that was built on its ruins. The successor civilization was a rather nasty sort of Draka-esque place where most of the population were slaves, and they went as far as using selective breeding and later genetic engineering to create specialized slave races, which is where most of the nonhumans come from. I'm thinking that the blending period might actually have occurred in the second civilization, as it lasted longer than ours and they might have practiced a policy of carting off any groups they enslaved to lots of different parts of the planet, so that they would be less likely to be able to escape or effectively form resistances. Individual slavers might also have gone out of their way to collect slaves from lots of different parts of the planet in order to enhance the diversity and vitality of their "stock".

Before we breed diversity out of humanity we will be able to craft it back in with genetic engineering.

Would a blended humanity actually be much less diverse? Most of the diverse genes are still there, they're just mashed together in a big "soup" instead of seperated out in different populations in a "stew". A blended population might actually be more optimally diverse, as while there may have been some reduction in overall species diversity there would actually be more genetic diversity on the scale of small groups. Genetic diversity is not necessarily correlated with radically heterogenous physical appearance - IIRC the San are some of the most genetically diverse people on the planet and they're relatively homogenous in terms of appearance.

Also, genetic engineering might be used to restore diversity of critical genes without paying much attention to the ones that influence external appearance. And a lot of the reason genetic diversity is desirable is the deletrious recessive gene problem, which could be solved by genetic engineering without touching the bulk of the genome.

[Mr Bean]

Also, genetic engineering might be used to restore diversity of critical genes without paying much attention to the ones that influence external appearance. And a lot of the reason genetic diversity is desirable is the deletrious recessive gene problem, which could be solved by genetic engineering without touching the bulk of the genome.

People want naturally blue hair, people want to be tall, short, skinny, stout, strong, fast. People will want to look like their favorite stars. If genetic engineering can monkey around with it, someone will want it. Once it's widespread enough your going to see artificial diversity. In additional to simple random diversity.

[Broomstick]

I suspect in the first example you might get people who have kind of a medium build, medium-brown skin, usually straight dark hair and brown eyes but with the occassional other eye color and hair type cropping up here and there (after all, the genes are still there, it's just that they're more-or-less drops in the ocean and in some cases recessive), and maybe a certain amount of Asian features like eye folds in some people.

I suspect epicanthal folds would be more common than you suppose. Although commonly associated with Asians, where it is the norm, the trait appears in many other groups including Native Americans, the Celtic peoples of Europe (which extend not only through the British Isles but also into France, Spain, and Germany even if they are largely assimilated now), and various African groups, including the Koi-San. I've occasionally wondered if epicanthal folds weren't actually the original trait in humanity with groups losing it rather than acquiring it, but I haven't a clue if there is any evidence for or against that.

You're still going to get extremely dark and extremely light skin colors, you'll still have blonds and "gingers" (we call 'em redheads over here), and so on, but they'll be a smaller percentage of the overall population.

[Sarevok]

In the indian subcontient you have people who look stereotypical chineese, you have people you would mistake for an European and persons who resemble people from Africa and variations in between. A lot of mixing had been going on there for a long time. Maybe in a global scale something similar would happen.

[Darth Wong]

Even if you could remove geography and pre-existing racial classifications as an impediment to mixing, you would still have stratifications based on wealth, religion, and culture.

[Surlethe]

Populations are incredibly dynamic things. In a perfect homogeneous mixing of people, the average person at every location might have brown or olive skin with epicanthal folds and dark brown hair, but the actual people will be widely distributed around that average. There's also the fact that the more people you have, the more mutations will occur and inject themselves into the population.

[Kanastrous]

I thought that the Eloi in The Time Machine were in the right vein; sort of indistinctly Asian-African-Europoid.

[Akkleptos]

First of all, there are no races per se in humankind. Just populations that were historically isolated for long enough, in which certain treats became more abundant due to relative endogamy and natural selection. But we can't speak of "races" in humans as we can speak of "breeds" in dogs. The genotype doesn't differ as much in the case of humans.

Say, I know this bloke... he's tall, his hair is extremely curly (afro-curly, that is), his lips are wide and fat... but wait... his skin is pinkish-white, his hair is blond and his eyes are baby-blue. What is he? A Black? a White? (A teacher in HS jokingly said he was "a perfect example of an Afro-Saxon" ) It would be the same as if saying people with green eyes and people with blue eyes belonged in different "races". Okay, you'd say that the classification involves more than one trait. So what if we have a person who's tall, white-skinned (Anglo-Saxon, Germanic kind of white), green eyed, with straight, black hair; and another person who's short, white-skinned (Mediterranean, Italian or Spanish kind of white), blue-eyed, with curly blond hair... would you say they're different races? Of course not.

It's also important to point out that when humans started to migrate and expand over the continents, they were still small groups of hunters-gatherers, so a relative endogamy tended to preserve specific traits in them.

Having cleared that out,

(1) Start with present demographics. Chinese and Indians are about 1/6 of the planetary population each, whites, blacks, and Hispanics (white + Native American + meztizo) are maybe another 1/6 each give or take a few hundred million

The Chinese (from China alone) are ALREADY 20% of the world's population. So, if we eliminate any economic and geographic limitations to interbreeding, and given millennia without human intervention via genetic engineering, we're all bound to look a lot more "Chinese" all over the globe.

[Formless]

First of all, there are no races per se in humankind.

Not to be pedantic or anything, but isn't that exactly wrong? I mean, if the word "race" were synonymous with "breed" you would have a point; but it doesn't, it has more to do with ethnicity than genetics.

But maybe I'm just nitpicking...

[Akkleptos]

First of all, there are no races per se in humankind.

Not to be pedantic or anything, but isn't that exactly wrong? I mean, if the word "race" were synonymous with "breed" you would have a point; but it doesn't, it has more to do with ethnicity than genetics.
But maybe I'm just nitpicking...

You are. In many Western languages, "race" IS a synonym of "breed". And what are "human races" if not "human breeds"?

[madd0ct0r]

You may be making a poor assumption that looks tend towards the mean.

A Japanese - Cauacasin couple we know had four daughters who ranged perfectly from European to Japanese in looks.

My family is a Dark Celtic - Arayan mix, but one sister, while tall, blue eyed and blond also has epicanthal folds. As far as I'm aware this is a new development in the family genetics.


Seeing as my children will be Dark Celtic (recessive Arayan) - Vietnamese (recessive italian?) this is something I've been wondering about for a while.