This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Steve Mursky.

So humans are really, really good, or at least Western traditional,

tradition educated humans are really, really good at categorizing things

types.

Jennifer Raff, she's an anthropologist at the University of Kansas.

Raft spoke last month at New York University's Journalism Institute.

And if you go back through the history of physical anthropology, which we now call ourselves

biological anthropologists, to distance ourselves from that history,

we as a discipline have a lot to answer for because we were the ones who measured cranium, measured skulls,

and tried to come up with, we called the cockazoid and the meagroid and the mongoloid types,

right, this ideal specimen of a cranium that fit these perfect measurements and that was the type and we tried to fit in

then every other person into one of these categories and that really influenced eugenics

we still have that notion, are you this group, are you that group? When in reality we're mixtures, most of us are very mixed. We have lots of ancestry from lots of populations. So if we can stop

thinking of these categories as these fixed entities, we'll get somewhere.

Raff later noted that race does involve biology, but as an effect.

But that doesn't mean that these racial categories aren't real in some sense.

And what I mean by that is, yes, they are culturally

constructed categories, but they actually have biological effects.

When we create the race, black or African-American

or whatever we're going to call it, we put people into that category regardless of

their genetic background, right?

So I always come back to this example, President Obama is just as much Irish as he is African, right?

...