Summary and Reaction to Diamond

Summary

The main point of Diamond is raising an alarm against arbitrary classification of humans into race by characters. This is why there are many perspectives to classify humans to race. Diamond introduces the ways in four steps.

1.      The first step is denying the “common sense” of view of race, that human is classified as race by using the difference of skin color. Diamond claims that the “common sense” is subjective and dangerous.

2.      The second step is to make it clear the difference between a “species” and a “sub species”. Diamond insists that human could be classified as species because human cannot interbreed with animal. However, it is impossible to classify human into subspecies, which is race.

3.      At the third step, Diamond points out that new different group appear by changing criteria, because there are two issues of classification. The first issue is classification will vary depending on which trait a researcher chooses, because each species has many traits. The second issue is no one knows how much difference of DNA is enough to classify. Thus, Diamond claims that the result of classification is not concordant and the hierarchy of classification is arbitrary and vague.

4.      At the forth step, Diamond introduced three causes why human traits vary from person to person. These causes are natural selection, sexual selection and no known function such as fingerprints.

In conclusion, Diamond argues that quick and arbitrary judgment about the classification of race based on characters poses a risk.

Reaction

　　I agree that the classification of race has a wide variety and is arbitrary. Judging from article of Diamond, humans do not have sub-species, race, because as often as we change criteria to classify human into race, the new result would appear.

　　His argument is not so persuasive, because there are some paragraphs which do not have any citation. For example, the paragraphs discussing if the variation of skin color, eye color and hair form enhance survival do not have any evidence supporting Diamond’s opinion.

　　I could not understand his intention shown in the sentence” The last thing we need now is to continue codifying all those different appearances into an arbitrary system of racial classification”.