Understanding Race

Rob DeSalle is a Curator in the Sackler Institute for Comparative Biology and the Program for Microbial Research of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, USA. His research focuses on molecular systematics, microbial evolution, and genomics. He is the author of over 500 scientific papers and a wide range of books, from popular science titles to textbooks on genomics. Ian Tattersall is Curator Emeritus in the Division of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, USA. His most recent research is on the emergence of modern human cognition. He is author of over 400 scientific papers, numerous books and is a prominent interpreter of palaeoanthropology to the public, and writes regularly for Natural History.

• 1. The evolutionary background; 2. Race before evolutionary theory; 3. Race after Darwin; 4. Race in the era of genetics and genomics; 5. Variation in genomes, and how humans took over the world; 6. Clustering and treeing; 7. Race in medicine and complex phenotypic studies; 8. Human adaptations; 9. Race, science and pseudoscience.

'DeSalle and Tattersall provide a brilliant and comprehensive refutation of the folk concept of human races. Anyone who thinks that there are natural categories of people that correspond to zoological subspecies will have their worldview blown to bits!' Jonathan Marks, Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Charlotte