- Kirkegaard, E. O. W. (2019). Race Differences: A Very Brief Review. Mankind Quarterly, 60:2
The nature of race differences, and even the mere “existence” of human races, continues to be a major source of controversy and confusion. This brief review summarizes the empirical evidence about race differences and the conceptual issues related to taxonomy, as well as practical implications for medicine and the social sciences. The review shows that human races are distinctive phenotypically and genotypically, the latter with regard to the frequencies of a very large number (millions) of alleles. Distributions of these traits are clinal rather than discrete, and human races are subject to continuous change across evolutionary time.
Actually Gerhard wrote the abstract, but the most important meta-fact of this article is given in the postscript:
This review was originally written with intent to send to the Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, as I was invited to submit an entry for their encyclopedia. However, upon completion, the editor, Todd Shackelford, sent me an email letting me know that “After further discussion, we have decided to eliminate this entry. You are now free to send to a different publication.” This series of events should probably be interpreted in the light of a recent shaming of Shackelford by a journalist, which happened in between the invitation and the submission of the entry, which has made him more wary of taking on “controversial” material (Schulson, 2018; for context, see Carl & Woodley of Menie, 2019 and Woodley of Menie et al., 2018).
The article itself is a quite broad summary of recent research related to race. I spent more than a year compiling sources for this (There are some 150 sources), also because I was waiting for our admixture results to be published first (this and this).