How is the concept of race used elsewhere in biology? How do these uses compare to its use in Homo sapiens?
In non-human biology, the term “race” is not used as commonly as “subspecies,” and the two terms tend to be used interchangeably. Some biologists, however, regard races as less differentiated than subspecies. Although there is no accepted quantitative definition of subspecies or race, subspecies have traditionally been defined qualitatively on the basis of morphological similarities and a common geographic location. The appropriate definitions of geographic boundaries and key morphological characters are both open to debate. More recently, the subspecies definition has been sharpened somewhat by including an expectation of “the concordant distribution of multiple, independent genetically based traits” (O’Brien and Mayr, 1991). The use of genetic traits, such as DNA sequences, should increase the objectivity of these definitions, but arguments can be made about the relative weighting, for example, of non-coding versus coding DNA sequence variation. The term subspecies has seldom been ap
