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It has been suggested that this article be merged into Caucasian race. (Discuss) Proposed since December 2006.

Caucasoid may refer to one of five races on the basis of physical features. Despite disagreement among anthropologists, this classification remains in use by many researchers, as well as lay people.

The European Bioinformatics Institude defines Caucasoid as "People with historical origins in Europe, North Africa or Southwestern Asia, including India" .

The Oxford English Dictionary defines Caucasoid as as noun or adjective meaning Of, pertaining to, or resembling the Caucasian race. The suffix -oid can indicate "a similarity, not necessarily exact, to something else", so Caucasoid can mean "resembling" the Caucasian race, itself a term with an inexact definition, likewise it can mean pertaining to or belonging to the Caucasian race.

Genetics

Although genetic variability is very small within the human population, what varation that does exist can be used to deduce the geographical origins of an individual's recent ancestors, this is possible because human genetic variation is geographically distributed, with close geographical proximity strongly correlating with genetic similarity. While geographical origin can be infered from genetics, there is not, as yet, any consensus that the genetic variation that is observed to be geographically distributed, amounts to the sort of discontinuous distribution that would be expected if the human population were divided into discrete races. Indeed the subdivision of the human species is essentially an arbitrary one, and even geneticists that support the concept of biological races acknowledge this, but maintain that subdividing the human population along the lines of continental races is simply the most convinient method, it is also the traditional anthropological method for subdivision of the human populaton. The alternative view is that it is artificial to partition continuous variation into discrete groups.

Footnotes

1. http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v36/n11s/full/ng1438.html
2. European Bioinformatics Institute. Description of Ethnic Origin Quantifier. 2006. December 10, 2006.
3. OED definition of Caucasoid. Retrieved 13 December 2006.
4. American Heritage Book of English Usage. -oid. 1996. September 14, 2006. .
5. Between any two humans, the amount of genetic variation—biochemical individuality—is about 0.1 percent. National Institute of Health. Teacher's guide: Understanding Human Genetic Variation.
6. It has recently been demonstrated in several studies that to a large extent, without prior knowledge of individual origins, the geographic ancestries of individuals can be inferred from genetic markers.....In one of the most extensive of these studies to date, considering 1,056 individuals from 52 human populations, with each individual genotyped for 377 autosomal microsatellite markers, we found that individuals could be partitioned into six main genetic clusters, five of which corresponded to Africa, Europe and the part of Asia south and west of the Himalayas, East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. ( Rosenberg et al., 2005).
7. Our evidence for clustering should not be taken as evidence of our support of any particular concept of 'biological race'..The arguments about the existence or nonexistence of “biological races” in the absence of a specific context are largely orthogonal to the question of scientific utility. (Rosenberg et al., 2005)
8. race is merely a shorthand that enables us to speak sensibly, though with no great precision, about genetic rather than cultural or political differences. (Leroi, 2005)
9. ...the groups that emerge are native to Europe, East Asia, Africa, America and Australasia - more or less the major races of traditional anthropology.......Yet there is nothing very fundamental about the concept of the major continental races; they're just the easiest way to divide things up. Study enough genes in enough people and one could sort the world's population into 10, 100, perhaps 1,000 groups, each located somewhere on the map. This has not yet been done with any precision, but it will be. Soon it may be possible to identify your ancestors not merely as African or European, but Ibo or Yoruba, perhaps even Celt or Castilian, or all of the above. (Leroi, 2005)
10. They also showed that groups that live on the same continent were typically more similar to each other than groups from different continents. However, in all of these studies, the identities of groups and individuals were assigned a priori. In other words, ancestry information such as race, ethnicity or geographical origin was used in conjunction with genetic data to infer group boundaries and allocate individuals to groups. If individuals were stripped of all prior information about ancestry (such as geographical location of origin, race, ethnic group) and assigned to groups a posteriori using only genetic data, it was less clear that geographical origin or racial categories provided reliable information about population structure. (Bamshad et al. 2004)
11. The absence of strong continental clustering in the human gene pool is of practical importance. It has recently been claimed that "the greatest genetic structure that exists in the human population occurs at the 'racial level'". Our results show that this is not the case, and we see no reason to assume that "races" represent any units of relevance for understanding human genetic history. In clinical practice, the "classification" of people into "races," as recently suggested could perhaps have some justification as a proxy for differences in environmental and other factors of relevance for public health or to help identify rare disease alleles. However, in the absence of other knowledge, most alleles influencing susceptibility to disease or outcome of medical interventions cannot be expected to show significantly different frequencies between "races". (Serre and Pääbö, 2004)
12. Modern extant humans do not fracture into races (subspecies) based on the modern phylogenetic criteria of molecular systematics. National Human Genome Center, Howard University. Policy paper. .

References

• Bamshad, M., Wooding, S., Salisbury, B. A., and Stephens, J. C. DECONSTRUCTING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GENETICS AND RACE: Nat Rev Genet. 2004 Aug;5(8):598-609.. Retrieved 20 December 2006.

• Leroi, A. M. (2005), A FAmily Tree in Every Gene, The New York Times, 14 March. Retrieved 19 December 2006.

• Rosenberg, N. A., Mahajan, S., Ramachandran, S., Zhao, C., Pritchard, J. K. and Feldman, A. W. (2005): Clines, Clusters, and the Effect of Study Design on the Inference of Human Population Structure, PLoS Genet 1(6): e70 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pgen.0010070 Retrieved 19 December 2006.

• Serre and Pääbö (2004), Evidence for Gradients of Human Genetic Diversity Within and Among Continents: Genome Research 14:1679-1685. Retrieved 19 December 2006.

See also

• Caucasian race
• European American
• European people
• Craniofacial Anthropometry
• White people

• Articles to be merged from December 2006
• Physical anthropology
• Race