Here is a 3 year old article titled Perceptions of Race (PDF) by Cosmides, Tooby and Kurzban. A few caveats:

1) The authors do not seem to try very hard to eliminate normative judgements from their argument, which makes one a bit cautious about the reasons that they come to their conclusions (that is, is there a synthesis between ought and the logical & empirical?).

2) Tooby & co. have historically been more than happy to “triangulate” on the racial issue so as to inoculate themselves from charges of being politically incorrect (there is a mild recapitulation of the “race does not exist” mantra within the body of the article).

In any case, I am mildly convinced by the paper, because as the authors note, for most of humankind’s history, other “races” were not part of our everyday experience. Therefore, it seems unlikely that specialized responses to other races were needed, or could have been selected for.

The authors reject the position that:

1) Racial perception is an outgrowth of the interaction between our visual and correlation-detection systems.

And are not convinced that (but do not dismiss out of hand):

2) Racial perception emerges from our conception of “kinds” (that is, categories of animals that are imbued with a specific essence, etc.).

Instead they put forward the hypothesis that racial perception emerges out of mental processes designed to detect coalitions and alliances. They offer some empirical evidence to support this position. One interesting anecdote to me that indicates that perception of race and coalitions are connected: I have had fair-skinned pale-eyed Arab American friends be judged as “non-white” in the presence of Italian or Greek Americans who were of a darker hue. I believe that Arabs, and in particular Muslims, are perceived to be in a different coalition, so when they are on the boundaries of American racial categories, they are put on the “other side,” even if empirically there are “whites” who exhibit a range of phenotypes more at variance from “All American,” in the cases I am thinking of, within eye-shot of the pale non-white in question.

Posted by razib at 08:26 AM