Species and Races, Chimeras and Multiracial People

Jason Scott Robert and Françoise Baylis (2003) contrast the skepticism among scientists about the biological basis for the notion of fixed or well-defined species with the persistence of a strong popular conception of species as fixed and well-defined. In making this contrast, they suggest an intriguing analogy to race:

There is here an analogy to the recent debate about the concept of race. It is argued that race is a biologically meaningless category, and yet this in no way undermines the reality that fixed races exist independently as social constructs and they continue to function, for good, or more likely, ill, as a moral category.

The authors later suggest that a society facing the prospect of mixed-species beings might borrow a practice from U.S. racial classification:

Consider, for example, the relatively recent practice in the United States of classifying octoroons (people with one-eighth negro blood; the offspring of a quadroon and a white person) as black. By analogy, perhaps 1% animal DNA (i.e., mitochondrial DNA) makes for an animal.

They do not endorse this "one cell" analog of the notorious "one-drop of blood" rule, but merely suggest it as a likely response to the emergence of beings bearing genetic material from different species.

I will argue that the analogy to race is both closer and more limited than Robert and Baylis suggest, and that it suggests further reasons why we are unlikely to extend the welcome mat to chimeras. To begin with, not only the biological basis but the vintage of both concepts are a matter of continuing scholarly dispute (Montagu 1964; Coon 1962). People have always recognized different types of animals and plants but have used different classification schemes at different times. Similarly, people have always relied on outward markers to classify people into different types, but those markers have varied, as has the import of their classifications (McCoskey 2002; Omi and Winant 1994). I suspect that Noah, Linnaeus, and modern biologists would sort animals very differently and attribute different significance to their classifications. Similarly, it may be only since the European colonial era that races have been defined primarily by skin color and humanity divided into the now familiar "continental" races: Caucasoid/White, Negroid/Black, and Mongoloid/Asian (see Takaki 1992). Indeed, scholars debate about whether it is even appropriate to use the concept of race in studying the classification of people in ancient and medieval times. The issue rests on the extent to which the types to which people were assigned at different times were seen as "essential": as tied to identity, or as licensing a sufficiently wide range of inferences about character and capacity (McCoskey 2002; Hirschfeld 1996; Goldberg 1990).

A second point of analogy is that just as species have been regarded as not only a classification but an ordering, a Great Chain of Being, so have races (Omi and Winant 1994; Goldberg 1990). Not surprisingly, the race placed on top was typically that of the classifiers (although some contemporary white racists award the top slot to Asians; e.g., see Rushton 1994). That race was regarded as differing from the other races in ways that those races did not differ from one another. Crossing racial boundaries was more problematic when one of the races was the top one; mixing among lower races was a matter of little or no concern. Indeed, the United States Supreme Court seized upon this disparity in concern when it struck down Virginia's antimiscegenation law: the law served to protect only the integrity of the white race and not racial boundaries in general (Loving v. Virginia 388 U.S. 1 [1967]).

Human beings have proven remarkably resilient in maintaining racial hierarchy in the face of racial mixing, whether by elaborate schemes of gradation or by the procrustean dichotomy imposed by the one-drop rule (Lichtenberg et al. 1997; Omi and Winant 1994). Robert and Baylis suggest that...