Sometimes the things we believe in most confidently and never challenge crumble and collapse under the weight of the slightest bit of scrutiny and reason. Biological race is one such belief. To survive, it depends upon parental indoctrination, enculturation, compartmentalized thinking, and a lack of relevant science education. Given the mischief it inspires and facilitates, however, this house of cards is best blown over.

Racism is commonly viewed as a problem of evil or seen simply as a mean and unjust philosophy. I disagree with these characterizations. Racism is less about corrupt morality than it is ignorance and stubborn stupidity. Race belief and racism are the products of educational systems that do not teach students basic human biology and anthropology. Most people who could be described as racist do not need counselling on the virtues of fairness and cooperation. What they need is a few days in an introductory anthropology class.

Believing in race doesn’t mean one is unintelligent. It likely means one simply hasn’t yet heard about the many ways in which science has exposed the absurdity of the race concept. For example, most people probably missed the recent landmark study of African genomes. It revealed that two tribesmen who have lived their entire lives within walking distance of each other are more genetically distant from one another than a typical “white” European is to a typical person from China or Japan.

Skin, hair, and facial features conspire with our eyes to fool our minds. The genes within us, however, tell a story that is very different from the lies of superficial traits on the surface. Genes reveal the truth about our origins, the journeys of early people who spread from Africa to fill the world, and the remarkably close kinship of all people today. Biological race categories make no sense when we peer beneath the skin to see humankind as it really is.

In my latest book “Race and Reality: What Everyone Should Know About Our Biological Diversity,” I present several thought experiments designed to help readers recognize that the concept of race is a cultural construction and not something nature imposed on us. Here are a couple:

Race and time.

If you send a “white” Irishman back to the United States in the early 1800s a funny thing would happen. He wouldn’t be white anymore. Everything about him would be identical but his race would change because the US racial identification rules have changed over time. Racial identity is determined by culture, not nature.

The real lineup.

Imagine if we lined up every human alive today, single file, arranged from lightest to darkest. On one end we would have the darkest person on the planet and on the other end we would place the lightest-skinned person. We could inspect this line for a thousand years and never discover a naturally occurring border between one “race” and another. It would become obvious to us very quickly that humankind is far too blended to support the existence of distinct categories based on colour, hair type and facial features.

This still may feel wrong to many people because of the imagined lineup of a dark African, a light-skinned European, and, say, a typical Chinese person. The striking observable differences between these three carefully chosen samples would seem to prove the existence of at least three biological races. But this is a misleading scenario because the world’s population cannot be reduced to a three-person lineup. It’s an absurd presentation that offers no honest reflection of the real human species. It would be like standing a seven-foot man next to a five-foot man and then claiming that their contrasting heights establish that we are a two-race species, one tall and one short. But we all know that would be absurd. Why? Because we know that there is every possible height in between the short and tall man. Imagining a natural border between them would be silly. The same reasoning should apply to any attempt to separate human race groups based on observable physical traits.

One very interesting lady.

A beautiful Haitian woman I dated during my university days had the bizarre ability to change her race. When she was in the United States attending university she was “black” but when she went home to Haiti she became “white”. How can this be if race is about fixed physical traits and ancestry stretching back thousands of years? It could happen because races are not natural or logical categories. They are human inventions based on the made-up rules and customs of whatever society one happens to be standing in at the moment. My friend was “white” in Haiti because in that culture even a small amount of noticeable white-European ancestry means “white”. Whereas in the United States the criteria is reversed. America’s “one-drop rule” traditionally has meant that even a small amount of noticeable black-African ancestry means the person is “black”. Neither country is right or more sensible about this than the other. They are just different. It can be done either way because racial groups are not based on anything other than the whims of culture.

It is clear that race belief is a game of our making and not something nature imposed upon us. Sure, biological diversity is real and of course we don’t all look alike. But there is no justification for placing vast numbers of human beings into rigid categories and then pretending that these groupings determine what these people can and cannot do. The sooner we become aware of what science has revealed about our ancestry and kinship, the sooner we can put the illogical and dangerous belief in races behind us.

Guy is the author of “Race and Reality: What Everyone Should Know about Our Biological Diversity” and         “50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God.” Contact Guy at guyfeedback@gmail.com