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Christian Thalmann scripsit: > It's unquestioned that all contemporary humans belong > to the same subspecies, that being homo sapiens sapiens. > I was under the impression that "race" was an even lower > taxonomic level of distinction, e.g. the dog races, > which all belong to the subspecies canis lupus familiaris. Unless things have changed recently, C. familiaris is reckoned a separate species. Anyhow, all classifications below the species level are a matter of degree -- and dispute. As far as genetic differentiation goes, the DNA distance between the orangutans on Borneo and the basically identical-looking orangs on Sumatra is greater than that of the entire human-chimp-bonobo-gorilla clade. Yet all orangs constitute a single species. -- You escaped them by the will-death John Cowan and the Way of the Black Wheel. jcowan@hidden.email I could not. --Great-Souled Sam http://www.ccil.org/~cowan