Height (in the case of Pygmies) is indeed another interesting example. It’s instantly visible and can outweigh other phenotypic attributes. However, skin color still looks like a greater divider than height. African Pygmies in the U.S. will be classified with “blacks” and not with midgets. Also, Pygmies and Saamis are not “races.” Discrimination, of course, can take different forms.

“German, I am already aware of Peter Frost’s hypothesis. His hypothesis has nothing to do with your contention that there wouldn’t be widespread race talk if such extreme pigmentation differences hadn’t evolved in humans, and he says nothing about that.”

I never claimed he did. I said that I married his (and Manning’s – read him, too) hypothesis of sexual selection affecting skin pigmentation and manifesting itself in some very specific and quantifiable behaviors (e.g., polygyny) and the idea that the extremes of skin pigmentation are at the center of public race talk.

“Your overemphasis on White-Black skin color differences to the disadvantage of all other SALIENT racial differences is a completely artificial and a too US-centric attitude.”

There’s nothing artificial about it: only in the U.S. the extremely black populations from West Africa (the intrinsic part of the agricultural, highly polygynous belt in Africa) co-exist with extremely white (practicing long-term monogamy, as Manning noticed) populations from (dominantly northern and central) Europe. And the racial tensions along the black-white divide are unparalleled. Russia, on the contrary, is the country with extreme differences in the strength of an eyefold, but the “tensions” between Caucasoid Russians and Mongoloid populations in Siberia or the Caspian Sea (the Kalmyks) are nowhere near those between whites and blacks in the U.S. In racial slur, of course, there are references to “narrow-eyed people” but it’s never part of common parlance.

I’m aware that other factors such as local political and economic organization play their part in offsetting the direct cognitive impact of phenotypic differences but I do believe that most salient, long-term and geographically wide-spread phenotypic differences (such as skin color) are not purely natural adaptations. This is further connected to my larger thinking that, say, American Indians are not as black as Sub-Saharan Africans not because they are new comers to the New World but because the rate of polygyny is much lower there than in Africa. And Sub-Saharan Africans are as black as they are not because they’ve lived under UV light longer than any other human population but because the darkest of them show world highest polygyny rates (with the UV light component affecting all equatorial populations similarly). But this is beyond the scope of this string.

and also knowledge about the history of racial classifications

Go tell Pygmies or Samis that they never suffered racial discrimination from similarly-coloured groups.

Nuristan means “land of light,” whereas before Afghans called it Kafiristan, “land of the unbelievers”

FWIW, even non-Afghan Pakistanis still casually call it “Kafiristan” in everyday conversation.

What I have written in this thread isn’t dogma or speculation, but expressions of knowledge and observations about various human societies worldwide (not just the US) and also logic.

You haven’t done either. And if you prefer to spend your time not on hypotheses and theories but on dogmas and speculations, you’re most welcome to do so.

And now you request me to join you in your hypothetical world. Sorry, but I have more important things to do.

Okay, I got it. Yes, it’s possible. Theoretically. My point was, though, that, in practice, the fact that there are two polar opposites in the skin color variation, namely Blacks and Whites, was conditioned by sociocultural factors (in addition to natural factors), and it’s precisely those two sexual-selection driven racial characteristics that achieve such a salience in the public eye. Could you give an example of a hypothesis that ties eyefolds or other visible racial markers to sexual selection or other behavioral adaptations?

If every race had similar pigmentation averages and ranges, then facial features would be more salient than today and would be the sole primary criterion in classifying races, or at least primary races. So races would certainly still exist, and with them, race talk, and not just among a small group of professionals, but very widespread: down to the lowest levels of the societies.

Bioignoramus, I don’t know what would have happened if Google was invented 100 years ago, but the U.S. is the arena in which the relative perceptual salience of different phenotypes has played out. Prior to the settlement of the Americas, the extremes of human phenotypic variation didn’t mingle so freely together for such as long period of time.

Sure. But it’s only because of the skin color that the race discourse propagated so easily in the public sphere. Even in a most politically correct environment we’re allowed to say “blacks” and “whites.” Skin color leads the race conversation. Without these marked differences, the race issue would’ve stayed within a narrow group of human diversity connoisseurs. And it’s precisely the extreme values of this key racial attribute that are likely sexual-selection driven in Europe and Africa.

Cannot agree with these. Races weren’t primarily defined only based on pigmentation, but also features of the skull, especially facial features.