To this day, the only definite discovery ever made in anthropology is that human races do not exist: Grandpa's evolutionary anthropology was completely erroneous in its premises. The colour of one's skin and related ethnic tokens are informations of very little relevance when it comes to understand humans. This truism is always worth recalling: there are no biologically defined human groups. Homo Sapiens is peculiar in this respect: it is the only species of its kind.

How is it, then, that the human brain makes such tremendous use of this kind of information, and why does it put so much weight on them ? 'ethnical' features are perceived extremely early, and influence faces perception; they significantly bias a great proportion of social behaviors. everyone may know quite well that these features do not deserve attention, but this is entirely foreign to the matter, since the brain cannot refrain from processing this information, as though some ancient, deeply entrenched mechanism used the most discrete and irrelevant clues (be they biological or cultural) to spot 'the others'. Cultural devices that allow one group to distinguish from another group never fell out of fashion; think of the peculiar patterns of make-up in an indian tribe; think of Asby's Gangs of New York.

Many hypotheses have been put forward in explanation of Humans' 'racialist cognition' of ours: it might be that our Naive Biology, which conceives of animal species as immutable essences, whose few visible properties signal an underlying, invisible cluster of fundamental features) is meddling into our social brain; it might be a special faculty for discerning non-group-members, inherited from a history of group-selection.

Click here for a bibliography.