Single (sub)species then and now: An examination of the nonracial perspective of C. Loring Brace.

C. Loring Brace's writings on the concept of race have been among the most influential within anthropology. A review of the development of Brace's perspective on race shows that his philosophical approaches to fossil and modern human variation are consistent and integrated. Brace's views on race are compared with those of Ashley Montagu and Frank Livingstone, who also proposed eliminating "race" from anthropology, and with those of Stanley Garn and Alice Brues, who accepted "racial" subdivisions of humans. Carleton Coon's writings are more divergent; the aftermath of the publication of his Origin of Races highlights significant political tensions of the 1960s that intersected with scientific changes in anthropology emanating from the Evolutionary Synthesis. Recent forensic and "no race" positions are compared to explore their differences and the possibility of reconciliation, and the role of Brace and others in combating proposals of intellectual differences among human groups is discussed. While a spectrum of anthropological opinion regarding race exists, the commonalities are sufficient to allow valuable, united commentary emphasizing the complexity of modern human cultural and biological variation.