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Templeton's paper, "Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective," is published in the fall 1998 issue of American Anthropologist, an issue almost exclusively devoted to race. The new editor-in-chief of American Anthropologist is Robert W. Sussman, Ph.D., professor of anthropology in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

Sussman and his guest editor for this issue, Faye Harrison, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at the University of South Carolina, have enlisted the talents and expertise of anthropologists across the discipline's four subdivisions -- biological, socio-cultural, linguistics and archeological anthropology -- plus Templeton and literary essayist Gerald L. Early, Ph.D., Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, to provide a renewed perspective on race, a topic that historically is linked closely to anthropology.

"The folk concept of race in America is so ingrained as being biologically based and scientific that it is difficult to make people see otherwise," says Sussman, a biological anthropologist. "We live on the one-drop racial division -- if you have one drop of black or Native American blood, you are considered black or Native American, but that doesn't cover one's physical characteristics. Templeton's paper shows that if we were forced to divide people into groups using biological traits, we'd be in real trouble. Simple divisions are next to impossible to make scientifically, yet we have developed simplistic ways of dividing people socially."