According to one popular version of the race narrative, natural scientific concepts of race were conceptualized, in the 18th to early 20th century, such to imply discrete categories; and human “races,” were, accordingly, imaged to have significant discontinuities until post-World War II anthropologists, such as Frank Livingstone (1962), came to realize that human variation was relatively continuous, a fact which, the story goes, demonstrated that human “races,” as traditionally understood, did not exist — instead, only “populations” do. Anyone sufficiently familiar with actual 18th to early 20th century discourses on the matter, would find this tale outlandish. They would recall, for example, Wallace’s (1864) account, in “The origin of human races and the antiquity of man deduced from the theory of natural selection,” of the competing pre-evolutionary views about human variation:
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