ABSTRACT
Humans did not evolve to be racist, and racism is not an evolved psychological adaptation. For psychological traits to be considered adaptations, the problems that they are designed to solve must have been recurrent throughout the evolutionary history of the human lineage for long enough to have been shaped by natural selection. This is not likely to have been the case with racism, since only technologies developed relatively recently (in evolutionary time scale) have allowed humans to travel the types of long distances that enable members of differing racial groups to interact (Stringer & McKie, 1997). It is thus unlikely that natural selection shaped the human mind to produce a psychological system that was designed to promote racially biased cognition, attitudes, and behaviors. More plausibly, the mind generates mental representations of the self and others that might be described as racist as an epiphenomenon, or “by-product,” of mechanisms evolved to solve other categories of adaptive challenges in our evolutionary past.
