What if race wasn't fictional?

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A very small portion of the world's population would own half of the world's wealth. They would control the earth's natural resources and they would ruin democracy by funding warmongering candidates.

Hmmm... Why does that sound familiar?

Your divisions of humans into haves and have-nots is not useful to biology unfortunately. It's a socially constructed illusion you've been suckered into.

You got it all wrong.

In this world, a class would something like Paladin, Druid, Mage...etc.

We don't know why neanderthals became extinct. They were probably an at risk population to begin with. When populations are small it does not take much for them to be wiped out. One group could have succumb to an illness while another might have experienced a famine. War between different groups could have broken out over scarce resources. At one point populations might have become small enough that remaining neanderthals might have just joined human groups and that might be why neanderthal DNA is found in humans today. Neanderthals occupied a significantly smaller area than humans. That alone causes them to be more susceptible to exctinction. Humans seem to have a tendency to spread out.

It isn't exactly useful for biology, but it is useful for sociology.

People from different social classes have the same hardware, but they use different software. We all have the same neurological structure, but some of us become addicted to power and some of us do not.

Race isn't useful from a biological perspective, though it is useful from a sociological perspective. The races are all born with the same biological hardware, but we are treated differently by society and so we acquire different software.

There would be kings and peasants too.

That's what most medieval fantasy epics get wrong. A realistic medieval fantasy epic would be pretty depressing because most people would be covered in faeces.

Well that was a boring troll. Time for a serious comment.

This doesn't mean what you think it means DMK. It certainly doesn't mean:



I will try to explain using dogs. There are hundreds of breeds of dogs, all of them with different "hardware", different abilities, different looks, different talents, different behavioural patterns. If humans decided to group all these hundreds of breeds into five main categories, roughly based on looks, this is "race". A geneticist notes that there is actually huge genetic variation (hello?) within these broad categories and notes quite correctly that this is not useful to him.

You can craft a technically accurate (but misleading) statement saying that the concept of race is not useful from a biological (or at least a genetic) standpoint.
You cannot say there is no meaningful biological difference between human ethnic groups (scientists are very careful not to say this) or proclaim every ethnic group has the same talents and abilities.
You can't even say the races have the same biological hardware. Clumsy as race is from the point of view of a geneticist, somehow humans have created visual racial groupings with significant measurable differences - actually if you do the maths, it would be proof-of-God levels of bizarre if there were no differences on aggregate.

It's a sneaky trap you've fallen into, crafted by mad egalitarian anti-reality propagandists, if you seek truth about the world, be sure to avoid similar ones in future.

I saw that trailer, and said "Oh no, they're making a Shadowrun movie. With Will Smith in it. Oh no, it looks awful. Oh...'Bright'?? I guess Catalyst thought their movie sounded awful too, and denied them the rights to use the Shadowrun trademarks." =)

Unfortunately, it did poorly (understatement), which really hurts the chances of a real Shadowrun movie ever coming out. At least we will always have Johnny Mnemonic.

Apparently, their genetic coding may not be entirely lost:

I noted that they interbred with us.

The Neanderthals and Denisovans are simply a subpopulation of Homo Sapiens separated by 100.000 yrs otherwise they would not be able to breed and produce the current population of Homo sapiens in Asia, America and Europe

How do you get from meaningful biological difference to talents and abilities? Meaningful biological differences I know are things like increased prevalence of sickle cell anaemia in some populations exposed to malaria because being heterozygous for that variant of the hemoglobin gene confers resistance.

You do know that the original question was a hypothetical world in which there could be no dispute about differences existing? You promptly turn it into a dispute about difference in this world. Why?

Using DNA, Africans are pure homo sapiens. Europeans are interbred with Neanderthal. Basque people are interbred with another unidentified DNA source. Chinese are interbred with another dissimilar hominid. Okinawans interbred with yet another. There are more hominims than that (Australia, Caucuses, Java, etc.). The skeletons of these hominids contained no DNA from Homo sapiens. DNA results from human origins studies reveal updated results every year. Humans are one species, but not one breed.
Do any of these hominins still exist in the world? Bigfoot, Yeti, Leprechauns, Trolls?

Woof!

It is believed that Africans also interbred with earlier species of humans but because of the environmental conditions there are no remains of these species.

Not with me!...
I'm not that desperate...