Europeans thus represented a superior race. Racial categories are influenced by evolutionary processes through inheritance and selection. Social Darwinists believe racial differentiation makes for the improvement of races. Each group develops abilities that will be of most use in their particular environment and that some racial groups are further developed in the evolutionary scale. Berghe views both race and ethnicity as extensions of kinship and ethnic and racial sentiments, suggesting there is an interaction of genes, the physical environment, and culture that results in behavior, and that a phenotype is always the product of the interaction between the genotype and the environment.
Ethnicity therefore involves some notion of shared ancestry.
The first U.S. sociologist to provide a systematic analysis of race relations was Park. Racial categories exist because they serve the interests of the ruling classes and the true nature of the social system is not yet apparent to the workers. Bonacich sees ethnic conflict as a part of capitalism. Marxist Perspectives Marxists recognize a class-divided society as a result of capitalism. Individuals utilize physical and cultural differences in order to create categories for inclusion or exclusion.