Race and Human Diversity

Modern Humans

• Modern Humans (Homo sapiens) display considerable variation in skin color, facial features, hair form…etc.

Race and Human Diversity

• Clearly we look different. And these differences are due to random mutations.

• Many of the physical differences are due to natural selection. Different environments favor different traits.

Skin color geographically

Variation

• Some variation is due to natural selection…other variations might be due to sexual selection.

• If you have physical characteristics that are considered beautiful and desirable you have more chance of having offspring.

Race vs. Ethnicity

• Ethnicity is about shared cultural and social characteristics.

• Race is about shared physical characteristics

Origins of Race in the West

• Thinking about race originates largely in Europe during the 17th and 18th Century.

Racial “Types”

Race and Racism

• There was never a time when the idea of race, as formulated in 17th and 18th Century, wasn’t racist.

• Races were always arranged in hierarchies…with Europeans inevitably at the top.

Race and Human Diversity

• One question anthropologists have asked is this: just how different are the groups we call races?

Fraternal Twin Daughters

Problems with Race

• Most genetic diversity is between any two individuals…only about 5% is between groups.

Problems with Race

• No trait or gene distinguishes all the members of one “race” from all the members of another “race.”

So what is race?

• If we can’t find a clear biological definition for race, what is it?

Race is a social construct

• Race is a folk taxonomy, a system of classification based, not on science, but on historical and cultural ideas.