Race?: Debunking a Scientific MythRace has provided the rationale and excuse for some of the worst atrocities in human history. Yet, according to many biologists, physical anthropologists, and geneticists, there is no valid scientific justification for the concept of race. To be more precise, although there is clearly some physical basis for the variations that underlie perceptions of race, clear boundaries among “races” remain highly elusive from a purely biological standpoint. Differences among human populations that people intuitively view as “racial” are not only superficial but are also of astonishingly recent origin. In this intriguing and highly accessible book, physical anthropologist Ian Tattersall and geneticist Rob DeSalle, both senior scholars from the American Museum of Natural History, explain what human races actually are—and are not—and place them within the wider perspective of natural diversity. They explain that the relative isolation of local populations of the newly evolved human species during the last Ice Age—when Homo sapiens was spreading across the world from an African point of origin—has now begun to reverse itself, as differentiated human populations come back into contact and interbreed. Indeed, the authors suggest that all of the variety seen outside of Africa seems to have both accumulated and started reintegrating within only the last 50,000 or 60,000 years—the blink of an eye, from an evolutionary perspective. The overarching message of Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth is that scientifically speaking, there is nothing special about racial variation within the human species. These distinctions result from the working of entirely mundane evolutionary processes, such as those encountered in other organisms. |
Contents
| 1 | |
Chapter 2 Species Patterns and Evolution | 57 |
Chapter 3 Human Evolution and Dispersal | 101 |
Chapter 4 Is Race a Biological Problem? | 144 |
Chapter 5 Race in Ancestry Forensics and Disease | 158 |
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Common terms and phrases
actually adaptation admixture African Americans allele anatomy ancestors ancestry anthropologist apes approach Asian barcode biological biologists brain Caucasian century chapter chromosome classification complex cultural Darwin differentiation disease diversity DNA barcode DNA sequence ethnic groups Europeans evidence evolution evolutionary evolved existence fossil frequencies genes geneticist geographic GWAS haplotypes HapMap hominid Homo erectus Homo ergaster Homo heidelbergensis Homo sapiens huge human genome human populations human races human variation individuals interbreeding involved kind lactase Lewontin lineages Linnaeus living look males markers Mayr’s migration million years ago modern human molecular mtDNA natural selection Neanderthals notion organisms origin patterns percent phylogenetic physical planet polygenist population genetics pretty problem proteins race~based racial recent regions reintegration result samples scientific scientists simply single SNPs social speciation species concept structure subspecies suggest taxonomists taxonomy things thousand years ago tion tool tree variety What’s Y chromosome