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13: Race and Human Variation

  • Page ID
    158806
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    Learning Objectives

    • Review the illustrious and (at times) troubling history of “race” concepts.
    • Recognize human diversity and evolution as the thematic roots of our discipline.
    • Critique earlier “race” concepts based on overall human diversity being lower compared to other species and human genetic variation being greater within a population than between populations.
    • Explain how biological variation in humans is distributed clinally and in accordance with both isolation-by-distance and Out-of-Africa models.
    • Identify phenotypic traits that reflect selective and neutral evolution.
    • Relate a more nuanced view of human variation with today’s ongoing bioanthropological research, implications for biomedical studies, applications in forensic anthropology, and sociopolitical/economic concerns.

    Image: Human Genetic Variation by P.eldar under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

    • 13.1: The Concept of Race
      Humans exhibit biological diversity. Cognitively, humans also have a natural desire to categorize objects and other humans in order to make sense of the world around them. Since the birth of the discipline of biological anthropology, we have been interested in studying how humans vary biologically and what the sources of this variation are. Before we tackle these big problems, this first begs the question: Why should we study human diversity?
    • 13.2: Human Variation in Biological Anthropology Today
      After 1950, replacing the concept of “race” as a unit of diversity was the “population.” This was outlined by those pioneering the "new physical anthropology". “Races” were then defined simply as populations that differ in the frequency of some gene or genes. Put another way, a population is a local interbreeding group with reduced gene flow between themselves and other groups of humans. Members of the same population may be expected to share many genetic traits.
    • 13.3: Talking About Human Biological Variation
      Utilizing races to describe human biological variation is not accurate or productive. Using a select few hundred genetic loci, or perhaps a number of phenotypic traits, it may be possible to assign individuals to geographic ancestry. Improvements in the number of markers, the genetic technologies used to study variation, and the number of worldwide populations sampled have led to more nuanced understandings of human diversity.
    • 13.4: End of Chapter Review
      Discussion questions and key term definitions.
    • 13.5: Meet the Authors

     


    This page titled 13: Race and Human Variation is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Beth Shook, Katie Nelson, Kelsie Aguilera, & Lara Braff, Eds. (Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.