Human Races example essay topic
It has a biological meaning, and a cultural reality. Biologically, it means the same thing as subspecies, and cultural categories to classify and account for human diversity. The conditions required for sub specification are as follows: 1.) Some degree of acceptable population isolation with a limited gene flow 2.) Environments different enough to promote adaptive selection in different directions 3.) Genetic variation among the populations, and 4.) Enough time! No human population has been isolated long enough; cultural endogamy changes due to political, ethnic, and religious ideology domination; Gene flow is the norm for humans; Culture is our adaptive mechanism for survival and is the major reason for adaptation as humans for the last 100,000 years; and the bottom line is that we aren t that genetically diverse as a species. About 75 of all human genes are monomorphic (having only one allele); that is, all humans are identical for three-quarters of the human genome (The total genetic endowment for our species as human beings) This is a higher percentage than lets say a chimpanzee.
The genetic variation that does exist - the remaining 25 percent of our genes multiple alleles is actually fairly evenly distributed. If some great cataclysm left only Africans alive, that remnant of the human species would still retain 93 percent of the total genetic variation of the former population of the species, although certain traits, like skin color, would have different average expressions throughout the entire human population as a whole. The human species fails in theory to meet the criteria for division into subspecies or biologically different races of man. No real boundaries exist between any of the trait expressions and skin color does not change abruptly as a world map may imply to someone. Color changes gradually in populations closer or father away from the equator of the Earth. It does not come in neat little packages with clear geographic limits.
Neither does blood type. At the biological level, then, human variation exists, but human races do not. The idea of race can be cultural, and is, used to make prejudgments about people and to determine a person's place in society, often without regard to that person's individuality or their personal characteristics. 32 c.