Race: The Use Of Human Biological Variation

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Among contemporary anthropologists and population geneticists it has become increasingly clear that the use of race as a categorization tool for human biological variation is problematic. There are numerous problems that can be found with using race in this way. Race does not adequately describe human variation as human variation is non-concordant, there is more in-group variation than out-group variation, and human variation is clinal. These problems make it difficult to argue that races adequately describe human biological variation. The first problem that race has in adequately describing human biological variation is that human variation is non-concordant. This means that specific traits are distributed independently rather than as distinct racial sets. This means that a classification system that is based on skin color and one that is based on hair color would produce very different groupings. As this is the case it becomes difficult to use race in order to generalize biological variation. …show more content…
This indicates that a person does not necessarily share a higher degree of genetic similarity with people of the same race as people of different races. This point was displayed well in the documentary “Race- The Power of Illusion” when it showed the results of genetic tests on a group of students. The students expected to be most similar to those of the same race, however this expectation was proven wrong. This fact alone makes the use of race as a way of describing groups within human variation fundamentally unsound. If a person can be more similar genetically to a person of a different race than with someone of their own, then races hold no value as a way to genetically categorize

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