In contrast, the race concept doesn’t work so well with humans. That’s because not only do humans live in a wide range of environments, they also travel back and forth between them. As a result, there’s a high degree of gene flow among people groups that make it hard to organize them into discrete categories.
Full Answer
Throughout the modern history, race has been used as a driving force to violence, hate and discrimination causing great division between people. According to the textbook, “race is an outdated creation of the human mind that attempts to simplify biological complexity by organizing it into categories” (Lewis, Jurmain, & Kilgore, 2013, p. 73).
Dec 13, 2015 · Why is “race” not a scientifically useful category? A) There is no distinct set of physical features that clearly define races. B) The term is too sensitive to be used in scientific studies. C) There would only be three or four races, which is not a useful level of categorization. D) Scientists are not interested in biological differences.
Why Race? • Race has no scientific basis – Race is not useful for reconstructing prehistoric migration • Race is a social construction – A political construction • European and American scholars created theories of race to justify slavery and Imperialism
Oct 02, 2019 · There is no valid race science because race is not a valid scientific concept. We do know that there are genetic traits that run through families, including certain diseases, and that in particularly closed communities these traits can become statistically concentrated. But these cases are exceptions, not rules.
Indeed, the surge in diabetes – a lifestyle disease – in India is largely because lifestyles have changed to become more sedentary and more full of fatty, sugary foods.
A "race" used to refer to a family or a tribe. The distinct social categories we use today – for example, "black" and "Caucasian", are fairly recent, no more than a few hundred years old. And some are even more recent than that, for instance, "coloured" as is used in some countries, or "Latino". What’s important to remember is ...
One is in everyday science, when racial categories are used inappropriately by researchers who implicitly accept the assumption that they are genetically meaningful, even when the genetic evidence says they are not. We see this play out in health research in particularly.
Q&A with Angela Saini, author of "Superior: The Return of Race Science". Race science has a dark history - but it is being resurrected in the 21st century. In her new book "Superior: The Return of Race Science" (Fourth Estate), award-winning author, and regular New Humanist contributor Angela Saini explores the concept of race, ...
The sickle-cell trait is believed to be protective against malaria. Thus, sickle-cell disease is at its highest frequency in West Africans and people of West African descent. But this trait is not common in other regions of Africa, where malaria is not as prevalent. Therefore, it is not an “African” disease.
Race is used widely in human biological research and clinical practice to elucidate the relationship between our ancestry and our genes. In the laboratory, race can be used to investigate disease-causing genes within and between populations, and, more generally to classify groups in studies of human populations.
In the first decades of the 20th century, race was defined by discrete types, the belief that one member of a race was thought to share the same physical and social traits with other members of that race.
HuffPost Science recently posed that question and others to the paper’s co-author, Michael Yudell, who is associate professor and chair of community health and prevention at the Dornsife School of Public Health at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
Race is a social construct, researchers say. If a team of scientists in Philadelphia and New York have their way, using race to categorize groups of people in biological and genetic research will be forever discontinued. The concept of race in such research is “problematic at best and harmful at worst,” the researchers argued in a new paper ...
Race, on the other hand, is a pattern-based concept that has led scientists and laypersons alike to draw conclusions about a hierarchical organization of humans, connecting an individual to a larger, preconceived, geographically circumscribed or socially constructed group.
Rosa Parks, known as as the “mother of the civil rights movement,” arriving at circuit court to be arraigned in the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956. In the 1950s, Dobzhansky was moved by factors, both internal and external to science, to call into question the utility of racial classifications.
Today, the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct without biological meaning. And yet, you might still open a study on genetics in a major scientific journal and find categories like "white" and "black" being used as biological variables.
More than 100 years ago, American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois was concerned that race was being used as a biological explanation for what he understood to be social and cultural differences between different populations of people. He spoke out against the idea of "white" and "black" as discrete groups, claiming that these distinctions ignored ...
Mindy Fullilove, a psychiatrist at Columbia University, thinks the changes proposed in the Science article are "badly needed.". Fullilove noted that by some laws in the United States, people with one black ancestor of 32 might be called "black," but their 31 other ancestors are also important in influencing their health.
One classic example is the dehumanization of millions of Jewish people by Germany and other European nations during the 1930s and 40s, and the colonization and slavery of Africans by European and North American nations is another.
Michael Hadjiargyrou is chair of the Department of Life Sciences at the New York Institute of Technology. He contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights .
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