BIOL 305 Lecture Notes - Lecture 25: Genetic Drift, Heritability, Heart
7 Jun 2019
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Species vs race: species: able to mate and produce viable offspring, race: members of the same species that are distinctive in some way racial classifications are arbitrary and often non-functional. Failure in trying to categorize humans into races: huge variation in the number of races. Blumenbach"s racial classifications (1795: scientific approach, based on coherence of traits -> but racial traits are not coherent, eg: trying to divide humans by blood type: varies across longitude, trying to divine using skin colour: varies across latitude. Race is not a scientifically useful scheme for categorizing human diversity: biological traits do not cohere enough to make race useful, typical use of race is a set of social and cultural categories. Variation in humans relative to other species: fairly homogenous relative to other primates, randomly chosen pair of humans are much more similar than 2 primates.
