CAS AN 101 Chapter Notes - Chapter 6: Caucasian Race, Sunburn, Human Skin Color
Document Summary
6. 1 race: a discredited concept in biology classification, which is now widely abandoned, and the current trend to seek explanations for specific differences. Human biological diversity has been studied from two primary approaches: racial. Racial classifications rely on phenotypical (detectable) traits, skin color in particular, of a theoretical subdivision of the human species. The three supposed subspecies were called the three great races: white, black, and yellow or caucasoid, negroid, and mongoloid, to sound more scientific. Many populations do not fit into the oversimplified categories, and classifications based on a trait or set of traits is practically impossible because they vary so much within each population. Greater genetic variation exists among people within the traditional races than between them, which suggests that all humans are genetically uniform overall and descend from a recent common ancestor. Human groups are too recently related and have not been isolated enough to form subspecies groups.
