Race and ethnicity are two ways in which we categorize humans. Ethnicities are social groups that you belong to based largely on nationality or cultural traditions like religions. These are valid categories that represent traditions and norms within a specific culture or subculture. What about race? As you will learn from our lecture this week, anthropologists do not recognize race as a valid way to categorize humans, particularly from a biological.
Race is a social and cultural construct according to anthropologists. Racial categories are created by their cultures, which also provide meaning and value to those distinctions. We can’t see race in our DNA or bones, but we can certainly see how race impacts us socially and economically.
This week, we will investigate some of the evidence against "race as biology", and see how culturally created race categories impact people all over the world. As you can imagine, racism is one of the most prevalent consequences of racial ideologies. We will focus on understanding the evolution of skin color since this is a primary "racial indicator" in many countries.
In this week we met the members of the genus Homo, our genus. We watched over millions of years as species changed in response to climate and environmental factors. Our species is quite special. We are so intelligent and so innovative, that we have certainly outsmarted natural selection in some ways. For instance, if you have light skin you don’t have to stay in the north, you can simply wear sunscreen. Or if you are tall with long limbs, you don’t have to avoid cold climates, you can simply wear warm clothes. This has caused many people to assume that our species has stopped evolving, but is this true? It certainly is not!
For this discussion, please research one example of how our species is still currently evolving. It must be a real example based on a scholarly reading. By scholarly I prefer peer reviewed from the library, but it must at least have an author and a reference list.
- How does the article suggest we are evolving?
- What evidence do they present?
- Explain why we would be evolving in this way.
- Provide a proper reference in APA for your resource
