Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
to find mates fromwithin the same group.
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Several scholars contributed to this major shift in
the discipline, including Ashley Montagu (a Boas student) and Frank Livingstone (a Harvard
student who took classes from Hooton). These scholars argued that race does not exist
because it does not explain the scope of human variation (
Livingstone, 1962
), it ignores evolu-
tionary forces, and it is imbued with social meaning (Montagu, 1964;
Washburn, 1964
).
Further, Comas (1961), in refute of biological determinism, additionally emphasized the
importance that the environment plays in influencing trait expression.
While the discipline was changing focus, change nevertheless came slow.
Littlefield et al.
(1982)
demonstrated that the majority of physical anthropology textbooks published between
1932 and 1969 took the position that human beings were divided into races. Interestingly, this
trend began to decrease after 1970, with more texts arguing that races do not exist (
Littlefield
et al., 1982
). Despite this gradual development over the past 40 years,
Caspari (2003)
contends
that while the discipline may have discarded the race concept idea, certain aspects of racial
thinking continue. This includes essentialism (viewing each racial taxonomic category as
having certain essential features that define it which are due to a separate evolutionary
history) and cladistic thinking (viewing the relationships between races as clades, with
each race separate from the others having its own branch on a tree diagram) (Caspari, 2003).
While this is appropriate for illustrating evolutionary relationships between species,
which by definition are reproductively isolated from each other, separating human groups
into clades is not an appropriate way to explain human variation because (1) all modern
humans belong to the same species and therefore we successfully mate with each other;
and (2) it suggests that different human groups had separate evolutionary histories (evolving
from separate ancestors), which is not the case. Today biological anthropologists study pop-
ulations rather than races, but the definition of “population” still often incorporates these
essentialist and cladistic aspects (
Caspari, 2003
). Future research should move beyond this
type of antiquated thinking.
Human Variation
Recently, the American Journal of Physical Anthropology published a special issue on race and
human variation (2009, 139(1): 1
e
107). The papers cover the range of agreement and
disagreement regarding how the field currently conceptualizes human variation, in terms
of its differences and patterns. The papers demonstrate that general agreement centers
around several points: (1) variation exists within and between populations; (2) the environ-
ment, including culture and geography, has exerted considerable influence on variation; (3)
race is neither a useful nor correct way to describe populations; and (4) research in human
variation holds implications for society and fields such as forensics and medicine (
Edgar
and Hunley, 2009
).
Conversely, disagreement centers on how the geographic patterns of variation are orga-
nized. One school of thought is that human variation is clinally distributed, and that more
genetic variation exists within a population than between all populations (
Livingstone, 1962;
Lewontin, 1972; Edgar and Hunley, 2009
). The concept of a cline was introduced by British
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This mate choice tendency is not absolute
d
all humans are members of the same species because there is,
has been, and will continue to be gene flow between populations.
