Essay On Race And Race

Race by definition is a group of people identified as distinct from other groups because of supposed physical or genetic traits shared by the group. However, most biologists and anthropologists do not recognize race as a biologically valid classification, in part because there is more genetic variation within groups than between groups (definition of race, n.d). In the United States, both scholars and the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the human species based on visible physical differences. However, traditional race concepts give an inaccurate picture of human variations which is indicative that each group has a significant level of uniqueness (Race and Human Variation).

The myths fused behavior and physical features together in the public mind, impeding our comprehension of both biological variations and cultural behavior, implying that both are genetically determined. Racial myths bear no relationship to the reality of human capabilities or behavior. Scientists today find that reliance on such folk beliefs about human differences in research has led to countless errors. At the end of the 20th century, we now understand that human cultural behavior is learned, conditioned into infants beginning at birth, and always subject to modification. No human is born with a built-in culture or language. Our temperaments, dispositions, and personalities, regardless of genetic propensities, are developed within sets of meanings and values that we call "culture." Studies of infant and early childhood learning and behavior attest to the reality of our cultures in forming who we are. It is a fundamental tenet of anthropological knowledge that all normal human beings have the capacity to learn any cultural behavior. The American experience with immigrants from hundreds of different languages and cultural backgrounds who have acquired some version of American culture traits and behavior is the clearest evidence of this fact. Moreover, people of all physical variations have learned different cultural behaviors and continue to do so as modern transportation moves millions of immigrants around the world (American Anthropological, n.d). Given these points, human genetic variations(n.d) is best described by isolation by distance which mean that individuals who have ancestry, in particular, geographic regions are more likely to share genes than those from disparate regions. This sharing of genes is facilitated for individuals by using multiple loci, particularly when they are examined at