Chapter 7 Additional Resources

What Can Evolutionary Theory Tell Us about Human Variation?

Websites

  • “What Is Race?”.Race – The Power of an Illusion California Newsreel.
    https://www.pbs.org/race/000_General/000_00-Home.htm
    The Public Broadcasting Service has a website designed to serve as a companion to its three-part documentary Race—The Power of an Illusion. The website includes various information and activities including links to further readings.
  • McMaster Ancient DNA Centre
    http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/adna/
    McMaster University’s Ancient DNA Centre extracts and analyzes ancient DNA from skeletal samples to reconstruct ancient genomes of various hominins and to explore the origins of various pathogens.

Videos

Arledge, Elizabeth. 2001. NOVA: Cracking the Code of Life. Clear Blue Sky Productions. DVD, 120 min.

This film explores the Human Genome Project and its goal of reconstructing the human genome. It asks a central question that drives the project: now that the human genome has been decoded, how can and should it be interpreted and applied? As such, it addresses the practical outcomes and uses of this data, including its medical and health-related implications.

California Newsreel (PBS). 2009. “The Difference Between Us”. Race—the Power of an Illusion series. (YouTube video, 57:02) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXEV0tqox9k

This video challenges the mainstream assumption that race is an innate or an ascribed biological category. Race is revealed as a social or cultural category that is conveniently deployed and manipulated to fit particular political goals. While race is not “real” biologically, it nevertheless has very “real” and tangible social consequences.

Spencer Wells (2002) “The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey” (YouTube Video 1:53:37)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_xTG6VXlIQ

Video provides an overview of human genetic development that dispels views of race and explains how we are more tightly related genetically than we realize.

“Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly: Ethics of Genetic Testing.” 2001. PBS video, 7:32. http://video.pbs.org/video/2328708218/.

A number of private and publicly funded genetic testing companies have emerged within the last two decades. For a fee, many people can now be tested to determine their susceptibility to particular genetic diseases, to determine the likelihood of passing “defective” genes onto their children, or to find out if a fetus has inherited a particular disorder. However, all of these possibilities raise ethical issues concerning the use and ownership of such information. This video explores the synthesis between genetic testing and ethical debates surrounding genetic data.

Books and Articles

Ali-Khan, Sara E., Tomasz Krakowski, Rabia Tahir, and Abdallah S. Daar. 2011. “The Use of Race, Ethnicity and Ancestry in Human Genetic Research.” Hugo 5 (1–4): 47–63.

The authors examine how the ideas of “race,” “ethnicity,” and “ancestry” have been used in publications related to genetic research within journals identified as being of high impact in Canada and the United States. Comparing the period from 2001–2004 to 2008–2009, they find that there has been improvement in terms of how these concepts have been defined, but that there is still inconsistency and a lack of consideration for the socio-ethical impacts of the reporting of this kind of research.

Billinger, Michael S. 2007. "Another Look at Ethnicity as a Biological Concept: Moving Anthropology Beyond the Race Concept." Critique of Anthropology. 27 (1): 5-35.

Montagu referred to race as ‘man’s most dangerous myth,’ while Lévi-Strauss called it ‘the original sin of anthropology.’ Although persuasive arguments against the concept of race were made throughout the 20th century, race remains a particular problem for anthropologists who deal in the classification of human populations. In looking at the historical classification of race, Billinger shows the consistent assertion by anthropologists of the futility of the race concept, owing to the in-common genotype and that modern day movement of populations has watered down even the concept of ‘populations’ or biocultural constructions of ethnicity.

Cartmill, Matt. 1998. “The Status of the Race Concept in Physical Anthropology.” American Anthropologist 100 (3): 651–660.

Cartmill notes that there are hereditary differences among human beings that are—in some cases—associated with general geographic areas. Physical problems may be more common in some areas or among some ethnic groups. However, Cartmill stresses that these facts do not provide scholarly support for the race concept—especially for racial classifications based on ethnic-group membership. Race is a cultural, not biological, construct.

Cole, Johnnetta Betsch. 2011. “Personal Reflections on Race, Racism, and Anthropology.” AnthroNotes 32(1): 1–3. https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/anthronotesnat3212011hunt

The author is the director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African Art and offers here her personal reflections on the impact of race. She discusses legal racial segregation that she saw during a childhood growing up in Jacksonville, Florida. She takes an explicitly anthropological view of the racism that was and is around her, noting that racism is learned, not transmitted genetically.

de la Pena, Carolyn Thomas. 2006. “Bleaching the Ethiopian”: Desegregating Race and Technology through Early X-Ray Experiments". Technology and Culture. 47:27-55.

Dr. Henry Pancoast, December 9, 1903 and criticizing the use of x-rays to treat cancer, lupus and keloids, and denounced any idea that x-rays could be used to turn black skin white, even though this was a side effect for some treatments. Subsequent studies and popular media in the U.S. would raise the alarm that blackness could be changed to white ones – highlighting the issues of race in the eye of technologies that were constructed as “race-free.”

Gould, Stephen J., and Niles Eldredge. 1993. “Punctuated Equilibrium Comes of Age.” Nature 366: 223–227.

Gould and Eldredge reflect on their theory of punctuated equilibrium, then 21 years old. They note that, despite intense controversies that met the theory when it was first developed, it is now widely accepted. The authors explore the relationship between punctuated equilibrium and Darwin’s theory of natural selection, noting that the latter was tied in with Lyell’s concept of gradualism.

Gravlee, C. 2009. “How Race Becomes Biology: Embodiment and Social Inequality.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology. 139(1): 47–57.

In this special journal issue on race, Gravlee adopts a socio-historical approach to explore how the social category of race was erroneously yet systematically granted scientific validation. Gravlee is particularly in demonstrating why race is inconsistent with long histories of human migration and interaction, and he argues that there is no biological basis for the “race” concept.

Hinterberger, Amy. 2012. “Publics and Populations: The Politics of Ancestry and Exchange in Genome Science.” Science as Culture 21 (4): 528–549.

This article looks at the politics of genome studies in Quebec. The author focuses on a project called Cartagene, which aims to produce a genetic map of the province in order to assist medical research. She questions the effects of the project’s emphasis on genetic similarity and difference within different segments of the Quebec population, which contrasts French Canadians to Quebecers from other racial and ethnic backgrounds. More specifically, she looks at how this creates certain distinct publics and works to naturalize existing perceptions of national belonging.

Jablonski, Nina G. 2011. “Why Human Skin Comes in Colors.” AnthroNotes 32(1): 7–10.

http://sites.psu.edu/ninajablonski/wp-content/uploads/sites/10224/2014/02/Jablonski.2011.AnthroNotes.7ff.pdf

———. 2012. Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color. Berkeley: University of California Press.

The above resources are invaluable for helping students understand why there is variation in human skin colour. Jablonski begins her article by noting that skin pigmentation is an excellent example of evolution by natural selection. Because of this, skin colours—both light and dark—have evolved more than once in human history and are independent of one another. Therefore, the use of skin colour to define “races” is particularly absurd.

Jantz, Richard L. 2004. “The Meaning and Consequences of Morphological Variation.” Paper presented at the session “Exploring the Nature of Human Biological Diversity: Myth v. Reality” at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting on November 21, 2003, Chicago, Illinois. Available online at: http://www.understandingrace.com/resources/pdf/myth_reality/jantz.pdf

Jantz focuses on variation in human cranial morphology in this paper because of historical connections to race and racism. He begins by examining a study Franz Boas conducted on immigrant populations. Boas demonstrated that cranial morphology was not tied to biological race, and posited that body morphology was affected by environmental influences. Jantz shows that other factors, including place of origin, may also have influenced cranial morphology. He notes that environmental changes that affect cranial morphology cannot erase genetic variation, at least in the case where different groups live in similar environments.

Kakaliouras, Ann M. 2010. “Race is… Only as Race Does: Essentialism and Ethnicity in (Bio)Archaeology and Skeletal Biology.” The SAA Archaeological Record 10(3): 16–20.

Kakaliouras discusses how anthropologists who work with skeletal biology are often singled out for criticism in both scholarly and public discussions over race and racialism. This situation partly arises because of the high profile nature of anthropologists who are involved with forensic cases when the “race” of an individual is identified based on their physical remains. Other conflicts are related to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act issues, particularly whether or when anthropologists should examine American Indian skeletal remains.

Long, Jeffrey C. 2004. “Human Genetic Variation: The Mechanisms and Results of Microevolution.” Paper presented at the session “Exploring the Nature of Human Biological Diversity: Myth v. Reality” at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting on November 21, 2003, Chicago, Illinois. Available online at http://www.understandingrace.com/resources/pdf/myth_reality/long.pdf

Rapid advances in science have greatly expanded our knowledge about genetic diversity in recent years. The author examines how our detailed knowledge of the human genome influences our understanding of genetic—and genomic—diversity. Details of the structure of DNA and the human genome are provided in a technical, but accessible, fashion. Four mechanisms of evolutionary change are examined in terms of genetic variation: random sampling, mutation, exchange of members, and natural selection.

Marks, Jonathan. 2011. The Alternative Introduction to Biological Anthropology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Marks’ text is a highly readable and up-to-date text that raises a number of ethical issues and other critical debates in biological anthropology that are often ignored in other introductory, first-year textbooks. Marks also discusses the contributions of biological anthropologists to contemporary understandings of science.

Pálsson, Gísli. 2008. “Genomic Anthropology: Coming in from the Cold?” Current Anthropology 49 (4): 545–568.

This article addresses the importance of collaboration and the value of taking into account local understandings of subjectivity and relatedness when undertaking genomic research amongst Indigenous peoples, focusing on research with Inuit populations in Canada and Greenland. Examining the Inuit Genetic History Project, which the author co-organized, the paper considers the benefits and challenges of collaborative research in this field.

Sauer, Norman J. 1992. “Forensic Anthropology and the Concept of Race: If Races Don’t Exist, Why are Forensic Anthropologists so Good at Identifying Them?” Social Science and Medicine 34(2): 107–111.

This article looks at the continued use of the concept of “race” within forensic anthropology, despite widespread consensus that races do not exist. Sauer argues that the use of “race” by forensic anthropologists does not indicate support for the concept of race as a biological reality, but rather allows them to predict the socially constructed racial categories that individuals would likely have been assigned to when they were alive.

Templeton, Alan R. 1998. “Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective.” American Anthropologist 100 (3): 632–650.

Templeton discusses why human “races” cannot be seen as subspecies within Homo sapiens. Population movements and gene flow show that there are no distinct evolutionary lineages within humans. This is true today but also extending back to the origin of our species. All of humanity shares a common, long-term evolutionary trajectory.

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