In 1950, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) announced that all humans belong to the same species and that race is not a biological reality.
UNESCO made the announcement based on the findings of an international panel of Anthropologists, Geneticists, Sociologists, and Psychologists.
By that time, a great deal of evidence had accumulated to support this conclusion. The scientists who were involved, were those who had conducted research and were most knowledgeable about the topic of human variation.
But that notwithstanding, the issue created a controversy. Scientists continued to work in order to further explore the issue. Later, the American Anthropological Association and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, gathered scientific data to justify UNESCO’s assertion. However, this would not solve the controversy.
Long before this public proclamation by UNESCO, the famous German-American anthropologist, Franz Boas had opposed the concept of scientific racism in the late 19th Century. Scientific racism is the idea that race is a biological concept, and that human behavior is best understood through the typology of biological characteristics.
In a series of groundbreaking studies of skeletal anatomy, Boas showed that cranial shape and size was highly malleable depending on environmental factors such as health and nutrition. In contrast to these findings, racial anthropologists claimed that head shape is a stable racial trait. Boas also worked to demonstrate that differences in human behavior are not primarily determined by innate biological dispositions, but are largely the result of cultural differences acquired through social learning. In this way, Boas introduced culture as the primary concept for describing differences in behavior between human groups, and as the central analytical concept of anthropology.
Today, the majority of researchers involved in the study of human variation agree that biological races do not exist among humans. By using modern scientific techniques and logic, researchers say their scientific fact that race does not exist is as valid and true as the fact that the earth is round and revolves around the sun. However, researchers agree that ethnicity does exist, and that should not be confused with race. In the medical field, researchers say a DNA test can tell someone what their ethnic makeup is, but it cannot tell the race of the person. This therefore makes the whole issue of race some sort of mythology, as it cannot be proven by observation and empirical evidence.
Recent studies have also proved that humans have been migrating since Homo sapiens evolved some 200,000 years ago. This migration has not been in one direction; instead, humans have traveled back and forth. As a result, the human genes have been mixing since it evolved. Also, it is said the human genetic structure looks complex and intermixed.
On the TestTube Plus, Trace Dominguez, a journalist with a keen interest in human variation, explores the human evolution story. In the past, he explored how the modern man came into being. But in this episode of his show, he explores how race has played a part in human existence, despite the scientific notion that it does not exist.
He explains that the concept of race as we understand it (and often discuss it) is a product of social context. In the United States, slavery and the Civil War forced the society to come up with a specific social context of what made a person “white” versus what made a person “black”.
Even outside the US, different countries around the world define race in completely different ways. And they often contradict the racial classifications commonly used in the US.
An enthusiastic Dominguez digs beyond the usual scope to deliver details, developments and opinions on advanced topics like genetics, AI, and Mars exploration. Just stay focused and watch the conversation with an independent mind, and learn more about the controversial topic.
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This Article (Understanding Human Variations: Science Reveals Race Does Not Actually Exist [Video]) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and AnonHQ.com
Science has evolved since the 50s, and maybe so should Anonymous. Modern humans are a hybrid specie, as Homo Sapiens interbred with neanderthals, denisovans, etc. So we all belong to the same specie, but we also belong to different races. That some people connect race with racism is their problem. Besides, where does culture derive from, if not from genes and, to some extent, different environmental factors?
And what the heck is this?
“By using modern scientific techniques and logic, researchers say their scientific fact that race does not exist is as valid and true as the fact that the earth is round and revolves around the sun.”
Dudes, stick to hacking and activism. You don’t have to nitpick on every subject you come across.
Your bad, S.
Also this, and related science papers published in Nature and elsewhere :
->http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/07/14/1089694407514.html
Eg. ->https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=o4y7kIEAAAAJ&cstart=20&pagesize=80&citation_for_view=o4y7kIEAAAAJ:blknAaTinKkC
Further:
Also :
British scientific journal: Nature -most prestigious scientific journal in the English language world:
”
Editor’s summary
The emergence of agriculture is thought to have caused many of the evolutionary changes in human physiology evident in the fossil record. Precisely which changes it is hard to say in the absence of a baseline — a record of human physiology just before the advent of farming. We may now have that in the form of a genome of a Mesolithic hunter-gatherer from Spain, described by Carles Lalueza-Fox and colleagues this week. The genes of this male, who lived around 7,000 years ago, had more in common with ancient genomes from Siberia than with other Europeans, suggesting a wide if thinly spread genetic continuity across Eurasia. He would have been lactose intolerant and less able to digest starchy foods than Neolithic farming people, suggesting that these changes came in with agriculture. He would also have had the unusual combination of dark skin and blue eyes, suggesting that in Mesolithic times, the transition to a lighter, more modern European skin tone was incomplete and that changes in eye colour came first.
” –>http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v507/n7491/full/nature12960.html
Catching up with this, belatedly. –white supremacists so full of it, nonsense; by comparison with this European-ethnicity-origin science effectively critical of fallacies of white skin colour supremacy.
*Top quality ‘white’ people’s science, evidences, many published science articles, do not agree with white skin colour supremacists’ trash-talk bigotry, toxic fallacies.
Simpler version if this story, from summary of the above Nature (journal) scientific paper by the BBC:->http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-25885519
Further: ->http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v513/n7518/full/nature13673.html
”
Editor’s Summary:
By sequencing and comparing the genomes of nine ancient Europeans that bridge the transition to agriculture in Europe between 8,000 and 7,000 years ago, David Reich and colleagues show that most present-day Europeans derive from at least three highly differentiated populations — west European hunter-gatherers, ancient north Eurasians (related to Upper Palaeolithic Siberians) and early European farmers of mainly Near Eastern origin. They further propose that early European farmers had about 44% ancestry from a ‘basal Eurasian’ population that split before the diversification of other non-African lineages. These results raise interesting new questions, for instance that of where and when the Near Eastern farmers mixed with European hunter-gatherers to produce the early European farmers.
“
You’re a fucking basic ass bitch. Race is a social context imparted by social groups on other social groups (i.e. Chinese vs Koreans). Ethnicity is the genetic variance that gives this species it’s physical differences that some (correctly or not) use to lump groups of our species together along with geographical or cultural differences. While ethnicity is as specific as each individual and can be traced back through DNA across generations like a biological blueprint, race is a general determinant from outdated labels assigned often without regard to ethnicity in certain populations. This study points to a societal root of culture as influential, where as blueprints determine the structure of an individual being. A good example would be “German Jews” vs “the master race”. One need only look as far as the Asian continent to see the context that enthicity is given in the “race” assignment. Despite sharing common ancestry, pan Asian countries often are described as “racially diverse” in terms of geographical dispersion of ethnically similar societies (from the chzec republic and Russia to China). However, DNA studies reveal less than 2% differences in DNA among the span of our species, and even less among certain continental inhabitants. In short, it is no more nit picky to say that race is a myth than to point out that the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself. Distinctions are important, but perhaps more important is the importance we place on them. Interesting no?
^ Says the guy nitpicking.
Nit picking means taking pieces of information to represent a point that does not include the whole of the information. Being as general as possible I simply tried to compare the differences between a “racial” description and a more accurate “ethnic” distinction of individuals. Should I have included sources to explain the pan Asian shared heritage? Should I have included historical examples of racial categorizing that ignores ethnic identities? Should I have further fleshed out what this article articulates but -Sebastian- fails to grasp? No… You’ve got eyes and an Internet connection.
~”fuck it, let’s go bowling”~
No division into races = no formation of subspecies. No formation of subspecies = no creation of species. In other words, humans would not be here if there were no races. It’s not rocket science. It’s evolutionary science, the cornerstone of modern biology.
Stick to hacktivism, Anonymous, that at least is something you understand.