Contributions In Bryan Sykes's The Seven Daughters Of Eve

A statement adopted by the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association that posits racial differences, while often deemed by society to be genetic in nature, are actually social in nature. The statement supports this assertion by using genetic studies that have found genetic difference is greater within racial groups rather than between different groups. The statement from the AAA also uses the history of the construction of race, and its link to colonialism and enslavement; to further its claim that race is a social construction, not a collection of genetic differences.

Mary Orr’s “The Wisdom of Eve” is a short, but very unpredictable story about a new life for Eve Harrington and about the individual she is perceived to be by her appearance however, the true identity of Eve that is hidden within is projected throughout the story. The narrator of this story opens up with “I shall call her Eve Harrington because this is not her name, though the Eve part of the alias is not unapt, considering the original’s snaky activities in a once-peaceful garden” (Orr 284). Eve Harrington made her way to stardom but in a very unusual way. Eve Harrington’s “idol” Margola Cranston and Cranston’s closes friend who narrates the story are of the few people who fell for Eve’s manipulative ways. Eve is describe an awkward and unappealing

Additionally, there is a substantial lack of real evidence that the divisions between groups that we often specify as “races” actually have specific genetic identities. The extreme presence of ambiguity central to races, and the plentiful variations within these races point towards evidence that even two randomly selected citizens of European descent could be more genetically related to a person of Asian descent than they are to each other.

However, the video Race: The Power of Illusion presents significant evidence refuting the biological theories of race. Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory instructor Scott Bronson and several high school students from different ethnicities conducted personal genetic research exploring biological race theory. Students’ typed their blood, compared skin tones and took DNA samples. After sending the samples to a genetics lab, Bronson asked students whom they might expect to be more genetically similar to in the workshop. The consensus of the students was that they would each be genetically comparable to others in the group with similar physical attributes.

Race is a hot topic in our world. We all think we know what race is. After all, we are constantly being bombarded with it whether it be from media, politics, or sports. The truth is that race does not revolve around the idea of biological traits or characteristics. It is a modern concept that we as a society have created to divide people into categories. I will argue that race is socially constructed from a biological, political history, and sociological standpoint, and how it may impact other areas of our society.

The idea of race in society is truly that; an idea. However, one of the first things one notices about another human is their perceived race. Often, incorrect assumptions are made about a person, based on his race. In addition, many believe race can be determined by biological factors. However, there is no biological basis to race. Without a doubt, genes play a role in our skin, hair, and eye color; however, there are not certain genes present in an entire race and not another. Race is not clear cut; if one were to travel from either pole to the equator, a specific location could not be identified to separate any two races.

This article written by Mark Nathan Cohen, who is an anthropology professor in the State University of New York; talks about how race does not define human diversity. In the article, he also mentions that in school students learn the definition of race based on “biological variation” and not based on their culture. The professor Cohen says that studies on human family tree that were based on their genetic analysis of traits do not show any relation of who those traits belong to. He gives an example by stating that even skin color is not a god indicator of who it relates to because the “traits occur independently in several different branches of the human family.”

At some point of our lives, we’ve all wondered who our ancestors are, and what might

Ensuing Jefferson’s doctrine, racial science developed rapidly with the accrual of select Northern scientists whose goal was to further the boundaries of ethnology and phrenology. The most influential of these scientists were Samuel George Morton and his two cohorts Josiah Nott and Louis Agassiz; Morton launched a study

“Think about race in its universality. Where is your measurement device? There is no way to measure race. We sometimes do it by skin color, other people may do it by hair texture - other people may have the dividing lines different in terms of skin color. What is black in the United States is not what 's black in Brazil or what 's black in South Africa.”-Dr.Goodman, Race: The Power of an Illusion

The book I chose to read for this assignment was Expecting Adam, authored by Martha Beck, which is based on a true story written in 1999. Martha and John Beck are a young couple living in Cambridge, Massachusetts pursing their doctoral degrees. Martha writes the book from when their daughter, Katie, is a toddler (18 months old) and they are expecting their second child, Adam. She tells about the nine months from conception to the birth of her child, Adam, who has Down syndrome and her life changing values and experiences.

The PBS series “Race: The Power of an Illusion” effectively works to expose race as a social construct and deconstructs the false notions that race is a biological marker. The series first discusses that all human beings originated from Africa but dispersed about 70,000 years ago to various places in the world. As a result of this migration, people were spread to different locations throughout the world with different environmental conditions that affected their physical traits. It was many years after the migration in which people began to display these new physical traits such as slanted eyes, fair skin, and differing hair textures. While the series notes the physical changes that occurred during the migration it also emphasizes that race while it may seem apparent in skin color and other physical features has no real biological basis.

The meaning, significance, and definition of race have been debated for centuries. Historical race concepts have varied across time and cultures, creating scientific, social, and political controversy. Of course, today’s definition varies from the scientific racism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that justified slavery and later, Jim Crow laws in the early twentieth. It is also different from the genetic inferiority argument that was present at the wake of the civil rights movement. However, despite the constantly shifting concepts, there seems to be one constant that has provided a foundation for ideas towards race: race is a matter of visually observable attributes such as skin color, facial features, and other self-evident

The Williams Model is the most prominent model for analysing the relationship between race and health. Conceptualisation of race is important and can have implications in society in the form of racism (Williams, 1997). The historical definition of race was on a biological basis, but it was later found that there was a slight biological difference between different races (Bhopal, 2004). At this time, there was a stigma around those with different physical appearances and this contributed to racism, where people were ‘othered’. Now, the more favoured definition of race is the human classification of people based on social origins such as ancestry and social interactions between them (Bhopal, 2004). Despite the more

Due to scientist’s interest in human genetic variation, human racial classification became a focus of scientific investigation by evolutionary biologists attempting to categorize individual humans based on presumed patterns of biological difference. Scientists had hoped to classify humans in the same way that they classified other species. These scientists attached hierarchical titles to these categorizations; they claimed that differences in skin color, physiognomy, and geography were associated with scientifically measurable differences in character, aptitude, and temperament (Smedley, 1998). However, studies supporting these claims have been unsound (Gould, 1981). Categorization of humans by racial and ethnic groups continues, as researchers must remain aware of this historical legacy of the science of heredity as the genomic era continues to develop (Bonham et al., 2005).