˗ˏˋ race and variation ´ˎ˗ Flashcards
what is human variation?
group differences involving variation in biology, physiology, body chemistry, behavior, and culture.
what is ethnicity?
a term used commonly in an interchangeable way with the term race, complicated because how different people define this term depends on the qualities and characteristics they use to assign a label or identity to themselves and/or others (which may include aspects of family background, skin color, language(s) spoken, religion, physical proportions, behavior and temperament, etc.).
what is race?
- a major division of the human species based on particular physical characteristics.
- the biological origin of a group of people, or ancestry.
- the fact or condition of belonging to a racial division or group, or the social qualities associated with this.
- a group of people sharing the same culture and language.
- any group of people or things with a common feature or features.
a population within a species that is distinct in some way, especially a subspecies.
what is racism?
any action or belief that discriminates against someone based on perceived differences in race or ethnicity, and the characteristics, qualities, or abilities believed to be specific to a race that is inferior to another in some way.
what is prejudice?
an unjustified attitude toward an individual or group not based on reason, whether that is positive and showing preference for one group of people over another or negative and resulting in harm or injury to others.
what is the book of gates (1550 B.C.E. and 1077 B.C.E)?
- divided egyptians into four categories: aamu (asiatics),
nehesu (nubians), reth (egyptians), themehu (libyans)/ - distinctions were not rooted in science.
- believed these categories were distinguishable by their skin color, place of origin, and even behavioral traits.
what is pliny the elder (23‒79 C.E.)?
- wrote about different groupings of people in his encyclopedia naturalis historian.
- organized humans into three categories: civilized peoples (romans), barbarians, and monstrous Individuals.
what is the ladder?
- all objects, plants, animals, humans, and celestial bodies in a hierarchy.
- order of existential importance.
- humans near the top, beneath divine beings.
what does the bible say about race?
- all humankind descends from one of three sons of noah: shem (the ancestor to all olive-skinned asians), japheth (the ancestor to pale-skinned europeans), and ham (the ancestor to darker-skinned africans).
- distinctions were based on behavioral traits and skin color.
- recent work in historiography and linguistics suggest that the branches of “hamites,” “japhethites,” and “shemites” may also relate to the formation of three independent language groups sometime between 1000 and 3000 B.C.E.
what is the scientific revolution?
a period between the 1400s and 1600s when substantial shifts occurred in the social, technological, and philosophical sense, when a scientific method based on the collection of empirical evidence through experimentation was emphasized and inductive reasoning used to test hypotheses and interpret their results.
who is carl linnaeus?
- wrote systema naturae (1758).
- developed binomial nomenclature.
- first to group humans with apes and monkeys.
what is essentialism?
a belief or view that an entity, organism, or human grouping has a specific set of characteristics that are fundamentally necessary to its being and classification into definitive categories.
what is the age of discovery?
a period between the late 1400s and late 1700s when european explorers and ships sailed extensively across the globe in pursuit of new trading routes and territorial conquest.
who is johann friedrich blumenbach (1752‒1840)?
- classified humans into five races based on his observations of cranial form variation as well as skin color.
- some ways he was on the right track (believing that human variation is a gradient), he also believed erroneously that human “subspecies” were “degenerated” or “transformed” varieties of an ancestral caucasian or european race.
what is polygenic?
- having many different ancestries, as in older theories about human origins that involved multiple traditional groupings of humans evolving concurrently in different parts of the world before they merged into one species through interbreeding and/or intergroup warfare.
- these earlier suggestions have now been overwhelmed by insurmountable evidence for a single origin of the human species in africa (see the “out-of-africa model”).
