<p><a href="%5Burl=http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1062164994-post205.html%5D#205%5B/url%5D">quote</a> ...How is race a recent human invention? People of different races have existed for thousand of years...
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<p>All quotes below are from the American Association of Behavioral and Social Sciences: The</a> Anthropological Perspective on Race: An Histrorical Overview. Considering that our species (Homo Sapiens) has been around for about 90,000</a> years, the biological misconception/social concept of 'race' is recent:</p>
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An Historical Perspective on the Concept of Race in Biological Anthropology</p>
<p>A scientific interest in racial variation, as far as western society is concerned, dates to the time of the ancient Greeks, who associated racial characteristics with the environment. Today, we know that many human biological characteristics are environmentally influenced.</p>
<p>Linneaus (1806) was the first scientist to classify humanity into different types. In the mid 1700s he sorted Homo sapiens into a few finite categories, which were stereotyped phenotypically and behaviorally. For example, he described the European type as fair and brawny, blue eyed, inventive, and governed by laws; the Asian type was sooty, black eyed, melancholic, haughty, and governed by opinion. </p>
<p>Johann Blumenbach (1795), later in the 18th century, coined the term Caucasian, after a skull from the Caucasus Mountains of central Eurasia. He described the skull as perfectly formed and Europeans came to be called Caucasians because they were thought to be descendents of the "perfect" people from the Caucasus area. As the unknown world was explored and different indigenous people encountered, naturalists, the scientists of the time, described their physical characteristics and classified different populations as to their relatedness. This typological approach, description and classification, was to be a focus of biological anthropology for a century and a half, even into the genetic age, the 20th century. Races were described in terms of their biological patterns or norms and modern humanity was classified in terms of the number of races and how they were biologically related to one another. Some naturalists recognized a handful of racial categories, while others put the number at considerably more.</p>
<p>During the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, the scientific literature on human races was filled with such schemes; often they were subtly, and sometimes overtly, racist. Populations were viewed in terms of their external phenotypic characteristics; arguments involved how many races existed, and how they were related to one another. There was no interest in the significance of the biological variation within Homo sapiens. Racial characteristics and human races themselves were viewed as static entities. Primary emphasis was put on norms and modes, usually of externally visible physical characteristics--on types; individual biological variation within groups was not considered, nor typically was biochemical or serological variation. Biological variation within a population, manifest in any human group, was ignored.</p>
<p>That perspective persisted into the 1940s, after evolutionary theory had become accepted as the underlying cause of biological variation in living things, and well after biological anthropologists began to focus on genetic variation among modern human populations. Biological anthropologists were slow to adopt evolution as the fundamental paradigm for their science. Today evolution is the theoretical foundation upon which all of biological anthropology rests.</p>
<p>Coon, Garn, and Birdsell (1950) infused evolutionary thinking into the consideration of human races by biological anthropologists in the early 1950s. While their work contained the traditional classification of human races, it was the first to view biological variations and human populations as dynamic entities. It was also the first to consider human races in terms of the evolutionary significance of global patterns of biological variation. Human races were understood to be populations that change in terms of their biological patterns and those patterns were understood to be the result of adaptation, among other evolutionary processes. Hulse’s (1962) classic paper, Race as an Evolutionary Episode, reflected the new way that biological anthropologists viewed human races. </p>
<p>That is the basic fabric of human population biology today. Patterns of human biological variation across populations are viewed with evolutionary and biocultural lenses. Patterns of cultural variation, ecological parameters, and hereditary qualities result in the fact that people differ biological, both within and among populations...
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<p><a href="%5Burl=http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1062164994-post205.html%5D#205%5B/url%5D">quote</a> ...How is race not about biology? Are skin tone and physical features not biological in nature? Of course they are.</p>
<p>And what does it mean that the idea of race is "not found in nature?" ...
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Traditionally, biological anthropologists have been the scientists that studied the nature of human racial variation. Until 50 years ago, the study of modern human biological variation focused on describing and classifying human races, which were viewed as static entities. About 50 years ago, evolutionary thinking influenced the bioanthropological focus on human races; study of their evolutionary dynamics and the significance of physical variation predominated. Scientists began seriously questioning the validity of biological races among humanity in the 1980s; by the mid 1990s most anthropologists and some professionals in other social and behavioral sciences had concluded that the biological concept of race had no scientific validity when applied to living Homo sapiens. Rather, human races are now understood to be social constructs. Cross-cultural views of race reveal no common cognitive framework to a consideration of human races and human racial variation. The criteria by which individuals are assigned to a particular racial category differ widely across cultures. Some cultures have relatively complex cognitive systems of reckoning races and others like our own, relatively simple ones. Thus, the modern anthropological view of human "races" represents an important pedagogical challenge to social and behavioral scientists...
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<p>More links to reseach can be found at: The</a> Unhyphenated Amercian including the American</a> Anthropological Association Statement on "Race":
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...With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups...
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<p>Finally, post</a> #103 in "Race" in College Applications FAQ & Discussion may be food for thought:</p>