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ARCH 131 (HUMAN ORIGIN) BIOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY FINAL EXAM COMPLETE RATED A
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ARCH 131 (HUMAN ORIGIN) BIOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY FINAL EXAM COMPLETE RATED A
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ARCH 131 (HUMAN ORIGIN) BIOLOGICALANTHROPOLOGY FINAL EXAM COMPLETE
RATED A
Carleton Coon
✔✔1960s-1980s categorization of human races:
• Caucasoid - white
• Mongoloid - Asian
• Australoid - Australasians
• Negroid - Africans
• Capoid - bushmen
The idea of intrinsic differences between 'races' was a product of the
notion of Social Evolution:
... the idea that cultures evolve like organisms and that this results in
'more advanced' forms.
Saw 5 major races
Early 2000s still this idea that you werent just looking at groups that
looked different, but there is also genetically determined charactersitics
including behavioural can cultural differences between these groups
People had idea that evolution is directional
Primitive and advanced cultures = idea of social evolution
Useful for europeans
Argued european culture was more advacned
,The misunderstanding of evolution as being directional supported
colonial ideas, help lesser culutres
led to the concept of biological determinism
Cultural variability was seen as biologically determined and, therefore,
inherited in the same way that physical characteristics were.
The idea that people of different geographic origin have biologically
determined differences - that some are superior to others - is the
definition of racism.
Individuals behaviour was tired into their racial history
Culutres partly genetically determined
Think that others with geographical differnces are lesser than themselves
eugenics
✔✔This belief in superior and inferior groups and individuals among
humans led to eugenics movements in most countries.
Eugenics - artifical selection, if we want human race to be better then we
need to pay attention to whose having kids
Common medical wisdom into 1900s, widespread
Eugenics changed to scoial biology, only became bad in the 60s
1930 sexual sterilization, for the good of people
1990s lawsuit ended it
,Misundestanding of reproduction and genetics, and races
Race and Intelligence?
✔✔The most damaging misconception that has accompanied the
assertion that humans can be divided up into visibly discrete groups is
that they are inherently different in complex human characteristics like
cognitive abilities...
There is no evidence that complex characteristics like intelligence vary
with skin colour or geographic origin.
Bell curve book
Argued you could lump people in this curve based on their intelligance
Scientific community shut this down
IQ scores meaningless
Patterns overlap with socioeconomic background not race
Mostly made us stuff
Spured some research
No relationship between race and intelligence
The Concept of "Race" Today
✔✔The most common and prevalent use is still based mainly on
perceived geographic phenotypes:
"Race" = visibly distinct groups associated with broad geographic
regions.
People still use race in this term
, Distinctive traits in these groups
The Problem with 'race' and the Normative View
✔✔The normative view = members of different groups are characterized
by discrete traits and so can be easily divided into discrete
groups/categories.
Like stereotyping
Idea you can take a group of things and break them into discrete
cateogries
Draw lines between them based on traits
Sometimes this view is not acceptable
Discrete traits but in the triats don't really exist
Traits don't occur discretely, continnuous distribuiton = clinal
Studying different people around the world, anthropologists were seeing
continuous (not discrete) distributions of traits across "racial"
boundaries and between geographic regions.
All the traits we can see (and those that are not visible, like blood type)
have a clinal distribution - they grade across geographic space in either
frequency or form.
Skin colour doesn't follow discrete boundaries
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