User:Maunus/Racesources


 * "Therefore the biological race concept is not equivalent to human variation; it has three components that make it a specific way of interpreting variation: essentialism (which, as discussed earlier, is intrinsic to taxonomies and itself may have a biological basis); biological determinism; and the assumption that human intraspecific relationships are phylogenetic. Biological determinism, as a link between race and racism, has been ardently and effectively addressed by the field since the 1960s, partially in reaction to expressions of racism from the scientific community and to the ways in which they were politically used (Coon 1962; Gates 1944; Garrett 1961; George 1962; Putnam 1962). However, the essentialism of the race concept is more difficult to dispel, and this fact would be made even more difficult if the pattern of human relationships really is phylogenetic." (Caspari, Rachel. 2010. "Deconstructing Race: Racial Thinking, Geographic Variation, and Implications for Biological Anthropology" in A Companion to Biological Anthropology Clark Spencer Larsen (ed.), Wiley-Blackwell p. 112)

Results indicate that none of these models completely fits the data and that a combination of isolation by distance and nested regions seemed to fit the data best. Moreover, while most genetic studies involving the apportionment of human variation have focused on neutral loci, the pattern of spread of recent alleles under selection may also contribute to our understanding of population elationships (Hawks et al. 2007; Coop et al. 2009), including the evolution and spread of mutations of regional adaptive significance. The genetic data to date indicate that there is a clinal pattern for both neutral and adaptive genetic variation, which is affected by variable population expansions and population structure. This complexity undermines the taxonomic assumptions of the race concept." (Caspari p 115)
 * "At issue for the race concept is how significant population structure is in characterizing relationships between local populations, and whether those relationships should be considered taxonomic. Recent studies have underscored the complexities of the causes of human genetic diversity, complexity caused by variation in gene flow and selection which undermines the taxonomic assumption. Since the genetics of populations are based on population histories (including large-scale migrations, population fissioning and reticulation, marriage patterns and an assortment of other social variables) and, perhaps most importantly, on natural selection, the apportionment of diversity is extremely variable. This was underscored in a recent study where the genetic diversity at a number of neutral microsatellite loci was compared to computer simulations of the genetic variation predicted for different demographic models: isolation by distance, independent regions, serial fissions and nested regions (Hunley et al. 2009).