Biological Aspects of Race Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Biological Aspects of Race - Term Paper Example Societies have universally accepted this idea that, naturally, humans fall into racial groups. It is true that different people have had mixed ancestry crossing racial boundaries, but there are also undeniably clear physical differences between various populations of the world. The physical differences may reflect genetic differences used by researchers to pinpoint people’s geographical origins. Genes reflect geography certainly. Human genetic differences, on the other hand, do not fall along boundaries that could define race. Without defined boundaries that can guide us, the human racial categories continue to be the product of the human choice. Our definition of race reflects not only biology but culture, history and politics (Cadena, 2000). Human racial groups do compose breeding units that initially were geographical and at times temporarily isolated. However, they could interbreed, producing viable offspring that are also within the species of Homo sapiens. The molecular techniques that have been developed recently to examine genetic differences between populations and individuals such as DNA have produced clear evidence that population differences exist within the human species but racial differences do not. Race should therefore not be equated with ethnicity that is a self-described category with the three components of ancestry, culture and language. These components have affinities to some ancestral groups. The genetic differences that exist between groups, therefore, do not correspond to some historical racial categories (Sarich and Frank, 2004).