Biology and Race - Research Paper Example

For example, it may be very easy to distinguish between a Chinese and an American, but it may not be equally easy to tell a Chinese from a Japanese. The site denies any subspecies of humans and considers all humans as belonging to the same specie. This can be understood as one of many factors that differentiate between humans and animals. Since all human beings belong to the same species, all human beings carry similar genes. People belonging to a certain race differ in all characteristics of their genes.

Accordingly, the concept of variation between races is meaningless as there is a lot of genetic diversity among people of the same race. Despite lack of any biological significance of race, it is such an important social phenomenon that different people of one society belonging to different races have different levels of access to opportunities. My reaction to “quick facts about race” The quick facts about race provide a quick insight into the concept of race, its origin, its sociological impact and the perceptions associated with it.

While most of the quick facts seem correct, there are a few controversial or debatable facts as they didn’t appeal to me as such. For example, one of the quick facts mentioned in the site denies the race having a genetic basis. This essentially means that no person on Earth has any biological significance of race. . “Yet common definitions of race do sometimes work well to divide groups according to genetically determined propensities for certain diseases. Sickle cell disease is usually found among people of largely African or Mediterranean descent, for instance, whereas cystic fibrosis is far more common among those of European ancestry” (Bamshad and Olson, 2003).

Another quick fact that I didn’t feel agreeing with was that people in the past have not been enslaved on the basis of their belongingness to a certain race, but because they were conquered by other nations. Literature review suggests that race has conventionally one of the strongest predictors of slavery. People in the past have been enslaved because of their belongingness to a certain race. “Following the arrival of twenty Africans aboard a Dutch man-of-war in Virginia in 1619, the face of American slavery began to change from the "tawny" Indian to the "blackamoor" African in the years between 1650 and 1750” (Becker, 1999).

Summary of the key findings The site begins the discussion by questioning the audiences if they see a difference between race and ethnicity given people of some nations can be identified by the way they look. Although there are many factors that differentiate between race and ethnicity, yet the two terms also have some factors in common. Race and ethnicity “carry complex connotations that reflect culture, history, socioeconomics and political status, as well as a variably important connection to ancestral geographic origins” (Collins, 2004, p. 513). The site declares race as a concept that marks the present age as this concept was inexistent in ancient ages.

The site proposes that the concept of race in the US is just as old as the concept of