Testing Common Misconceptions about the Nature of Human Racial Variation

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Social Science, Teaching Resources, United States on 2019-02-19 19:29Z by Steven

Testing Common Misconceptions about the Nature of Human Racial Variation

The American Biology Teacher
Volume 79 Number 7 (September 2017)
pages 538-543
DOI: 10.1525/abt.2017.79.7.538

Amelia R. Hubbard, Associate Professor
Department of Sociology and Anthropology
Wright State University, Dayton Ohio

Race is a hot-button topic in American society, but one that needs to be addressed in the biological science curriculum. This paper examines how college students in a large introductory course came to understand race through the exploration of four key concepts about the nature of human biological and genetic variation. Using clicker data collected from four courses (n = 296), change in starting and ending understanding of content was compared using paired t-tests and mean difference scores. Results indicate statistically significant improvement in student understanding of common fallacies of the “biological race concept” after a single exposure to content.

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‘Race is not biological, it’s a social construct’: Scientists say ethnicity does NOT determine health risks – and doctors who say so are just fueling ‘racial prejudice’

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive on 2019-02-19 14:24Z by Steven

‘Race is not biological, it’s a social construct’: Scientists say ethnicity does NOT determine health risks – and doctors who say so are just fueling ‘racial prejudice’

The Daily Mail
2019-02-16

Mia De Graaf, Health Editor
Washington, D.C.


Researchers presented papers at a conference this week on race and genetics. This graph, presented by Brian Donovan at BSCS Science Learning says we often see race as disparate circles in a Venn diagram. Actually, he and other say, it’s more like circles on top of each other.
  • New research adds fuel to the firey debate about race and genetics
  • Experts told a conference we should not use race as a risk factor for health
  • They say differences between racial groups are minimal and differences within groups are huge

Race is not a legitimate category to use in medicine, top scientists declared at the world’s biggest science conference this week.

In the US, African Americans are told to watch out for hypertension, white people for multiple sclerosis, Asians for heart disease, Hispanics for diabetes, and so on.

But on Friday, leading biologists said those general warnings are based on ‘bad science’ and do no more than fuel ‘racial prejudice’.

Among them, anthropologist Keith Hunley of the University of New Mexico presented a new map of genomes around the world, finding few differences between the clusters of racial groups that are often cited in medical research.

By lumping people into distinct broad categories, he and others warned, we risk ‘hyping’ certain inherited health risks for some and underestimating them for others – while sewing division, stereotypes and ignorance within society…

‘We have this notion that there are variants that are unique to certain groups, that there are genes that are unique to certain groups. And that’s almost never the case,’ Dr Hunley said as he described his presented his paper at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference…

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