Week two Quiz

Polymorphic

For characteristics controlled by a single gene, different versions of that gene, known as alleles, also mediate variation. - Such traits are called polymorphic (meaning many shapes). - Our blood types - determined by the alleles for types A, B, and O blood - are an example of polymorphism and may appear in any of for distinct phenotypic forms (A, B, O, and AB).

What would be a better explanation why some people are more likely to have a certain gene variation

Geography, a certain variation might develop through time due to the environment

Melanin

a dark pigment in the skin's outer layer. - Melanin protect skin against damaging ultraviolet solar radiation. - It confers less susceptibility to skin cancers and sunburn on dark-skinned peoples compared to those with less melanin. - Dark skin also helps to prevent the destruction of certain vitamins under intense exposure to sunlight. - Because the highest concentrations of dark-skinned people tend to be found in tropical regions of the world, it appears that natural selection has favored heavily pigmented skin as a protection against exposure where ultraviolet radiation is most constant.

The Nazi doctrine justified, on supposed what grounds

biological grounds, political repression and extermination.

The Nuremberg race laws of 1935

codified the superiority of the Aryan race and the inferiority of the Gypsy and Jewish races.

Ota Benga

non-Caucasians were considered lesser species, they were often treated as such. Ota Benga's story exemplifies this point of view. He was a Twa Pygmy man, captured in a raid in the Congo and 'owned' by a North American businessman, Samuel Verner. Benga's owner wanted exotic 'savages' to exhibit in the U.S. In 1904, Ota and other Twa were shipped to be exhibited at the St. Louis World's Fair. Throngs of people came to see displays of indigenous peoples. After the fair, the Twa were returned home, and Benga helped Verner gather artifacts to sell to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Benga came back to the U.S. with Verner, who then went bankrupt. Benga was stranded and was taken to the Bronx Zoo and exhibited in the monkey house with an Orangutan. Eventually, he could roam the zoo, but visitors harassed him. In time, he was given to an orphanage. He was 4 feet, 11 inches tall and considered to be a boy, though he was 23 or 24. When he learned he would never return home, he killed himself. The racist display at the Bronx Zoo was by no means unique. Benga's tragic life was the manifestation of a powerful ideology in which one small part of humanity sought to justify its claims of biological and cultural superiority .

posterior hippocampus

spatial memory and navigation

What different factors influence skin color

transparency or thickness of the skin; a copper-colored pigment called carotene; reflected color from the blood vessels (responsible for the rosy color of lightly pigmented people); and the amount of melanin - a dark pigment in the skin's outer layer. - People with dark skin have more melanin-producing cells than those with light skin. Everyone except albinos has a measure of melanin. - Exposure to the sunlight increases melanin production, causing skin color to deepen. - The inheritance of skin color involves several genes, each with several alleles, thus creating a continuous range of expression for this trait. - Geographic distribution of skin color tends to be continuous.

What can interfere with the RNA and DNA messenger

Hormones and signals coming from our environment

What did conclusion did Frederick Hoffman come to? What did the public think of the study

That white people were superior because African Americans would on a downturn because he compared mortality rates and that they would go extinct It was influential report because it fit to the racist mindset of the time

what influence Hilter

The American eugenics movement of the early 20th century. He considered a 1916 book by Madison Grant, from the American Museum of Natural History, titled The Passing of the Great Race, his bible.

How do genes work

Through gene expression genes can get turned off and on depending on the environment and other genes

Race and Behavior

To date, no inborn behavioral characteristic can be attributed to any single group of people (which nonscientists might call a race) that cannot be explained in terms of cultural practices. - If the Chinese happen to exhibit exceptional visual-spatial skills, it is probably because learning to read Chinese characters requires a visual-spatial mastery that Western alphabets do not (Chan & Vernon, 1988). - Similarly, the almost complete exclusion of non-whites from achievements in golf in the United States (until Tiger Woods) had everything to do with the social rules of country clubs and the sport's expense. All such behavioral characteristics can be explained in terms of culture. - High crime rates, alcoholism, and drug use among certain groups can be explained with reference to culture rather than biology. Individuals alienated and demoralized by poverty, injustice, and unequal opportunity tend to abandon the dominant culture's traditional paths to success because these paths are blocked. In a racialized society, poverty and all its ill consequences affect some groups more severely than others.

How genetically similar are humans to one another?

We are one of the most genetically similar species Only one out of 1,000 nucleotide is different from each other

false belief

"In some societies, the false belief that precise biological features neatly divide our species into discrete types fuels racism, a doctrine of superiority by which one group justifies the dehumanization of others based on their distinctive physical characteristics. There are obvious physical differences among humans, but biological evidence demonstrates that separate races or subspecies, do not exist. Far more genetic diversity exists within a single so-called racial category than between any two. However, racism and its vocabulary continually surface in many countries, the United States among them. Although distinct biological races do not exist, the social and political reality of race impacts, if not determines, the human experience in some societies, including the United States."

Culture and adaptation

- Although cultural adaptation has become vital for the human species, cultural forces also impose their own selective pressures. - Culture can also contribute directly to the development of disease. - For example, type 2 diabetes, very common among overweight individuals who get little exercise - a combination that describes 61 percent of people from the United States today - disproportionately affects the poor. Further, adoption of the Western high-sugar diet and low activity pattern skyrockets the incidence of diabetes and obesity

U.S. Census Bureau

- Ever-changing racial categories used by the U.S. Census Bureau reinforce the conflation of the biological and the cultural. The 2010 list includes large catchall political categories such as white and black but ask for specific tribal affiliations of American Indians or Alaskan Natives, a designation that comes much closer to a population in the biological sense. - The census bureau asks people to identify Hispanic ethnicity, independent of the category of race, but considers Arabs and Christians of Middle Eastern ancestry as white (Caucasian) despite the political import of Arab and Muslim identities. - The census bureau lets people check off multiple categories. The purported race of individuals can vary over the course of their lifetime, because cultural forces designate membership in a racial category. - The U.S. Census Bureau gathers health statistics by racial category for the purposes of correcting health disparities among social groups. The false biological concept of race gets inferred in these analyses. As a result, the increased risk of dying from a heart attack for African Americans compared to whites is falsely attributed to biological differences rather than to health care disparities or other social forces.

What ways did people try make that race was based on genetics

- skull size and shape - brain color - hair texture - people tried to find a body part that was different of African American so that they could show they were different then whites biologically

In all, _____ million people (____________________________________________so-called inferior people, as well as political opponents of the Nazi regime) were deliberately put to death or died from starvation, disease, and exposure in labor camps.

11 millions Jews, Homosexual, Gypsies

How much genetic difference do Penguins have compare to human And fruit fries

2 times 10 times

Beans, enzymes and malaria

-The sickle-cell allele is a biological adaptation to malaria. - Cultural adaptations to malaria take the form of local cuisine. - The broad, flat fava bean is a dietary staple in malaria-endemic areas along the Mediterranean coast. G6PD is an enzyme that serves to reduce one sugar, glucose-6-phophate, to another sugar - in the process releasing an energy-rich molecule. - The malaria parasite lives in red blood cells off energy produced via G6PD. Individuals with a mutation in the G6PD gene, so-called G6PD deficiency, produce energy by an alternate pathway not involving this enzyme that the parasite cannot use. Furthermore, G6PD deficient red blood cells seem to turn over more quickly, thus allowing less time for the parasite to grow and multiply. - Enzymes naturally occurring in fava beans also contain substances that interfere with the development of the malarial parasite. - In cultures around the Mediterranean Sea, where malaria is common, fava beans are incorporated into the diet through foods eaten at the height of the malaria season. - However, if an individual with G6PD deficiency eats fava beans, the substances toxic to the parasite become toxic to humans.

In the 20th century, how many, how it's been estimated that die from genocide

83 million

How many people die in the Rwanda genocide

1 million in three months

What were ways that people tried to reach white racial purity

1. Life segregation 2. Sterilization 3. Restrictive marriage 4. Eugenic education 5. System of mating 6. General environment 7. Polygamy 8: euthanasia

how many people die in the WWI due to genocide

1.5 million

What geographic region has the most genetic variation

Africa

Earliest settlers' ideology of dehumanization

By the time early setters came from England to the Americas, they had already learned to dehumanized the Irish, and even imported Irish slaves. They had already refined this idea of racial superiority and dehumanization and saw the Native Americans through this viewpoint. To them, the Indians were an inferior species.

Race as a cultural category

Although biologically separate human races do not exist, race remains a significant cultural category. Human groups frequently insert a false notion of biological difference into the cultural category of race to make it appear more factual and objective. In various ways, cultures define religious, linguistic, and ethnic groups as races, thereby confusing linguistic and cultural traits with physical traits. Against the backdrop of prejudice, the conflation of the cultural with the biological has historically provided a 'scientific' justification for the exclusion of whole categories of people from certain roles or positions in society. Before the civil rights era, some states using the 'one drop rule', also known as hypodescent, would assign individuals with mixed ethnicity or socioeconomic class to the subordinate group in the hierarchy. Because of the colonial association of lighter skin with greater power and higher social status, people whose history includes domination by lighter-skinned Europeans have sometimes valued this phenotype. In Haiti, for example, the color question has been the dominant force in social and political life. Skin texture, facial features, hair color and class play a role in ranking. "A rich black becomes a mulatto, a poor mulatto becomes black."

Clines

Anthropologists have abandoned the race concept as being of no utility in understanding human biological variation. Instead they study clines. - Clines are the distribution and significance in a population of a single specific, genetically based characteristic or continuous trait. - When expressed across an environmental gradient, clines reflect adaptation. - The physical characteristics of both populations and individuals derive from the interaction between genes and environment

Race, a biological concept not applicable to humans

Biologists define race as a subspecies, or a population of a species differing geographically, morphologically, or genetically from other populations of the same species. Three factors complicate the use of this term. First, it is arbitrary; no scientific criteria exist on how many differences it takes to make a race. If one researcher emphasizes skin color while another emphasizes fingerprint differences, they will not classify people in the same way. Second, no singe race has exclusive possession of any particular variant of any gene or genes. Example: the frequency of a trait like the type O blood group may be high in one population and low in another, but it is present in both. Populations are genetically 'open', meaning that genes flow between them. The only reproductive barriers that exist for humans are the cultural rules some societies impose regarding appropriate mates. Social barriers change through time. Third, the vast majority of genetic variation exists within a so-called racial group. As science writer James Shreeve puts it, "most of what separates me genetically from a typical African or Eskimo also separates me from another average American of European ancestry."

Eight recognizable stages of genocide

Classification- Symbolization- Dehumanization- Organization- Polarization- Preparation- Extermination- Denial

Lactose and Lactase

Culture played a large part in the biological selection for lactose tolerance. - - People in cultures that started dairying would do better if their bodies continued to produce lactase as an enzyme so they could digest the milk, and especially lactose, without getting ill. A mutation likely created this ability, which was naturally selected because of the 'fitness' advantage of those who could continue producing lactase over their lifetimes. - - Most mammals as well as most human populations do not continue to produce lactase into childhood. Adults with lactose intolerance, and this includes 85 percent of adults globally, suffer from gas pains and diarrhea when they consume milk or milk products. - - Only populations with long tradition of dairying (as seen in northern and eastern Europe, eastern Arica, central Asia and the Middle East) tend to retain lactase into adulthood. - - Because North American and European societies associate milk with health, powdered milk used to be a staple of economic aid to other countries. But for populations who do not retain lactase into adulthood, milk consumption causes diarrhea, abdominal cramping, and even bone degeneration. Shipping powdered milk to 2 million people left homeless in the wake of a 1960 earthquake made many terribly sick instead of feeding them.

History of human classification

Early European scholars tried to systematically classify Homo Sapiens into subspecies, or races, based on geographic location and phenotypic features such as skin color, body size, head shape and hair texture. Carolus Linnaeus originally divided humans into subspecies based on geographic location. All Europeans were classified as white, Africans as black, American Indians as red, Asians as yellow. (Haviland, Prins, Walrath, McBride)

Epigenetics

Epigenetics literally means "above" or "on top of" genetics. It refers to external modifications to DNA that turn genes "on" or "off." These modifications do not change the DNA sequence, but instead, they affect how cells "read" genes." "Once nurture seemed clearly distinct from nature. Now it appears that our diets and lifestyles can change the expression of our genes. How? By influencing a network of chemical switches within our cells collectively known as the epigenome."

thrifty genotype

For years, scientists attributed a tendency toward diabetes among Native Americans to their thrifty genotype, a genotype thought to characterize all humans until about 6,000 years ago. The thrifty genotype permitted efficient storage of fat to draw on in times of food shortage. - In times of scarcity, individuals with the thrifty genotype conserve glucose (a simple sugar) for use in the bran and red blood cells (as opposed to other tissues such as muscle), as well as nitrogen (vital for growth and health). Regular access to glucose particularly through the lactose in milk led to the selection for the non-thrifty genotype as protection against type 2 diabetes. - Recently anthropologists and biologists have enriched the discussion of diabetes among Native Americans by focusing on diet and activity instead of genetic difference. They show that native "slow-release foods" such as the prickly pear lower the glucose levels of American Indians prone to diabetes. They chronicle the ability of these desert foods to sustain American Indians during long treks into the desert. These "treatments", unlike biomedical shots and pills, predate the appearance of the disease and also empower and preserve native cultures. - Each culture developed as a complete adaptive system so it stands that biological variation and cultural variation would be linked.

Newness of light skin does not make it more evolved.

In northern latitudes, light skin has an adaptive advantage related to the skin's important biological function as the manufacturer of vitamin D, a function dependent upon sunlight. - Vitamin D maintains the balance of calcium in the body essential for healthy bones and balance in the nervous system. - In northern climates with little sunshine, light skin allows enough sunlight to penetrate the skin and stimulate the formation of vitamin D. Dark pigmentation interferes with this process in environments with limited sunlight. - Given what we know about the adaptive significance of human skin color, and the fact that, until 800,000 years ago, members of the genus Homo were almost exclusively creatures of the tropics, lightly pigmented skins are likely a recent development in human history. - One should not conclude that its relative newness makes lightly pigmented skin better or more highly evolved than heavily pigmented skin. Darker skin better suits the conditions of life in the tropics or at high altitudes. - With time and with the efforts being made in many cultures today, skin color may eventually lose its social significance.

What did Boas and his students come to find?

In the early 20th century, some scholars began to challenge the concept of racial hierarchies and the pseudoscience of race as biology.Anthropologist Franz Boas (1858- 1942) was a strong critic of racial hierarchy pseudoscience. He founded North America's four-field anthropology. His students, including Ashley Montagu, devoted careers to combat scientific racism. Montagu's 1942 book, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, took the lead in debunking the concept of clearly bounded races as a "social myth". The book went through six editions, the last in 1998. Montagu's once controversial ideas are now mainstream.

Is race biological?

No, because there are no genetic markers to show that there is a difference between different races

Has there enough time for subspecies of humans to develop

No, evolutionary speaking 100, 000 is short amount of time

Blumenbach's pernicious re- classification

Physician Johann Blumenbach (1752-1840), had his own classification system. He considered a skull from the Caucasus Mountains to be the most beautiful in his collection and decided it must resemble God's original creation. To him, the Caucasus Mountains must be the place of human origins. All light skinned people must be of the same variety as this skull, he thought, and he called them Caucasian. He considered them superior because he believed them closer to God's original creation. For Blumenbach, Africans were "Ethiopian", Native Americans a separate variety of human, and inhabitants of Asia were Mongolian. These non-Caucasians, he said, were less connected to the Caucasus Mountain ideal. They had moved away from their roots and degenerated by adapting to different environments. Political leaders have used this notion of superior and inferior races to justify brutalities, repression and genocide.

Polytypic

Polytypic (many types). - This occurs when polymorphisms are distributed into geographically dispersed populations; that is uneven distribution of genetic variability among populations. - For example, consider the polytypic distribution of the polymorphism for blood type (four distinct phenotypic groups: A, B, O, or AB). - American Indian populations possess the highest frequency of the O allele, especially in some populations native to South America; certain European populations have the highest frequencies of the allele for type A blood (although the highest frequency is found among the Blackfoot Indians of the northern Plains in North America) - Some Asian populations have the highest frequencies of the B allele. - Even though single traits may be grouped within specific populations, when a great number of traits are considered, specific human 'types' cannot be identified. - Instead, evolutionary forces work independently on each of these traits

Social significance of race

Scientific facts have been slow to change what people think about race. Racism, a doctrine of superiority by which one group justifies the dehumanization of others based on their distinctive physical characteristics, persists as a major political problem. Politicians have often exploited this concept as a means of mobilizing support, demonizing opponents, and eliminating rivals. Racial conflicts result from social stereotypes, not scientific facts.

Richard Lewontins discoveries

Richard Lewontins discoveries Humans are a species with less genetic diversity than almost all other species. Richard Lewontin found looking at DNA that of the very small amount of human variation, 85 percent of it occurs between any two people of any geographic group or population rather than between people of different geographic populations. The vast majority of human variation is found at a local level, or even between any two people of any so-called race. Of the variation between geographic populations, most of it is new and surface variation, such as skin color, hair texture, eye color etc. which is nonconcordant with other, deeper, more essential traits

Adaptation to human made stressors

So often structural violence leads to a disproportionate impact of these toxins on the poor and non-whites. - Scientists have identified at least fifty-one chemicals - many in common use - that disrupt hormones. Some of these chemicals mimic estrogens, whereas others interfere with thyroid and testosterone metabolism. - Some of these chemicals are in inert substances as plastics that are widely used, detergents, contraceptive creams, and the giant jugs used to bottle drinking water. BPA is a chemical used to make water bottles and baby bottles. It is associated with higher rates of heart disease and diabetes. It disrupts reproductive and metabolic processes. Infants and fetuses are at the greatest risk from exposure - Today, cultural practices, probably as never before, impact human gene pools.

Race and Intelligence

The association between class and IQ has been amply established, as has the association between race and class in a racialized society like the United States (American Psychological Association) -There is a bias in IQ testing based on social class. - The assertion that IQ is biologically fixed and immutable is clearly false. - Ranking human beings with respect to their intelligence scores in terms of racial difference is doubly false. Over the past 2.5 million years, all populations of the genus Homo have adapted primarily through culture - actively inventing solutions to the problems of existence rather than relying only on biological adaptation. Genetic flow has existed between groups for all of these years. Thus, we would expect a comparable degree of intelligence in all present-day human populations. The only way to be sure that individual human beings develop their innate abilities and skills to the fullest is to make sure they all have access to the necessary resources and opportunity to do so. - Whatever the alleles that may be associated with intelligence, they bear no relationship with the ones for skin pigmentation or with other aspects of human variation. Expression of genes occurs in an environment, and among humans, culture shapes all aspects of the environment.

brain plasticity

The capacity for the brain to alter its structure and function.

Why did people want to find a way that race was biological

They wanted their racism to be justified and if they found a biological difference then they could treat the inferior

William Cobbs

Was one of the only people to come out at the time and say that there was no difference between African Americans and whites. There is no Inherit difference in why Jessie Owens who was a 4 time gold medal olympics winner . African Americans were saw inferior and to be able to do this conflicted with this racist notion.

Why was one aim of the eugenics movement

White racial purity One gene each from both parents could give rise to any trait

Can the brain structure change

Yes, because when looking at brain scan of cabbies drivers in London there posterior hippocampus was bigger then non cabbies