Race Genetics Essay

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Race and Genetics

On the surface, race seems like a legitimate way of categorizing human beings. Physical characteristics are passed down from parent to child, thereby recreating racial markers. However, the concept of race is generally rooted in ignorance. Race is an ephemeral construction, and genetic science is proving this to be so. If race were real, then there would be ways of tracing different races back to a few ancestors: such as an ancestral Polynesian, ancestral African, and ancestral Jew. As it stands, though, all human beings trace ancestry to the same basic gene pool from humanoid ancestors in Africa. This one fact alone is sufficient to debunk the concept that race "exists," or is a form of biological determinism. There are other reasons to believe that race is not as real as was once thought. Race is not real, and the reasons are rooted in genetic science, anthropology, linguistics, and sociology.

Genetic science research is showing that the genetic anomalies that were once associated with race are actually distributed across geographic zones.

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For example, Adelman (2003) points out that the Tay Sachs disease was once believed to be a Jewish disease, but many Gentiles carry the Tay Sachs gene. Of course, that could be due to the fact that some Christians might have once been Jews and later converted. However, the same is true for Sickle Cell Anemia, which was once believed to be a genetic abnormality present only in African-Americans. New research shows that Sickle Cell Anemia is not present in the ancestral groups of former slaves, showing that there is no "racial" component to the disease. Instead, there is a geographic component, linked closely to anthropology and patterns of population migration. In the case with Sickle Cell Anemia, the gene is found in some Arab and Greek populations, which has led researchers to conclude that the disease was spread via old trade routes from Africa to the Middle East and Europe (Adelman, 2003). Human genetics….....

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