Topic > Essay on Race and Race - 1158

Myths conflated behavior and physical characteristics together in the public mind, impeding our understanding of both biological variation and cultural behavior, implying that both are genetically determined. Racial myths have no bearing on the reality of human capabilities or behavior. Today, scientists find that relying on such popular beliefs about human differences in research has led to countless errors. At the end of the 20th century, we now understand that human cultural behavior is learned, conditioned from birth, and always subject to change. No human being is born with a built-in culture or language. Our temperaments, dispositions, and personalities, regardless of genetic propensities, develop within sets of meanings and values ​​that we call “culture.” Studies of infant and early childhood learning and behavior attest to the reality of our cultures in shaping who we are. It is a fundamental principle of anthropological knowledge that all normal human beings have the capacity to learn any cultural behavior. The American experience with immigrants from hundreds of different languages ​​and cultural backgrounds who have acquired some version of American cultural traits and behaviors is the clearest evidence of this fact. Furthermore, people of all physical variations have learned different cultural behaviors and continue to do so as modern transportation moves millions of immigrants around the world (American Anthropological, n.d.). Given these points, human genetic variations (nd) are best described by isolation by distance, meaning that individuals who have ancestry, particularly geographic regions, are more likely to share genes than those from disparate regions. This sharing of genes is facilitated for individuals by the use of multiple loci, particularly when examined