Twenty years ago, I wrote a piece for the newsletter of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study explaining how important it was to teach high school students about human biological variation and conceptions of race. The issue of variation within species has been of interest to naturalists beginning in the eighteenth century. Unfortunately, when Linnaeus published the tenth edition of Systema Naturae in 1758, he included a description of human varieties ranked hierarchically, with Europeans at the top and Africans at the bottom, as influenced by the colonialism and racism of the time. Thus began the sad history of Europeans deploying pseudoscientific schemes to classify and rank human beings. Fortunately, using concepts from the neo-Darwinian synthesis of the twentieth century based on genetic variation and phylogenetic methods, we know that modern humans do not display biological races, but earlier views are frustratingly long-lasting.
Despite our modern understanding of biological variation, race...
University of California Press