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Physical Anthropology Human Variation Physical Thesis

What was black in 1940 is different from what is black in 2000. Certainly, with the evolution of whiteness, what was white in 1920 - as a Jew I was not white then, but I'm white now, so white has changed tremendously" (Goodman 2003). The views of biological anthropologists on race have varied widely throughout the ages, almost as much as human physical differences of dress, skin, hair, and size. Yet beneath the skin, modern science reveals, we are genetically far more alike than different. In contrast to the old, culturally-justifying racism of the past, physical anthropologists today look to science to 'set us free' as a species with the truth -- that race is a cultural construction, not a biological fact. This once conservative field now takes one of the most radical views of the human condition of all the social sciences.

Works Cited

Gravlee, Clarence, C.H. Russell Bernard, & William R. Leonard. (2003). New answers to old questions: Did Boas get it right? Heredity, environment, and cranial form: A reanalysis of Boas' immigrant data. American Anthropologist, 105(1), 125-138. Retrieved May 25,

2009, from...

(Document ID: 318797191).
Goodman, Alan. Interview. Race: The Power of an Illusion. Retrieved May 25, 2009

at http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-01.htm

Lewontin, Richard. (2003). Interview. Race: The Power of an Illusion. Retrieved May 25, 2009

at http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-01.htm

Nineteenth-Century racism: The anthropologist who first defined the Negro's place in nature. (2001). The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, (32), 124. Retrieved May

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Price, David H. (2005). From racism to genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich.

Anthropological Quarterly, 78(4), 1009-1012. Retrieved May 25, 2009, from Platinum

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Works Cited

Gravlee, Clarence, C.H. Russell Bernard, & William R. Leonard. (2003). New answers to old questions: Did Boas get it right? Heredity, environment, and cranial form: A reanalysis of Boas' immigrant data. American Anthropologist, 105(1), 125-138. Retrieved May 25,

2009, from Platinum Periodicals database. (Document ID: 318797191).

Goodman, Alan. Interview. Race: The Power of an Illusion. Retrieved May 25, 2009

at http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-01.htm
at http://www.pbs.org/race/000_About/002_04-background-01.htm
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