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57 I N FEBRUARY of 2010, the beautiful southern U.S. city of Atlanta, Georgia, was besieged by a billboard campaign that claimed that black children were becoming “an endangered species.” Antiabortion proponents sponsored the installation of over seventy-five of these sensationalist billboards across Atlanta, mostly in African American neighborhoods. Regardless of the politics involved, scientists were shocked at the blatant misuse of the terms “endangered” and “species” in this campaign . Because there is so much confusion regarding the terms “species” and “race” with respect to humans, we feel it important to set the record straight here. No human population, or social group, is a species, and it is critically important that everyone understand how biologists use the terms at issue here—especially since a complete understanding of the concepts they embody lies at the heart our argument for the “burning” of the term “race” as a biological epithet among humans. From everything we’ve said so far, it will also be evident that the key to understanding the way human diversity is patterned lies in a proper understanding of the evolutionary process which produced our species Homo sapiens. This is why we will spend the next few pages discussing this widely misunderstood process and how we go about understanding both the process itself and the historical patterns it has produced. After that, we will be in a position to tackle the human fossil record that documents exactly how it was that human beings came to be as they are. Because humans are mammals, and have thus been subject to all of those influences that affect the evolutionary history of any successful mammalian group, we think it’s important that the reader should have some acquaintance with the systematic context within which all mammals have to be understood. In this chapter we may provide more detail on this SPECIES,PATTERNS,ANDEVOLUTION CHAPTER 2 58 CHAPTER 2 than some readers may care to acquire, in which case we encourage you to skim the following sections on your way to our more focused discussion of human races. But we do believe that you will be rewarded by a closer reading. THATFOUR-LETTERWORD The human diversity we see around us today is simply one single, if extreme, example among millions of evolutionary experiments in the almost four-billion-year history of life on Earth. The results of other such experiments are everywhere: just look around you. Even if you are indoors right now you are surrounded by hundreds of other expressions of evolutionary history. If you are inside, perhaps you see your cat or dog, an obvious example. Through the window you might see some trees and other plants outside in the garden; again, very obvious. If you were able to look closer, you might even see several kinds of small wormlike creatures called nematodes crawling around in the soil, or on and in the plants themselves. Back indoors, you might look at your carpet closely. Lurking in the pile would be mites, many of them: depending on how often you vacuum, there might be as many as one hundred thousand in a single square yard of your carpet. If you could look even closer, say at a dirty tabletop, you would see a huge variety of bacteria; a mere spoonful of dirt from that backyard outside would yield hundreds of different kinds. Then again, the air you breathe is billowing with huge numbers of living things—bacteria, fungi, and even the reproductive cells of eukaryotic organisms (pollen from plants). In fact, to assess the diversity of the results of evolution you need not go any further than your very own body or even your mouth. It has been estimated that the hundreds of kinds of bacterial cells living in and upon you outnumber your own cells by ten to one. In your mouth alone, even if you brush your teeth regularly, there are over four hundred kinds of bacteria resident. These are just some of the thousands of different kinds of living things we encounter each day. But exactly what do we mean by “different kinds of living things”? In order to understand our place as humans in the grand evolutionary experiment, and to make sense of how we view ourselves, we need to understand how living things become discrete enough to be recognized as individual “kinds.” We will never understand why we see the diversity of people that we do around us, organized in the way we perceive, if we...

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