Darwin jako antropolog ewolucyjny problem ras ludzkich

Abstrakt

In the work ,,Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex", Charles Darwin (1871) devoted one chapter to human morphological diversity. In the 19th century many anthropologists dealt with the problem of human races which were described and treated by them as discrete units - i.e., as essentialistic types, indistinguishable from species. The theory of evolution by means of natural selection, however, could not accommodate the abovementioned discrete view of human variability. Darwin insisted that human races were open (freely intermating) groups and that morphological differences between them reflected locally operating environmental factors - it is well documented that these groups had a common origin as one species. Recently such groups have been described as populations. The great majority of anthropologists now agree that in humans intrapopulational genetic variance amounts to more than 90 percent of all the variance of our species, thus vindicating Darwin: Human races as classificatory typological units do not exist.