hollowmoon wrote:
1. How many races are there, what are the specific countries to specific races?
2. Is it by skin color, eye color, hair texture? If so, is a person from india the same race as a person from africa. Is a thai the same race as chinese although the thai have tanner skin and wider noses? Is a swede the same race as an italian? Is a southern african or a mauritian the same race even though they have different features? The khoi of southern africa have almond eyes just like the Japanese are they the same race? Is someone from papa new ginueua the same race as someone from sudan even though they are far away but have the same skin color? How you define these people when these features inter collide? What is the difference between race and nationality? How do you know what race someone is? If race is simply what you look like why does it even matter?
3. I am very confused by this, my literal brain isn't grasping the concept. Can someone xplain it to me?
Different populations of people constitute a gene pool with genes mixing and combining with each generation. Mutations that are beneficial or preferred stay in the gene pool of a population, such as dark skin to protect from sun and light skin to absorb more vitamin D in areas with less sun.
populations that are separated can evolve similar traits, especially if the climate is similar.
All humans today are the end product of over 6 million years of evolution from our common ape ancestors and the differences in modern humans are mostly superficial adaptations to different climates.
Genetic variation is not the only difference in populations. Cultural difference, different belief systems and ways of life that help humans adapt and survive are probably create more barriers between populations of humans than genetic difference.
To complicate matters, modern communication and transportation technology results in less separation between different populations and the human race is becoming more of one shared gene pool with a lot of variation in superficial traits.
Humans like to label things and obvious differences like skin color and facial features are an easy marker to identify someone as belonging to a different group, even though they are part of the same culture and gene pool.
A lot of genetic variation is a good thing though.
I wish there were other species of hominids still surviving on earth so we would not be alone and we would have a better perspective of our place in the animal kingdom.
I wonder how similar other hominids were to us.
I wonder if they were still alive today, if little Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, or Neanderthal kids would be playing video games all day long with the Homo sapien kids.