The Future of Education

As many national populations have become visibly diversified due to recent global migration, modern biological science can be an important source of information about the evolution of human diversity, especially skin color. Therefore, changes in science education could proactively deconstruct the justification for racism by demonstrating how racial categories and associated stereotypes are cultural constructs lacking biological validity. Skin color has always been an immediate marker of ancestral difference, and even though it was omitted from most history lessons, existing documentation shows how the concept of race was invented as unapologetic justification for colonialism and slavery. Modern discrimination based on race is rooted in persistent vestiges of this history. This problem is exacerbated by mistaken ideas which mislead people into believing that fundamental differences of intelligence and temperament are genetically-determined and linked to physical characteristics and appearance. Thanks to very recent advances in genomics and archaeogenetics, a more complete understanding of human evolution demonstrates how natural selection led to the differences in skin color that serve as markers for those historic racial categories. This information provides a strong foundation for new lessons that can be incorporated into biology classes emphasizing how any variation in skin color is strictly due to genetic regulation of differing amounts of two pigments, black-brown eumelanin and red-yellow phaeomelanin, in response to changes in solar exposure. When indigenous populations remained isolated, skin color distribution remained constant and distributed according to latitude. As global travel changes the proximity of different populations, genetic mixing has and will continue to dramatically alter the distribution of skin colors, further showing that there is no biological validity in the racial classifications that are the basis for social discrimination and cultural division.

Keywords: Globalization, Skin Color, Antiracist Science Teaching, Human Evolution;

References: 
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