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SG - Race (an evanescing key-concept)
In much everyday parlance, ‘race’ is a very loaded term, when applied to humans and especially when a set of values surrounds it.
However, in evolutionary biology – in humans but mostly in other species – the term has been applied to populations with an intermediate amount of genetic differentiation. In this presentation, dr. Menno Schilthuizen will, from an evolutionary biology perspective, examine the historical and current meanings of the term race and how we can talk about the undeniable genetic differences that exist among animal (including human) populations without falling into the trap of attaching values to those differences.
About series Islands, Race, Genocide
3 key-concepts
In this series we take a thorough look at three key-concepts from three different scientific schools, fields or disciplines. A key-concept lies at the core of such a scientific habitat. How do you sharply define such a concept? How strong is the concept? Did it change in time? And also, how to delimit it from the connotations and associations in daily life and other societal practices? The series is about a new, rising key-concept: Islands; about an evanescing concept in Biology: Race; and about an urgent concept: Genocide.
About Menno Schilthuizen
Menno Schilthuizen (1965) is a Dutch ecologist and evolutionary biologist based at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, who also holds a chair in evolution at Leiden University. His research deals with the diversification of groups of closely-related species, in land snails and beetles, and the questions of how and why different body-shapes evolve rapidly in such evolutionary ‘radiations’. He obtained his PhD from Leiden University in 1994 on the evolution of land snails from Greece, then did two postdoctoral stints at Wageningen University and from 2000 to 2006 worked as an associate professor at the Institute for Tropical Biology and Conservation in Malaysian Borneo, where he still holds a research associateship. He has authored over 100 scientific publications in professional journals such as Trends in Ecology and Evolution, The Journal of Evolutionary Biology, and Nature.
Besides his scientific career, he has been an active free-lance science reporter and populariser of biodiversity science, having written more than 150 popular articles and news reports in Science, New Scientist, and Natural History, and in newspapers and magazines. He has coordinated the Dutch branch of the 2009 international citizen science project Evolution Megalab. He wrote several well-received books: Frogs, Flies & Dandelions; The Making of Species (2001, Oxford University Press), The Loom of Life; Unravelling Ecosystems (2008, Springer), Nature’s Nether Regions (2014, Penguin), and Darwin Comes to Town (Quercus, 2018).