Teaching Human Variation

It is fitting that this book on teaching human variation appears in 2009, for this year marks the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the sesquicentenary of the publication of "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection". The concept of Natural Selection was put forward as a mechanism to explain how evolutionary change might have occurred. We owe the hypothesis to Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Independently they had lighted upon it and their preliminary essays were presented to a meeting of the Linnean Society in London on 1st July 1858. All teaching of biological variation should start by reference to evolution and what Wallace, in an act of extraordinary generosity, proposed should be called Darwinism. This book is expected to be published just 150 years after "The Origin of Species" first saw the light of day. There can be no comprehensive teaching of human variation without its being seen as a function of time. Deep time is the domain of evolutionary change, or phylogeny, the direct evidence for which is for the most part the palaeontological record in the rocks making up the crust of the earth. Recent time refers to more recent archaeological and fossil remains and to living people and their ontogeny. Human variation has a history of over 5 million years and, on the latest calculations, perhaps of 10 million years.

ISBN 1608766160   DEWEY edition DC22 ISBN13 9781608766161 (What's this?)   Pages 152 Publisher Nova Science Publishers Inc   Published in New York Imprint Nova Science Publishers Inc   Height (mm) 230 Format Hardback   Width (mm) 155 Publication date 01 Aug 2010   Academic level Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly DEWEY 599.938

		Foreword: Random Thoughts on Teaching Human Variation, Past and Present by Phillip V. Tobias
		Introduction by Goran Strkalj
Chapter 1		Human Variation: The Major Unifying Theme of Biological Anthropology by Darren Curnoe		1
Chapter 2		Racial Identification of Single Skulls in Forensic Cases: When Myth Becomes Reality by Alan G. Morris		15
Chapter 3		The Illusive Concept of Human Variation: Thirty Years of Teaching Biological Anthropology on Four Continents by Maciej Henneberg		33
Chapter 4		Race and Geographic Variation Conflated: An Impediment to Teaching Human Biology by Rachel Caspari		43
Chapter 5		An In-class Exercise on Human Variation by Patricia C. Rice		61
Chapter 6		Challenging University Students' Concepts about Race by Donna Hart		81
Chapter 7		The Bad Old Days of Anthropology Revisited: Teaching Human Variation through the Portal of the Experimental History of Science by Robyn Beirman		101
Chapter 8		Should Human Variation Be Taught to Medical Students? by Muhammad A. Spocter		115
Chapter 9		Human Variation: How to Counteract the New Waves of Racism? by Charles Susanne		127
		Index		139

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