• skin color
• face shape and hair texture
• variability in height, ratio between fast twitch and slow twitch muscles
• but things can be genetic without actually being real differences because the variability is much greater than the difference
  

• average height is mostly the result of nutrition
  
• education determines performance on most tests, even IQ tests
• epigenetics--environment of the parents can affect the offspring because genes turn on and off
  

• values
• different musical talents

humans make sense of the world by putting things into categories
we think those categories are realer than they are

How scientists moved away from scientific racism:

Franz Boas had experienced anti-Semitism in Germany and was committed to fighting racial prejudice

• argued against the idea of racial purity, mostly looking at European groups who were discriminated against
  
• argued for the importance of environment over heredity
• 1906 commencement address at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University)
• argues for example that Africans were the first to smelt iron
  
• in 1931 he argued there was no evidence that mulattoes showed any genetic ill effects
• p. 46 quoting Boas: "There is no reason to believe that one race is by nature so much more intelligent, endowed with great will power, or emotionally more stable than another, that the difference would materially influence its culture."
• his anthropological ideas were so influential that his follows became known as a school (not an actual institution, but they were identified as a distinct approach)
  

Other anthropologists continued the work

• Melville Herskovitz showed in the late 1920s that almost 80% of African Americans were the product of race mixing. 
  
• Modern figures show that the average African-American today has 24% European ancestry.
  
• a study showed that 5% of white South Carolinians had at least 2% African ancestry and 12% have at least 1% (an African ancestor no further back than 7 generations)
  
• they actually had less variability than those of only African descent, which showed that the homogeneity of pure groups was a myth
• average differences aren't very meaningful if individual variation is much larger
  
• argued that race had no biological meaning for humans
  
• a classification of human beings, but based on a mixture of characteristics that doesn't make much scientific sense
• you can't classify human beings into races that match at all our social categories by genetics alone
  
• Otto Klineberg showed that there was no evidence for racial differences in intelligence and argued that there was no reason to prohibit race mixing
• Ashley Montagu argued for race and gender equality in the 1950s, pointing out that races are not fixed entities with fixed characteristics
• statistics show races differ on average, but that is just the average of varied and shifting populations
• suggested using the term ethnic group instead of race
• pointed out that biologists knew outbreeding produced better offspring in plants and animals but due to prejudice refused to apply that to humans
• noted in 1942 in Man's Most Dangerous Myth that anti-miscegenation laws violated the constitution

Why did the Nazi campaign against the Jews and others seen as inferior end talk about eugenics?

• after all, the US was putting Japanese people in camps
  
• but the Nazi level of prejudice against people who were white was shocking
• killing people because they were undesirable crossed a line, and the arguments used against that could be used against other eugenic programs as well
  

In a UNESCO statement in 1950 first social scientists and then physical anthropologists and geneticists backed the statement that races had long been mixed and race mixing had no harmful consequences