Race

Introduction

In his chapter On the Races of Man, from The Descent of Man, Darwin argued that most of the visible differences between human races (skin colour, hair type and so on) were superficial, and that most of the mental differences merely reflected the impact of ‘civilization’ or a lack thereof. He concluded that all humans belonged to a single species, and that visible differences between races were not adaptive to any significant degree, instead being more likely due to sexual selection (i.e. different criteria for beauty and mating amongst different people).

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