Ask the Scholars
Interviews from 2003
People are all the same underneath the skin, but you can't help but notice that different groups (both within American society and globally) have had varying levels of success and achievement. This seems to correlate with race or the way people look. What's your take?
Biological Anthropologist
I think there are several faulty leaps of logic here. First, there's no environmental control that makes people comparable. Individuals aren't in equal environments, or on equal footing, leaving the starting gate at the same time. And without at least some crude approximation of that, it's extremely hard to make all of these assumptions about what group outperforms another group. It's also not true to fact. Not true if one looks at this more historically. The data really don't quite fit ...
Molecular Anthropologist
There's two points I'd like to make about this question. One is that I disagree with the questioner's statement that all people are the same underneath the skin. The basic processes of genetics make people different underneath the skin - after all, we're not clones of one another. The real question is, what is the pattern of biological diversity we find? And I think the point we're all trying to make here is that the pattern is not clustering all Africans against all Europeans, against a...
