Oct 26, 20171 min
Monday, October 30, from 12-2pm in Room 2e14
All are welcome to join a lunchtime viewing and discussion of Part 1 in the series Race: The Power of an Illusion
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Everyone can tell a Nubian from a Norwegian, so why not divide people into different races? That's the question explored in "The Difference Between Us," the first hour of the series, Race: The Power of an Illusion. This episode shows that despite what we've always believed, the world's peoples simply don't come bundled into distinct biological groups. The episode begins by following a dozen students, including Black athletes and Asian string players, who sequence and compare their own DNA to see who is more genetically similar. The results surprise the students and the viewer, when they discover their closest genetic matches are as likely to be with people from other "races" as their own.
Much of the program is devoted to understanding why. The episode looks at several scientific discoveries that illustrate why humans cannot be subdivided into races and how there isn't a single characteristic, trait - or even one gene - that can be used to distinguish all members of one race from all members of another.