INTRODUCTION TO EVOLUTIONARY GENETICS

Racial–typological approaches, discussed in Chapter 2, are attempts to interpret human biological variation without making explicit reference to models of population structure and evolution. The alternative to the racial–typological view of human variation is an evolutionary approach. In this chapter, I discuss the forces of evolution and the underlying mathematical models for mutation, selection, migration, and random genetic drift. Human skeletal and dental diversity has an underlying genetic basis. The genes underlying such diversity can be used to create evolutionary models that can tell us about the origin, demographic history, and microevolution of Native Americans over the past 12,000 or so years. Racial typology and categorization cannot provide this information without numerous simplifying assumptions.

These include the primary assumption that each human population is totally distinctive in morphology and changes only as a result of historical events, such as when a racially different group invades/colonizes and replaces the original population.