Chapter 6, Sexual Selection, and the Origin of Human Races Summary and Analysis

It is evident that the human race is often strongly associated with geographic dispersion. Race is a fundamental aspect of humanity and in general is easy to determine even by non-experts. Some racial traits appear to be loosely correlated with environment and offer some survival benefit, but most racial traits do not appear to have any meaningful influence on environmental fitness.

Charles Darwin realized that many organisms possessed traits that do not appear to give any survival benefit; in fact, many traits are apparently adverse to survival. Clearly, natural selection could not explain these traits. Darwin offered the theory of sexual selection to explain these traits. In brief, if mating individuals of one sex show a strong predilection for a particular trait in members of...