Does Race Exist Analysis

In “Does Race Exist?” by Michael J. Bamshad and Steve E. Olson, they speak about what make race a thing and what makes a person belong to a specific group. When most people think of race, they look at the color of a person’s skin and where they come from. However, simply saying someone belongs to a certain race because of where they come from or the color of their skin is somewhat incorrect. In this article, the authors argue that certain elements in you DNA, called Alu, contain pieces of information that can be compared to other individuals to see if there is any relatedness. What they found is that certain Alus make characteristics specific to one group, but does not separate groups simply by skin color. For example, they found that people from India shared Alus with people from Europe and Asia because of the constant contact that they had with each other either through trade or invasion. In conclusion, there is no real race. People may share similarities, but a race should not be formed simply based on skin color or recent origin.

While this article was very interesting to read, it does have a few things that would make it a little difficult for the reader to understand. First, most of the article has to do with science and facts, leaving no room for any opinions or overviews, so the reader is left confused reading on. From the way that the article is written, you can tell that it is written for an audience who has studied this or is a little bit more educated. If they were to write this for a wide variety of people, they should speak with less scientific words. If they do not want to use simpler words, they should define what they are talking about or break the material up into more understandable topics. If the writers want a larger audience, they should also add pictures and maps to the article to give a better context about what they are talking about. With this revisions, the article should appeal to a much larger audience who will actually find the topic interesting.