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The study of human genetic variation has evolutionary significance and medical applications. It can help scientists reconstruct and understand patterns of past human migration. In medicine, study of human genetic variation may be important because some disease-causing alleles occur more often in certain population groups.
Genetic studies of traits and populations have been used to justify social inequalities associated with race, [7] despite the fact that patterns of human variation have been shown to be mostly clinal, [8] with human genetic code being approximately 99.6% – 99.9% identical between individuals and without clear boundaries between groups.
There is general agreement that a goal of health-related genetics should be to move past the weak surrogate relationships of racial health disparity and get to the root causes of health and disease. This includes research which strives to analyze human genetic variation in smaller groups than races across the world. [16]
Race is a categorization of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into groups generally viewed as distinct within a given society. [1] The term came into common usage during the 16th century, when it was used to refer to groups of various kinds, including those characterized by close kinship relations. [2]
Cave paintings (such as this one from France) represent a benchmark in the evolutionary history of human cognition. Victorian naturalist Charles Darwin was the first to propose the out-of-Africa hypothesis for the peopling of the world, [39] but the story of prehistoric human migration is now understood to be much more complex thanks to twenty-first-century advances in genomic sequencing.
Lewontin found that the majority of the total genetic variation between humans (i.e., of the 0.1% of DNA that varies between individuals), 85.4%, is found within populations, 8.3% of the variation is found between populations within a "race", and only 6.3% was found to account for the racial classification.
An example of the codominant inheritance of some of the four blood groups. Mendelian traits in humans are human traits that are substantially influenced by Mendelian inheritance . Most – if not all – Mendelian traits are also influenced by other genes, the environment, immune responses, and chance.
Genetic variation was thus increased and resulted in a significant increase in population growth of the Florida Panther. [39] Creating or maintaining high genetic diversity is an important consideration in species rescue efforts, in order to ensure the longevity of a population.