History of the Founder Effect in Anthropology

摘要

Anthropology and Biology share an evolutionary paradigm. However, as Kuhn has argued (1970), this does not mean the paradigm is interpreted in the same manner. Nor does the sharing of an evolutionary paradigm automatically guarantee that rules abstracted from the paradigm by various sub-disciplines will be the same. Within anthropology, various other traditions of research (sociology, history) have contributed their own alternative rules and paradigms. These influences combine with the lingering pre-Darwinian paradigms (racism, polygenesim) to intermittently broaden the gap between the anthropological community understanding of the evolutionary paradigm and the biological community's respective understanding of the evolutionary paradigm. To examine this process, this thesis investigates the history of two, interlinked biological concepts, the 'flounder effect' and 'genetic drift'.