Topic: Jonathan Marks

Jonathan Marks (born 1955) is a lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Born in 1955, he studied at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and took graduate degrees in genetics and anthropology from the University of Arizona, completing his doctorate in 1984. He did post-doctoral research in the genetics department at UC-Davis from 1984-1987, then taught at Yale for 10 years and Berkeley for 3, before settling in Charlotte where he now a professor at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.

His published works include Evolutionary Anthropology (1991, with Edward Staski), Human Biodiversity (1995), and What It Means to be 98% Chimpanzee (2002), and many scholarly articles and essays. He is an outspoken critic of scientific racism, and has prominently argued against the idea that "race" is a natural category. In Marks's view, "race" is a negotiation between patterns of biological variation and patterns of perceived difference.