Editing Human variability (section)

==Social significance and valuation==
Both individuals and entire societies and cultures place values on different aspects of human variability; however, values can change as societies and cultures change. Not all people agree on the values or relative rankings, and neither do all societies and cultures. Nonetheless, nearly all human differences have a social value dimension. Examples of variations which may be given different values in different societies include skin color and/or body structure. Race and sex have a strong value difference, while [[handedness]] has a much weaker value difference. The values given to different traits among human variability are often influenced by what [[phenotype]]s are more prevalent locally. Local valuation may affect social standing, reproductive opportunities, or even survival.

Differences may vary or be distributed in various ways. Some, like height for a given sex, vary in close to a [[normal distribution|"normal" or Gaussian distribution]]. Other characteristics (e.g., [[Human skin color|skin color]]) vary continuously in a population, but the continuum may be socially divided into a small number of distinct categories. Then, there are some characteristics that vary bimodally (for example, [[handedness]]), with fewer people in intermediate categories.