When Europeans arrived in America, they met people they had never seen before. The natives were considered savage and uncivilized, regardless of their well-established culture and presence. As colonies formed and Africans began their journeys to America as slaves, many colonists perceived them as inferior. Eurocentrism helped lay the foundations on which the concept of race was built and flourished. As research shows, there is only one species of human beings, Homo sapiens. “Race,” used as a concept to stratify societies, does not refer to biological variation. Much controversy has focused on the concept of racial variations. A debate questioned the differences between people with "black, brown, white or yellow skin" and whether they originated from separate species. Another debate centered on whether or not variations resulted from natural selection (Banton 3). Across a variety of disciplines, scholars increasingly view race as a cultural creation, one that has no inherent relationship to tangible physical and human variation. Rather, it echoes the social implications arising from these dissimilarities. “‘Race’ has emerged as the dominant form of identity in societies where it functions to stratify the social system” (Smedley 690). A socially created concept, race is not a reference to biological differences, but is a construct used to elicit social variances based on physical images. These social variations are often the product of ethnocentric ideas and social prejudices. These societies are often characterized by racial stratification (McDaniel 140). The discipline of anthropology was born from a dual study of the physical and mental facets of “human nature”. Midway through this article, controversy will continue among anthropologists as to the method by which groups should be classified, whether physical, biological, linguistic, or cultural. As science advances, it is likely that a new method will develop to attempt to classify everything in nature, including humans. Due to racial discrimination and prejudice, anthropologists will likely continue to struggle for a uniform understanding of humans and their variations, thus eradicating the deeply ingrained concept of race among Americans. Science has sowed confusion within its various disciplines, creating an unstable consensus. Social stratification will continue unless a consensus is reached in which the public can understand and apply, which will perpetuate segregation based on physical variations and negate the concept of multicultural society..