Blog on Nathaniel Comfort's “Under the Skin“

Blog on Nathaniel Comfort - Genetics: Under the Skin

In his text “Genetics: Under the Skin“ Nathaniel Comfort wonders at the enduring trend of misrepresenting race and and starts off with the answerless question if race is biologically real. He presents a handful of works by several scientists that deal with this very question  producing highly diverse results and than calls it accurately “a dead end, a distraction from what is really at stake in this debate: human social equality.“. Comfort says that race is certainly genetically real in the sense of sets of “phenotypes and stereotypes“ that “correlate with haplotypes, clusters of genetic variation“, but he marks that those correlations “depend on judgement calls.“ and he therefore argues that “race is real and race is genetic, but that does not mean that race is ’really’ genetic.“!

As said in the first paragraph, Comfort presents several assertions of scientist dealing with the question of race is biologically real and gives examples of their opinions. For example, he talks about their idea that “Europeans have become the world’s richest and most powerful people mainly because they are genetically the most open, curious, innovative and hard-working“, or that, talking about developing nations, “foreign aid is probably wasted because poor countries are not genetically prepared for the institutions necessary for wealth“. I myself totally disagree with all kinds of thoughts like that, since I feel like there is not a single persuasive evidence proving the relation between your genes and your development or success in life. 

I prefer the other kind of statements of other scientists and Comfort himself presented in his text, when it comes to the view that debates over the genetic reality of race “are not mainly scientific, but social“. So I would agree with Montagu, who wanted to call race a fiction and a product of culture, since I assume that every category a human being develops in life is not more than a cultural product of getting one’s head around the world easier—And so is the category called “race“.