“A Family Tree in Every Gene” - Armand Marie Leroi
Enumeratio:
- Beneath the jargon,
cautious phrases and academic courtesies, one thing was clear…
- Most scientists are thoughtful, liberal-minded and
socially aware people.
- The shapes of our eyes, noses and skulls; the color of our eyes and
our hair; the heaviness, height and hairiness of our bodies are all,
individually, poor guides to ancestry.
- Certain skin colors tend to go with certain kinds
of eyes, noses, skulls and bodies.
- If you want to know what fraction of your genes
are African, European or East Asian, all it takes is a mouth swab, a postage stamp and $400.
- We do not know why some people have prominent rather than flat noses,
round rather than pointed skulls, wide rather than narrow faces, straight
rather than curly hair.
- But through it, we may be able to write the
genetic recipe for the fair hair of
a Norwegian, the black-verging-on-purple skin of a Solomon Islander, the
flat face of an Inuit, and the curved eyelid of a Han Chinese.
- They will remain visible in the unusually dark skin of some
Indonesians, the unusually curly hair of some Sri Lankans, the unusually
slight frames of some Filipinos.
Distinctio:
- The metaphor is as colorful as it is well
intentioned. But what exactly does
it mean?
- Who speaks of "racial stocks" anymore?
After all, to do so would be to
speak of something that many scientists and scholars say does not exist.
- These tribes are special, it said, because they are of "Negrito
racial stocks" that are "remnants of the oldest human populations
of Asia and Australia.”
“Straw Men and Their Followers: The Return of Biological Race” - Evelynn
M. Hammonds
Enumeratio:
- A number of evolutionary
biologists, geneticists, biological anthropologists and medical
researchers have recently challenged the view […].
- […] that human beings can be lumped together in
groups by skin color, hair type,
eye shape and color, head shape and body type.
- The book generated extensive critiques by historians, social scientist and
journalists. In the collection of reviews, arguments, historical background and critiques of the
work published in 1995, there are detailed criticisms against each
aspect of the argument, evidence
and research presented by Herrnstein and Murray.
- It is even more troubling to geneticists that
there is no consensus within science as to what race is, how it should be used, or its utility for predicting
health outcomes in individuals.
- The public was given no information about the
potential problems that this project raises, the most obvious being questions of privacy, future use of
the DNA that will reside in the database, and even the waste of money that
might have gone elsewhere.
- Can genetic research tell us who we really are, where we come from, who we are related to, or
why we get sick without resorting to concepts of race that confound
and distort these very questions?
Distinctio:
- […] the view that race is socially constructed as
“race deniers”—people who refuse to
acknowledge what any child can see— […]
- To assert that race is real is not, Leroi
claims, a return to the position that races are pure or that some races
are superior to others.
- Human genetic variation is essentially a continuous phenomenon, reflecting the various histories and migration patterns of groups
of human beings.
- As one of my students quipped, “Race in America is not a biological
category; it is a cosmology, an entire world view.”
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