Enumeratio and Distinctio: Miriam

 “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 […].
• 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:

• But what exactly does it mean? […]There are several possible answers to this question. 
• 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.
• 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. 
• It is time for geneticists and biomedical researchers to directly confront the methodological limitations, errors and uncertainties in the way they use race constructs in their research designs and statistical analyses.
• 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 […]. 

Distinctio:

• […] 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.
• The same is true of disease. If the incidence of disease differs by race and if race is biological, then we must use race to explore the cause and treatment of disease.