Race According to Biological Science

Abstract

Modern biologists and anthropologists invented ideas of scientific race as a universal system of human typing that began with geography and description but by the nineteenth century relied on essences and assessment. When racial categories were seen to be arbitrary and culture viewed as the result of history, ideas of populations were substituted for race. But populations are more numerous than races and can only work as races if social races are assumed to be real and used to identify populations. Also, there are more differences within populations of physical racial traits, than between populations. By the twenty-first century, the idea of race was abandoned in biological science, although in the “race debates” some philosophers, try to retain it.

Essay and Discussion Questions

• 1. How were modern ideas of race different from older ideas of division within society?

• 2. Explain how description and assessment figured into racialist and racist ideas of race.

• 3. How was the idea of biological race retained by transitional thinkers such as Franz Boas and Claude Lévi-Strauss?

• 4. Explain the difference between classificatory and evolutionary-historical genetic descriptions of human groups.

• 5. How is the genetic difference within and between groups relevant to whether or not races exist in science?

• 6. What are some problems with the idea of populations? If races were defined as populations, what problems would follow?

• 7. Critically engage Andreasen’s suggestion that races are clades.

• 8. Critically engage Hardimon’s idea of “minimal race.”

• 9. What can be concluded from the fact that some people have genetic material related to ancestral origins that are different from how those people identify racially?

• 10. Explain why the status of race as a real system in science is important for how we think about race.

Glossary

clades

—multigenerational groups with distinctive traits forming after a split with a larger group, who have a common ancestor.

clines

—traits that gradually change into other traits over geographical and climactic differences.

ethnological studies

—anthropological studies of specific practices within different cultures.

eugenics movement

—thought and policies based on the idea that only people judged superior relative to others should be permitted to have offspring.

monogeny

—doctrine that all human varieties have a common evolutionary origin.

pangenesis

—out of date theory that changes in bodily cells “drift” to genetic material, changing what can be inherited.

polygenism

—doctrine that different human races have different evolutionary origins.

population

—term for a group used by evolutionary biologists and anthropologists for a group of people in the same geographical area who breed mainly among themselves.

racialism

—thought or action based on the belief that human races are real and the differences among races are important.

reduction

—translating the terms for entities and principles studied in one science to entities and principles studied in another more basic or more rigorous science.

revisionism

—changing knowledge as a valued practice.

social construction

—an idea, thing, or practice that is created in society and not the result of anything natural or self-evident.

social Darwinism

—late nineteenth and early twentieth-century misapplications of Darwinian evolution to support oppression and/or neglect of circumstances of nonwhites and poor in society.

valorization

—positive value assessment.