Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T01:17:43.842Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Racism and Human Genome Diversity Research: The Ethical Limits of “Population Thinking”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Lisa Gannett
Lisa Gannett*
Affiliation:
California State University, Chico
*
†Send requests for reprints to the author, Department of Philosophy, California State University, Chico, Chico, CA 95929–0730; email: [email protected].
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This paper questions the prevailing historical understanding that scientific racism “retreated” in the 1950s when anthropology adopted the concepts and methods of population genetics and race was recognized to be a social construct and replaced by the concept of population. More accurately, a “populational” concept of race was substituted for a “typological one”—this is demonstrated by looking at the work of Theodosius Dobzhansky circa 1950. The potential for contemporary research in human population genetics to contribute to racism needs to be considered with respect to the ability of the typological-population distinction to arbitrate boundaries between racist society and nonracist, even anti-racist, science. I point out some ethical limits of “population thinking” in doing so.

Type
Science and Values
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 68 , Issue S3: No. 3 Supplement: Proceedings of the 2000 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers Sep., 2001 , 2001 , pp. S479 - S492
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

‡

This research was supported by a post-doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. My thanks to all those who made possible enjoyable and stimulating stays at the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science (1998–1999) and the Program in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Davis (1999–2000). I received helpful comments on various aspects of this work from John Beatty, Jim Griesemer, Jenny Reardon, and John Spriggs, as well as audiences at the University of Toronto and PSA 2000. Thanks especially to Jenny Reardon for reading a version of this paper at 4-S 2000.

References

Banton, Michael (1998), Racial Theories. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511583407CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barkan, Elazar (1992), The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing concepts of race in Britain and the United States between the world wars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Blum, Lawrence (1999), “Moral Asymmetries in Racism”, in Babbitt, Susan E. and Campbell, Sue (eds.), Racism and Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 79–97.Google Scholar
Cavalli-Sforza, L. Luca, Menozzi, Paolo, and Piazza, Alberto (1994), The History and Geography of Human Genes. Abridged paperback edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Dobzhansky, Theodosius (1950), “Mendelian Populations and Their Evolution”, The American Naturalist 84:401–418.10.1086/281638CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dobzhansky, Theodosius (1951a), “Human Diversity and Adaptation”, Cold Spring Harbor Symposia in Quantitative Biology 15:385–400.10.1101/SQB.1950.015.01.037CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dobzhansky, Theodosius (1951b), “Race and Humanity”, Science 113 (9 March): 264–266.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dobzhansky, Theodosius (1951c), “Human Races in the Light of Genetics”, International Social Science Bulletin 3:660–663.Google Scholar
Dunn, L.C. and Dobzhansky, Theodosius (1946), Heredity, Race, and Society. New York: Penguin Books.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gannett, Lisa (1999), “What's in a Cause?: The Pragmatic Dimensions of Genetic Explanations”, Biology and Philosophy 14:349–373.10.1023/A:1006583215835CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartl, Daniel L. (1985), Our Uncertain Heritage: Genetics and Human Diversity. 2nd ed. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Lewontin, Richard (1982), Human Diversity. New York: Scientific American Books.Google Scholar
Marks, Jonathan (1995), Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Mayr, Ernst (1942), Systematics and the Origin of Species. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Mayr, Ernst ([1959] 1984), “Typological versus Population Thinking”, in Sober, Elliott (ed.), Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology: An Anthology. Originally appeared as “Darwin and the evolutionary theory in biology”, in Evolution and Anthropology: A Centennial Appraisal (Washington, DC: Anthropology Society of Washington), 409–412. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 15–17.Google Scholar
Reardon, Jennifer (2001), “The Human Genome Diversity Project: A Failure to Co-produce Natural and Social Order”, Journal of the Social Studies of Science, forthcoming.10.1177/030631201031003002CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stepan, Nancy (1982), The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960. Hamden, CT: Archon Books.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
UNESCO (1996), “Bioethics and Human Population Genetics Research”, Proceedings of the Third Session of the International Bioethics Committee of UNESCO, Vol. 1, 44–69.Google Scholar
Van Horne, Winston A. (1997), “Introduction”, in Van Horne, Winston A. (ed.), Global Convulsions: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism at the End of the Twentieth Century. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1–45.Google Scholar