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Loading... Is Science Racist? (Debating Race)by Jonathan Marks
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Marks’ real rallying cry in this book is against consumer and medical genomics, which apply race on a limited level to help with simplification. For most people who work in genomics, the use of race is applied as a conceptual scaffold, not as a fact of discreteness. Marks’ critiques of race and IQ are familiar to people working in these fields. Of course, we know that most variation is clinal and local (and, as Marks admits, this does not remove the fact that there are group differences). We know that a cluster of global genomes partitioned into two groups will give you Africans and the rest of the world and that a cluster partitioned into five will give you Africans, Europeans, Asians, Native Americans and Oceanics, but that these clusters don’t reflect exactly how people move around. Everyone knows that the boundaries are fuzzy, and the only people imposing a strict usage of race concepts are the people in Marks’ strawman version.
Every arena of science has its own flash-point issues--chemistry and poison gas, physics and the atom bomb--and genetics has had a troubled history with race. As Jonathan Marks reveals, this dangerous relationship rumbles on to this day, still leaving plenty of leeway for a belief in the basic natural inequality of races. The eugenic science of the early twentieth century and the commodified genomic science of today are unified by the mistaken belief that human races are naturalistic categories. Yet their boundaries are founded neither in biology nor in genetics and, not being a formal scientific concept, race is largely not accessible to the scientist. As Marks argues, race can only be grasped through the humanities: historically, experientially, politically. This wise, witty essay explores the persistence and legacy of scientific racism, which misappropriates the authority of science and undermines it by converting it into a social weapon. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)500.89Natural sciences and mathematics General Science General Science Culture StudiesLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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