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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Debating Race
- Sprache: Englisch
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.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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Table of Contents
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
One: Introduction
Notes
Two: How science invented race
Three: Science, race, and genomics
Notes
Four: Racism and biomedical science
Notes
Five: What we know, and why it matters
1 Human groups distinguish themselves principally culturally
2 There is much more variation within groups (polymorphism) than between groups (polytypy)
3 Human biological variation is continuous, not discrete
4 Populations are biologically real, not races
5 Populations also have a constructed component
6 Clustering populations is arbitrary
7 People are similar to those nearby and different from those far away
8 Racial classification is historical and political, and does not reflect natural biological patterns
9 Humans have little genetic variation
10 Racial issues are social-political-economic, not biological
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Figure 1.1 Frontispiece of the 1868 first German edition of Ernst Haeckel's
The History of Creation
. (Courtesy of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.)
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Series page
Debating Race series
David Theo Goldberg,
Are we all postracial yet?
Ghassan Hage,
Is racism an environmental threat?
Jonathan Marks,
Is science racist?
Copyright page
Copyright © Jonathan Marks 2017
The right of Jonathan Marks to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2017 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
350 Main Street
Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8921-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8922-7(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2016029623
Typeset in 11 on 15 pt Adobe Garamond
by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives PLC
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:
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Dedication
To my parents Richard and Renée,
to my wife Peta,
and to our daughter Abby
Acknowledgments
I started writing this book while I was a Templeton Fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, and probably should have been working on my project, Tales of the ex-Apes (University of California Press, 2015). That project came to happy fruition, and now so too has this, and I am very grateful to the John Templeton Foundation and to the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study for their stimulation and support.
I have been strongly influenced by the voices of friends and colleagues who have helped me to clarify my own thinking, while sharing theirs. That is a group that includes Troy Duster, Jay Kaufman, Jonathan Kahn, Dorothy Roberts, Duana Fullwiley, Kim TallBear, Alan Goodman, Deborah Bolnick, Susan Reverby, Evelynn Hammonds, Joseph Graves, Richard Cooper, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Pilar Ossorio, Lundy Braun, Terence Keel, and others.
I thank Jonathan Kahn and Julia Feder for their insightful comments on the manuscript, and Karen Strier for long-term wisdom.
OneIntroduction
Racism pervades many, if not all, aspects of modern society, in different ways. Like other modern institutions, science can sometimes reflect the subtle and not-so-subtle biases of its practitioners. This book is not about the institutions and practices of science, however, but about its content.
I teach two principal subjects as a biological anthropologist: human diversity and human origins. These are about, respectively, who we are and where we come from. For any other society, this would be considered a sacred origin myth, a domain of kinship, by which people establish their orientation in a complex social universe. In our society, it involves the contested scientific domains of race and evolution, both of which are conceptualized rather differently than they were a few decades ago.
Evolution, for example, used to be conceptualized reductively – without bodies, and without species – as simply genotypes and gene pools. Any contemporary discussion of the subject, however, now considers the reactivity and adaptability of the body (plasticity), the reciprocal relations between the environment and the species (niche construction), and nongenetic modes of inheritance (epigenetics and culture).
Race, likewise, has been reconceptualized in the last few decades. Where it was once conceptualized as a fundamental unit of the human species, we now know that the species does not really come partitioned that way. That is a fallacy of primary interest to pedants, like me, and we can call that taxonomic fallacy “racialism.” More significant is the recognition that the social and behavioral differences between any two groups of people are far more likely to be due to the processes of history than to those of microevolution. Consequently, the judgment of innate individual properties on the basis of group membership is illegitimate, and we can call that political position “racism.”
Nevertheless, when dealing with ancestors and relatives, one never traffics in value-neutral facts. Kinship is invariably bio-cultural. The opposite of evolution – creationism – is so political that its history actually is just a series of court cases in the United States: Tennessee vs Scopes (1925), McLean vs Arkansas (1982), Edwards vs. Aguillard (1987), and Kitzmiller vs. Dover School District (2005) are just the most familiar ones. And racism is most familiar as political acts: slavery, segregation, anti-Semitism, once again, to name only the most familiar examples.
This book is about a paradox in science. Both creationism and racism are considered outmoded ideologies. If you espouse creationist ideas in science, you are branded as an ideologue, as a closed-minded pseudo-scientist who is unable to adopt a modern perspective, and who consequently has no place in the community of scholars. But if you espouse racist ideas in science, that's not quite so bad. People might look at you a little askance, but as a racist you can coexist in science alongside them, which you couldn't do if you were a creationist. Science is racist when it permits scientists who advance racist ideas to exist and to thrive institutionally.1
Consider an op-ed that appeared in the New York Times on April 11, 2014, called “Raising a Moral Child,” which casually cited “a classic experiment” by “the psychologist J. Philippe Rushton.”2 Sure, why not? He was indeed a respected psychologist at the University of Western Ontario. Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve, which notoriously argued in 1994 that IQ is largely genetically determined, sets one's intellectual fate, and differs across large demographic swaths of the American public, cited more than 20 of Rushton's papers. It then went so far as to pre-emptively defend him in an Appendix – rather an unusual step – calling his work “not that of a crackpot or a bigot” (Herrnstein and Murray, 1994: 662). That obviously raises a few questions, such as: Do other scholars regard him as such? Why? Just what does he think his work demonstrates? The answers to these questions became widely known a few years later, when Rushton mass-mailed an abridgement of his own book to the memberships of several professional societies. The unabridged version had been memorably reviewed in the journal Animal Behaviour in uncompromising terms: “I don't know which is worse,” wrote the reviewer, “Rushton's scientific failings or his blatant racism.” Methodologically, the reviewer continued, Rushton cherry-picks data of very dubious quality to make his pseudo-scientific argument, which amounts to “the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit” (Barash, 1995: 1133).
Rushton believed, and believed that his data showed, that there are three kinds of people associated with the continents of the Old World (a biogeographic scenario that in fact owes more to the biblical sons of Noah than to modern biology). Moreover, the peoples of Africa had undergone eons of natural selection for high reproductive rate and low intelligence, which he measured via surrogate variables – notably, sex drive, criminality rates, penis size, and brain size; the peoples of Asia had undergone selection for low libido and high intelligence; and the peoples of Europe comprised a happy medium. He believed that the average sub-Saharan African had the IQ of a mentally handicapped European. Yes, he was a racist crackpot. Anybody who ever took the trouble to examine his inane corpus of work could see that.
When Philippe Rushton died in 2012, he had been president of The Pioneer Fund for a decade, a philanthropy that carefully selects its academic beneficiaries, ranging from eugenicists in the 1930s to segregationists in the 1960s, and radical hereditarian psychologists – notably Rushton himself – in the 1980s (Tucker, 2002). Clearly this was a man who was utterly incapable of rendering sober, informed, scientific judgments; simply a wacky ideologue with a PhD and the admiration of some wealthy and powerful misanthropes. Yet somehow he had risen to a position of status and authority in certain areas of science. Indeed, the New York Times cited a paper of his in 2014. Sure, the paper wasn't about race per se, but the issue here is Rushton's credibility as a scientist. Every practicing scientist knows that data can be manipulated, and that there is a good faith expectation between the scientist and the community at large. That's why losing your scientific credibility is such a fall from grace: it represents irrevocable descent from a pristine state of full trust and honesty. We expect you to be able to generate fair conclusions from fair data. Consequently, to cite Rushton's work is to tarnish your own scholarly credibility, because it says that you have no idea what's going on within the mind or oeuvre of the presumptive scholar on whom you are relying.
So, once you know about Philippe Rushton's work and ideas, it becomes difficult to understand why any competent scholar would cite, much less praise, his work. And yet, the journal Personality and Individual Differences, published by the academic giant Elsevier, devoted its issue of July 2013 to an admiring memorial of his work. Had Rushton been a creationist instead of a racist, no mainstream scientist or journal would have touched him. Adhering to such a retrogressive ideology would render you effectively friendless in academia. But there was a place for someone who thought he had demonstrated that “Africans” are naturally underendowed intellectually – in academia, in scientific philanthropy, and in ostensibly scientific journals.
Some people feel that psychology is a “soft” science anyway, and that a “real” scientist would easily transcend such nonsense. That brings us to the father of molecular genetics, and Nobel laureate for the discovery of DNA, James Watson. Watson has had a career not just in science, but at its apex, doing his most famous work in his twenties, and winning the Nobel prize for it in his thirties. In addition to two decades on the Harvard faculty, he was the first director of the Human Genome Project, and the long-time director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory of molecular genetics.
And yet he has an odd reputation. Biologist Edward O. Wilson was a long-time colleague at Harvard, and recalled: “Watson, having risen to historic fame at an early age, became the Caligula of biology. He was given license to say anything that came to his mind and expect to be taken seriously … Few dared call him openly to account” (1994: 219). Watson was always glib in his unofficial role as publicity hound for molecular genetics. Trying to drum up public support for the Human Genome Project in 1989, he was famously quoted in Time Magazine: “We used to think our fate was in the stars. Now we know, in large measure, our fate is in our genes” (Jaroff, 1989: 67). Of course, it isn't clear that we have fates at all, much less that they have been identified within our cellular nuclei.
Watson's hereditarian comments raised eyebrows, but a bit later he became freer with racist comments. In 2000, he told an audience that he thought there was a biochemical link between skin pigmentation and sex drive.3 That provoked some indignation, but nothing particularly threatening to the reputation of the scientist-pundit. Finally, in 2007, he wrote a book cutely titled Avoid Boring People, and explained that: “There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so” (2007: 326). Promoting the book in the UK, he made things absolutely clear in an interview for the Sunday Times (London) that the intelligence of Africans is just not the same as “ours,” which leaves him “gloomy about the prospect of Africa” (Hunt-Grubbe, 2007). This time, however, his comments provoked a week-long national furore – hate speech laws being rather more strict in the UK than in the US – which culminated in the cancellation of his speaking tour.
Eventually Watson was prevailed upon to retire from his directorship of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the wake of the scandal. Yet although there wasn't even anything particularly subtle about his racist musings – that Africans are just dumber than Europeans – there were still plenty of scientists willing to defend and to support him. My contention is that had Watson been a creationist, that would not have been the case; and that is the theme of this book. I believe that the toleration of racism in science is a problem for science; in large measure because it constructs science as a force of evil, by entering a political discourse and rationalizing the economic and social disparities in the modern world. Indeed, the perseverance of scientific racism can be seen as a bioethical problem, combining the narrowness of scientific education, the arrogance of otherwise bright people, and the misappropriation of the authority of science.
Watson's comments about the relative innate intelligence of races was in fact quite normative for the biology and anthropology of the mid-1800s. Although other scientific fashions have come and gone since then – for example, creationism, the idea that species were zapped into existence independently of one another; or phrenology, the idea that the fine features of the skull revealed the mental traits or personality quirks of its bearer; or eugenics, the idea that the state should take it upon itself to breed a better form of citizen, primarily through programs of mass sterilization – racism has never departed, even though it has taken several guises. Indeed, a testament to the power of racism in science is that it was only minimally affected by the emergence of Darwinism.
Prior to Darwinism, a major question in biology was whether the human races were the products of common descent from a single origin (Adam and Eve, presumably), a position known as monogenism. The alternative supposed that God had created different human groups separately and independently of one another, as different kinds, a position known as polygenism. Unsurprisingly, monogenism had broad appeal with abolitionists, and polygenism found favor among slavers. Nevertheless, there were also intermediate positions. To be against slavery didn't necessarily mean that you believed the different races had equal capacities; it simply meant that you recognized non-white peoples as fundamentally human.
As odd is it may seem today, polygenism actually had its attractions within the intellectual community. Notably, it was unbiblical; consequently, it was attractive to secular radicals who wanted to transcend biblical authority in the modern age. Further, advances in geology and archaeology were consistently showing the world to be very unbiblically old. This made the possibility that God had created other races earlier than Europeans seem all the more likely (Livingstone, 2008).
By the 1840s, the British had outlawed slavery, and the early stirrings of evolution appeared in a very popular anonymous book called Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (
