[...] There was at least one geneticist on hand who wasn't quite ready to do away with race entirely. "It's been said that race is biologically meaningless, and I disagree with that," Lynn Jorde of the University of Utah told a reporter. He provoked much debate in the meeting with his talk about "clusters" of genetic markers that correspond to geographic origin or ancestry. These clusters are correlated with some traditional concepts of race, he said, though there is too much genetic overlap to support the notion that some people are simply white, black, etc.
Still, talk of any biological element to race drew rebukes from some participants. Evolutionary geneticist Joseph Graves, author of "The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America," said scientists have misunderstood the nature of human genetic variation. It doesn't translate into racial categories. "There are no races in anatomically modern humans," Graves said.
Gary Segura, a political scientist at the University of Iowa, said that people tend to pay far too much attention to just a few of the morphological differences among humans. People vary in dozens of different ways, he said.
"We tend to fetishize the shape of the eyes, the shape of the nose, the color of the skin and the texture of the hair," he said.
But he made a prediction: If all the experts in the world suddenly announced that there's no such thing as race, and if newspapers ran the story on the front page, it still wouldn't change the way whites and blacks interact in Alabama. [...]
| Oh, to have been a fly in the buttermilk on the wall at the "Understanding Race and Human Variation" brainstorming session described in Joel Achenbach's Washington Post article "Taking Off the Color Blinders" (noticed via the much-recommended ms.musings, via the also-much-recommended Alas, a Blog)
posted in articles on September 20, 2004 5:57 AM | t (0)
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