Since Kerim’s touched on the subject I’ll mention a few more things. First, Troy Duster (CV) has a nice, brief piece on pharmacogenetics that is worth checking out. Of course, those of you who are more old-school may prefer Buffon’s Of the varieties of the human species. Of course there is indeed such a thing as the liberal knee-jerk reaction against any account of the genetics of human difference. A more troubling issue is not anthropologists who are ignorant of genetics, but geneticists who apparently weren’t made to read any social science as undergraduates. Our tools for understanding biology are becoming more and more sophisticated, but the sophistication of the concepts some people use to analyze this data appears to be staying more or less the same. In the past — particularly during the AAA meeting fiascos — I felt that anthropology’s four field approach was growing more and more obsolete. Aracheologists were talking with GIS and imaging people, socio-culturals were interested in cultural studies, physical anthros were doing more and more bioinformatics and population genetics, and the linguists had always been sort of attached to philology. I thought: “that’s cool with me.” More and more, however, the archaeology I read seems to benefit from a deep engagement with the anthropological literature (_including_ the literature on ethnicity, thank you very much) and discussions like this make it clear that physical/biological and sociocultural types need to stick together if our ability to make good sense of biological data is going to keep up with out ability to collect it.
Ok I am done with race now. My obsession will now shift to the topic of strong societies and weak states and New Institutional Economics.
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I am consistently grateful that I was forced to take introductory courses in all four fields (five if you count visual anthropology), although I still resent the fact that one of my Physical Anthropology professors marked me down on a paper simply because I disagreed with his Popperian view of science…
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so, wading into the debate on whether race is a biologically based category or a socially constructed label, a stanford genetics professor has found 326 genetic markers that can be used to accurately classify people into common ‘racial’ groupings. here’s the abstract.
interesting in light of the summers’ brouhaha over his speculation on women’s intelligence in certain fields. i guess it makes some people uncomfortable that some phenotypic traits may be genetically innate or predetermined to some extent.
Human X Chromosome Coded: Sequence Confirms How Sex Evolved and Explains Some Male, Female Differences
there was also some nytimes coverage on the issue the other day. oh and btw, jim holt had a great new yorker article on francis galton recently:
Galton was one of the great Victorian innovators. He explored unknown regions of Africa. He pioneered the fields of weather forecasting and fingerprinting. He discovered statistical rules that revolutionized the methodology of science. Yet today he is most often remembered for an achievement that puts him in a decidedly sinister light: he was the father of eugenics, the science, or pseudoscience, of “improving” the human race by selective breeding.
he was also charles darwin’s cousin :D
cheers!
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glory —
Kerim’s post touches on the NYT editorial as well as the Stanford study — in fact the existence of those two pieces is why I wrote this entry. Thanks for reminding me of them again, though. Galton is, of course, one of the greatest Victorian polymaths and is widely remembered for quantifying everything. There was a picture of him carved into the entrace of the Social Sciences building at my university. As a student I heard several funny stories about his penchant for self-experimentation. Unforutnately, as one of the leading figures in the early Eugenics movement his legacy is somewhat controversial today.I think what makes me uncomfortable personally — and this was the point of this entry — is that some people can’t imagine that some traits could be determined by anything other than genetic innateness
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of course, they’re not mutually exclusive. rather, i suspect, they’re self-reinforcing: that race is a biologically based category and a socially constructed label. and on that continuum (or are they separate axes?) i guess i lean more toward the ‘socially constructed label’ but based, in part, on ‘genetic distance’ as kerim’s post alludes.
as for “strong societies and weak states and New Institutional Economics,” might i point out douglas rushkoff’s recent response to richard foreman‘s and george dyson‘s edge speculation on, “the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self“—mediated by technology such that we essentially become ‘thin clients’ who access cultural institutions as needed for meaning and instruction in our lives?
anyway, rushkoff’s response emphasized a new “renaissance” taking place, but one that values “the power of collectivism.” he cites as examples:
The open source development model, shunning the corporate secrets of the competitive marketplace, promotes the free and open exchange of the codes underlying the software we use. Anyone and everyone is invited to make improvements and additions, and the resulting projects—like the Firefox browser—are more nimble, stable, and user-friendly. Likewise, the development of complementary currency models, such as Ithaca Hours, allow people to agree together what their goods and services are worth to one another without involving the Fed. They don’t need to compete for currency in order to pay back the central creditor—currency is an enabler of collaborative efforts rather than purely competitive ones.
oh and bringing it back to genetics, just thought i’d point out some research into new DNA base pairs :D
Since such organisms (simple yeasts or bacteria) would carry a brand-new genetic code, they would in effect be new life forms. Organisms with more than the standard two base pairs would be able to make more than the standard 20 amino acids. Thus, such organisms could make novel, unnatural proteins.
here’s an earlier article from the economist, btw.
cheers!
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oh hey, fwiw :D
Of course, there will be people who object. There will be people who will say that this is a revival of racial science. Perhaps so. I would argue, however, that even if this is a revival of racial science, we should engage in it for it does not follow that it is a revival of racist science. Indeed, I would argue, that it is just the opposite.
cheers!
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