Troublesome Science: The Misuse of Genetics and Genomics in Understanding Race

213 Pages·2018·4.62 MB·English

by  Rob DeSalle

TROUBLESOME SCIENCE
RACE, INEQUALITY, AND HEALTH
RACE, INEQUALITY, AND HEALTH
Edited by Samuel Kelton Roberts Jr. and Michael Yudell
The Race, Inequality, and Health series explores how race has become a basis for discrimination and
inequality, as well as a foundation for reactionary or affirmative group politics. The goal of this series is to
offer an intellectual space for leading scholars, combining work in history, the social sciences, the
biological sciences, and public health that will deepen our understanding of how ideological and scientific
claims about race and race difference have impacted health and society both historically and in the
present day.
Michael Yudell, Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the Twentieth Century
TROUBLESOME SCIENCE
The Misuse of Genetics and Genomics in understanding race
ROB DESALLE AND IAN
TATTERSALL
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2018 Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-54630-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: DeSalle, Rob, author. | Tattersall, Ian, author.
Title: Troublesome science : the misuse of genetics and genomics in understanding race / Rob DeSalle
and Ian Tattersall.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017052052 | ISBN 9780231185721 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231546300 (e-book)
Subjects: | MESH: Genetics, Population | Continental Population Groups | Genomics | Biological Evolution
Classification: LCC QH455 | NLM QU 450 | DDC 576.5/8—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017052052
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-
[email protected].
Cover image: Byron Kim, Synecdoche (1991–present).
Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art
Cover design: Chang Jae Lee
To the memory of our colleague and good friend Bob Sussman, who
detested inequality
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1
Evolutionary Lessons
2
Species and How to Recognize Them
3
Phylogenetic Trees
4
The Name Game: Modern Zoological Nomenclature and the Rules of
Naming Things
5
DNA Fingerprinting and Barcoding
6
Early Biological Notions of Human Divergence
7
Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosome Adam
8
The Other 99 Percent of the Genome
9
ABBA/BABA and the Genomes of Our Ancient Relatives
10
Human Migration and Neolithic Genomes
11
Gene Genealogies and Species Trees
12
Clustering Humans?
13
STRUCTUREing Humans?
14
Mr. Murray Loses His Bet
Epilogue: Race and Society
Notes and Bibliography
Index
Preface
In a perfect world, there would be no need for another book on science and
race. After all, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that attempting to subdivide
our species Homo sapiens into the objectively recognizable units that scientific
analysis requires is an entirely hopeless task. Indeed, we thought that we had
reasonably effectively shown this ourselves a few years ago, in our 2011 book
Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth. Our late and hugely lamented colleague
Robert W. Sussman subsequently complemented our efforts to what should
have been great effect in his The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of
an Unscientific Idea, in which he used eugenics as a lens through which to
elegantly explain how bigotry so often contrives to be mistaken for science.
Sadly, though, even a cursory review of the recent literature is enough to
demonstrate the tenacity of the belief that the real existence of human races is
somehow justified by biological science. Comparative molecular biologists, for
example, continue to “stratify” their geographic samples as a prelude to further
study, while many clinical pharmacological studies carry on the venerable
tradition of classifying their subjects by race. The U.S. government persists in
requesting its citizens pigeonhole themselves by race for a whole host of
different purposes; and equally disturbing is the ongoing success of popular
books such as Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and
Human History, which purports to demonstrate the objective existence of
human races on scientific grounds.
Clearly, widespread confusion still exists about the nature of the evidence on
which the human species is subdivided and about the objectivity or applicability
of the scientific methods used to do this. Most of those methods belong to
taxonomy, the science devoted to the ordering and classification of the riotous
diversity of the natural world of which we form a part. As taxonomists ourselves,
we fully appreciate the power of such methods to help us organize the
complexities of a biosphere with a long and branching evolutionary history. But
we equally recognize that these methods are totally unsuited to classifying
variants within species, the fundamental units of analysis when we examine the
structure of life. For while species are individuated historical units, off on their
own unique evolutionary trajectories, variants within them are not only in
principle ephemera, but almost by definition have no discrete boundaries.
Consequently, the procedures that have been developed for ordering different
species cannot usefully be applied to the undeniable variety that exists within
Homo sapiens.