Posted on 06/02/2019 12:09:52 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
In 2003, the anthropologist Duana Fullwiley spent six months observing a team of biomedical research scientists. The team wanted to find out whether genetic variation could affect how different people respond to drugs, and to do so, they recruited a group of racially and ethnically diverse research subjects. They were a diverse team themselves, with good intentions to address a worthy problem—it’s well known that different races suffer from health problems at different rates and can respond differently to treatments. If they could trace these discrepancies to genetic differences between races, the team reasoned, they could explain, and perhaps start to resolve, these health disparities.
After observing their work, the anthropologist asked each of them a simple question: How would you define race?
“You know—probably I haven’t given that as much thought as I should have,” said the team’s lead scientist. Others fumbled, paused, or dodged the question. When pushed, one researcher acknowledged that racial categories didn’t mean that much but in the same breath insisted that defining races genetically was the way to go. Not one could offer a coherent answer.
British science journalist Angela Saini tells this story in her exceptional and damning new book, Superior: The Return of Race Science. “Race was the entire premise upon which they were doing their research, but they were unable to tell her what it was,” writes Saini. “Their work instead seemed to rest upon a hope that if they just persisted, they would eventually come to find meaning in these categories. What they couldn’t yet define would then be defined. Somehow it would become real.”
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Cool. No race, no affirmative action, no quotas, no reparations.
I’m in.
So many contradictions.
Huge funding is going for studying how different races are impacted by anything and everything.
It’s where the money is in grants.
Money. There is zero science to support it. Control.. if you make people stay indide a man made box, they will submit their health, wealth and every aspect of their lives to the box maker.
And yet, if you are looking for tendencies towards Sickle Cell Anemia, Tay Sachs, or lack of enzymes that process alcohol, it is a great way to get a running start.
Why do people stubbornly believe that Pit Bulls and Golden Retrievers have any important differences?
After all, they’re just both dogs.
Politics and science....such natural bedfellows!
Genetics is science. At some level, genetics is science at it’s most profound level.
Race is the direct observation of a myraid of genetic differences. It is not necessary to be a high level geneticist to recognize by casual observation the results of those complex genetic differences.
The irony is that the wacko leftists worship at the alter of diversity and then refuse to recognize difference when it stands and breathes before them.
With today’s DNA, they CAN indeed tell what race you are from your saliva or skin cells.
Well stated, but your mistake is that you used logic, which is symptomatic of white privilege, therefore, you are a racist pig.
You are supposed to automatically submit to your betters.
We ahve whole neighborhoods of Polish, Italian, Irish and Africans. What is the problem?
That would be because it is a scientific concept? Refusal to acknowledge that there are racial differences is simply subordinating science to ideology. But of course, Slate would embrace Lysenkoism wholeheartedly.
You must remember, priviledge is at the base, the result of inate supremacy
I couldn’t help it. God made me that way
This is a ludicrous political article.
Discredits itself in biased premise and polemic.
“In the 16 years since the anthropologist made her observations, scientists have still not found any meaningful biological definition of race. All human genomes are 99.5 percent identical, and although it’s true that the remaining 0.5 percent can vary in ways that correlate with geographical ancestry, these correlations do not strictly map to racial categories.”
The above is very true and well-stated, so it’s not as if the author needs to be biased.
“Saini’s book comes at a time when race science is making a startling comeback. Ethno-nationalists like Steve Bannon channel race science when alluding to the “naturally aggressive and violent” tendencies of black people. White nationalists chug milk as an ...”
It moves in to liberal lefty fantasy land - make stuff up land - and never comes back.
To liberals everything is about race, even race.
If you don’t rake race in to account, you are racist and an oppressor . If you take race in to account you are racist.
It’s all such a hodge podge.
“Scientists today tend to think of themselves as experts who deal only in scientific fact, rather than as unwitting agents of political ideologies.”
Slate ultra liberal news source.
Sociologists are lecturing us on biology.
If they define race by skin color alone then they are merely determining if melatonin genes have an impact.
Instead what they should do is define various genetic features - including melatonin genes, eye shape, ear lobes, bone structure, etc and do their regressions on the unique features.
Don’t they already know that sickle cell is more prominent among Africans and linked to specific genes? Yet some non-africans still have the gene as well and get the disease.
They should forget about race and investigate specific genes. Then when therapies are being constructed they can check for those genes.... just like they check women with breast cancer for BRAC1 and BRAC2.
Liberia is a $hitho!e because of the Democrats!! Just like Detroit and Zimbabwe!!
The author invents a conservative fixation with race that does not exist. Most conservatives would be very happy to leave the concept of race in the dustbin and move forward. But liberals cling to their race fixation like “cauliflower is racist” lunatics. Today’s liberal America is the most race obsessed culture since the fall of Nazi germany.
Why do so many researchers treat differences between Wolves and Chihuahuas being owed to the genetics of the two breeds of canines as a Scientific Concept? Don’t they know that the concept of dog breeds is simply a SOCIAL CONSTRUCT? Dog breeds don’t exist.
By the way FReepers, check your FReeper privilege while you’re at it. /s
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.