Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-05T03:20:53.223Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Clines, Clusters, and Clades in the Race Debate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Matthew Kopec
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this paper, I argue against Andreasen and Sesardic, who have both claimed that recent cluster results in population genetics serve as evidence that the human species contains, or at least once contained, subspecies. I show that the cluster results are in fact evidentially inert relative to each author’s preferred subspecies concept. I then sketch the kinds of biological facts that could be used to push the debate further.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 81 , Issue 5 , December 2014 , pp. 1053 - 1065
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

I’d like to thank Dominic Bailey, Matthew Barker, John Basl, Daniel Hausman, Jonathan Kaplan, Larry Shapiro, Elliott Sober, Quayshawn Spencer, and Rasmus Winther for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay, as well as Alan Templeton and the audiences at CU-Boulder, Northeastern University, University of British Columbia, UW-Madison, the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology 2011, and PSA 2012 for helpful discussion. This research was funded under a project at Northeastern University’s Ethics Institute entitled Nanotechnology in the Public Interest: Regulatory Challenges, Capacity, and Policy Recommendations (National Science Foundation, grant SES-0609078).

References

Andreasen, Robin. 1998. “A New Perspective on the Race Debate.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (2): 199–225.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andreasen, Robin 2000. “Race: Biological Reality or Social Construct?” Philosophy of Science 67 (Proceedings): S653–S666.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andreasen, Robin 2004. “The Cladistic Race Concept: A Defense.” Biology and Philosophy 19:425–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andreasen, Robin 2005. “The Meaning of ‘Race’: Folk Conceptions and the New Biology of Race.” Journal of Philosophy 102 (2): 94–106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andreasen, Robin 2007. “Biological Conceptions of Race.” In Philosophy of Biology, ed. Gabbay, Dov and Matthen, Mohan, 455–81. Amsterdam: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Appiah, Kwame. 1996. “Why There Are No Human Races.” In Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, ed. Sober, Elliott, 455–75. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Bamshad, Michael, Wooding, Stephen, Watkins, Scott, Ostler, Christopher, Batzer, Mark, and Jorde, Lynn. 2003. “Human Population Genetic Structure and Inference of Group Membership.” American Journal of Human Genetics 72:578–89.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Coyne, Jerry, and Orr, Allan. 2004. Speciation. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer.Google Scholar
Dobzhansky, Theodosius. 1970. Genetics of the Evolutionary Process. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Frantz, A. C., Cellina, S., Krier, A., Schley, L., and Burke, T.. 2009. “Using Spatial Bayesian Methods to Determine the Genetic Structure of a Continuously Distributed Population: Clusters or Isolation by Distance?” Journal of Applied Ecology 46:493–505.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gannett, Lisa. 2004. “The Biological Reification of Race.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55:323–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Glasgow, Joshua. 2009. A Theory of Race. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hardimon, Michael. 2003. “The Ordinary Concept of Race.” Journal of Philosophy 100:437–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hardimon, Michael 2012. “The Idea of a Scientific Concept of Race.” Journal of Philosophical Research 37:249–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaplan, Jonathan. 2011. “‘Race’: What Biology Can Tell Us about a Social Construct.” In Encyclopedia of Life Sciences. Chichester: Wiley.Google Scholar
Kitcher, Philip. 1999. “Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture.” Repr. in In Mendel’s Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology, 230–57. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lewontin, Richard. 1972. “The Apportionment of Human Diversity.” Evolutionary Biology 6:381–98.Google Scholar
Li, Jun, Absher, Devin, Tang, Hua, Southwick, Audrey M., Casto, Amanda, Ramachandran, Sohini, and Cann, Howard. 2008. “Worldwide Human Relationships Inferred from Genome-Wide Patterns of Variation.” Science 319:1100–1104.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Livingstone, Frank. 1962. “On the Non-existence of Human Races.” Current Anthropology 3:279–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Long, Jeffrey, and Kittles, Rick. 2003. “Human Genetic Diversity and the Nonexistence of Biological Races.” Human Biology 75:449–71.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mayr, Ernst. 1942. Systematics and the Origin of Species. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Pigliucci, Massimo, and Kaplan, Jonathan. 2003. “On the Concept of Biological Race and Its Applicability to Humans.” Philosophy of Science 70:1161–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pritchard, Jonathan, Stephens, Matthew, and Donnelly, Peter. 2000. “Inference of Population Structure Using Multilocus Genotype Data.” Genetics 155:945–59.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Risch, Neil, Burchard, Esteban, Ziv, Elad, and Tang, Hua. 2002. “Categorization of Humans in Biomedical Research: Genes, Race and Disease.” Genome Biology 3:1–12.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rosenberg, Noah, Pritchard, Jonathan, Weber, James, Cann, Howard, Kidd, Kenneth, Zhivotovsky, Lev, and Feldman, Marcus. 2002. “Genetic Structure of Human Populations.” Science 298:2381–85.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Safner, Toni, Miller, Mark, McRae, Brad, Fortin, Marie-Josée, and Manel, Stéphanie. 2011. “Comparison of Bayesian Clustering and Edge Detection Methods for Inferring Boundaries in Landscape Genetics.” International Journal of Molecular Sciences 12:865–89.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schwartz, Michael, and McKelvey, Kevin. 2009. “Why Sampling Scheme Matters: The Effect of Sampling Scheme on Landscape Genetic Results.” Conservation Genetics 10:441–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sesardic, Neven. 2010. “Race: A Social Destruction of a Biological Concept.” Biology and Philosophy 25:143–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sober, Elliott. 1980. “Evolution, Population Thinking, and Essentialism.” Philosophy of Science 47:350–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spencer, Quayshawn. 2012. “What ‘Biological Racial Realism’ Should Mean.” Philosophical Studies 159:181–204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spencer, Quayshawn 2013. “Biological Theory and the Metaphysics of Race: A Reply to Kaplan and Winther.” Biological Theory 8:114–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Templeton, Alan. 1998. “Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective.” American Anthropologist 100:632–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Robert, Barker, Matthew, and Brigandt, Ingo. 2007. “When Traditional Essentialism Fails: Biological Natural Kinds.” Philosophical Topics 35:189–215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Winther, Rasmus, and Kaplan, Jonathan. 2013. “Ontologies and Politics of Bio-genomic ‘Race.’” Theoria 60:54–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar