Among race theorists, the view that race is a social construction is widespread. While the term ‘ social construction’ is sometimes intended to mean merely that race does not constitute a robust, biological natural kind, it often labels the stronger position that race is real, but not a biological kind. For example, Charles Mills writes that, ‘‘the task of those working on race is to put race in quotes, ‘race’, while still insisting that nevertheless, it exists ’’. It is to (...) ‘‘make a plausible social ontology neither essentialist, innate, nor transhistorical, but real enough for all that’’. Racial constructionism, thus conceived, is a metaphysical position that contrasts both with the view that race is an important biological kind and with the more recent claim that race does not exist. The desire for a constructionist metaphysics of race emerges against the background of a cluster of normative disputes, including. (shrink)

Debates on the role of biotechnology in food production are beset with notorious ambiguities. This already applies to the term “biotechnology” itself. Does it refer to the use and modification of living organisms in general, or rather to a specific set of technologies developed quite recently in the form of bioengineering and genetic modification? No less ambiguous are discussions concerning the question to what extent biotechnology must be regarded as “unnatural.” In this article it will be argued that, in order (...) to disentangle some of the ambiguities involved, we have to broaden the temporal horizon of the debate. Ideas about biotechniques and naturalness have evolved in various socio-historical contexts and their historical origins will determine to a considerable extent their actual meaning and use in contemporary deliberations. For this purpose, a comprehensive timetable is developed, beginning with the Neolithic revolution ~10,000 years ago (resulting in the emergence of agriculture and the Common Human Pattern) up to the biotech revolution as it has evolved from the 1970s onwards—sometimes referred to as a second “Genesis.” The concept of nature that emerged in the context of the “Common Human Pattern” differs considerably from traditional philosophical concepts of nature (such as coined by Aristotle), as well as from the scientific view of nature conveyed by the contemporary life sciences. A clarification of these different historical backdrops will allow us to understand and elucidate the conceptual ambiguities that are at work in contemporary debates on biotechnology and the place of human beings in nature. (shrink)

Selectionist evolutionary theory has often been faulted for not making novel predictions that are surprising, risky, and correct. I argue that it in fact exhibits the theoretical virtue of predictive capacity in addition to two other virtues: explanatory unification and model fitting. Two case studies show the predictive capacity of selectionist evolutionary theory: parallel evolutionary change in E. coli, and the origin of eukaryotic cells through endosymbiosis.

The development of evolutionary approaches to psychology from Classical Ethology through Sociobiology to Evolutionary Psychology is outlined and the main tenets of today's Evolutionary Psychology briefly examined: the heuristic value of evolutionary thinking for psychology, the massive modularity thesis and the monomorphic mind thesis.

This paper elaborates the hypothesis that the unique demography and sociology of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe selected for intelligence. Ashkenazi literacy, economic specialization, and closure to inward gene flow led to a social environment in which there was high fitness payoff to intelligence, specifically verbal and mathematical intelligence but not spatial ability. As with any regime of strong directional selection on a quantitative trait, genetic variants that were otherwise fitness reducing rose in frequency. In particular we propose that the well-known (...) clusters of Ashkenazi genetic diseases, the sphingolipid cluster and the DNA repair cluster in particular, increase intelligence in heterozygotes. Other Ashkenazi disorders are known to increase intelligence. Although these disorders have been attributed to a bottleneck in Ashkenazi history and consequent genetic drift, there is no evidence of any bottleneck. Gene frequencies at a large number of autosomal loci show that if there was a bottleneck then subsequent gene flow from Europeans must have been very large, obliterating the effects of any bottleneck. The clustering of the disorders in only a few pathways and the presence at elevated frequency of more than one deleterious allele at many of them could not have been produced by drift. Instead these are signatures of strong and recent natural selection. (shrink)

In recent years, mtDNA and Y chromosome studies involving human populations from South Asia and the rest of the world have revealed new insights about the peopling of the world by anatomically modern humans during the late Pleistocene, some 40,000–60,000 years ago, over the southern coastal route from Africa. Molecular studies and archaeological record are both largely consistent with autochthonous differentiation of the genetic structure of the caste and tribal populations in South Asia. High level of endogamy created by numerous (...) social boundaries within and between castes and tribes, along with the influence of several evolutionary forces such as genetic drift, fragmentation and long‐term isolation, has kept the Indian populations diverse and distant from each other as well as from other continental populations. This review attempts to summarize recent genetic studies on Indian caste and tribal populations with the focus on the information embedded in the socially defined structure of Indian populations. BioEssays 29: 91–100, 2007. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

We show that, contrary to long-standing assumptions, syntactic traits, modeled here within the generative biolinguistic framework, provide insights into deep-time language history. To support this claim, we have encoded the diversity of nominal structures using 94 universally definable binary parameters, set in 69 languages spanning across up to 13 traditionally irreducible Eurasian families. We found a phylogenetic signal that distinguishes all such families and matches the family-internal tree topologies that are safely established through classical etymological methods and datasets. We have (...) retrieved “near-perfect” phylogenies, which are essentially immune to homoplastic disruption and only moderately influenced by horizontal convergence, two factors that instead severely affect more externalized linguistic features, like sound inventories. This result allows us to draw some preliminary inferences about plausible/implausible cross-family classifications; it also provides a new source of evidence for testing the representation of diversity in syntactic theories. (shrink)

Ethnic nepotism theory predicts that even in times of communal peace altruism is more pronounced within than between ethnic groups. The present study tested the hypothesis that altruism in the form of alms giving would be greater within than between ethnic groups, and greater between more closely related groups than between more distant groups. The three groups chosen for study were ethnic Russians, Moldavians, and Gypsies. Russians are genetically closer to Moldavians than to Gypsies. Observations were made of 128 ethnic (...) Russian, 25 Moldavian, and 25 Gypsy beggars receiving gifts from ethnic Russians in Moscow trains. The Gypsies were mainly girls, contrary to the Russian sample. Multivariate analysis identified three main strategies: active, personified, and appeasing-undirected. Russian strategies were most variable. Gypsies presented strong charity releasers: 84% were children who played music and sang and showed appeasing-undirected behavior. The few adults were highly submissive or friendly. Nevertheless, their success was limited compared with that of ethnic Russians despite the latter’s demanding behavior and their being mostly mature or elderly persons. Moldavians received an intermediate amount of charity. The hypothesis was supported. (shrink)

We animals have evolved a variety of mechanisms to avoid conspecifics who might be infected. It is currently unclear whether and why this “behavioral immune system” targets unfamiliar individuals more than familiar ones. Here I answer this question in humans, using publicly available data of a recent study on 1969 participants from India and 1615 from the USA. The apparent health of a male stranger, as estimated from his face, and the comfort with contact with him were a direct function (...) of his similarity to the men in the local community. This held true regardless of whether the face carried overt signs of infection. I conclude that our behavioral immune system is finely tuned to degrees of outgroupness — and that cues of outgroupness are partly processed as cues of infectiousness. These findings, which were consistent across the two cultures, support the notion that the pathogens of strangers are perceived as more dangerous. (shrink)

Surnames were obtained for the second half of the 20th century from civil and religious marriage registers on fifteen Provençal-Italian and five Italian villages of Cuneo Province, Italy. To insert in the analysis an outward comparison, surnames from two Italian villages of Turin Province, one parish of Turin, one village of Alessandria Province and one village of Asti Province were also collected. Ethnicity does not seem to be the main factor affecting the present genetic structure of the Provençal-Italians. They are (...) an open community, and evidence the end of the genetic isolation of the alpine populations. (shrink)

Many contemporary race scholars reject the biological reality of race.Elsewhere I have argued that they have been too quick to do so. Part ofthe reason is that they have overlooked the possibility that races canbe defined cladistically. Since the publication of the cladistic raceconcept, a number of questions and objections have been raised. My aimin this paper is to address these objections.

This paper defends the position that the supposed gap between biological altruism and psychological altruism is not nearly as wide as some scholars (e.g., Elliott Sober) insist. Crucial to this defense is the use of James Mark Baldwin's concepts of “organic selection”and “social heredity” to assist in revealing that the gap between biological and psychological altruism is more of a small lacuna. Specifically, this paper argues that ontogenetic behavioral adjustments, which are crucial to individual survival and reproduction, are also crucial (...) to species survival. In particular, it is argued that human psychological altruism is produced and maintained by various sorts of mimicry and self-reflection in the aid of both individual and species survival. The upshot of this analysis is that it is possible to offer an account of psychological altruism that is closelytethered to biological altruism without reducing entirely the former to thelatter. (shrink)

This study takes off from the ethical problem that racism grounded in population genetics raises. It is an analysis of four standard scientific responses to the problem of genetically motivated racism, seen in connection with the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP): (1) Discriminatory uses of scientific facts and arguments are in principle ‘misuses’ of scientific data that the researcher cannot be further responsible for. (2) In a strict scientific sense, genomic facts ‘disclaim racism’, which means that an epistemically correct grasp (...) of genomics should be ethically justified. (3) Ethical difficulties are issues to be ‘resolved’ by an ethics institution or committee, which will guarantee the ethical quality of the research scrutinized. (4) Although population genetics occasionally may lead to racism, its overall ‘value’ for humankind justifies its cause as a desirable pursuit. I argue that these typical responses to genetically motivated racism supervene on a principle called the ‘ethic of knowledge’, which implies that an epistemically correct account has intrinsic ethical value. This principle, and its logically related ideas concerning the ethic of science, effectively avoids a deeper ethical question of responsibility in science from being raised. (shrink)

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is (...) substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

In the years leading up to the Second World War the ethologists Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen, created the tradition of rigorous, Darwinian research on animal behavior that developed into modern behavioral ecology. At first glance, research on specifically human behavior seems to exhibit greater discontinuity that research on animal behavior in general. The 'human ethology' of the 1960s appears to have been replaced in the early 1970s by a new approach called ‘sociobiology’. Sociobiology in its turn appears to have (...) been replaced by an approach calling itself Evolutionary Psychology. Closer examination, however, reveals a great deal of continuity between these schools. At present, whilst Evolutionary Psychology is the most visible form of evolutionary psychology, empirical and theoretical research on the evolution of mind and behavior is marked by a diversity of ideas and approaches and it is far from clear which direction(s) the field will take in future. (shrink)

As Raymond Williams famously declared, nature is one of the most complex words in the English language – and, we may confidently predict, its Germanic relatives including Dutch. The workshop that took place in June 2007 in the Netherlands, from which this volume is derived, was based on an earlier program exploring connections between our concepts of nature and related concepts of science and religion. Though one may not immediately expect these three realms to be interrelated, countless examples suggest otherwise.

Racial constructionists, anti-naturalists, and anti-realists have challenged users of the biological race concept to provide and defend, from the perspective of biology, biological philosophy, and ethics, a biologically informed concept of race. In this paper, an ontoepistemology of biology is developed. What it is, by this, to be "biological real" and "biologically meaningful" and to represent a "biological natural division" is explained. Early 18th century race concepts are discussed in detail and are shown to be both sensible and not greatly (...) dissimilar to modern concepts. A general biological race concept (GBRC) is developed. It is explained what the GBRC does and does not entail and how this concept unifies the plethora of specific ones, past and present. Other race concepts as developed in the philosophical literature are discussed in relation to the GBRC. The sense in which races are both real and natural is explained. Racial essentialism of the relational sort is shown to be coherent. Next, the GBRC is discussed in relation to anthropological discourse. Traditional human racial classifications are defended from common criticisms: historical incoherence, arbitrariness, cluster discordance, etc. Whether or not these traditional human races could qualify as taxa subspecies – or even species – is considered. It is argued that they could qualify as taxa subspecies by liberal readings of conventional standards. Further, it is pointed out that some species concepts potentially allow certain human populations to be designated as species. It is explained why, by conventional population genetic and statistical standards, genetic differences between major human racial groups are at least moderate. Behavioral genetic differences associated with human races are discussed in general and in specific. The matter of race differences in cognitive ability is briefly considered. Finally, the race concept is defended from various criticisms. First, logical and empirical critiques are dissected. These include: biological scientific, sociological, ontological, onto-epistemological, semantic, and teleological arguments. None are found to have any merit. Second, moral-based arguments are investigated in context to a general ethical frame and are counter-critiqued. Racial inequality, racial nepotism, and the “Racial Worldview" are discussed. What is dubbed the Anti-Racial Worldview is rejected on both empirical and moral grounds. Finally, an area of future investigation – the politics of the destruction of the race concept – is pointed to. (shrink)

The genome between socially constructed racial groups is 99.5%–99.9% identical; the 0.1%–0.5% variation between any two unrelated individuals is greatest between individuals in the same racial grou...

This year’s topic is “Genomics and Philosophy of Race.” Different researchers might work on distinct subsets of the six thematic clusters below, which are neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive: (1) Concepts of ‘Race’; (2) Mathematical Modeling of Human History and Population Structure; (3) Data and Technologies of Human Genomics; (4) Biological Reality of Race; (5) Racialized Selves in a Global Context; (6) Pragmatic Consequences of ‘Race Talk’ among Biologists.

This paper examines how the 19th-century British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace used biogeographical mapping practices to draw a boundary line between Malay and Papuan groups in the colonial East Indies in the 1850s. Instead of looking for a continuous gradient of variation between Malays and Papuans, Wallace chose to look for a sharp discontinuity between them. While Wallace's "human biogeography" paralleled his similar project to map plant and animal distributions in the same region, he invoked distinctive "mental and moral" features (...) as more decisive than physical ones. By following Wallace in the field, we can see his field mapping practices in action -- how he conquered the problem of local particularity in the case of human variation. His experiences on the periphery of expanding European empires, far from metropolitan centers, shaped Wallace's observations in the field. Taking his cues from colonial racial categories and his experiences collaborating with local people in the field, Wallace constructed the boundary line between the Malay and Papuan races during several years of work in the field criss-crossing the archipelago as a scientific collector. This effort to map a boundary line in the field was a bold example of using the practices of survey science to raise the status of field work by combining fact gathering with higher-level generalizing, although the response back in the metropole was less than enthusiastic. Upon his return to Britain in the 1860s, Wallace found that appreciation for observational facts he had gathered in the field was not accompanied by agreement with his theoretical interpretations and methods for doing human biogeography. (shrink)

This paper examines how the 19th-century British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace used biogeographical mapping practices to draw a boundary line between Malay and Papuan groups in the colonial East Indies in the 1850s. Instead of looking for a continuous gradient of variation between Malays and Papuans, Wallace chose to look for a sharp discontinuity between them. While Wallace's "human biogeography" paralleled his similar project to map plant and animal distributions in the same region, he invoked distinctive "mental and moral" features (...) as more decisive than physical ones. By following Wallace in the field, we can see his field mapping practices in action -- how he conquered the problem of local particularity in the case of human variation. His experiences on the periphery of expanding European empires, far from metropolitan centers, shaped Wallace's observations in the field. Taking his cues from colonial racial categories and his experiences collaborating with local people in the field, Wallace constructed the boundary line between the Malay and Papuan races during several years of work in the field criss-crossing the archipelago as a scientific collector. This effort to map a boundary line in the field was a bold example of using the practices of survey science to raise the status of field work by combining fact gathering with higher-level generalizing, although the response back in the metropole was less than enthusiastic. Upon his return to Britain in the 1860s, Wallace found that appreciation for observational facts he had gathered in the field was not accompanied by agreement with his theoretical interpretations and methods for doing human biogeography. (shrink)

The project of this paper is to understand what a phylogenetic tree represents and to discuss some of the implications that this has for the practice of systematics. At least the first part of this task, if not both parts, might appear trivial—or perhaps better suited for a single page in a textbook rather than a scholarly research paper. But this would be a mistake. While the task of interpreting phylogenetic trees is often treated in a trivial way, their interpretation (...) is tied to foundational conceptual questions at the heart of systematics—questions whose answers are hotly disputed. I have previously argued that widely shared ideas about the meaning and interpretation of phylogenetic trees are inconsistent with species concepts other than some genealogical version of a phylogenetic species concept (Velasco 2008). Here I rely on a similar approach and concentrate on the implications of the necessary conditions underlying the inferences that we make using phylogenetic trees. I argue that common practices for the interpretation and use of trees are in conflict and that unacceptable principles about species as units of phylogeny must be given up. According to the view that I will develop, all phylogenetic trees depict the history of populations. The branches on trees represent collections of population lineages through time and the splits represent population lineage splits. This is true regardless of whether the tips of the trees are themselves populations, or are species or higher taxa. Although this conclusion might be paired naturally with a view that species must be monophyletic groups, this population-centric view of trees is independent of that view of species. If we still want to have species that are paraphyletic groups of populations, this is permissible as long as we also do not treat species as the units of phylogeny. This population-centric view opposes a species-centric view of phylogeny and might be called a “rank-free” approach since it entails that we do not need to determine which groups are species (which is partly a ranking question) in order to build a tree. This conclusion and the argument for it are meant to be consistent with, but not require, acceptance of the conclusions of Velasco (2008) regarding species. (shrink)

Behavioral genetics and cultural evolution have both revolutionized our understanding of human behavior – largely independent of each other. Here, we reconcile these two fields under a dual inheritance framework, offering a more nuanced understanding of the interaction between genes and culture. Going beyond typical analyses of gene–environment interactions, we describe the cultural dynamics that shape these interactions by shaping the environment and population structure. A cultural evolutionary approach can explain, for example, how factors such as rates of innovation and (...) diffusion, density of cultural subgroups, and tolerance for behavioral diversity impact heritability estimates, thus yielding predictions for different social contexts. Moreover, when cumulative culture functionally overlaps with genes, genetic effects become masked, unmasked, or even reversed, and the causal effects of an identified gene become confounded with features of the cultural environment. The manner of confounding is specific to a particular society at a particular time, but a WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) sampling problem obscures this boundedness. Cultural evolutionary dynamics are typically missing from models of gene-to-phenotype causality, hindering generalizability of genetic effects across societies and across time. We lay out a reconciled framework and use it to predict the ways in which heritability should differ between societies, between socioeconomic levels, and other groupings within some societies but not others, and over the life course. An integrated cultural evolutionary behavioral genetic approach cuts through the nature–nurture debate and helps resolve controversies in topics such as IQ. (shrink)

SummaryThis study examines local heterogeneity in the aptitude of Sardinian mothers towards late reproduction, and explores its temporal persistence and association with both post-reproductive longevity and propensity to consanguineous marriage. Data on women's fertility from 1961 and birth records for 1980–1996 from Vital Statistics were analysed by means of the following indicators: the incidence of old mothers at last childbirth, female mortality at 80 years of age and over and the proportion of consanguineous marriages. A variable kernel-smoothing method was used (...) to create interpretable representations of the true spatial structure of the indicators, and to highlight areas of higher than expected intensity. In particular, an area of reproductive and post-reproductive longevity was identified where the traits combine with a higher tendency to relatedness. Intriguingly, this area corresponds approximately to the geographically and historically well defined central-eastern zone, which was the refuge of Sardinians during past invasions, and overlaps the Ogliastra region, which has been widely studied for its genetic homogeneity. (shrink)

Recent discussions of human categories have suffered from an over emphasis on intention and language, and have not paid enough attention to the role of material conditions, and, specifically, of social space in the construction of human categories. The relationship between human categories and social spaces is vital, especially with the categories of class, race, and gender. This paper argues that social space is not merely the consequent of the division of the world into social categories; it is constitutive of (...) social categories. To put it more bluntly, if who we are is bound up with place, then not only do we inhabit a divided America; divided America inhabits us. The second, and equally dramatic, conclusion is that attempts to transform social categories must involve the transformation of social space. When we sort people by categories, we do so spatially: with race come racialized spaces. And because our place comes to inhabit us, when we divide spatially we cannot help but to inscribe and produce categories and identities associated with our spatial divisions: with racialized spaces come race. Recognition of this dialectic is a direct challenge to the one-way considerations of social identity and social space that occurs in much urban sociology and history. Moreover, it demonstrates that there is an internal contradiction in policies--often based in urban sociology and history--that assume that integration can be accomplished along with the conservation of ethnic and racial identity. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss and critique how metaphysicians of race have conceived of and defended racial realism according to how biologists use “race”. I start by defining “racial realism” in the broadest accepted way in the metaphysics of race. Next, I summarize a representative sample of recent attempts from metaphysicians of race and biologists to defend racial realism and the main criticisms against each attempt. I discuss how metaphysicians of race have defended racial realism according to how ordinary people (...) use “race” in Part II. (shrink)

From the 1960s, mathematical and computational tools have been developed to arrive at human population trees from various kinds of serological and molecular data. Focusing on the work of the Italian-born population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, I follow the practices of tree-building and mapping from the early blood-group studies to the current genetic admixture research. I argue that the visual language of the tree is paralleled in the narrative of the human diasporas, and I show how the tree was actually (...) mapped onto the surface of the earth. This visual and textual structure is mirrored in the liberal discourse of unity in diversity that has been criticized as running counter to the socio-political effects of human population genetics. From this perspective, one may ask how far the phylogenetic diagram in its various forms is a manifestation of the physics of power that according to Michel Foucault consists in mechanisms that analyse distributions, movements, series, combinations, and that uses instruments to render visible, to register, to differentiate and to compare. It is one among other disciplinary technologies that ensure the ordering of human diversity. In the case of intra-human phylogenetic trees, population samples and labels are one issue. Another is that the separated branches seem to show groups of people, who have in reality been interacting and converging, as isolated. Often based on so-called isolated peoples, molecular tree diagrams freeze a hierarchical kinship system that is meant to represent a state before the great historical population movements. (shrink)

It is nowadays a dominant opinion in a number of disciplines (anthropology, genetics, psychology, philosophy of science) that the taxonomy of human races does not make much biological sense. My aim is to challenge the arguments that are usually thought to invalidate the biological concept of race. I will try to show that the way “race” was defined by biologists several decades ago (by Dobzhansky and others) is in no way discredited by conceptual criticisms that are now fashionable and widely (...) regarded as cogent. These criticisms often arbitrarily burden the biological category of race with some implausible connotations, which then opens the path for a quick eliminative move. However, when properly understood, the biological notion of race proves remarkably resistant to these deconstructive attempts. Moreover, by analyzing statements of some leading contemporary scholars who support social constructivism about race, I hope to demonstrate that their eliminativist views are actually in conflict with what the best contemporary science tells us about human genetic variation. (shrink)

For much of the first millennium BC, the number of Greeks increased considerably, both in the Aegean core and in the expanding periphery of the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions. This paper is the first attempt to establish a coherent quantitative framework for the study of this process. In the first section, I argue that despite the lack of statistical data, it is possible to identify a plausible range of estimates of average long-term demographic growth rates in mainland Greece from (...) the Early Iron Age to the Classical period. Elaborating on this finding, the second section offers a comprehensive rebuttal of the notion of explosive population growth in parts of the eighth and seventh centuries BC. In the third section, I seek to determine the probable scale and demographic consequences of Greek settlement overseas. A brief preliminary look at the relationship between population growth and the quality of life concludes my survey. The resultant series of interlocking parametric models is meant to contextualize the demographic development of ancient Greece within the wider ambit of pre-modern demography, and to provide a conceptual template for future research in this area. (shrink)

Race is a prominent category in medicine. Epidemiologists describe how rates of morbidity and mortality vary with race, and doctors consider the race of their patients when deciding whether to test them for sickle‐cell anemia or what drug to use to treat their hypertension. At the same time, critics of racial classification say that race is not real but only an illusion or that race is scientifically meaningless. In this paper, I explain how race is used in medicine as a (...) proxy for genes that encode drug metabolizing enzymes and how a proper understanding of race calls into doubt the practice of treating race as a marker of any medically relevant genetic trait. (shrink)

A prominent explanation of the evolution of altruism is ‘indirect reciprocity’ where the tracking of reputations in a population promotes altruistic outcomes. This paper investigates the conditions under which the meaning of reputation-tracking signals can co-evolve with altruistic behaviours. Previous work on this question suggests that such a co-evolution is unlikely. In our model, we introduce a mixture of direct and indirect information: individuals directly observe the actions and signals of others with some probability, rather than individuals always relying only (...) upon information conveyed through signals. In this context, we see the co-evolution of altruism and the kind of ‘moral signals’ required for individuals to track reputation. Our interpretation of this model is that, although individuals can sometimes observe the behaviour of their fellows directly, they cannot always do so, and signals evolve to fill this gap. Although ‘can’ does not imply ‘must’—that our model can produce this co-evolution does not establish that we have found the only possible mechanism—we nonetheless consider this an interesting possibility result worthy of further investigation. (shrink)

Human cooperation is highly unusual. We live in large groups composed mostly of non-relatives. Evolutionists have proposed a number of explanations for this pattern, including cultural group selection and extensions of more general processes such as reciprocity, kin selection, and multi-level selection acting on genes. Evolutionary processes are consilient; they affect several different empirical domains, such as patterns of behavior and the proximal drivers of that behavior. In this target article, we sketch the evidence from five domains that bear on (...) the explanatory adequacy of cultural group selection and competing hypotheses to explain human cooperation. Does cultural transmission constitute an inheritance system that can evolve in a Darwinian fashion? Are the norms that underpin institutions among the cultural traits so transmitted? Do we observe sufficient variation at the level of groups of considerable size for group selection to be a plausible process? Do human groups compete, and do success and failure in competition depend upon cultural variation? Do we observe adaptations for cooperation in humans that most plausibly arose by cultural group selection? If the answer to one of these questions is “no,” then we must look to other hypotheses. We present evidence, including quantitative evidence, that the answer to all of the questions is “yes” and argue that we must take the cultural group selection hypothesis seriously. If culturally transmitted systems of rules that limit individual deviance organize cooperation in human societies, then it is not clear that any extant alternative to cultural group selection can be a complete explanation. (shrink)

The commentaries have both drawn out the implications of, and challenged, our definition and operationalization of innovation. In this response, we reply to these concerns, discuss the differences between our operationalization and the preexisting operationalization if innovation, and make suggestions for the advancement of the challenging and exciting field of animal innovation.

Innovation is a key component of most definitions of culture and intelligence. Additionally, innovations may affect a species' ecology and evolution. Nonetheless, conceptual and empirical work on innovation has only recently begun. In particular, largely because the existing operational definition (first occurrence in a population) requires long-term studies of populations, there has been no systematic study of innovation in wild animals. To facilitate such study, we have produced a new definition of innovation: Innovation is the process that generates in an (...) individual a novel learned behavior that is not simply a consequence of social learning or environmental induction. Using this definition, we propose a new operational approach for distinguishing innovations in the field. The operational criteria employ information from the following sources: (1) the behavior's geographic and local prevalence and individual frequency; (2) properties of the behavior, such as the social role of the behavior, the context in which the behavior is exhibited, and its similarity to other behaviors; (3) changes in the occurrence of the behavior over time; and (4) knowledge of spontaneous or experimentally induced behavior in captivity. These criteria do not require long-term studies at a single site, but information from multiple populations of a species will generally be needed. These criteria are systematized into a dichotomous key that can be used to assess whether a behavior observed in the field is likely to be an innovation. (shrink)

In this article we examine the history of the production of microarray technologies and their role in constructing and operationalizing views of human genetic difference in contemporary genomics. Rather than the “turn to difference” emerging as a post-Human Genome Project phenomenon, interest in individual and group differences was a central, motivating concept in human genetics throughout the twentieth century. This interest was entwined with efforts to develop polymorphic “genetic markers” for studying human traits and diseases. We trace the technological, methodological (...) and conceptual strategies in the late twentieth century that established single nucleotide polymorphisms as key focal points for locating difference in the genome. By embedding SNPs in microarrays, researchers created a technology that they used to catalog and assess human genetic variation. In the process of making genetic markers and array-based technologies to track variation, scientists also made commitments to ways of describing, cataloging and “knowing” human genetic differences that refracted difference through a continental geographic lens. We show how difference came to matter in both senses of the term: difference was made salient to, and inscribed on, genetic matter, as a result of the decisions, assessments and choices of collaborative and hybrid research collectives in medical genomics research. (shrink)

Biological research on race has often been seen as motivated by or lending credence to underlying racist attitudes; in part for this reason, recently philosophers and biologists have gone through great pains to essentially deny the existence of biological human races. We argue that human races, in the biological sense of local populations adapted to particular environments, do in fact exist; such races are best understood through the common ecological concept of ecotypes. However, human ecotypic races do not in general (...) correspond with 'folk' racial categories, largely because many similar ecotypes have multiple independent origins. Consequently, while human natural races exist, they have little or nothing in common with 'folk' races. (shrink)

The consideration of racial differences in the biology of disease and treatment options is a hallmark of modern medicine. However, this time-honored medical tradition has no scientific basis, and the premise itself, that is, the existence of biological differences between the commonly known races, is false inasmuch as races are only sociocultural constructions. It is time to rid medical research of the highly damaging exercise of searching for supposed racial differences in the biological manifestations of disease. The practice not only (...) condoned but required by the National Institutes of Health of utilizing racial identification as a demographic characteristic with assumed biological implications is at best badly flawed, and at worst unintentionally contributes to perpetuating the fallacy of natural differences between persons of different skin color, which has been used in the past to advance the cause of racial discrimination. (shrink)

Philosophers have little to lose in making practical proposals. If the proposals are enacted, the power of ideas to change the world is affirmed. If the proposals are rejected, there is new material for theoretical reflection. During the 1990s, I believed that broad public recognition of mixed race, particularly black and white mixed race, would contribute to an undoing of rigid and racist, socially constructed racial categories. I argued for such recognition in my first book, Race and Mixed Race (Zack (...) 1993), a follow-through anthology, American Mixed Race (Zack 1995), and numerous articles, especially the essay, ''Mixed Black and White Race and Public Policy," which appeared first in Hypatia in 1995. I aho delivered scores of public and academic lectures and presentations on this subject, all of which expressed the following in varied forms and formats: Race is an idea that lacks the biological foundation it is commonly assumed to have. There is need for broad education about this absence of foundation; mixed-race identities should be recognized, especially black-white identities. (shrink)

Unlike all other present-day nationalities, Arab nationality is defined exclusively in terms of a single written language, which encompasses a huge range of mutually incomprehensible speech forms—the better to make the “Arab nationality” as large as possible, and to establish continuity between today's “Arabs” and the glorious past of the early Islamic conquerors. The secular version of Arabic nationalism lost its appeal when the Arab countries failed to unite politically and when they were defeated by Israel in 1967. The apparent (...) Islamization of Arabic society since 1967 is actually a response to these failures. When “Arabs” perceived that secular ideology had failed to achieve their national goals, they turned to Islamism as a different strategy for achieving the same objectives. (shrink)

In the article titled ‘A new perspective on the race debate’，Robin O. Andreasen argues that contrary to popular scientific belief, human races are biologically real—it is just that we are wrong about them. Andreasen calls her contemporary biological concept of race ‘the cladistic race concept’ (or CRC). Her theory uses theory from cladistics—a systematic school founded by entomologist Willi Hennig in 1950—to define human races genealogically as cladistic subspecies. In this paper I will argue that despite its promise as a (...) biological definition of human races, Andreasen's CRC is unconvincing. In particular, I will show that the central problem of the CRC is its attempt to apply cladistics below the species level. In other words, there is good reason to think that cladistic subspecies are not real, and therefore, they cannot be the target of a realist concept of race. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:‘Race’ has long searched for a stable, suitable idea, with no consensus on a master meaning in sight. What I call deflationary pluralism about the existence of race recognizes that various meanings may be true as far as they go but avoids murky disputes over whether there are races in some sense. Once we have rejected the notion that racial essences yield innate cognitive differences, there is little point to arguing over the race idea. In its place, I propose the (...) idea of socioancestry, which jettisons racial thinking yet recognizes the social dynamics of color. For example, Black Americans, many of whom have traceable non-African ancestry, constitute an Africa-identified, socioancestrally black subgroup. ‘Race’ talk is not needed to sustain legitimate color-conscious approaches to social identity and social justice. Long-standing fixation on the race idea has obscured the simple truth that visible continental ancestry is the root of the social reality of color consciousness. (shrink)

In recent years, numerous articles and books in the humanities and the social sciences have been devoted to understanding the ascription of race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, mental illness, and other ‘human kind’ concepts to persons. What may be more surprising given the enormous volume of this research and the diversity of its sources is that much of it shares a common commitment to understanding the categories picked out by these concepts in an non- essentialist way. For example, Iris Marion (...) Young suggests of social groups (including races, genders, classes, age groups, and ethnicities) that they. (shrink)

The linguistic and cognitive sciences have severely underestimated the degree of linguistic diversity in the world. Part of the reason for this is that we have projected assumptions based on English and familiar languages onto the rest. We focus on some distortions this has introduced, especially in the study of semantics.

[T]he races of man are not sufficiently distinct to inhabit the same country without fusion; and the absence of fusion affords the usual and best test of specific distinctiveness.The subspecies is merely a strictly utilitarian classificatory device for the pigeonholing of population samples.Did human evolutionary history lead to a natural division of our species into subspecies, the so-called biological human races? The issue seemed to have been beaten to death during the second half of the 20th century. But the situation (...) in the biological sciences changed significantly with the rise of genomic science at the close of the century. The issue of race in science, which most people had deemed passé and obsolete, has .. (shrink)