THE UNCOMPLETED ARGUMENT - DUBOIS AND THE ILLUSION OF RACE
THE UNCOMPLETED ARGUMENT - DUBOIS AND THE ILLUSION OF RACE
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DOI：
10.1086/448319
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发表时间：
1985-01-01
期刊：
影响因子：
1.7
通讯作者：
APPIAH, A
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
APPIAH, A
当代生物学家对是否存在人类种族的问题并不一致，尽管科学界对潜在的遗传学达成了广泛的共识。然而，就大多数目的而言，我们可以合理地将这个问题视为术语问题。我认为，大多数文化中的大多数人通常认为的”种族”差异的重要性与生物学家的共识相距甚远，每一位著名的生物学家都会同意，非洲、欧洲或亚洲人群之间的人类遗传变异性并不比这些人群内部的大多少;尽管大多少部分取决于生物学家选择的遗传变异性的衡量标准。如果生物学家想使种族间的差异看起来相对较大，他们可以说：”可归因于种族差异的基因变异的比例...... 9- 11%。“如果他们想让它看起来很小，他们可以说，对于两个都是高加索人的人来说，在给定染色体上的一个位点上遗传构成差异的可能性目前估计约为14.3%，而对于从人类中随机抽取的任何两个人，估计约为14.8%。（我将在第2节讨论为什么这被认为是遗传差异的衡量标准。无论如何表述，关于变异特征在人群和亚人群中分布的统计事实是相同的。除了皮肤、头发和骨骼等可见的形态特征外，我们倾向于将人们划分为最广泛的种族类别-
Contemporary biologists are not agreed on the question of whether there are any human races, despite the widespread scientific consensus on the underlying genetics. For most purposes, however, we can reasonably treat this issue as terminological. What most people in most cultures ordinarily believe about the significance of" racial" difference is quite remote, I think, from what the biologists are agreed on. Every reputable biologist will agree that human genetic variability between the populations of Africa or Europe or Asia is not much greater than that within those populations; though how much greater depends, in part, on the measure of genetic variability the biologist chooses. If biologists want to make interracial difference seem relatively large, they can say that" the proportion of genic variation attributable to racial differences is... 9-11%."'If they want to make it seem small, they can say that, for two people who are both Caucasoid, the chances of difference in genetic constitution at one site on a given chromosome are currently estimated at about 14.3 percent, while for any two people taken at random from the human population, they are estimated at about 14.8 percent.(I will discuss why this is considered a measure of genetic difference in section 2.) The statistical facts about the distribution of variant characteristics in human populations and subpopulations are the same, whichever way the matter is expressed. Apart from the visible morphological characteristics of skin, hair, and bone, by which we are inclined to assign people to the broadest racial categories-