What type of person are you? Old-fashioned thinking even in modern science.
What type of person are you? Old-fashioned thinking even in modern science.
复制标题
你是什么类型的人？
DOI：
10.1101/cshperspect.a021238
复制
发表时间：
2014
影响因子：
7.2
通讯作者：
Lambert,BrianW
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Weiss,KennethM;Lambert,BrianW
世界各地的人们都有民间起源神话，这些故事解释了他们来自哪里，并解释了他们在世界上的位置以及他们与其他民族的差异。然而，作为科学家，我们声称正在寻求字面上的历史真相。在西方文化中，关于人类变异的类型学思想至少和关于这一主题的书面讨论一样古老，并主导了关于种族的社会和科学思维。从希罗多德到圣经中的以色列失落部落，令人惊讶的是，直到今天，人们普遍认为我们的物种是由不同的、甚至是离散的群体、类型或“种族”组成的，其他个体混杂在这些群体中。这样的言论与众所周知的进化现实背道而驰，以至于它肯定反映了人类思想的某些深层内容，至少在西方文化中是这样。类型学方法可以方便科学分析的某些实用方面，但它们可能具有诱惑性。我们知道如何以不同的方式思考，也应该这样做，因为类型学思维似乎总是潜伏在人类心中，导致了历史上的滥用。
People around the world have folk origin myths, stories that explain where they came from and account for their place in the world and their differences from other peoples. As scientists, however, we claim to be seeking literal historical truth. In Western culture, typological ideas about human variation are at least as ancient as written discussion of the subject, and have dominated both social and scientific thinking about race. From Herodotus to the Biblical lost tribes of Israel, and surprisingly even to today, it has been common to view our species as composed of distinct, or even discrete groups, types, or “races,” with other individuals admixed from among those groups. Such rhetoric goes so much against the well-known evolutionary realities that it must reflect something deep about human thought, at least in Western culture. Typological approaches can be convenient for some pragmatic aspects of scientific analysis, but they can be seductively deceiving. We know how to think differently and should do so, given the historical abuses that have occurred as a result of typological thinking that seem always to lurk in the human heart.