The Case against Biological Realism about Race: From Darwin to the Post-Genomic Era

Perspectives on Science 19 (4):361-390 (2011)
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Abstract

[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 ..

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Citations of this work

A Radical Solution to the Race Problem.Quayshawn Spencer - 2014 - Philosophy of Science 81 (5):1025-1038.
Against the New Metaphysics of Race.David Ludwig - 2015 - Philosophy of Science 82 (2):244-265.

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References found in this work

The social construction of what?Ian Hacking - 1999 - Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Science, truth, and democracy.Philip Kitcher - 2001 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Representing and Intervening.Ian Hacking - 1983 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 35 (4):381-390.
Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology.Rudolf Carnap - 2011 - In Robert B. Talisse & Scott F. Aikin (eds.), The Pragmatism Reader: From Peirce Through the Present. Princeton University Press. pp. 249-264.

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