The Scientific Fallacy and Political Misuse of the Concept of Race

The Scientific Fallacy and Political Misuse of the Concept of Race PDF Author: Ronald E. Hall
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Hall (Michigan State U.) describes the various definitions of race, and how it has been affected by questionable science and pernicious politics over time. He explores the racial issues behind the Atlantic slave trade, the fears behind the designations of quadroons, octoroons, and mulattoes, the particular racism directed at African-American men,

The Scientific Fallacy and Political Misuse of the Concept of Race

The Scientific Fallacy and Political Misuse of the Concept of Race PDF Author: Ronald E. Hall
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Hall (Michigan State U.) describes the various definitions of race, and how it has been affected by questionable science and pernicious politics over time. He explores the racial issues behind the Atlantic slave trade, the fears behind the designations of quadroons, octoroons, and mulattoes, the particular racism directed at African-American men,

The Concept of Race

The Concept of Race PDF Author: Ashley Montagu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
'Ten distinguished scientists attack the concept of race as a biologically unsound, socially invalid and prejudicial means of human classification.' -- cover.

Troublesome Science

Troublesome Science PDF Author: Rob DeSalle
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231546300
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
It is well established that all humans today, wherever they live, belong to one single species. Yet even many people who claim to abhor racism take for granted that human “races” have a biological reality. In Troublesome Science, Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall provide a lucid and forceful critique of how scientific tools have been misused to uphold misguided racial categorizations. DeSalle and Tattersall argue that taxonomy, the scientific classification of organisms, provides an antidote to the myth of race’s biological basis. They explain how taxonomists do their science—how to identify a species and to understand the relationships among different species and the variants within them. DeSalle and Tattersall also detail the use of genetic data to trace human origins and look at how scientists have attempted to recognize discrete populations within Homo sapiens. Troublesome Science demonstrates conclusively that modern genetic tools, when applied correctly to the study of human variety, fail to find genuine differences. While the diversity that exists within our species is a real phenomenon, it nevertheless defeats any systematic attempt to recognize discrete units within it. The stark lines that humans insist on drawing between their own groups and others are nothing but a mixture of imagination and ideology. Troublesome Science is an important call for researchers, journalists, and citizens to cast aside the belief that race has a biological meaning, for the sake of social justice and sound science alike.

Superior

Superior PDF Author: Angela Saini
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807076910
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
2019 Best-Of Lists: 10 Best Science Books of the Year (Smithsonian Magazine) · Best Science Books of the Year (NPR's Science Friday) · Best Science and Technology Books from 2019” (Library Journal) An astute and timely examination of the re-emergence of scientific research into racial differences. Superior tells the disturbing story of the persistent thread of belief in biological racial differences in the world of science. After the horrors of the Nazi regime in World War II, the mainstream scientific world turned its back on eugenics and the study of racial difference. But a worldwide network of intellectual racists and segregationists quietly founded journals and funded research, providing the kind of shoddy studies that were ultimately cited in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s 1994 title The Bell Curve, which purported to show differences in intelligence among races. If the vast majority of scientists and scholars disavowed these ideas and considered race a social construct, it was an idea that still managed to somehow survive in the way scientists thought about human variation and genetics. Dissecting the statements and work of contemporary scientists studying human biodiversity, most of whom claim to be just following the data, Angela Saini shows us how, again and again, even mainstream scientists cling to the idea that race is biologically real. As our understanding of complex traits like intelligence, and the effects of environmental and cultural influences on human beings, from the molecular level on up, grows, the hope of finding simple genetic differences between “races”—to explain differing rates of disease, to explain poverty or test scores, or to justify cultural assumptions—stubbornly persists. At a time when racialized nationalisms are a resurgent threat throughout the world, Superior is a rigorous, much-needed examination of the insidious and destructive nature of race science—and a powerful reminder that, biologically, we are all far more alike than different.

Palgrave Advances in Intellectual History

Palgrave Advances in Intellectual History PDF Author: R. Whatmore
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230204309
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
The past three decades have seen a remarkable growth of interest in intellectual history and this book provides the first comprehensive survey of recent research in this field. Each chapter considers developments in intellectual history, and shows the ways intellectual historians have contributed to more established disciplinary enquiries.

The Mismeasure of Man (Revised and Expanded)

The Mismeasure of Man (Revised and Expanded) PDF Author: Stephen Jay Gould
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393340406
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
The definitive refutation to the argument of The Bell Curve. When published in 1981, The Mismeasure of Man was immediately hailed as a masterwork, the ringing answer to those who would classify people, rank them according to their supposed genetic gifts and limits. And yet the idea of innate limits—of biology as destiny—dies hard, as witness the attention devoted to The Bell Curve, whose arguments are here so effectively anticipated and thoroughly undermined by Stephen Jay Gould. In this edition Dr. Gould has written a substantial new introduction telling how and why he wrote the book and tracing the subsequent history of the controversy on innateness right through The Bell Curve. Further, he has added five essays on questions of The Bell Curve in particular and on race, racism, and biological determinism in general. These additions strengthen the book's claim to be, as Leo J. Kamin of Princeton University has said, "a major contribution toward deflating pseudo-biological 'explanations' of our present social woes."

Social Statistics and Ethnic Diversity

Social Statistics and Ethnic Diversity PDF Author: Patrick Simon
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331920095X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This open access book examines the question of collecting and disseminating data on ethnicity and race in order to describe characteristics of ethnic and racial groups, identify factors of social and economic integration and implement policies to redress discrimination. It offers a global perspective on the issue by looking at race and ethnicity in a wide variety of historical, country-specific contexts, including Asia, Latin America, Europe, Oceania and North America. In addition, the book also includes analysis on the indigenous populations of the Americas. The book first offers comparative accounts of ethnic statistics. It compares and empirically tests two perspectives for understanding national ethnic enumeration practices in a global context based on national census questionnaires and population registration forms for over 200 countries between 1990 to 2006. Next, the book explores enumeration and identity politics with chapters that cover the debate on ethnic and racial statistics in France, ethnic and linguistic categories in Québec, Brazilian ethnoracial classification and affirmative action policies and the Hispanic/Latino identity and the United States census. The third, and final, part of the book examines measurement issues and competing claims. It explores such issues as the complexity of measuring diversity using Malaysia as an example, social inequalities and indigenous populations in Mexico and the demographic explosion of aboriginal populations in Canada from 1986 to 2006. Overall, the book sheds light on four main questions: should ethnic groups be counted, how should they be counted, who is and who is not counted and what are the political and economic incentives for counting. It will be of interest to all students of race, ethnicity, identity, and immigration. In addition, researchers as well as policymakers will find useful discussions and insights for a better understanding of the complexity of categorization and related political and policy challenges.

Are Racists Crazy?

Are Racists Crazy? PDF Author: Sander L. Gilman
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479856126
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Introduction -- Psychopathology and difference from the nineteenth century to the present -- The long, slow burn from pathological accounts of race to racial attitudes as pathological -- Hatred and the crowd: World War I and the rise of a psychology of racism -- The Holocaust and post-war theories of antisemitism and racism -- Race and madness in mid-twentieth-century America and beyond -- The modern pathologization of racism -- Conclusion: the specter of science in twenty-first-century racial discourse

The Retreat of Scientific Racism

The Retreat of Scientific Racism PDF Author: Elazar Barkan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521458757
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
This fascinating study in the sociology of knowledge documents the refutation of scientific foundations for racism in Britain and the United States between the two World Wars, when racial differences were no longer attributed to cultural factors. Professor Barkan considers the social significance of this transformation, particularly its effect on race relations in the modern world. Discussing the work of the leading biologists and anthropologists who wrote between the wars, he argues that the impetus for the shift in ideologies came from the inclusion of outsiders (women, Jews, and leftists) who infused greater egalitarianism into scientific discourse. But even though the emerging view of race was constrained by a scientific language, he shows that modern theorists were as much influenced by social and political events as were their predecessors.

Race?

Race? PDF Author: Ian Tattersall
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 1603444254
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Race has provided the rationale and excuse for some of the worst atrocities in human history. Yet, according to many biologists, physical anthropologists, and geneticists, there is no valid scientific justification for the concept of race. To be more precise, although there is clearly some physical basis for the variations that underlie perceptions of race, clear boundaries among “races” remain highly elusive from a purely biological standpoint. Differences among human populations that people intuitively view as “racial” are not only superficial but are also of astonishingly recent origin. In this intriguing and highly accessible book, physical anthropologist Ian Tattersall and geneticist Rob DeSalle, both senior scholars from the American Museum of Natural History, explain what human races actually are—and are not—and place them within the wider perspective of natural diversity. They explain that the relative isolation of local populations of the newly evolved human species during the last Ice Age—when Homo sapiens was spreading across the world from an African point of origin—has now begun to reverse itself, as differentiated human populations come back into contact and interbreed. Indeed, the authors suggest that all of the variety seen outside of Africa seems to have both accumulated and started reintegrating within only the last 50,000 or 60,000 years—the blink of an eye, from an evolutionary perspective. The overarching message of Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth is that scientifically speaking, there is nothing special about racial variation within the human species. These distinctions result from the working of entirely mundane evolutionary processes, such as those encountered in other organisms.