The Definition of Race?

I am starting to be struck by a theme that I feel is at the heart of a lot of "race" talk. There are a million definitions of race, and most people are not defining the term when they use it, Templeton exempted from this.

Radio Lab. MacArther Genius Grant Award winning radio show. Episode: "Race Doesn't Exist. Or Does it?"  They never actually define the term "race." The closest they get is "Race doesn't not have a biological basis." When they remove their own double negative, they then state at the top of the program, after talking about the human genome project (sciencizing the subject some more), that "race kind of has a biological basis." If they define the term "race," as a social construct that varies wildly from culture to culture, then there can't be a biological basis. What they mean at that moment is "biological ancestry," which is the definition that Kahn states the medical community wants to use. Except no where in the world does "race" mean "biological ancestry," as Kahn points out.

So what is the definition of "race?"  There's the academic definition: a social construct specific to the culture that prescribes it, and that has no biological basis. But that's not the definition that makes everyone afraid. As the comedians Key and Peele say, there's nothing worse to a white person than calling them a racist. To use the term racist, we would not say "You're a social constructor of something that doesn't exist and that is culturally specific and has no biological basis." That's not what people are afraid of being. They are afraid of something worse. So there's a different definition of race that cannot be divorced from the word, or else our students would fluidly and easily answer when we ask "What is race?"

That working definition is dirty. It has a history, and I find that no one says it out loud. I've been trying to define it to myself for a couple months now. The best I can come up with is this: "race" is a way of grouping people by physical traits to judge those people's value without getting to know them. "Race" places value on people based on how they look. This is the best I can do, and I don't feel it's good enough. But from this definition, or something like it, springs all the hushed worry and fear to openly talk about race and confront it. No well meaning person wants to be called a racist.

So in statements like "race kind of has a biological basis," there are actually two definitions of race. 1. The dirty definition of race, as they proceed to continue through the episode addressing classic cases of race as it's defined in an American social context (black, white, asian, etc.). 2. Biological ancestry, which is not race, but is looking at the results of gene flow, founder's effect and genetic drift from small portions of populations that are geographical very disparate (comparing Swedes to Yoruba to San to Han). The first one is the public definition, and the second one is the medical profession's preferred definition, for which they use the term race as a proxy.

A comment on the trellis vs tree portion of Templeton's argument: the trees of today are a far cry from the candelabras of our past field. A candelabra was a tree with deep divisions between the "races" and was associated with physical anthropologists like Carleton Coon (who could make mundane human variation roaringly racist - public definition). I can support Templeton's argument, as I have only recently become aware, awakened from my ivory tower, that the implied gene-flow of today's trees does not sit front and center in the public's mind today.

I'm sorry to not be there and be a part of the conversation, as I've really enjoyed these articles, but I hope I've added a bit to the conversation.

Interdisciplinary conference in Sydney

From Drew:


This just came across my e-desk, and I thought the topic (if not the conference) might be interesting to the group. If any thing, it's an example of the type of reaching across strict disciplinary boundaries that is going on.

EvolDir is a email list for evolutionary biologists and is commonly used to disseminate job postings, conferences, questions, and questions of broad interest.

A Conference at the Interface of Evolution and Economics
February 2 - 5 2014, UNSW, Sydney
www.evolvingeconomics.com<http://www.evolvingeconomics.com>
Abstract Submission<http://evolvingeconomics.com/call-for-abstracts/>  Closes 31 August 2013
Early-Bird Registration<http://evolvingeconomics.com/registration/>  Closes 30 September 2013

The Cooperation and Conflict in the Family, UNSW, Sydney Australia.  February 2-5 2014.

We will bring together leading economic and evolutionary researchers to explore the nature of conflict and cooperation between the sexes in the areas of mating, fertility, marriage and family life. The conference provides an opportunity for researchers to discuss the economic and evolutionary biology approaches to these issues, explore common ground and identify collaborative opportunities.

Sydney makes a magnificent year-round destination, but is especially splendid in February. The Conference and social events will all happen in Randwick and Coogee, near some of Australia's most famous beaches, and a short bus or cab ride from the City Centre.
Public Lectures
Paul Seabright: What role is there for biology in explaining gender outcomes in the 21st century workplace?
Monique Borgerhoff Mulder: "My Kin are Witches" - Life in an African Village in an Era of Globalization
Invited Speakers
David P. Barash: The evolutionary mysteries of female sexuality
Alison Booth: Gender Differences in Risk Aversion: Do Single-Sex Environments Affect their Development?
Lena Edlund: I do, I do, I do — family law and how the West won
Michael Jennions: A biologist's perspective on sexual conflict in humans. Just another animal?
Hillard Kaplan: An ecological framework for understanding the role of men in families
Hanna Kokko: How to make sense of male care strategies
Jason Potts: Cooperation and Conflict in Innovation Commons


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Teaching Evolution

As those of you who were able to make our last meeting know, we spent most of our time talking about Lent's article on teaching evolution. I've continued to think about his teaching experiment since then and, belatedly as usual, my thoughts about it have clarified. I've decided to post them here, but first, for those of you who didn't get a chance to read the article, a quick summary of what Lents did and what he's arguing.

Concerned, as are many biologists, by continuing resistance to the theory of evolution among his students, Nathan H. Lents, an associate professor of molecular biology at CUNY, decided to survey his students looking for any shift in beliefs about evolution among students taking two courses he was teaching. One was a Gender Studies course for which he assigned readings on gender, sex and sexuality by Roughgarden (2008), Judson (2004) and Fasto-Sterling (2000). The other was an introductory biology course for majors which used this textbook by Campbell. Students in both courses were asked a series of questions designed to assess their beliefs about and resistance to evolution at the beginning of the semester and again at the end of the course.

Here's what he found:

"Surprisingly, students in the gender studies course consistently displayed greater improvement in their acceptance of evolutionary theory than the biology students, despite only tangential coverage of these topics in the gender studies course and substantial coverage of them in the biology course. These results provide evidence that one strategy for advancing the proper education of biology and natural history is through teaching of the biological basis of reproduction and sexuality, topics that exhibit a high level of student interest and uniquely convey the effects and consequence of evolutionary forces such as natural and sexual selection, adaptation, mutation, and genetic drift."

In other words, contrary to what you might expect, teaching students about evolution explicitly and carefully, providing them with more evidence of evolutionary processes and describing the mechanisms that produce it, DOES NOT appear to increase the likelihood that students will accept it. This, perhaps, should not be surprising. Studies have also shown that teaching members of the public more about how genes work does not improve public acceptance of genetic research. Concerns about genetic research are, after all, moral and ethical, not technical. Similarly, religious faith is, well, faith-based, not based on a rational assessment of evidence that God exists and most students, presumably, reject evolutionary theory because it challenges some moral or ethical principles they feel are important. [I don't know enough about fundamentalist objections to evolution to know exactly why it's so difficult to accept (it seems to be fine with European Christians) but I suspect the doctrine that God made the world in seven days just a few thousand years ago is less difficult to give up than the notion that God made man in his image and gave us dominion over nature.]

But if this is the case, why do we see increasing acceptance of evolutionary theory among the Gender Studies students? Lents suggests that in the process of learning about sex they are, in fact, getting some information about evolutionary processes, just less of it and less directly than in the biology class. This less confrontational approach, he thinks, works because it's kind of a sneak attack. Distract them with talk about sex - what student doesn't want to talk about sex? - and then get them when their guard's not up.

I don't find this very persuasive. We know that more information doesn't shift attitudes. But what they are learning in the Gender Studies class that they're not learning in the biology class is a kind of critical thinking. The Campbell textbook presents information as facts. It makes no mention of the long set of arguments, claims and counter-claims that produced what might be better described as the current scientific consensus. Students have no sense that they are participating in the construction of knowledge or that it has anything much to do with them. They simply need to learn the stuff in the book and reproduce it on the test. The readings assigned for the Gender Studies class, in contrast, make it very clear that they are presenting an argument that other people disagree with. They demonstrate point by point how they reach the conclusions they do, and by doing so demonstrate that this trajectory is contestable. Interestingly, they also directly challenge traditional understandings of science, arguing that science itself is a social and cultural endeavor, that scientific knowledge is constructed through a process of argumentation rather than simply discovered, and that scientists are as subject as any of the rest of us to seeing the world through "the prism of culture" (Fausto-Sterling 2000).

Teaching evolution in this way might seem a scary proposition. Why open the door to student objections, after all? Evolution is not "a theory" in the way students think it is, it's not open to debate. But this is why Gerald Graff argues that we need to "teach the controversy" and deal with creationism directly in classrooms rather than avoiding it. He suggests that it's a "certain failure of nerve" on the part of secularists and scientists to refuse to do so. It would teach students more about how science is done than a textbook full of information, and in the process, it reveals it as the exciting, engaging, constantly stimulating intellectual occupation that professional scientists, who often work at edge of controversy, know it to be.

I think there's also an argument here for biology departments to start teaching a critical history of their own discipline, one that explores debates within biology and the political and social context that shaped those debates. This should not be some fluff course, or some "optional" credit, but should be central to the discipline. It would teach students how science is done, expose them to debates about scientific methods and help them learn to see the difference between science and pseudo-science. From a personal point of view, I think if students knew something about what biologists in the past have thought about gender and sex, it would make it less likely that they would mistake new claims about biological differences between men and women for something fascinating, shiny and new. Instead they'd see them for what they usually are - the same old arguments dressed up in new-fangled clothes.

Teaching Evolution

From Hannah 06/25/2013:
I'm sorry I'll miss our meeting today, but moving and visiting family have eaten my time. I've looked over the second article about teaching evolution and this really supports a new teaching tactic I've deployed in the last year:

At the beginning of biology classes (Intro to Bio at Kirkwood and Human Origins at Uiowa), I cover the framework of science by talking about Germ Theory (the theoretical framework about how, what and when we get sick) and the hypotheses within that (What makes us sick? How? Pathogen transmission; treatment, etc.). This helps people understand that hypos are not guesses, but statements about what we understand about the world. I use HIV, and talk about all the hypotheses we work with to understand the disease. The last hypo is treatment, and the prevailing multidrug approach today. Why won't one drug work anymore? Because of evolution. Why do you need a new flu shot every year? Evolution. The prevailing theory before Germ Theory was Miasma, with "bad air" as the pathogen, or even bad spirits. The main critique of Germ Theory initially? "I can't see these tiny pathogens, but I can see bad air." The main "critique" of evolution? "I can't see the change." Students have been struck by this to the point of mouths hanging open. They go on this great journey about Germ Theory and doctors not washing their hands during the Civil War, and all of sudden they're using evolution as the reasoning to sign up for their next flu shot. I call it the Evolution Sneak Attack: nothing makes sense in biology without evolution.

I'm interested in using that survey as well at the beginning and end of my course to see if I'm making an impact. Gosh, I hope so.

Reading suggestions

From Drew: This is the latest "table of contents" from PNAS, a prestigious science journal (PNAS articles are generally thought of as top-notch, high impact research--thought of, with all the caveats of course). (Title: In the light of Evolution VII: The Human Mental Machinery)

I wonder if the idea of genetic and evolutionary basis for behavior as presented by prominent scientists (and critiqued by prominent anthropologists), as evidenced here, might be a good organizing principle. Mark Pagel, a prominent evolutionary biologist, has written a book about a) he origins of culture, and b) why is there such diversity in culture? Naturally (pun intended), he takes an evolutionary perspective for this. The book is titled "Wired for Culture" and has been reviewed several places; it might be worth checking it out.

From David:

This paper ("Against 'Genes For'" by Dick Burian) comes close to arguing that in order to teach genetics today as it really is you might have just forget about Mendelian genetics, especially as a foundation; and speak not of genes but as genetic material…Evelyn Keller calls for similar abrogation of gene talk but says replace it with DNA, which is not broad enough according to Dick and Kostas to accommodate RNA.

Schneider on Schneider

I want to thank Drew for being so responsive to the question posed at our last meeting about where the conflicts are within one's own discipline.  We got a wonderful overview of the current state of affairs between biological and cultural anthropology, and a great sense of how much energy one has to expend just to maintain one's speaking position.  What seem like tensions in a subject area are often such disciplinary contestations writ large and sometimes projected onto the public sphere, in the fantasized hope that getting support from the public at large will help move the needle within one's field and within the academic disciplinary ecology in general.  I urge us all to be as forthcoming as Drew. That way we will learn a lot not only about each other but about the questions we are addressing.

I also want to thank who ever it was--Hannah?--who  recommended the book Schneider on Schneider.  I read it with great pleasure.   I liked it so much I made a personalized summary of it which I'm sending you.  Here it is, as I don't quite know how to attach files to our blog yet

Schneider on Schneider, an oral history taken by his former student Richard Handler of David Schneider, is a fun, rich, irreverent read, and a great way of looking at American anthropology as it passed from its golden four-field age to a mid-century silver age in which cultural and biological anthropology were already pulling away from each other. 

 

Schneider’s work was about kinship.  His approach from the start was to say that how people actually talk about who their kin are trumps any matter of biological fact that anthropologists (Chagnon comes to mind) notoriously try to squeeze out of their informants.  He uses very simple concepts from ordinary language philosophy to make a distinction between “referential” and “vocative” ideas of kinship.  Given this view, he tells Handler about how he almost flunked his dissertation defense by repeatedly insisting that biology has nothing to do with psychology or a fortiori anthropology.  Kluckhohn, “smiting” his head with his hand, asks him whether he really believed that. “Well, yes, Clyde, I really do believe that” (71).  The next day Kluckhohn tells him that if he had not made such a good defense of “such an asinine position” it would have been all over for him (72).  You see, Schneider says, Kluckhohn had taken on from Talcott Parsons (who had trained Schneider at Harvard but apparently to less effect) that social science always includes “a biological stratum, a social stratum, a cultural stratum, and a psychological stratum” (73).  In Talcott Parsons social strata pile up like cordwood.

 

As it happens, after various adventures Schneider becomes a member of the Berkeley department, the almost retired Kroeber pulling the strings to get him there to help rebuild the department in ways that might be called neo-Boasian.  Although Schneider doesn’t use that term, he gives a short history of anthropology in America that makes the point.  Anthropology emerged by studying primitive societies as a way to get clues about human evolution, he says. It got away from evolution by importing from sociology roughly Durkheimian (and later Levi-Straussians) ideas about how societies, defined as a set of institutions, work as structural wholes with functional parts.  But then, says  Schneider, anthropologists discovered that you can’t find out any more about how societies work by looking at so-called primitive societies than by looking as societies as you find them.  From there is easy to see that when you look at the societies that are in front of your nose--say kinship identifications in American society, Schneider’s forte--what you find is culture, but this time without the burden of evolution or its pale replacement ‘function’ at all.   So anthropology is or should be solely the study of culture.  “I beat the culture drum,” he confides to Handler.  “Geertz beats the culture drum.  We both got it through Parsons from Kroeber and Kluckhohn…We were Boasians … partly because that was the general climate of anthropology in the America in which we grew up and participated” (203).  “So anthropology was then defined as the study of culture?” offers Handler.  “Yes,” replies Schneider.

 

Schneider made Kroeber feel betrayed when he, Geertz, and several other members of what he hoped in his retirement would be a renaissance at Berkeley decamped to Chicago.  But clearly this exclusive focus on culture had weakened the four-field idea to which Boas and Kroeber professed fealty into mere external arrangements about what professors got paid by what departments.  Schneider has the effrontery to lament the passing of communities of inquiry in anthropology departments, but fails to note his complicity in this…unless he means, as he probably does, communities of inquiry exclusively composed of cultural anthropologists. He makes fun, for example, of Sherwood Washburn, who had “opened up this whole business of man the hunter and primate studies” (176) and who some members of the Berkeley department wanted to lure from Chicago.  Kroeber argued very strongly that … Washburn wasn’t …very imaginative …a routine, mediocre, pedestrian type person.  I think Kroeber was right” (176).   Kroeber and Schneider lost--Washburn came to Berkeley, Schneider went to Chicago--because “all sorts of people and granting agencies bought the idea lock stock and barrel” of “watching moneys and apes all over the globe …It seemed to me inexplicable how many apparently intelligent people bought this nonsense…A long time ago humans were very ape-like but are different now in most if not all significant respects” (177-178).

 

Schneider used what informants told him as evidence not only for whatever case he was making at the time but implicitly for the claim that biology in the form of “referential” kinship is not truly anthropology.  He didn’t think one could or should look behind or below “vocative” kinship.  For that reason Schneider’s interactions with the people he studied were appreciative, informal, wry, accepting of human frailty, and mostly friendly.  His account portrays him as an un-patronizing sort of person, though he owns up to having a problem with authority and sides with his informants when they resist it.  If they want a beer he gives them a beer.  He is inclined to admit in theory the imperial context in which anthropology emerged and to some extent still operates, but to deny it at the level of interpersonal relationships.  He found it easy to spontaneously ascribe to the folks he lived with every sophisticated motive one would like to ascribe to oneself.   In this he was a true Boasian.  But a one-field Boasian.

Fuentes response to Wade

I'm putting Jill's comment in a new post, because it's not visible unless you click on the comments link (or the post title). Thanks for this, Jill!

I'm new to blogging, so I'm not sure if I should create a new post or comment here, but I just wanted to post that Agustín Fuentes, a biological anthropologist and blogger at Notre Dame, posted a brief response to Wade's article on the American Anthropological Association site here.