Jeg vil be deg om å lese dette, som er et utdrag fra side 9-11: "Is the Concept of Race Illegitimate?" av Max H Ocutt, som er professor of philosophy emeritus ved University of Alabama. Artikkelen er refleksjoner hvor vidt konseptet, eller begrepet "rase" er legitimt (meningsfylt, hensiktsmessig).
Jeg har gjort noen edits, slik som gjort en redigering av avsnittene (det brukes KUN innrykk i originalen) i tillegg har jeg satt inn fotnoter der de inntraff i artikkelen (du finner fotnotene som
uthevede tall, 6-8) og gjort rede inne i artikkelen for hva et begrep betyr.
Noen har omfavnet idéene til far og sønn Cavalli-Sforza. Dog, er deres presentasjon også kritisert sterkt. Deres bidrag til debatten i akademiske kretser er forsøk på å stille spørsmålstegn ved om det finnes et biologisk grunnlag for å snakke om "rase" blant mennesker, annet enn som kulturelt konstruerte fenomener. Et utdrag av artikkelen jeg linket til følger her:
Cavalli-Sforza
Nearly a quarter century passed between the publication of the three essays in physical
anthropology that I have just criticized and the publication of The Great Human Dias-
poras by the population biologist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and his son Francesco
(1995). Yet this recent book offers few new arguments. Instead, it repeats the old ones.
The authors begin the chapter "Race and Racism" by mentioning the evil of
racism and by condemning research that they regard as racist.
6 They observe that race is often confused with nation or culture and complain that, given the looseness of the
concept, no one can say how many races exist. They attribute the difficulty of making
a count to the fact that many genetically related features of human beings vary con-
tinuously, leaving no breaks that provide clear demarcations between races.
After making these now familiar points, the Cavalli-Sforzas dilate on the difficul-
ties that confront attempts to distinguish one race from another. They illustrate these
difficulties by explaining, with a map, how interbreeding has obliterated once-obvious
differences between the Etruscans who settled northern Italy and the Greek peoples
who colonized the southern half of the boot. This blending of two formerly distin-
guishable races into one, the authors claim, shows that it never makes sense to talk of
distinguishable races. Yet they also note that various European "peoples," such as the
Basques of Spain and the Celts from Breton, differ not only culturally but also genetically (like races!).
In this same "I can say breakfast" fashion, the Cavalli-Sforzas go on to aver (fastslå, EDIT: bjornh) that because Jews are a heterogeneous people from many parts of the world, there is no Jewish race. They admit, however, that "endogamy (marriage between individuals from the same group) was sufficiently widespread among the forebears of todays Jews for them to continue to have a not insignificant level of genes in common and a certain resemblance" (236) (like members of the same race!).
Showing no awareness that they are giving back with one hand what they took
with the other, the Cavalli-Sforzas go on to conclude, "The idea of race in the human
species serves no purpose" (237). With the usual reflex, they attribute belief in race to
the Nazi myth of racial purity and to an irrational but innate tribalism.
7 They then cite
the mistreatment of Pygmies by their larger and more aggressive neighbors as a
regrettable example of our human tendency to divide the world up into them and us.
Clearly, there is nothing new here, just the now-familiar arguments: that a belief
in racial distinctions is wrong because it encourages racism; that no distinctions exist
between races because the distinctions that do exist are not sharp and clear; that
although racial differences may be real, it would be better to describe them as differ-
ences between "peoples"; that there are no races because there are no pure races; and
so on. Having already refuted these arguments -or, rather, having shown how they
refute themselves -I will not go over them again.
Instead, I will examine the only new argument to be found in the Cavalli-Sforza
book. In the preface, the authors casually remark that racial distinctions are unimpor-
tant because they are limited to such trivial matters as skin color and bodily confor-
mation. They return to this theme in chapter 8, claiming that although physical dif-
ferences can be explained in genetic terms, no mental differences can be explained in
this way. They declare, "The biological differences [between Pygmies and othergroups] are obviously striking, and equally obviously superficial. . . . [T]he explana-
tion [of the Pygmy economy] must lie in a radically different cultural legacy" (204);
"[n]othing, however, is truly or solely innate in child or adult intelligence. On the
contrary, intelligence is the product of personal experience, which is complex and dif-
fers from person to person" (219).
Here we have one more example of faulty reasoning. Reduced to its essence, the
argument is: racial distinctions are unreal because they are unimportant.
8
For the sake of discussion, let us grant for the moment the premise that racial differences are super-ficial and inconsequential because they are physical. Still, the conclusion -that racial
differences are fictitious, imaginary, or mythical -does not follow. On the contrary,
what follows is that racial differences must be real, for how else can they be trivial or
superficial? The Cavalli-Sforzas have shot themselves in the foot.
Nor is that the worst of it: the gun was illegally obtained. That a certain differ-
ence between persons is unimportant is not a scientific judgment; it is an evaluation.
The Cavalli-Sforzas are speaking here as moralists who seek cover for their egalitarian
political views by presenting them as well-established science. Furthermore, whether
any differences of temperament and intellect are related to genes cannot be settled a
priori (forut for erfaring, jfr. Emmanuel Kant, EDIT: bjornh). The question is an empirical one still very much in dispute (Herrnstein and Murray 1994; Levin 1997; Rushton 1995). Hence, as the Cavalli-Sforzas are forced to admit when they get down to particulars, "We cannot exclude the possibility that there is a genetic component to behavioral characteristics" (1995, 205), and "[t]his [environmental influence on IQ] does not mean that heredity has no bearing on intel-ligence quotient" (221). Here, at last, they speak in the voice of science.
As moralists, the Cavalli-Sforzas have no authority. It is as scientists that they
must appeal to us, but when we examine their science, we find little support for their
unguarded dicta about race. On the contrary, we find evidence to refute those dicta.
The first chapter of The Great Human Diasporas has to do with Pygmies. This mate-
rial is significant because it seems beyond dispute that the Pygmies constitute a dis-
tinctive race that differs from others in both genotype and phenotype. If you were
looking for a prototype of the sort of breeding group that is meant by the word race,
it would be difficult to find a better one than the Pygmies. How can a man who has
spent much of his life studying this unique group of people, as the elder Cavalli-
Sforza has, deny the reality of racial distinctions? Only, I suspect, by letting his feel-
ings color his scientific judgment.
Fotnoter
6. Characteristically, Cavalli-Sforza uses the term loosely, describing as racist all research that draws attention to racial differences, even if its authors endorse no declaration of superiority and inferiority. Thus, Arthur Jensens work on IQ counts as racist by Cavalli-Sforza&s tendentious definition -a slick but not an admirable way to poison the wells of scientific research and to beg the question of whether its conclusions are sound.
7. With consummate wit, a friend of mine calls this pseudoreasoning the argumentum ad nazium.
8. I am aware that what is important for purposes of biology might be unimportant for other purposes, but the Cavalli-Sforzas neither make nor observe this distinction. Instead, they blur it by running the two kinds of importance together.
Resten av artikkelen finner man her:
http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_07_1_hocutt.pdf -jeg beklager at det i publiseringen her på "Off-topic" ble en del rot, men dette er nå rettet opp.