Racial disparities in health outcomes have recently become a flashpoint in the debate about the value of race as a biological concept. What role, if any, race has in the etiology of disease is a philosophically and scientifically contested topic. In this article, I expand on the insights of the new mechanistic philosophy of science to defend a mechanism discovery approach to investigating epidemiological racial disparities. The mechanism discovery approach has explanatory virtues lacking in the populational approach typically employed in (...) the study of race and biomedicine. The explanatory constraints that form an integral part of the new mechanistic approach enable mechanism discovery to avoid the epistemic and normative shortcomings of the populational approach. The methodology of mechanism discovery can fruitfully be extended to the treatment and reversal of epidemiological racial disparities. (shrink)

The UNESCO Statements on Race of the early 1950s are understood to have marked a consensus amongst natural scientists and social scientists that ‘race’ is a social construct. Human biological diversity was shown to be predominantly clinal, or gradual, not discreet, and clustered, as racial naturalism implied. From the seventies social constructionists added that the vast majority of human genetic diversity resides within any given racialised group. While social constructionism about race became the majority consensus view on the topic, social (...) constructionism has always had its critics. Sesardic (2010) has compiled these criticisms into one of the strongest defences of racial naturalism in recent times. In this paper I argue that Sesardic equivocates between two versions of racial naturalism: a weak version and a strong version. As I shall argue, the strong version is not supported by the relevant science. The weak version, on the other hand, does not contrast properly with what social constructionists think about ‘race’. By leaning on this weak view Sesardic’s racial naturalism intermittently gains an appearance of plausibility, but this view is too weak to revive racial naturalism. As Sesardic demonstrates, there are new arguments for racial naturalism post-Human Genome Diversity Project. The positive message behind my critique is how to be a social constructionist about race in the post-genomic era. (shrink)

U svojoj inačici filozofije biologije Neven Sesardić izvodi dalekosežne moralne i političke posljedice određenih genetičkih istraživanja. On pretpostavlja da su uočene razlike u kvocijentu inteligencije između crnih i bijelih studenata urođene i da one ne mogu biti objašnjene niti promijenjene bilo kakvim utjecajem iz okoliša. Na toj osnovi on razvija teoriju o genetski određenoj inferiornosti crne rase. Teorija tvrdi da su svi podaci o društvenim i ekonomskim nedostatcima crne rase učinak njihovog lošeg biološkog nasljeđa, a ne društvene segregacije ili rasne (...) diskriminacije. Prema tome, bilo koja politika usmjerena na smanjivanje ili eliminiranje društvenih i ekonomskih razlika između siromašnih i bogatih ljudi, kao što je politika pozitivne diskriminacije, osuđena je na propast. U ovom se članku suprotstavljam Sesardićevu filozofskom tumačenju genetike i njegovim izvodima koji se tiču politike i društva. Pokazujem da mnogi relevantni genetičari ne prihvaćaju takvo filozofsko tumačenje i njegove političke posljedice. Suprotno Sesardićevoj tvrdnji da su svi environmentalisti zaraženi ljevičarskom političkom ideologijom, pokazujem da njih njihova znanstvena istraživanja, a ne apriorna politička uvjerenja, navode na odbacivanje jednostranih hereditarističkih filozofskih tumačenja i njihove političke primjene. Posebno sam usmjeren na povijest ropstva u Americi i na aktualne izvještaje o rasnoj diskriminaciji kao na važne elemente društvenog okoliša koji ne mogu biti zanijekani u bilo kojem ozbiljnom pokušaju objašnjavanja klasnih i rasnih odnosa u suvremenoj Americi. (shrink)

Neven Sesardic has recently defended his arguments in favour of racial naturalism—the view that race is a valid biological category—in response to my criticism of his work. While Sesardic claims that a strong version of racial naturalism can survive critique, he has in fact weakened his position considerably. He concedes that conventional racial taxonomy is arbitrary and he no longer identifies ‘races’ as human subspecies. Sesardic now relies almost entirely on Theodosius Dobzhansky’s notion of race-as-population. This weak approach to ‘race’—according (...) to which all genetic difference between populations is ‘racial’ and ‘the races’ are simply the populations we choose to call races—survived its early critiques. As it is being mobilised to support racial naturalism once more, we need to continue the debate about whether we should weaken the concept of race to mean ‘population’, or abandon it as a failed biological category. I argue that Sesardic’s case for racial naturalism is only supported by his continued mischaracterisation of anti-realism about biological race and his appeal to Dobzhansky’s authority. Rather than deflating the meaning of ‘race’, it should be eliminated from our biological ontology. (shrink)