To those who claim that human races don't exist,
here is a brief sensible commentary:
http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=search.displayRecord&uid=2006-01690-008
Race--Social, Biological, or Lemonade?.
Carey, Gregory
American Psychologist. 2006 Feb-Mar Vol 61(2) 176
Abstract
Comments on an article by R. L. Sternberg, E. L. Grigorenko,
and K. K. Kidd (see record 2005-00117-006) and another article
by H. Tang, T. Quertermous, B. Rodriguez, S. L. Kardia, X. Zhu, X.,
A. Brown, et al. (2005). On the day that I read Sternberg, Grigorenko,
and Kidd's (January 2005) article on race, an article from the
American Journal of Human Genetics (Tang et al., 2005) also crossed
my desk. As part of their research, the latter authors compared the
results of a cluster analysis of people using many genetic markers
with the respondent's self-identified race/ethnicity: "Of 3,636 subjects
of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster
member****p different from their self-identified race/ethnicity" (Tang
et al., 2005, p. 268). I would very much like to hear a response to this
finding from Sternberg et al. (2005), who maintained that "race is a
socially constructed concept, not a biological one" (p. 49), that reifies
those physical correlates of ancient population dispersions "as deriving
from some imagined natural grouping of people that does not in fact
exist, except in our heads" (p. 51). My take is that if we psychologists
could use genetics (or any other biological variables) to distinguish
those with schizophrenia from those with bipolar disorder with an
error rate even a hundredfold greater than that of Tang et al. (2005),
we would announce--and do it with no small fanfare--that there are
valid, biological differences between the two disorders. I suspect that
much of the difficulty in discussing this issue stems from a tendency
to treat "social" and "biological" (or "genetic" and "environmental")
phenomena as mutually exclusive. Placing a complicated construct
like race into a discrete "social" or "biological" box makes as much
sense as asking whether lemonade is (a) lemon juice, (b) water,
or (c) sugar.
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