Taxonomic Approaches to Race
TAXONOMIC APPROACHES TO RACE ANDREW HAMILTON _______________________ “Dr. [J. Craig] Venter and scientists at the National Institutes of Health recently announced that they had put together a draft of the entire sequence of the human genome, and the researchers had unanimously declared, there is only one race—the human race.” —Natalie Angier1 The mawkish sentiment reported by Natalie Angier is incorrect. In biology, race is a synonym for subspecies.2 In fact there is no “human race”—only the human species (Homo sapiens). All human beings be- long to a single species because they can interbreed and produce fer- tile offspring.3 ALL-PERVASIVE RACE DENIAL Academic, media, and political elites, including anthropologists and geneticists, mouth the dogma that biological race does not exist— race is a “social construct,” nothing more. This absurd proposition is now the norm, unthinkingly accepted by scientific elites and masses alike. It dominates standard encyclopedias, best-selling books, televi- 1 “Do Races Differ? Not Really, DNA Shows,” New York Times, August 22, 2000. The Jewish Ms. Angier is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter for the Times. 2 Races (subspecies) pervade the plant and animal kingdoms: “‘Races’ of insects (e.g., fruit flies), mice, rats, rabbits, dogs, horses, etc., have developed . and if hu- man beings failed to develop races they would constitute the only exception in the whole biological kingdom.” Roger J. Williams, Free and Unequal: The Biological Basis of Individual Liberty (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1953), 210. Williams was Di- rector of the Biochemical Institute, University of Texas. 3 Charles Darwin, in Chapter 7, “On the Races of Man” in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, vol.
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