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One of the most contentious issues in contemporary genetics is the status of the concept of "race." Critics of the research program in human genomics regularly cite the historical and contemporary associations between racism and genetics as a reason to be suspicious or non-supportive of genetic research.1 these criticisms operate on varying underlying assumptions about the nature of science and its relationship to culture. The predominant account, however, holds that science is the handmaiden of the dominant forces in the culture. In this account, because genetic science is a tool of the dominant forces in society, which are structured in a racist fashion, genetic science is predetermined to support racism. Substantial research in science studies has complicated the account of the relationship between science and culture,2 but the topic of racism and genetics has only recently begun to receive similarly sophisticated attention.3 i wish to contribute to this on-going exploration by analyzing the processes by which and the motives for which race terms are fit to the patterns of human genetic variation by scientists and medical research personnel.
My essay presumes and shows that human genetic variation has a complex structure that cannot be directly fit into a simple category set of race terms. Nevertheless, the essay identifies strong cultural and scientific motives for creating, defending, and deploying such a set of terms to describe that variation. Given the tension between the nature of human genetic variation and the scientific vocabularies proposed to define it, the essay reveals two specific rhetorical strategies used by scientific proponents of such categorization: casuistic stretching and the deployment of a mediating term through a two-step argumentative structure.
The essay proceeds in five movements. The first briefly overviews the historical trajectory of the naming of race in the U.S. The second enumerates the diverse motive structures that drive the contemporary categorization of human genetic variation into "race" groups, focusing particularly on the work of neil risch and his colleagues. The next provides a conceptually- and visually-based depiction of the nature of human genetic variation that highlights its clinal and brecciated character. 4 the essay then offers an analysis of the rhetorical strategies by which these heterogeneous and continuous materials are organized into simple, discrete categories by the scientific proponents of...