Q. "Is Science Racist?"
02/28/2017
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A. Yes, according to a new book.

From Amazon, a new book:

Is Science Racist?

Jonathan Marks

Every arena of science has its own flash-point issues – chemistry and poison gas, physics and the atom bomb – and genetics has had a troubled history with race.

As Jonathan Marks reveals, this dangerous relationship rumbles on to this day, still leaving plenty of leeway for a belief in the basic natural inequality of races.

The eugenic science of the early twentieth century and the commodified genomic science of today are unified by the mistaken belief that human races are naturalistic categories.

Yet their boundaries are founded neither in biology nor genetics and, not being a formal scientific concept, race is largely not accessible to the scientist. As Marks argues, race can only be grasped through the humanities: historically, experientially, politically.

This wise, witty essay explores the persistence and legacy of scientific racism, which misappropriates the authority of science and undermines it by converting it into a social weapon.

Jonathan Marks is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Dr. Marks invented the term “human biodiversity” in his 1995 book of that title. I independently came up with it later in the 1990s, but when I plugged it into the old AltaVista search engine, I immediately discovered that Dr. Marks had beaten me to it.

[Comment at Unz.com]

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