Month: March 2022

For my reading, I chose to read the interview with Jonathan Marks, a physical anthropologist. I’ve very intrigued by the intersection of science and anthropology, and find that the two fields complement each other well. In the interview, Marks begins by comparing the current social definition and ideas of race to what heredity really has to say about it– and just as we learned in the film, race does not divide us genetically. The divisions of race that society has created are just that– societally created. Marks continues to discuss migration patterns, and how race is an example of non-concordance, meaning that individual traits in the human species don’t share the same patterns of variation across geographic space, so skin color and eye color don’t vary geographically in the same way. I thought the term “cline” was an excellent definition to use in this conversation surrounding race and genetics: it means the gradient that certain traits form. This was discussed in the film, saying if we walked from Northern Europe to South Africa, we would see a whole gradient of skin colors– but where would we draw the line? Marks finishes the interview by discussing Social Darwinism and false claims that our “natures” are determined by our genes. Reading about how the “Darwin” in Social Darwinism was included simply to come across as having some sort of scientific basis for racism and eugenics was so frustrating, and not to mention so dangerous. It made me think a lot about the anti-vax movement (if you can even call it a movement) and people who claim that vaccines have caused health issues within our species, turning a innovation backed by scientific research and discovery into a political debate. This interview left me wondering how many controversial issues in the past, present, and future can be answered by science, and maybe aren’t so controversial after all?

In this interview, Stephen Jay Gould, a famous natural historian and the author of The Mismeasure of Man, was asked questions about the skull measurement and classification “experiments” of Samuel Morton, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and Friedrich Tiedemann, as well as his thoughts on these experiments and the approach of today’s scientist to the subject.

Samuel Morton’s experiments were based on the volume measurements of the skulls of different races and his finding was that the Caucasians had the largest skull volume, hence intelligence, followed by Indians and Blacks. According to Jay Gould, along with his bias, Morton’s experiment was also affected by the unconscious errors made during the measurements since volume measurements have a big potential for error and the sample pool which did not have a good distribution for the body sizes. The volume of the skull correlates with the body stature- which Morton did not consider. Moreover, the idea of the skull volume correlating with intelligence is a baseless, naive assumption as Jay Gould emphasized.

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s classification scheme was also neither scientific nor objective despite him being a “genuine egalitarian” of the period. Jay Gould commented that one can’t escape the context of their time. Even though Blumenbach is considered “the most egalitarian-minded of late 18th century scientists”, his classification scheme based on “beauty” is totally a product of his own beauty perception. Blumenbach looked at skulls of different races and decided that the white people who lived around the Caucasus Mountains had the most beautiful skulls- the reason why we call the European and Near Eastern natives “Caucasian”. Later, Friedrich Tiedemann’s studies showed that there was no correlation between races and the volume of the skull, disputing Samuel Morton’s studies. His motivation to conduct these studies and publish his findings in English was to praise Britain’s abolition of the slave trade.
Overall, the debates about the race of the 19th century “scientists” do not come from a genuine sense of equity or an understanding of racism. Jay Gould emphasized that the debate is among white men who collectively agreed that whites are superior, even the most egalitarian of those believed that everyone is equal in a moral sense, not an intellectual one.

Today, it is scientifically proven that the human species originated from Africa, and if that was the basis of the classifications that society makes today, we are all Africans. The genetic variations between races are insignificantly small, and the way that we classify races today is totally based on visual differences. We are still not sure what caused these visual differences even though there are theories such as sexual selection and adaptation to get vitamin D, but according to Jay Gould, these differences are not even significant in evolutionists’ sense. Today, our system of racial classification is based solely on the way you look (the reason why the famous baseball player Roy Campanella, whose father is Italian and mother is Black, has always been classified as Black) and the culture. Quite a “screwed up classification”, quoting Stephen Jay Gould.

In “Misuse of Race in Medical Diagnosis”, author Richard Garcia highlights the complexity of using race to diagnose medical conditions. Just as Giovanna pointed out in her post, there are many instances of misdiagnosis by attributing too much, and sometimes too little, credit to race. Garcia establishes this dilemma of race by first explaining the cases in which a patient’s race can and should influence a doctor’s thinking about possible diagnoses. He provides many examples to illustrate this point: a black boy might have sickle cell anemia while a southeast asian girl might have thalassemia. Statistically, there have been medical diagnoses proven for increased susceptibility among certain populations more so than others. However, we are quick to assign the cause of this to race. But if race is not biological, how do we know the impact it has on biological conditions? Furthermore, how do you truly determine someone’s race — especially if some have heritages rooted in many different cultures? An example that stood out to me was that of the 8-year old black girl with cystic fibrosis (CF). She had countless doctors over the years who simply dismissed her as “black girl with fever/cough” or “black girl with pneumonia.” She wasn’t diagnosed until one radiologist, who didn’t see her face to face, recognized her CF. Furthermore, Garcia’s description of his daughter in particular also provoked my thoughts. Although she is of Mexican and African descent, Garcia’s daughter has blonde hair, green eyes, and pale skin. Without knowledge of her parents’ heritage, one would assume, by looks alone, that she is white. How does genetic risk change for people like her, whose “racial ancestry defies geography and time”? Garcia’s article was eye opening in how it revealed the importance of recognizing the impact of race and medicine, but not relying on it for diagnoses. 

Misconceptions of race in medicine have been a long-standing issue. Assumptions of fundamental differences in anatomy between individuals of different races can still be found today, which is concerning when considering that these misconceptions may influence current diagnosis and treatment. Perhaps less well-recognized, however, is that some of the treatment options themselves have been grounded in race, despite the accepted belief that there is no biological basis for it. In “Unlikely mix — Race, biology, and drugs”, Troy Duster discusses the development of “ethnic drugs”: those targeted to specific racial and ethnic markets. The two drugs he discusses, a vaccine against AIDS developed by VaxGen and a congestive heart failure drug known as BiDil, were remarketed as treatments for specific racial groups after finding unconvincing results in clinical trials of the entire population but slightly higher success rates when comparing among individual groups of color. This marketing strategy, as Duster portrays, is not based in sound statistical analysis nor biological reasoning, especially in considering that a number of health conditions that disproportionately affect racial minorities in the US are caused by social –and not biological– factors, including discrimination, that induce significant stress which can then produce biological effects of concern. Therefore, drawing attention to and regulating targeted marketing schemes such as racialized drugs may be essential for ensuring that appropriate medical care is delivered to individuals of all backgrounds across the US.

In this interview, Dr. Gould, being a historian of science, discussed the roots of racial delineations in the scientific field.

When people think of anti-non-white pseudoscience, most point to the skull measurements of Samuel Morton: he found, in his book Crania Americana, that the average size of Indian and Black skulls were significantly smaller than those of Caucasians; he then concluded that the size difference led to an intellectual inferiority among the non-white groups. Upon reading his conclusions, a natural assumption was that Morton’s data was biased, or that he intentionally fabricated his results to push a narrative. Dr. Gould argues, however, that “his errors were unconscious” and that the differences in skull size came from myriad of other factors, including body size and sex. In any case, the idea that sheer brain mass directly correlates with intelligence was born of a “human inclination to rank people in hierarchies so that they can put their own group on top,” said Gould. That inclination permeated Morton’s paper, but wasn’t limited to just science.

The term “caucasian” has its roots, again, in unconscious racist beliefs. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who coined the term, was “the most egalitarian minded of late 18th century scientists. And yet you can never escape your time.” Gould highlighted that Blumenbach, in choosing how to define ethnic groups, labelled whites as caucasian as he thought that “the Caucasian people are the most beautiful,” Gould said, therefore the skull of whites differed from their non-white counterparts because white people were “the highest manifestation thereof in terms of beauty.” There was no statistically significant difference between their skulls, which de-emphasized racism, but it was because of a belief equally, albeit unconsciously, biased.

The interview then shifted gears onto how white people came into existence. Under the pretext that “we are all Africans,” Gould pointed out that “current African peoples are as descended from that original entity as people of European extraction are… because that’s where the species started.” Differences in skin colour instead came not from a genealogical delineation, but an evolutionary one: first, “sexual selections… and different standards of beauty” favoured white mates over darker-toned counterparts; second, the relative abundance of sunlight in the equatorial and polar regions led each black and white skin to more adequately capture enough vitamin D, respectively. However, Gould pointed out, “skin colour differences are so minor with respect to the immensity of evolutionary change” that our current field of knowledge on the subject is limited: it is too controversial and insignificant a topic to have been “solved” by science.

To finalize the interview, Gould highlighted the racial classification system of the United States: “Roy Campanella… Tiger Woods, [and] Colin Powell” are as equally non-white as they are black, but we “classify” them as the latter. Our classification system, he argues, is too heavily biased towards two parties, which, although mathematically is proven to produce the most centred distribution, can be illogical and anti-science.