The Atlantic is now trying to tar human genetics with the “racist” brush

Friday, December 30th, 2016

The Atlantic is now trying to tar human genetics with the “racist” brush:

Modern geneticists now take pains to distance their work from the racist assumptions of eugenics. Yet since the dawn of the genomic revolution, sociologists and historians have warned that even seemingly benign genetics research can reinforce a belief that different races are essentially different—an argument made most famously by Troy Duster in his book Backdoor to Eugenics. If a genetic test can identify you as 78 percent Norwegian, 12 percent Scottish, and 10 percent Italian, then it’s easy to assume there is such thing as white DNA. If scientists find that a new drug works works better in African Americans because of a certain mutation common among them, then it’s easy to believe that races are genetically meaningful categories.

If a drug works better on one race than another, then, yes, it is easy to believe that races are genetically meaningful categories — easy for a very good reason.

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