2026/04/01 by Charles C. Roseman, Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther · 1 voice
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Race, Genetics, and Society #Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices #Geographies of human-animal interactions
paper · doi:10.1086/741015
Richard Lewontin's 1972 paper, "The Apportionment of Human Diversity," troubled the concept of race by showing that only a small proportion of the overall genetic variance across human groups is accounted for by the racial categories inherited from early twentieth-century physical anthropology. Since Lewontin's landmark paper, critics of the biological race concept have continued appealing to this and other studies of the apportionment of genetic variance among putative groups. But has the critique gone far enough? We demonstrate that Lewontin's results should trouble population as much as they do race. Indeed, an apportionment can be evolutionarily meaningful only insofar as the apportionments are adequate summaries of the evolutionary history and dynamics of the relevant structured variation. By appealing to four different scenarios of evolutionary process-expressed in a quantitative genetic manner-we show that Lewontin's results are consistent with radically different histories, including ones understood in racial terms. Lewontin's apportionment figures thus underdetermine a plurality of distinct models, which racialize in particular ways. This methodology may thus constitute a kind of racial classification rather than undermining all such classification. In a nutshell, population genetics is not nearly as antiracist as many would have us believe. What if the apportionment of variation among racial groups is not, in the first instance, a meaningful exercise? We argue that the continued use of apportionment statistics based on populations of dubious ontological status is inimical to the development of an antiracist account of human variation. A good first step toward developing an antiracist science of human variation is to stop taking the racists' categories for granted.