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Projectibility and Group Concepts in Population Genetics and Genomics

  • THEMATIC ISSUE ARTICLE: NATURAL KINDS: NEW DAWN?
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Abstract

Although the category “race” fails as a postulated natural kind, racial, ethnic, national, linguistic, religious, and other group designations might nonetheless be considered projectible insofar as they support inductive inferences in biomedicine. This article investigates what it might mean for group concepts in population genetics and genomics to be projectible and whether the projectibility of such predicates licenses the representation of their corresponding classes as natural kinds according to currently prevailing projectibility-based accounts of natural kinds. The article draws on a case study from cancer genetics, specifically, breast cancer risk in Ashkenazi Jewish women.

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Notes

  1. These BRCA1 mutations are also referred to as 187delAG and 5385insC.

  2. In a UK study, in contrast, 22 mutations were found in 32 of 60 families with breast and/or ovarian cancer of “predominantly British origin,” but 185delAG was only found once (Gayther et al. 1995).

  3. Despite his empiricism and attention to practice, in FFF, Goodman appears to adhere to a dichotomy. Although he describes predicates and hypotheses as more and less projectible and entrenched, positive instances either confirm a hypothesis or they do not, and this follows from their projectibility—perhaps, for him, degrees of projectibility reflect the record’s incompleteness, not what it will eventually reveal.

  4. However, Goodman himself (1973, p. 103), using a statistical hypothesis about shape distribution among emeralds as an example, says in a footnote that “the treatment of statistical hypotheses is a complicated matter requiring redefinition of support, violation, conflict, and so on.”

  5. In using differences in “ascertainment strategies” to explain why their results were more similar to one US study than another, the Australian researchers assume an underlying truth about Ashkenazi Jewish mutation frequencies that ignores the heterogeneity of those who identify as Ashkenazi Jews.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the opportunity to have participated in the workshop on natural kinds that was held in September 2011 in Granada, where excellent conversations and tapas were in constant supply; thanks go to organizers, María José Frápolli, Miles MacLeod, and Thomas Reydon, and sponsors, the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research and the Department of Philosophy I, University of Granada. This paper was vastly improved with the help of the amazing editorial duo of Miles and Thomas, insightful audiences in Granada and at University of Bielefeld’s philosophy club meeting (especially Maria Kronfeldner, Christian Nimtz, and Yuri Pascacio Montijo), and three generous reviewers for this journal.

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  1. Philosophy Department, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada

    Lisa Gannett

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Correspondence to Lisa Gannett.

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Gannett, L. Projectibility and Group Concepts in Population Genetics and Genomics. Biol Theory 7, 130–143 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-012-0085-8

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