Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The Cladistic Race Concept: A Defense

  • Published:
Biology and Philosophy Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Many contemporary race scholars reject the biological reality of race.Elsewhere I have argued that they have been too quick to do so. Part ofthe reason is that they have overlooked the possibility that races canbe defined cladistically. Since the publication of the cladistic raceconcept, a number of questions and objections have been raised. My aimin this paper is to address these objections.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Andreasen, R.O.: 1998, 'A New Perspective on the Race Debate', British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49, 199–225.

    Google Scholar 

  • Andreasen, R.O.: 2000, 'Race: Biological Reality or Social Construct?', Philosophy of Science 67(Proceedings), 653–666.

    Google Scholar 

  • Block, N.: 1995, 'How Heritability Misleads About Race', Cognition 56, 99–126.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cann, R.L., Stoneking, M. and Wilson, A.C.: 1987, 'Mitochondrial DNA and Human Evolution', Nature 325, 31–36.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cavalli-Sforza, L.L.: 1991, 'Genes, People, Language', Scientific American 265, 104–110.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. and Cavalli-Sforza, F.: 1995, The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution, Addison-Wesley, New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. and Edwards, A.W.F.: 1967, 'Phylogenetic Analysis: Models and Estimation Procedures', Evolution 21, 550–570.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cavalli-Sforza, L.L., Menozzi, P. and Piazza, A.: 1994, The History and Geography of Human Genes, Princeton University Press, Princeton.

    Google Scholar 

  • Diamond, J.: 1994, 'Race Without Color', Discover (November), 83–89.

  • Edwards, A.W.F.: 2003, 'Human Genetic Diveasity: Lewontins Fallacy', Bio Essays 25, 798–801.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ereshefsky, M.: 1992, 'Eliminative Pluralism', Philosophy of Science 59, 671–690.

    Google Scholar 

  • Felsenstein, J.: 1981, 'Evolutionary Trees from Gene Frequencies and Quantitative Characters: Finding Maximum Likelihood Estimates', Evolution 35(6), 1229–1242.

    Google Scholar 

  • Felsenstein, J.: 1984, 'The Statistical Approach to Inferring Evolutionary Trees and What it Tells Us about Parsimony and Compatibility', in T. Duncan and T. Stuessy (eds.), Cladistics: Perspectives on the Reconstruction of Evolutionary History, Columbia University Press, New York, pp. 169–191.

    Google Scholar 

  • Felsenstein, J.: 1988, 'Phylogenies from Molecular Sequences: Inference and Reliability', Annual Review of Genetics 22, 521–565.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gould, S.J.: 1977, Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History, W. W. Norton, New York.

  • Hull, D.: 1976, 'Are Species Really Individuals?', Systematic Zoology 25, 174–179.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hull, D.: 1978, 'A Matter of Individuality', Philosophy of Science 45, 335–360.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jorde L.B.: 1997, 'Microsatellite Diversity and the Demographic History of Modern Humans', Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 94, 3100–3103.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kaplan, J. and Pigliucci, M.: 2003, 'On the Concept of Biological Race and Its Applicability to Humans', Philosophy of Science, Supplement, Vol. 70(3), Proceedings of the 2002 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, Part I: Contributed Papers.

  • Kitcher, P.: 1985, Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kitcher, P.: 1999, 'Race, Ethnicity, Biology, Culture', in L. Harris (ed.), Racism, Humanity Books, Amherst, NY.

  • Legge, J.T.: 1996, 'Genetic Criteria for Establishing Evolutionarily Significant Units in Cryans Buckmoth', Conservation Biology 10, 85–98.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lewontin, R.C.: 1982, Human Diversity, Freeman, San Francisco, CA.

  • Lewontin, R.C. and Rose, S.: 1984, 'I. Q.: The Rank Ordering of the World', in Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature, Pantheon Books, New York, pp. 83–129.

    Google Scholar 

  • Livingstone, F.B.: 1964, 'On the Nonexistence of Human Races', in A. Montagu (ed.), The Concept of Race, Collier Books, New York, pp. 46–60.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mallon, R.: 2003, 'Social Construction, Social Roles, and Stability', in F. Schmitt (ed.), Socializing Metaphysics, Rowman and Littlefield.

  • Marks, J.: 1995, Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History, Aldine De Gruyter, Hawthorne, NY.

  • Mayr, E.: 1969, Principles of Systematic Zoology, McGraw Hill, New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nei, M. and Roychoudhury, A.K.: 1982, 'Genetic Relationships and Evolution of Human Races', Evolutionary Biology 14, 1–59.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nei, M. and Roychoudhury, A.K.: 1993, 'Evolutionary Relationships of Human Populations on a Global Scale', Molecular Biology and Evolution 10(5), 927–943.

    Google Scholar 

  • Omi, M. and Winant, H.: 1994, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd. ed., Routledge, New York.

    Google Scholar 

  • Outlaw, L.: 1990, 'Toward a Critical Theory of "Race"', in D.T. Goldberg (ed.), Anatomy of Racism, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, pp. 58–82.

    Google Scholar 

  • Perez-Lezaun, A.: 1997, 'Microsatellite Variation with the Differentiation of Modern Humans', Human Genetics 99, 1–7.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ridley, M.: 1986, Evolution and Classification: The Reformation of Cladism, Longman Scientific and Technical, London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ridley, M.: 1993, Evolution, Blackwell, Boston, MA.

    Google Scholar 

  • Risch, N.: 2002, 'Categorization of Humans in Biomedical Research: Genes, Race, and Disease', Genome Biology 3(7), 1–12.

    Google Scholar 

  • Root, M.: 2000, 'How We Divide the World', Philosophy of Science 67(Proceedings), S628–S639.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shaffer, H.B., and McKnight, M.L.: 1996, 'The Polytypic Species Revisited', Evolution 50, 417–433.

    Google Scholar 

  • Templeton, A.: 1999, 'Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective', American Anthropologis 100, 632–650.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vigilant, L. and Stoneking, M.: 1991, 'African Populations and the Evolution of Human Mitochondrial DNA', Science 253, 1503–1507.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilson, A.C. and Cann, R.L.: 1992, 'The Recent African Genesis of Humans', Scientific American 266, 68–73.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilson, E.O. and Brown, W.L.: 1953, 'The Subspecies Concept and Its Taxonomic Applications', Systematic Zoology 2, 97–111.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wright, L.: 1994, 'One Drop of Blood', The New Yorker 25 (July), 46–55.

  • Zack, N.: 1993, Race and Mixed Race, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zack, N.: 2002, Philosophy of Science and Race, Routledge, New York.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Delaware, 24 Kent Way, Newark, DE, 19716, USA

    Robin O. Andreasen

Authors
  1. Robin O. Andreasen
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Andreasen, R.O. The Cladistic Race Concept: A Defense. Biology & Philosophy 19, 425–442 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:BIPH.0000036110.07449.8d

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:BIPH.0000036110.07449.8d

Search

Navigation