ERIC Number: EJ733637
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2006
Pages: 1
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0003-066X
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Race--Social, Biological, or Lemonade?
Carey, Gregory
American Psychologist, v61 n2 p176 Feb-Mar 2006
This paper presents comments on an article by R. L. Sternberg, E. L. Grigorenko, and K. K. Kidd and another article by H. Tang, T. Quertermous, B. Rodriguez, S. L. Kardia, X. Zhu, X., A. Brown, et al. (2005). On the day that the author of this paper reads Sternberg, Grigorenko, and Kidd's (January 2005) article on race, an article from the American Journal of Human Genetics (Tang et al., 2005) also crossed his desk. As part of their research, the latter authors compared the results of a cluster analysis of people using many genetic markers with the respondent's self-identified race/ethnicity: "Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity" (Tang et al., 2005, p. 268). He would very much like to hear a response to this finding from Sternberg et al. (2005), who maintained that "race is a socially constructed concept, not a biological one" (p. 49), that reifies those physical correlates of ancient population dispersions "as deriving from some imagined natural grouping of people that does not in fact exist, except in our heads" (p. 51). His take is that if psychologists could use genetics (or any other biological variables) to distinguish those with schizophrenia from those with bipolar disorder with an error rate even a hundredfold greater than that of Tang et al. (2005), they would announce--and do it with no small fanfare--that there are valid, biological differences between the two disorders. He suspects that much of the difficulty in discussing this issue stems from a tendency to treat "social" and "biological" (or "genetic" and "environmental") phenomena as mutually exclusive. Placing a complicated construct like race into a discrete "social" or "biological" box makes as much sense as asking whether lemonade is (a) lemon juice, (b) water, or (c) sugar.
Descriptors: Genetics, Ethnicity, Psychologists, Schizophrenia, Mental Disorders, Racial Identification, Social Influences, Identification (Psychology), Depression (Psychology), Biology
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Opinion Papers
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Language: English
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