On the New Biology of Race

The notion that race has some biological basis has been widely criticized, by both biologists and philosophers. Indeed, the view that race is no more scientifically real than witchcraft is so influential that many who want to argue that race is real divert to understandings of race and reality according to which race is real as a social, rather than natural, kind. ¹ Against this trend, however, Robin Andreasen and Philip Kitcher have recently argued for an improved biology of race. ² The improvements over past biological accounts of race are twofold. First, the new biology of race avoids the racism of prior biological accounts of race, which often attributed intrinsic significance to racial phenotypic traits or tied intellectual, aesthetic, cultural, and moral potential to those traits. Indeed, both Andreasen and Kitcher, while trying to make biological sense of race, reject the conflict and social division that has surrounded race for so long. Second, the new biology of race actually includes sound scientific research. Briefly, the key idea to this new biology of race is that while perhaps there is no “race gene” or set of necessary and jointly sufficient phenotypic features that can be attributed to each race, races can be understood as breeding populations. Here I want to question the viability of this approach.