Midas Deckers don’t practice culture

People are animals. But human science is not animal science. You cannot cross people or put pieces of people in strong water. And if you talk about race, the study samples suddenly get angry.

Midas-Deckers see the latter as unfortunate. in a What is going on there? Race is championed as a biological concept. Whoever wants to understand human variation cannot ignore race, according to a biologist. What should result from that? Order and overview. This is where knowledge and insight flow. Free value. This is how science works.

Wow the theory. In fact, judgments of racial values ​​crept into the racial divide immediately. In the first half of his book, Dekkers looked at ethnologists who traveled the world from the eighteenth century with skull meters and color samples. Dekkers quotes fondly from colonial literature: about women and men who were searched, exchanged, opened, displayed, and humiliated in the name of science.

Is this what he started? Dekkers focuses on senior taxonomist Carl Linnaeus. who distinguished sane man In red, black, white and yellow. According to Deckers, Linnaeus did not have a “hidden agenda” and was not a “racist”. You might want to ask the Swede why the African race has been described as intelligent, lazy and careless and the European warm-blooded, muscular, and inventor.

granular earwax

Dekkers treats Linnaeus with velvet gloves. He sees black and white race out of the question, but “yellow race, on the other hand, does exist. Absolutely!” Just look at the skin fold! Granular earwax! Is this enough? Apparently. The reader has to deal with it.

I was hoping the Dekkers would show the knowledge that all this racial science has produced. Little of nothing, is the answer. Labeling Africa “black” ignores the continent’s great genetic diversity. Relations between Polynesians, Melanesians and East Asians, Native Americans and the inhabitants of Siberia remained hidden under the designation asiaticus.

Decker is not very fond of today’s humanities scholars. Anthropologists, psychologists, physicians, and geneticists fail. An ironic judgment, as it relies heavily on recent insights from genetics. About congenital disorders, inheritance of skin color, about genetic relationships between peoples. Here’s your answer, you want to contact the biologist. All knowledge collected over the past thirty years. What is the taboo?

Dekkers do not do culture. But for humans, culture has become nature. He has already rated himself. People all over the world have united into tribes, clans, religions, and nation states. Culture determines who does it with more than nature. Good geneticists know this. They involve anthropologists and archaeologists in their investigations.

Whether the word “race” is useful or not remains unclear. Dekkers at one point thinks it’s good to talk about diversity, form, or subspecies. To grumble later about those who “enough” with words like race, common ancestry, or genetic group. Call a variety, Dickers says. But words matter. And this three-letter word simply has a horrific history of racist laws, apartheid, racial hatred and racism. In light of these crimes, it is strange to complain about the length of the toes.