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  3. Why do readers of New Scientist continue to get steamed up about race? After all

Why do readers of New Scientist continue to get steamed up about race? After all

游客2025-01-29  24
问题 Why do readers of New Scientist continue to get steamed up about race? After all, it can be used as an innocuous technical term by anthropologists. But all too often discussions of "race" lead to "racism", and tempers begin to fray. Before the 18th century, race merely described a group of common cultural origin, not one defined by immutable characteristics. Unfortunately, this usage changed as the Western powers colonized Asia and Africa and needed a way to characterize the peoples they subjected as not only different, but inferior.
    A long list of scientists helped to "classify" the races. Among them were some of the famous names of the 18th and 19th centuries: Linnaeus, Cuvier, Haeckel, Huxley and Buffon. Although their classifications rarely agreed, many accepted that the races were fundamentally different and could be arranged with Caucasians at the top.
    Only after the Darwinian evolution and the emergence of genetics did the notion of a league table start to crumble. By the 1940s, UNESCO could emphatically state:    "Racism falsely claims that there is a scientific basis for arranging groups hierarchically in terms of psychological and cultural characteristics that are immutable and innate."
    That groups cannot be arranged hierarchically does not mean that anthropologists cannot set up classifications which divide people into different groups, or that such classifications will not be useful, as several of our latter writers point out. For example, they can provide vital tools (along with language distribution) to reconstruct the prehistoric movements of peoples. Where genetic data are available, these reconstructions can be greatly refined.
    In other contexts, such classifications are misleading. Many of the differences they record (including facial features, skin and hair color) are most probably superficial adaptations to local climate. Although useful as indicators of the origin of different groups, they imply nothing fundamental about differences between them.
    Attempts to assess more important differences between groups (of any number of cognitive abilities, for example) always come to the same very well-known conclusion—that the differences between individuals within one racial group are much larger than the differences between the average members of two such groups.
    What this means is that it is impossible to say anything about a particular individual’s ability because of his or her race (however, defined) because the spread of variation within a race is larger than the average difference between races. Racism can thus receive no support from science, even though a classification of races can be scientifically useful.
    Lay people sometimes put more faith in the concept of race than scientists do, perhaps because they believe they can quite easily identify a person’s race or even nationality. But it’s not that easy: our correspondent from Le Vesinet, for example, identified some of the people in our recent feature ("Genes in Black and White") as Australian, Sicilian, Sumatran and Brazilian. In fact, they came from Sweden, Greece, the Central African Republic and Russia. [br] Anthropologists’ classifications are sometimes misleading because they _____.
选项 A、imply fundamental differences between groups
B、refine the reconstruction of prehistoric human movements
C、do not imply the basic differences between groups
D、tell nothing about the influence of local climate
答案 C
解析 本题问为什么人类学家对种族的划分有时候有误导性。根据第5段第2、3句可知，这是因为种族划分的标记只是一些表面特征，而非根本差异。因此C项“不能表明种族间的根本差异”最为接近文意。A“表明了种族问的根本性差异”与文意相反，直接排除。B“提高了人类史前运动轨迹构建的准确性”，由第4段最后一句可知，这是基因数据而非种族划分的作用，故排除。第5段第2句指出，种族的特征是为了适应当地气候而形成的，也就是可以表明当地气候的影响，则D与文意不符。
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