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  3. More than 100 years ago, American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois was concerned that race was being used as a biological explanatio

More than 100 years ago, American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois was concerned that race was being used as a biological explanatio

admin2020-03-17  0
问题     More than 100 years ago, American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois was concerned that race was being used as a biological explanation for what he understood to be social and cultural differences between different populations of people. He spoke out against the idea of "white" and "black" as distinct groups, claiming that these distinctions ignored the scope of human diversity.
    Science would favor Du Bois. Today, the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct without biological meaning. In an article published in the journal Science, four scholars say racial categories need to be phased out.
    "Essentially, I could not agree more with the authors," said Svante Paabo, a biologist and director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. In one example that demonstrated genetic differences were not fixed along racial lines, the full genomes(基因组)of James Watson and Craig Venter, two famous American scientists of European ancestry, were compared to that of a Korean scientist, Seong-Jin Kim. It turned out that Watson and Venter shared fewer variations in their genetic sequences than they each shared with Kim.
    Michael Yudell, a professor of public health at Drexel University in Philadelphia, said that modern genetics research is operating in a paradox: on the one hand, race is understood to be a useful tool to illuminate human genetic diversity, but on the other hand, race is also understood to be a poorly defined marker of that diversity.
    Assumptions about genetic differences between people of different races could be particularly dangerous in a medical setting. " If you make clinical predictions based on somebody’s race, you’re going to be wrong a good chunk of the time," Yudell told Live Science. In the paper, he and his colleagues used the example of cystic fibrosis, which is underdiagnosed in people of African ancestry because it is thought of as a "white" disease.
    So what other variables could be used if the racial concept is thrown out? Yudell said scientists need to get more specific with their language, perhaps using terms like "ancestry" or "population" that might more precisely reflect the relationship between humans and their genes, on both the individual and population level. The researchers also acknowledged that there are a few areas where race as a construct might still be useful in scientific research: as a political and social, but not biological, variable.
    " While we argue phasing out racial terminology(术语)in the biological sciences, we also acknowledge that using race as a political or social category to study racism, although filled with lots of challenges, remains necessary given our need to understand how structural inequities and discrimination produce health disparities(差异)between groups. " Yudell said.
The study by Svante Paabo served as an example to show______.
选项 A、modern genetics research is likely to fuel racial conflicts
B、race is a poorly defined marker of human genetic diversity
C、race as a biological term can explain human genetic diversity
D、genetics research should consider social and cultural variables
答案B
解析 推理判断题。第三段第一句提到斯万特·帕博认为种族类别需要逐步淘汰，接着第四段又提到现代遗传学研究的操作自相矛盾：一方面，种族被认为是用来说明人类遗传多样性的有用工具，但另一方面，种族又被认为是该多样性界定不清的标志。斯万特·帕博的研究也属于现代遗传学的研究，由此可知，他的研究作为示例表明种族是人类遗传多样性界定不清的标记，故答案为B)。
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