The race delusion
Richard Dawkins is wrong about race, and you probably are too
I’ve lost count of the number of conversations in which I’ve defended Richard Dawkins over the years. I find his views — especially those he tweets — are often misconstrued, and at times deliberately misrepresented. But I won’t be defending Dawkins for his view that “race is biologically real”. It’s a view he has written about in The Ancestor’s Tale, and more recently tweeted.
As far as controversy in biology goes, this is about as controversial as it gets, so why the free pass from the media that normally lambastes Dawkins for such tweets? Seemingly, the lack of controversy arising from an evolutionary biologist proclaiming race is a biological reality is due to the fact most people happen to agree, but most people are wrong, and an evolutionary biologist really ought to know better.
Dawkins’ view of race isn’t just contrary to that of most anthropologists, who have long argued race is a social construct; many (perhaps most) biologists also believe it to be. The disagreement over race being a social construct or a biological reality therefore represents a divide, not between the humanities…
