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Thinking about populations and races in time

Millstein, Roberta L. (2015) Thinking about populations and races in time. [Preprint]

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Abstract

Biologists and philosophers have offered differing concepts of biological race. That is, they have offered different candidates for what a biological correlate of race might be; for example, races might be subspecies, clades, lineages, ecotypes, or genetic clusters. One thing that is striking about each of these proposals is that they all depend on a concept of population. Indeed, some authors have explicitly characterized races in terms of populations. However, including the concept of population into concepts of race raises three puzzles, all having to do with time. In this paper, I extend the causal interactionist population concept (CIPC) by introducing some simple assumptions about how to understand populations through time. These assumptions help to shed light on the three puzzles, and in the process show that if we want to understand races in terms of populations, we will need to revise our concept(s) of race.


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Item Type: Preprint
Creators:
CreatorsEmailORCID
Millstein, Roberta L.rlmillstein@ucdavis.edu
Additional Information: Forthcoming in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences for a special issue, “Genomics and Philosophy of Race.” There may be small changes between this version and the final published version.
Keywords: races, populations, Lisa Gannett, causal interactionist population concept, genomics, structure
Subjects: Specific Sciences > Biology
Specific Sciences > Biology > Evolutionary Theory
Depositing User: Dr. Roberta L. Millstein
Date Deposited: 09 Feb 2015 14:09
Last Modified: 24 Apr 2016 14:58
Item ID: 11307
Subjects: Specific Sciences > Biology
Specific Sciences > Biology > Evolutionary Theory
Date: February 2015
URI: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/11307

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