Understanding Human Variation
University of Alberta
September 21-22, 2007

This was a public conference run over two days at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in September 2007. It explored human behavioral, phenotypic, and genetic variation, how these are or have been conceptualized, and how these conceptions manifest themselves in everyday and scientific practices. The keynote speaker was Anita Silvers from San Francisco State University. Other speakers were Timothy Caulfield, Emmanuel Eze, Ron Mallon, Edouard Machery, Pamela Willoughby, Gregor Wolbring, Cressida Heyes, and Rob Wilson. Talks from the conference were not recorded, since we put our organizational resources instead into arranging sign interpretation and CART services for both the conference and associated pre-conference workshop. Abstracts for the talks and speaker bios are available below.

Workshop presenters were David Kahane, Nicola Fairbrother, Ingo Brigandt, Marc Workman, Angela Thachuk, Joanne Faulkner, Michael Billinger, Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, Doug Wahlsten, and Heidi Janz. The workshop ran over the Thursday afternoon and Friday morning, and provided a great way for What Sorts Network team members to discover more about one another’s work, common interests, and to discuss potential collaborations. We were especially grateful to Teresa Burke, from Gallaudet University in Washington, for making the trip and giving several short presentations at the workshop.

View the flyer for the conference

View the schedule for the pre-conference workshop

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Abstracts

Anita Silvers, Professor and Chair of Philosophy at San Francisco State University.
Human Biological Diversity and the Basis for Social Justice

The paper explores what social policy does as well as what it should do in regard to the facts (and the theory) about human variation.

Emmanuel Eze, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago.
Moral Reasoning and Racial Categories

Mature moral reasoning is usually seen as based on norms and principles, whereas racial categories are said to be based on facts and empirical observations. While moral judgement is accepted as applicable in the domains of personal ethics and of social values, categories of race are believed to be products of application of neutral procedures of science, namely, the science of classification of natural kinds. In the first section of this paper, I explore in what ways this separation between moral reasoning and racial taxonomy is true. But I also explore in what ways the separation is misleading. In the second section, I argue that moral judgement and racial categories are related in ways that could be merely empirical and contingent, logical and necessary, or, at different moments, both. If this is the case, I make the effort to offer an outline of a work to determine what aspects of these relations come from the side of morality and which of them come from the side of natural science. In the third and final section, while comparing the results of my effort to insights drawn from the works of Immanuel Kant and Jonathan Dancy, I review some illustrative cases in current public life where mutually implicated categories of moral norms and procedures in the science of racial classification can be, together, identified in the practices of justification of government policies, in the natural and the social sciences, and in notable habits of everyday culture.

Cressida J. Heyes, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Alberta.
Erasing Human Variation: Cosmetic Surgery and Mental Health

Most critics would concur that cosmetic surgery erases human physical variation, creating more uniform bodies. This paper suggests that the literature on mental health and cosmetic surgery also functions to create a normalized psychology-in effect using cosmetic surgery to erase human psychic variation. In the absence of overt physical health benefits, cosmetic surgery has throughout its history relied on psycho-social justifications, from enabling effective social functioning, to curing inferiority complexes, to improving self-esteem. Increasingly, surgeons and psychologists (two rather different constituencies) are interested also in identifying patients for whom cosmetic surgery is psychologically contraindicated. By exploring the relationship between psychological diagnosis and constructions of the ideal or contraindicated cosmetic surgical candidate, I suggest that the literature on cosmetic surgery and mental health tends to construct a "normal psychology" that is highly normative. This move requires the mutually constitutive construction of the patient who should not be operated on, who is overtly represented as symptomatically neurotic, but can also be understood through more political lenses as, variously, resistant, critical, hyperresponsive to cultural pressures, or indifferent to the financial and ideological world of the surgeon. Thus the case of cosmetic surgery and mental health illustrates a larger cultural dynamic, in which political struggles over the body's normal form become metonymic of struggles over who will be sane or mad.

Pamela Willoughby, Professor of Anthropology and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Programmes, Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta.
The origins of human variation: Evidence from fossils, archaeology and genetics

Fossil and archaeological data clearly document an African origin for our own species, Homo sapiens, probably by 200,000 years ago. Sometime after 50,000 years ago, descendants of this founder group dispersed out of Africa to populate the world, replacing indigenous groups throughout Eurasia. The processes underlying this replacement model of early dispersal are not well understood. But the results are visible in the genetic diversity of living humans. In 1972, using classical genetic markers, Richard Lewontin argued that “race” was not a valid term for explaining human variation, since there appeared to be more differences within a “race” than between them. Our recent common ancestry is the reason for the lack of geographically specific groups. Human geneticists currently discuss biological variation in terms of mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome haplogroups. These are defined by key mutations in non-coding DNA, and now substitute for populations. This presentation reviews the new evidence for the origins of human variation, and asks if our explanations have really overturned the “morphology equals race” explanations of earlier anthropologists.

Timothy Caulfield, Research Director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta.
Reifying Race?: Genetic Research and Public Representations of Human Variation

The concept of "race" remains a highly contested social and scientific concept. Though most academics view race as a social construct and not a true biological boundary, the term is commonly used in both scientific papers and in the popular media - particularly in the context of population genetic studies, pharmacogenics and in the emerging field of nutrigenomics. The media coverage of the first "race-based" drug, BiDil, exemplifies how easily both the health care community and the popular press embrace race as a scientifically legitimate classification. In this presentation, I will explore and critique the use and social impact of the "race" in the realm of genetics, with a particular emphasis on popular representations.

Edouard Machery, Assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh and a Member of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at the University of Pittsburgh.
The Folk Concept of Race

How do the folk think about races? That is, what is the folk concept of race? Answering this question is crucial for many theoretical debates about race, such as whether races do exist. It also matters for numerous practical debates such as how to reform people’s racial beliefs. Unfortunately, philosophers have failed to characterize the folk concept of race in a systematic and detailed way, while psychologists disagree on the nature of this concept. Particularly, evolutionary psychologists Robert Kurzban, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have argued that people classify others and themselves into distinct races, because, for historical reasons, superficial phenotypic features, such as skin color, correlate with coalitional affiliation. Thus, according to Kurzban and colleagues, the folk concept of race is essentially a coalitional concept. By contrast, following Francisco Gil-White, I have argued that the folk concept of race is a biological concept: Races are thought of by analogy with biological species. In my presentation, I will review the competing hypotheses about the folk concept of race and I will present some new evidence supporting the claim that the folk concept of race is a biological concept.

Gregor Wolbring, University of Calgary with other appointments at the Center for Nanotechnology and Society at Arizona State University, USA and Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, Canada.
New and emerging sciences and technologies and the Changing Way of Life

Today's scientific news seems to become yesterday's news... fast replaced by even more astonishing news. One field of science is chased by another at an ever-increasing speed. This presentation will highlight the impact of numerous sciences and technologies on a) concepts, preservation and generation of biological and cultural diversity, b) concepts of ableism and transhumanism and c) social cohesion, security and the way of life. The presentation covers among others the areas of information and communication technology, genetics, nanotechnology and nanoscience, cognitive sciences and neuro engineering, longevity and immortality research and artificial intelligence research. It introduces the newest field synthetic biology which according to the self description of the synthetic biology community is the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems; and the re-design of existing, natural biological systems for useful purposes.

Rob Wilson, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta.
Normalcy and natural variation in humans and other animals

The concept of normalcy plays a number of different roles in structuring how we view natural variation in human populations. Here I would like to examine a few of these, locating what I have to say against the background of both previous work by Canguilhem and Foucault, as well as against the foreground of how biologists of various stripes think about natural variation in non-human populations. For possible discussion: conceptions of disease, views of disability, and ways in which normativity gets purchase on our thinking about variation.

Ron Mallon, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Utah.
Beyond Non-Essentialism and Toward a New Standard Argument Against Racialism

In philosophy and across many other disciplines, the standard argument against racialism attacks an especially implausible account of human race. This has lead to the failure to address arguments against more biologically realistic racialist theses. I begin by showing why the standard argument fails. I then proceed to consider what exactly it is that progressive anti-racialists should deny and how they should deny it.