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  3. Why do readers of New Scientist continue to get steamed up about race? After all, it can be used as an innocuous technical term

Why do readers of New Scientist continue to get steamed up about race? After all, it can be used as an innocuous technical term

admin2019-09-17  55
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.
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    细节识别。第五段第一句的such classifications衔接了第四段的anthropologists’ classifications，因此两段分别讲述了人类学家分类的优缺点。本段所讲的缺点主要是他们记录的种族差异(包括面部特征、肤色及发色)大多都是归因于为了适应当地气候，有些肤浅，没有挖掘出不同种族的根本性区别(fundamental about differences between them)。这一表述与选项C一致。【知识拓展】与上题一样，本题也需要借助关键词such classifications和misleading快速定位问题所在的段落，然后据此做出判断。另：气候决定论的基本观点认为人类不同肤色的形成主要归因于气候，如黑种人形成于热带地区，黄种人形成于温带地区，白种人则形成于高纬度的寒带地区(如北欧寒冷的高加索地区)。这是因为热带地区因阳光强烈，紫外线强，气温高，黑色皮肤可以有效抵挡强烈阳光造成的伤害，鼻孔阔大，便于散热，嘴唇也较厚。而北欧由于气候较寒冷，阳光稀弱，紫外线弱，较浅的肤色则易于吸收微弱的紫外线，有利于身体发育。鼻梁较高，鼻子孔道长，可以使吸入的冷空气预先“温暖一下”。
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