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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  102
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.
The Darwinian evolution and the emergence of genetics helped to______.
选项 A、promote the notion of a league table
B、get rid of the notion of a league table
C、establish the UNESCO
D、arrange groups hierarchically
答案B
解析    细节识别。根据第三段“Only after the Darwinian evolution and the emergence of genetics did the notion of a league table start to crumble”可知，只有在达尔文进化论和遗传学出现后，种族排行的概念才开始瓦解，据此可以判断，选项B与本句意义相近。【知识拓展】遗传学(Genetics)是研究生物的遗传与变异的科学，研究基因的结构、功能及其变异、传递和表达规律。遗传学中的亲子概念不限于父母子女或一个家族，还可以延伸到包括许多家族的群体，这是群体遗传学的研究对象，也是本文对遗传学的应用视角。
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