Class notes
Lecture 4: History & Concepts 1
- Course
- BIOC70
- Institution
- University Of Toronto (U Of T )
This lecture focuses on eugenics and the heritability of IQ.
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Clones- Exact copy of genetic differences
What is psychological essentialism?
- Essence
- Outward features
- Deeper features
- Essentialism is a cognitive bias
● Certain categories of people
● A similar quality or essence that cannot be observed directly but that
○ Determines identity
○ Give rise to similarities shared by category members
○ Related to observable features of members
● For example, people with glasses are smart
- Biological mechanisms can provide justification for psychological essentialism
Psychological essentialism: language matters
- Psychological essentialism becomes genetic essentialism when you add research
What is genetic essentialism?
- Inferring a person’s characteristics and behaviours from their genetic makeup
- the ‘genetic basis’ for some categories of people is believed
- to be the ‘essence’ of that category of people
- The category we perceive should be distinct from others
- Just because something is natural does not mean its good
What is Race?
- Race is a concept used to group people that share a set of visible characteristics
such as skin, colour, and facial features
- Visible characteristics influenced by genes
- But the vast majority of genetic variation exists within racial groups
and not between
- Race is related to ancestral background
- Race is a social construct
- Genes determine physical characteristics but do not predict variation in the rest of the
genome
When might genetic essentialism be reasonable?
- When traits arise from variation in one or a few genes
- Reasonable to talk about genetic essentialism
- Eye colour
- Presence of freckles or dimples
- Ability to roll your tongue
- Broccoli tastes bitter (those people have an allele)
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