PREFACE

Diversity, Difference, Deviance: Ethics and Human Biology

The chapters in this volume were drawn from papers presented at the 45 th Annual Symposium of the Society for the Study of Human Biology, sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Wellcome Trust's research program in Biomedical Ethics. The symposium took as its theme ‘Diversity, Difference, Deviance: Ethics and Human Biology' and aimed to explore:

(i) the ethical issues that accompany the scientific production of data on human biological variation; and

(ii) how human biologists might tackle the social, political, and ethical consequences of their research

The symposium solicited papers from a range of different academic disciplines to generate a rich tapestry of contrasting, yet essentially complementary, perspectives on human nature, the nature of difference, and related scientific practice.*

The chapters included in this volume offer a detailed analysis of selected presentations. These were chosen to represent the range of issues addressed, and to facilitate a synthesis of the multi-disciplinary discourse and inter-disciplinary dialogue the symposium was able to provoke. At the same time, this selection of chapters, and the way they have been arranged in this volume, sought to address a number of specific suggestions and concerns raised by symposium participants during an open forum at the end of the final day.

Many participants told us that they found the symposium's diverse range of presentations, and the opportunities these provided for synthesizing contrasting disciplinary perspectives, both refreshing and important. They were refreshing because the multi-disciplinary discourse and interdisciplinary dialogue offered by contributors to the symposium provided unexpected insights into biological explanations for human nature and difference. Important because the symposium demonstrated that different disciplines could talk to one another and that, despite their more obvious differences, there was extensive common ground. The symposium provided a tangible sense that bringing together different perspectives on human biology and the nature of difference enabled progress toward characterizing many of the conceptual and ethical problems that human biologists face.

Nonetheless, some participants expressed concern about the possible marginalization of biologists themselves. They felt that an interdisciplinary lens which explored scientific practices risked being misinterpreted as an ‘anti-science' agenda which criticized and de-legitimized ‘scientific' topics and analytical approaches on essentially political grounds. This was a valid concern, not least because some of the contributors from the biological sciences were wary of being seen as token representatives of their craft.

We took this potential risk seriously, not least because many of the participants from non-biological disciplines responded by describing how they too had felt marginalized during parts of the symposium. However, they suggested that everyone probably felt as if they were sometimes "standing outside" of the symposium, if only because the range of perspectives and the inter-disciplinary dialogue was such unfamiliar territory. Indeed, there was consensus that it was important to acknowledge and address the potential to alienate some academic constituencies. The participants encouraged us to ensure that all relevant disciplines were adequately represented within the proceedings, and that the volume was accessible to students and a wider audience beyond the confines of academia.

In constructing this volume we sought to achieve these ancillary objectives, by selecting: contributors from a wide range of different disciplinary backgrounds - including the humanities, the social and natural sciences, and disciplines in-between (such as bioethics); and contributions on a wide range of relevant topics and perspectives - including the material, philosophical and symbolic nature of ‘difference,' and the popular and scientific practices that inform our understanding thereof. In the process the following chapters demonstrate the extraordinary scope of contemporary research and scholarship on the nature and meaning of human biological differences, and the important contribution that different disciplinary perspectives can bring to this work.

Because diverse analytical styles and foci tend to make such compilations vulnerable to inaccessible or incomprehensible eclecticism - accentuating the very differences this volume aims to transcend - each of the contributors was tasked to reach out beyond their own community of practice to engage those with very different perspectives and very different analytical approaches. For similar reasons, the chapters have been carefully arranged into three sections: "looking for ‘nature' in human nature;" "geneticization and the nature of difference;" and "scientific practice and the pursuit of difference" - each with four chapters and with ‘bridging' chapters at the beginning and end of each section. The volume's three sections aim to combine different disciplinary perspectives in a way that challenges popular and conservative paradigms - paradigms that undermine and constrain our ability to understand the nature and causes of difference.

The Nature of Difference: Science, Society and Human Biology

The volume has thereby evolved into a collection of perspectives on the "nature of difference" - what difference is ; what difference means ; and what causes difference. As such the contributions selected for inclusion herein demonstrate how the different perspectives from unrelated disciplines (which are, after all, subcultures of the wider academic community) influence the answers to each of these questions. To some, this variation and lack of consensus might seem to question the validity of what each of us classify as ‘biological,' and might even undermine the importance of biology as a determinant of difference. This more critical analysis of different disciplinary perspectives might also adopt a less optimistic view of the volume's three sections which they might label: "the epistemological importance and theoretical power of biology-as-nature;" "the social recognition, reification and ‘naturalization' of difference;" and "the corruption of scientific enquiry by social perspectives of difference." Yet this is essentially a cynical approach that views the lack of consensus as problematic rather than illuminating. Instead, we aimed to demonstrate the potential benefits of combining different disciplinary perspectives which challenge the popular and conservative paradigms that undermine our ability to understand and address the nature and causes of difference.

The first section examines the role that ‘nature' plays in contemporary explanations for human nature. It opens with Cartmill's thoughtful essay exploring the arguments for and against a biological basis for morality and concluding that language provides the crucial link between our biological and social selves, and between our material, philosophical and symbolic nature. This is followed by Dingwall et al.'s analysis of past attempts to situate human behavior within a biological framework. They

use criminality as an example to revisit the sociological critiques of biological determinism and the limits these critiques face without a rapprochement between the social and natural sciences. This is evident in Marks' subsequent chapter, which explores the symbolic and scientific value of comparisons between humans and non-human primates. He concludes that we need to recognize the capacity of such aesthetic comparisons to constrain and subvert scientific analyses. Finally, the section concludes with Durrheim and Dixon's empirical study of popular explanations for biological and social difference in South Africa. They demonstrate how scientific methods and arguments are co-opted within lay ontologies which reify and naturalize difference and provide tautological explanations of difference that reflect and reinforce illegitimate scientific analyses.

The second section of the book includes four chapters that consider the important role that genetics has come to play in naturalistic explanations of human difference - a role that imposes a natural cause and individual responsibility for difference through a process that has become known as ‘geneticization.' In this regard, Wexler's chapter follows on from Durrheim and Dixon by demonstrating how popular representations of ‘witchcraft' have been subject to crude re-interpretation and put to use for eugenicist ends by what appears to have been a deliberately biased genealogy of Huntington's chorea. This was a genealogy that was socially and scientifically satisfying because it successfully mapped the stigma of disease against the evils of witchcraft to reproduce the imaginary material and metaphysical symmetry of deviance. The role of genetics in sexuality forms the focus for the next chapter, in which Kitzinger compares media and scientific representations of an apparent association between male homosexuality and specific genetic traits. The media questioned these ‘findings' on various grounds, particularly the basis on which social phenomena were: deemed to require a ‘cause;' selected as relevant for scientific analysis; and thereby reified as materially different. Shakespeare takes up these points in his analysis of the role of social and biological factors in defining and producing ‘disability.' He suggests that research into the genetic basis of disability does not explain why such research is necessary or relevant, while it ignores the social production and interpretation of difference as dis-abled. Finally, Ashcroft demonstrates how race and ethnicity have come to play such an important role in the application of research into genetic determinants of drug response (so-called ‘pharmacogenetics') despite serious social and scientific misgivings. This is a practice that seems to reflect the way in which social and scientific perspectives work together to satisfy preconceived interpretations of difference and thereby conserve popular biological explanations of human difference.

The third and final section of the book takes a closer look at how research into human biological difference is practiced. Outram and Ellison's chapter follows on from Ashcroft's analyses by exploring the views and experiences of geneticists and genetics journal editors concerning the use of race and ethnicity in genetic research. They suggest that geneticists implicitly recognize the questionable reliability, validity and sensitivity of racial and ethnic categories as markers of genetic difference, but separate their pragmatic use of these (as rough and ready scientific tools) from their social meanings and consequences. This is an issue Santos considers when exploring the ethical challenges facing genetic and related biological research on isolated human populations. By examining the regulatory constraints that govern human biological research on such populations, using Brazilian Amerindians as a case study, he is able demonstrate how these continue to draw on historical caricatures of difference, and adopt a protectionist rather than an emancipatory approach which stifles research into human diversity. Not that all such regulation need operate in this fashion - as evident in the next chapter by Turner et al. They review a range of (un)ethical research practices in skeletal biology and forensic anthropology, past and present, and conclude that substantial scientific benefits have accrued from recent legislation (such as NAGPRA in the USA) and related developments which help scientists use biological material as evidence of social and cultural processes. The book concludes with Goodman's call to arms, which argues forcibly for the reintegration of physical/biological and social/cultural anthropology, drawing on the examples of race-as-biology and stature to demonstrate why it is impossible to understand human biology outside its socio-cultural context.

Beyond their collective focus on the role of science, society and human biology in defining the nature of difference, the chapters in this volume raise three additional issues that have wider ramifications for scientific research into human biology and beyond. The first of these involves the tautological tendencies of all scientific enquiries. The second concerns the exceptional power of biological explanations for ‘difference.' The third considers what science and society might do to escape the clutches of biological determinism. All are issues that are addressed in greater depth in the introductory chapter.

* Abstracts and extended summaries of papers and posters presented at the three-day symposium have been published in a special issue of the BioSocial Society's in-house journal, Society, Biology and Human Affairs . 2002; 67(2).