Department of Anthropology, Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802.
Cold Spring Harb Perspect Biol. 2014 Jan 1;6(1):a021238. doi: 10.1101/cshperspect.a021238.
People around the world have folk origin myths, stories that explain where they came from and account for their place in the world and their differences from other peoples. As scientists, however, we claim to be seeking literal historical truth. In Western culture, typological ideas about human variation are at least as ancient as written discussion of the subject, and have dominated both social and scientific thinking about race. From Herodotus to the Biblical lost tribes of Israel, and surprisingly even to today, it has been common to view our species as composed of distinct, or even discrete groups, types, or "races," with other individuals admixed from among those groups. Such rhetoric goes so much against the well-known evolutionary realities that it must reflect something deep about human thought, at least in Western culture. Typological approaches can be convenient for some pragmatic aspects of scientific analysis, but they can be seductively deceiving. We know how to think differently and should do so, given the historical abuses that have occurred as a result of typological thinking that seem always to lurk in the human heart.
世界各地的人们都有民间起源神话，这些神话解释了他们的起源，以及他们在世界上的位置和与其他民族的区别。然而，作为科学家，我们声称自己在寻求真实的历史事实。在西方文化中，关于人类变异的类型学思想至少和关于这个主题的书面讨论一样古老，并主导了种族的社会和科学思维。从希罗多德到圣经中失落的以色列部落，甚至令人惊讶的是，直到今天，人们还普遍认为我们的物种由不同的、甚至离散的群体、类型或“种族”组成，其他个体则是从这些群体中混合而来。这种言论与众所周知的进化现实如此相悖，以至于它必须反映出人类思想的某些深刻之处，至少在西方文化中是这样。类型学方法对于科学分析的某些实际方面可能很方便，但它们也可能具有诱人的欺骗性。考虑到由于类型学思维而导致的历史滥用，我们知道应该以不同的方式思考，而这种滥用似乎总是潜伏在人类的内心深处。
