Evolution: Education and Outreach<\/em>.<\/p>\nIt was co-written with geneticists Heather L. Norton, associate professor of molecular anthropology at the University of Cincinnati; Ellen E. Quillen, assistant professor of molecular medicine at the Wake Forest School of Medicine; Abigail W. Bigham, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan; and Laurel N. Pearson, assistant professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University.<\/p>\n
\u201cI approached them and said, \u2018Have you heard this analogy before?\u2019\u201d said Dunsworth. \u201cI said, \u2018Let’s take it down.\u2019 They said, \u2018Absolutely.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The five, all of whom attended graduate school together at Penn State, decided the best way to refute it was with a peer-reviewed, scholarly work that rebuked \u201cthe illegitimate appeal to science and the erroneous \u2018logic\u2019 of the widespread analogy.\u201d The analogy uses the perceived variation in dog breeds to support the superiority of one human race over another.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the U.S., and likely beyond, the human race-dog breed analogy is not merely an academic question about patterns of variation; today it factors substantially into the popular debate about whether race is fundamentally biological as opposed to a social construct, and it carries forward an ugly American tradition,\u201d the papers says. \u201cInherent to the analogy is the transference of beliefs about pure-bred dogs onto notions of human racial \u2018purity,\u2019 which helped U.S. legislators pass anti-miscegenation laws in the early twentieth century.\u201d<\/p>\n
The analogy, Dunsworth said, \u201cleads people to doubt the consensus among scientists and academics on the sociocultural significance of race, where the construction of race is emphasized over patterns of biological variation (which are not synonymous with race). This is a tough discussion for newcomers to enter, given that there is perceptible variation in human traits around the world that can be used to guess the geographic locale of some portion of someone\u2019s recent ancestors, and given that ancestry is a factor in the sociocultural construction of race. The bad analogy takes advantage of the confusion or frustration that results from this disconnect between what people see versus what they hear about race not being a biological concept.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis dog-breed comparison does not hold up to science and to everything we know about what \u2018race\u2019 is and is not. What\u2019s worse, the people who are trotting out this bad analogy do not have innocent intentions. They are not objectively curious about the wonders of biology, they are not confused about the sociocultural construction of race, they are interested in justifying racism and convincing others to do the same.\u201d<\/p>\n
The paper attacks the analogy by demonstrating the differences in patterns of genetic and biological variation between humans and dogs, contrasting them and explaining how differences between the two are unsurprising given the two species evolved very differently. Dogs are domesticated and different breeds have evolved through highly controlled breeding that has drastically reduced the variation within breeds. The paper goes on to lay out decades of interdisciplinary work beyond genetics and biology that has documented how the phenomenon of \u201crace\u201d in humans is vastly different from any groupings we impose on other animals.<\/p>\n
\u201cHistory tells us how people who use the dog-breed analogy for race are perpetuating racism,\u201d said Dunsworth. \u201cIt\u2019s bad science, bad everything. \u2018Race\u2019 as we know it in our daily lives \u2013 and as we have known it throughout history \u2013 goes well beyond science. Race is socioculturally, politically and historically constructed, but dog breeds are \u2026 dogs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dunsworth and her colleagues ensured the paper would be easily accessible, making it freely readable online without subscription. For the lay reader, there is a glossary of terms to make the scientific argument easier to understand.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe wanted it to be open access so that when you Google this, you can read a peer-reviewed, scholarly article that explains it,\u201d said Dunsworth, a widely published researcher whose interests include the evolution of humans and other primates. \u201cThere\u2019s so much in this paper. When I share it on Twitter, I’m just going to say you have to read the whole thing. That’s why this exists.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
KINGSTON, R.I. \u2013 July 17, 2019 \u2013 As a researcher and teacher, Holly Dunsworth enjoys poking holes in misconceptions about human evolution her students bring into the classroom. This time, Dunsworth is targeting a recurring popular evolutionary analogy that compares human races with dog breeds, one that may sound innocent and scientific on the surface […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":74945,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-74944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives","tag-college-of-arts-and-sciences"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74944","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74944\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74945"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}