The Risky Gene

An essay version of a lecture I gave at a conference on Race and the New Genomics at the University of Illinois–Chicago.  My argument here is that it was a misuse of Darwinian theory to assign differential fitness to different races, and a misinterpretation of epidemiologic findings to define behavior as a cause of disease risk – … the two errors together have contributed to the construction of race as a biological phenomenon.

Read the article from Race and Contemporary Medicine, a special issue of Patterns of Prejudice edited by Sander Gilman. (pdf)