Species and Races, Chimeras, and Multiracial People

Open Peer Commentaries

Species and Races, Chimeras, and Multiracial People David Wasserman, University of Maryland

Jason Scott Robert and Françoise Baylis (2003) contrast the skepticism among scientists about the biological basis for the notion of Žxed or well-deŽned species with the persistence of a strong popular conception of species as Žxed and well-deŽned. In making this contrast, they suggest an intriguing analogy to race: There is here an analogy to the recent debate about the concept of race. It is argued that race is a biologically meaningless category, and yet this in no way undermines the reality that Žxed races exist independently as social constructs and they continue to function, for good, or more likely, ill, as a moral category.

The authors later suggest that a society facing the prospect of mixed-species beings might borrow a practice from U.S. racial classiŽcation: Consider, for example, the relatively recent practice in the United States of classifying octoroons (people with oneeighth negro blood; the offspring of a quadroon and a white person) as black. By analogy, perhaps 1% animal DNA (i.e., mitochondrial DNA) makes for an animal.

They do not endorse this “one cell” analog of the notorious “one-drop of blood” rule, but merely suggest it as a likely response to the emergence of beings bearing genetic material from different species. I will argue that the analogy to race is both closer and more limited than Robert and Baylis suggest, and that it suggests further reasons why we are unlikely to extend the welcome mat to chimeras. To begin with, not only the biological basis but the vintage of both concepts are a matter of continuing scholarly dispute (Montagu 1964; Coon 1962). People have always recognized different types of animals and plants but have used different classiŽcation schemes at different times. Similarly, people have always relied on outward markers to classify people into different types, but those markers have varied, as has the import of their classiŽcations (McCoskey 2002; Omi and Winant 1994). I suspect that Noah, Linnaeus, and modern biologists would sort animals very differently and attribute different signiŽcance to their classiŽcations. Similarly, it may be only since the European colonial era that races have been deŽned primarily by skin color and humanity divided into the now familiar “continental” races: Caucasoid/White, Negroid/Black, and Mongoloid/Asian (see Takaki 1992). Indeed, scholars debate about whether it is even appropriate to use the concept of race in studying the classiŽcation of people in ancient and medieval times. The

Summer 2003, Volume 3, Number 3 © 2003 by The MIT Press

issue rests on the extent to which the types to which people were assigned at different times were seen as “essential”: as tied to identity, or as licensing a sufŽciently wide range of inferences about character and capacity (McCoskey 2002; Hirschfeld 1996; Goldberg 1990). A second point of analogy is that just as species have been regarded as not only a classiŽcation but an ordering, a Great Chain of Being, so have races (Omi and Winant 1994; Goldberg 1990). Not surprisingly, the race placed on top was typically that of the classiŽers (although some contemporary white racists award the top slot to Asians; e.g., see Rushton 1994). That race was regarded as differing from the other races in ways that those races did not differ from one another. Crossing racial boundaries was more problematic when one of the races was the top one; mixing among lower races was a matter of little or no concern. Indeed, the United States Supreme Court seized upon this disparity in concern when it struck down Virginia’s antimiscegenation law: the law served to protect only the integrity of the white race and not racial boundaries in general (Loving v. Virginia 388 U.S. 1 [1967]). Human beings have proven remarkably resilient in maintaining racial hierarchy in the face of racial mixing, whether by elaborate schemes of gradation or by the procrustean dichotomy imposed by the one-drop rule (Lichtenberg et al. 1997; Omi and Winant 1994). Robert and Baylis suggest that we might be no less adept at consigning chimeras to lower legal and moral status. We will surely have similar reasons of power, status, and privilege for doing so. But the issue of miscegenation also suggests crucial differences between species and races. First, races, unlike species (at least on one popular deŽnition of the latter) can and do mix without genetic technology, or any technology. Second, we (or most of us) now regard the mixing of races with equanimity or approval, not horror. Indeed, the racial classiŽcation scheme used by the U.S. Census was revised in 2000 to reect the substantial increase in mixed-race individuals and to avoid the distortions involved in forcing them into single racial categories (Lichtenberg et al. 1997). It is difŽcult to imagine that we would make a similar effort to accommodate a proliferation of chimeras. One reason is that chimeras will not enter the world the way mixed-race children typically do—”from women born”— but as laboratory artifacts. (This might not be an enduring distinction, however. With the growth of assisted reproduction and the advent of genetic engineering, the grounds for distinguishing beings born of women from

ajob

Y

w 13

The American Journal of Bioethics

beings produced by the laboratory will be increasingly eroded). Another reason is that chimeras are unlikely to beneŽt from any broader recognition of the equality of species, as multiracial individuals have beneŽted from a broader recognition of the equality of races. It was not racial mixing that compelled a recognition of the moral and legal equality of the races, but rather the recognition of their equality that made their mixing morally and legally acceptable. The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, invoked to strike down the ban on miscegenation, treats all human beings as “persons” regardless of their race. No future amendment is likely to confer equal status on all animals regardless of their species, for the obvious reason that the great majority of species, and of animals, lack the plausible requisites for such equality—self-consciousness and agency, or, more modestly, sentience and the capacity to feel pain. This difference, however, merely suggests that we should take animals, and chimeras, on a case-by-case basis, not that we should preserve species classiŽcations in the face of dwindling biological support. But there are good reasons for preserving those classiŽcations, and the analogy to race is again instructive, if largely by way of contrast. Species classiŽcations, unlike racial ones, license a wide range of useful generalizations. While there is currently a great deal of debate, for example, about how much medically useful genetic information is provided by racial classiŽcation (e.g., see Burchard et al. 2003; Cooper, Kaufman, and Ward 2003), there is little or no debate that a tremendous amount of medically useful genetic information is provided by species classiŽcation. A health professional would be well-advised to inquire into the species of her patient: a wide range of common diseases are nearly absent in, or largely conŽned to, certain species. And if the patient were a chimera, its pedigree, whether artiŽcial or natural, would be an essential part of its medical record. On the other hand, the strongest reason to preserve racial classiŽcation is one that has no counterpart for species classiŽcation—to undo the effects of racism. As Justice Blackmun famously asserted in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (438 U.S. 265 [1978]), “in order to get beyond racism, we must Žrst take account of race.” This is the primary reason why the federal government has rejected well-intentioned but naive efforts to end racial classiŽcation in the census and other ofŽcial records (Lichtenberg et al. 1997). In contrast, the imperative to reform our social practices provides little or no reason to preserve species classiŽcation. There is a growing consensus that we should not treat any sentient being in certain ways. But in order to abolish the practices that treat sen-

Y

w 14 ajob

tient beings these ways, we would not need to take account of species membership. Given the considerable differences in cognitive and behavioral capacity that obtain, on average, between species (however deŽned), it would hardly make sense to eliminate political and social inequalities among them. It would be as ludicrous to track disparities in education or employment among different species as it is appropriate to track them among different races. Because of our conviction that races do not differ signiŽcantly in the capacities relevant to economic, social, and political achievement, large disparities are presumptive evidence of continued discrimination. There would be no such presumption if we continued to Žnd large disparities between human beings and other species. We might expect politicians or professionals to be asses, but we don’t expect asses to be politicians or professionals. There are, perhaps, other reasons, for preserving species classiŽcation; perhaps the same moral, cultural, religious, and aesthetic reasons there are for preserving species. But that is the subject of another commentary. n Acknowledgment

This work was supported by NHGRI-ELSI Grant R01HGO2363. References Burchard, E. G., E. Ziv, N. Coyle et al. 2003. The importance of race and ethnic background in biomedical research and clinical practice. New England Journal of Medicine 348(12):1170–75. Coon, C. 1962. The origin of races. New York: Knopf. Cooper, R. S., J. S. Kaufman, and R. Ward. 2003. Race and genomics. New England Journal of Medicine 348(12):1166–70. Goldberg, D. T., ed. 1990. Anatomy of racism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hirschfeld, L. A. 1996. Race in the making. Cambridge: MIT Press. Lichtenberg, J., S. Bianchi, R.Wachbroit, and D. Wasserman. 1997. Counting race and ethnicity: Options for the 2000 census. Philosophy & Public Policy 17(3):18–22. Montagu, A., ed. 1964. The concept of race. New York: Free Press. McCoskey, D. E. 2002. Race before “whiteness”: Studying identity in Ptolemaic Egypt. Critical Sociology 28(1–2):13–39. Omi, M., and R. Winant. 1994. Racial formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge. Robert, J. S., and F. Baylis. 2003. Crossing species boundaries. The American Journal of Bioethics 3(3):1–13. Rushton, J. P. 1994. Evolution and behavior. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press. Takaki, R. 1992. The tempest in the wilderness: The racialization of slavery. Journal of American History 79:892–912.

Summer 2003, Volume 3, Number 3