History of Science and Technology Colloquium

The typological-population distinction has its genesis in the distinction between "races as types" and "races as populations" made by Theodosius Dobzhansky in a paper delivered at a 1950 Cold Spring Harbor symposium that sought to embrace physical anthropology and human genetics within the modern evolutionary synthesis. While developments in Dobzhansky's field of population genetics rendered the concept of "races as types" obsolete, his redefinition of "races as populations" remains to be fully understood, both historically and philosophically. This paper explores the question of race - especially the question of the reality of race - in Dobzhansky's work. Dobzhansky's views are compared with those of his and our contemporaries and critically assessed. Particular attention is paid to tensions arising in his joint appeal to an object ontology and a process ontology. On the one hand, a race is considered to be a genetically distinct Mendelian population, "which exists regardless of whether a classifier describes it or not." On the other hand, "what is considered essential about races is not their state of being but that of becoming."