HOW WE MAKE SENSE OF (WHAT WE CALL) NATURE - Making Sense of Nature - page 19

genetic make-up of homo sapiens that began in 1990. But many people con-
tinue to apply 'race' in a more specific way in order to distinguish different
groups of people according to certain criteria. This process of dividing up
one species - 'humanity' - into more-or-less distinct constituencies goes
back to at least the sixteenth century, the first period of sustained European
contact with the 'new world' and its peoples (Hannaford, 1996). Since that
time, what the term 'race' means and refers to have varied greatly. One
common belief - certainly in the nineteenth century and even today - is
that races are intra-specific variations in human biology rather than (say)
in ethnic identity or cultural custom. These variations can be regarded as
phenotypical (relating to externally visible things like skin colour) or geno-
typical (relating to the 'internal' character of people's minds or bodies), or
both. For instance, one might presume many 'blacks' to be 'naturally' more
athletic than Caucasians.
This, at least, was the claim made by science writer Jon Entine (2000) in
his book Taboo: why black athletes dominate sports and why we're afraid to talk
about it . Entine argued that athletes of West African origin tend to have a
higher percentage of energy-efficient 'fast twitch' muscles when compared
with other members of the human race. 11 Relatedly, the Human Genome
Diversity Project (HGDP), set up in 1991 as an independent complement
to the HGP, presumed there to be non-trivial genetic variations among
humans. Though it studiously avoided the term 'races', the project's deci-
sion to sample among different 'populations', for instance, geographically
isolated groups in different continents, risked naturalising biological differ-
ence in much the same way as Entine's topic. When I say ' naturalising ',
I mean that observed group-level difference was being presented as some-
thing biologically intrinsic : as a product of variations in the natural history
of humans since the time of 'mitochondrial Eve' some 200,000 years ago.
This, as I noted previously, contrasts with the idea that 'races' are - suppos-
ing we're prepared even to entertain the term - defined in non-biological
terms as contrasting ethno-cultural collectives. It also contrasts with the sug-
gestion that 'race' is a meaningless and malevolent category that we should
dispense with. This argument was advanced by cultural critic Paul Gilroy,
among others, in his topic Against race (2000). For Gilroy, there's nothing
natural about 'race' - and he's certainly not alone in accepting W. E. B. Du
Bois's famous, counter-intuitive insight that 'Race is a

...

cultural fact.' 12
A rather different collateral term, through which the concept of 'nature'
operates, is of much more recent provenance than the keyword 'race'.
'Biodiversity' - a contraction of the term 'biological diversity' - is undoubt-
edly an established part of our global lingua franca. It refers to the diversity
of genes, species and ecosystems within any given region of the Earth -
and by implication the whole planet. Yet 30 years ago, it was a new term
used only by a few biologists and environmental policymakers. It's said to
have been coined by American science administrator Walter G. Rosen in
1985 when deciding on a topical focus for an expert meeting funded by the