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“The desire to categorize humans along racial lines, and the impulse to superpose attributes such as intelligence (or criminality, creativity, or violence) on those lines, illustrates a general theme concerning genetics and categorization. Like the English novel, or the face, say, the human genome can be lumped and split in a million different ways. But whether to split or lump, to categorize or synthesize, is a choice. ... The narrower the definition of the heritable feature or the trait, the more likely we will find a genetic locus for that trait, and the more likely we will find that the trait will segregate within some human sub-population.” — Siddhartha Mukherjee
The desire to categorize humans along racial lines, and the impulse to superpose attributes such as intelligence (or criminality, creativity, or violence) on those lines, illustrates a general theme concerning genetics and categorization. Like the English novel, or the face, say, the human genome can be lumped and split in a million different ways. But whether to split or lump, to categorize or synthesize, is a choice. ... The narrower the definition of the heritable feature or the trait, the more likely we will find a genetic locus for that trait, and the more likely we will find that the trait will segregate within some human sub-population.