MWP3 Articles 1 & 2 Summaries with Supporting Quotations

Article 1 summary:
Fairchild writes in response to the works of a scientist by the name of J. Phillip Rushton, who he felt had incorporated racist beliefs, theories, and practices inherent from the studies of Darwin into common sociobiology.  He discusses how there are several factors underlying both Darwin and Rushton's writings and studies that reflect an unapologetic white supremacist standpoint, leading to Rushton's belief that there were actual biological differences between ethnicity, and that factors such as intelligence dwindled between "caucazoids, mongaloids, and negroids".  This lead many sociobiology texts and articles to contain traces of data that claimed certain ethnicities contained a more thorough inherent factor of agreeableness, adaptability, and intelligence.  Fairchild linked this to the original beliefs of Darwin, whose entire theory of evolution was based on the idea that dark-skinned people are "remnant to gorillas".

Quotations:
-"An examination of the assumptions underlying Rushton's reveals that the theoretical orientation is, in fact, unreliable...the basic assumption of Darwinian influence is teleological...the data bases that are used as evidence are frequently misrepresented" (Fairchild 101).
-"The review of sociobiological models of "racial" differences reveals a number of fatal flaws in their theoretical assumptions and interpretations of empirical databases" (Fairchild 108)

Article 2 summary:
Audrey and Brian Smedley write about how racist beliefs have been incorporated into many professional settings, causing leading scientists to study in taboo fields such as "chromosomal differences between one ethnicity and another", searching for an actually biological or anatomical difference between races, trying to expand different members of the human race to entirely different species.  They claim that this would cause racism to become completely commonplace, perhaps even scientifically reasonable.  They write about how the core of racism is in the study of anthropology, and how different cultures and beliefs have always separated people in their studies and practices, causing modern scientists to not see the problem in studying these harmful and offensive topics.

Quotations:
-"Ethnicity and culture are related phenomena and bear no intrinsic connection to human biological variations or race" (Smedley and Smedley 17)
-"The genetic conception of race appeared in the mid-20th century and remains today as a definition or working hypothesis for many scholars" (Smedley and Smedley 19)