What Does a Race Gene Really Mean?

Here is an interesting article I read before Christmas which I didn't want to let pass unnoticed, but my Christmas holiday included an inintended holiday from blogging.

Apparently scientists have located a genetic mutation that accounts for the development of white skin. The interesting aspect of the article is that these researchers are worried about the effect of this scientific discovery on race relations:

study leader Keith Cheng said he was at first uncomfortable talking about the new work, fearing that the finding of such a clear genetic difference between people of African and European ancestries might reawaken discredited assertions of other purported inborn differences between races

Cheng is quoted as saying: "I think human beings are extremely insecure and look to visual cues of sameness to feel better, and people will do bad things to people who are different."

Maybe I'm a little bit old-school, still holding on to the anachronistic view that includes faith and religion and all other things science has apparently replaced, but I just don't see how this information could override the rational person's view of the world and view of other races. It seems absurd--genetic science can not answer questions about society and relations between people. See Neil Postman's Technopoly:

What we may call sceince, then, is the quest to find the immutable and universal laws that govern processes, presuming that there are cause-and-effect relations among these processes. It follows that the quest to understand human behavior and feeling can in no sense except the most trivial be called science. One can, of course, point to the fact that students of both natural law and human behavior often quantify their observations, and on this common ground classify them together. A fair analogy would be to argue that, since a housepainter and an artist both use paint, they are engaged in the same enterprise and to the same end.

I would imagine that most people are aware of the universal characteristics of humanity that are shared by all races, as well as the inherent difference among races. We don't need a scientist to tell us we are more similar than different (though this same article reaffirms that "the number of DNA differences between races is tiny compared with the range of genetic diversity found within any single racial group."). We have learned this information from such basic sources as our interactions with others (not to mention any self-evident understanding of the dignity of Man). Why should our worldview change when we locate the genetic source of the differences? I wonder if these people think our opinion of our neighbor of German heritage will be altered by learning of Hitler's reign?

It seems clear that our social relations are based on more that a genetic map. It also seems clearly dangerous that we have given science the role of ultimate arbiter in all judgments. C.S. Lewis discussed this danger and that fact that Man's conquest of Nature ultimately leads to the destruction of real humanity--the abolition of Man:

We reduce things to mere nature in order that we may 'conquer' them. We are always conquering nature, because 'Nature' is the name for what we have, to some exent, conquered. The price of conquest is to treat a thing as mere Nature. Every conquest over Nature increases her domain. The stars do not become Nature till we can weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can psychoanalyse her. Ther wresting of powers from nature is also the surrendering of things to Nature. As long as this process stops short of the final stage we may well hold that the gain outweighs the loss. But as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same.

There is no middle ground between the idea that there is something special about humanity and the reduction of all human functions to quantifiable natural processes:

Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own 'natural' impulses.

The article on the white gene demonstrates, once again, that when the goddess Science speaks, her loyal followers believe that all else should be forgotten. As Lewis said, "once our souls, that is ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls." However, Science has not gained compelete dominion quite yet. The world still contains individuals who have not become mere "artefacts," but remain Men. It is up to them to make sure that science is given its proper respect, and that it is given nothing more.