Quayshawn Spencer (University of Pennsylvania)
In the early 2000s, Esteban Burchard and his colleagues advanced a hypothesis in medical genetics that has since become controversial among medical scientists, philosophers of medicine and biology, and race scholars. The hypothesis, which I'll call Burchard's hypothesis, is that the most inclusive racial division used on the 2000 US census questionnaire (American Indians, Asians, Blacks, Pacific Islanders, and Whites) is a reliable proxy for human genetic diversity when studying, diagnosing, and treating human genetic disorders (Burchard et al. 2003). In this paper, I will argue that Burchard's hypothesis is partially correct, specifically, with respect to studying human genetic disorders.
