Geography, Genealogy and Genetics: Dialectical Substance in Newspaper Coverage of Research on Race and Genetics

摘要

Genetics always had a genealogical component, but discussions of genetics and race add a geographic component to our understanding of genes. In newspaper accounts of genetics and race, genealogy and geography, along with nature and nurture, are the Burkean substances shaping the coverage. Newspaper coverage often favors a view of race as genetic and geographical, and this view is exacerbated by the use of "map" metaphors. The metaphor of "migration" offers a corrective that merges the dialectical substances in newspaper coverage, allowing a vision of racial and ethnic groups as the result of people moving from place to place.