(单词翻译:单击)
听力文本
This is Scientific American — 60-Second Science. I'm Steve Mirsky.
"So humans are really really good, or at least Western traditionally educated humans are really, really good at categorizing things into types." Jennifer Raff. She's an anthropologist at the University of Kansas. Raff spoke last month at New York University's Journalism Institute.
"And if you go back through the history of physical anthropology, which we now call ourselves biological anthropologists to distance ourselves from that history, we as a discipline have a lot to answer for. Because we were the ones who measured crania, measured skulls, to try to come up with...we called it the Caucasoid, and the Negroid and the Mongoloid types, right, this ideal specimen of a cranium that fit these perfect measurements. And that was the type. And we tried to fit in then every other person into one of these categories, and that...really influenced eugenics."
"We still have that notion, are you this group, are you that group, when in reality we're mixtures, most of us are very mixed. We have lots of ancestry from lots of populations. So if we can stop thinking of these categories as these fixed entities, we'll get somewhere."
Raff later noted that race does involve biology—but as an effect. "But that doesn't mean that these racial categories aren't real in some sense. And what I mean by that is, yes, they are culturally constructed categories, but they actually have biological effects...when we create the race 'black' or 'African-American' or whatever we're going to call it, we put people into that category regardless of their genetic background, right?"
"So, I always come back to this example: President Obama is just as much Irish as he is African-Am-, but we code him as black, right..., when we do that, when we categorize and classify people—that can have biological effects. We know that stress levels in African-Americans are chronically high, because of racism, because of structural racism, these categories that we've created, right? That is biological, that's real. It may not be because of the genetic variants that they had or there may be some complicated interaction there, but these categories that we create, these social categories, have biological effects."
For Scientific American — 60-Second Science. I'm Steve Mirsky.
参考译文
这里是科学美国人——60秒科学。我是史蒂夫·米尔斯基。
“人类，或至少是接受过西方传统教育的人类，真的很擅长将事物分类。”堪萨斯大学的人类学家詹妮弗·拉夫说到。拉夫上个月在纽约大学新闻学院发表了讲话。
“如果你回顾一下人类体格学的历史——我们现在称自己为生物人类学家，让自己与这段历史隔离开——作为一门学科，我们有很多问题需要解答。因为我们以前测量过头盖骨和颅骨，以提出所谓的‘白色人种'、‘黑色人种'和‘蒙古人种'的概念，对吗？颅骨的理想标本符合这些完美的测量值。就是该人种的典型。我们试图让所有人都归入这些人种类型，这确实影响了优生学。”
“我们仍然有这种观念，‘你是这类人种吗'、‘你是那类人种吗'，而实际上我们是混种，我们大多数人都是混种。我们有很多祖先，他们来自很多族群。因此，如果我们可以不再将这些人种分类视为固定的存在，那我们就能有所成就。”
拉夫随后指出，种族的确与生物学有关，但只是一种结果。“但这并不意味着在某种程度上，这些种族分类不是真的。我的意思是，没错，这些是从文化角度构建的分类，但它们确实产生了生物学影响。在我们创建‘黑人'或‘非洲裔美国人'或其它无论什么叫法的种族时，我们就在不顾人们遗传背景的情况下将他们归入了这一分类，对吧？”
“因此，我总是举这个例子：奥巴马总统既有爱尔兰血统也是非洲裔美国人，但我们将他定义为‘黑人'，对吧？当我们这样做时，在我们给人类分类时，会产生生物学影响。我们知道，由于种族主义、结构性种族主义和我们创造出来的这些分类，非洲裔美国人的压力水平一直居高不下，对吧？这是生物学上的影响，是真实存在的。这可能不是他们基因变异的结果，或是某些复杂的相互作用，而是我们创造出的这些分类，这些社会分类，产生了生物学影响。”
这里是科学美国人——60秒科学。我是史蒂夫·米尔斯基。
译文为可可英语翻译，未经授权请勿转载！
重点讲解
重点讲解：
1. distance oneself from 使疏远；对…冷淡；使不介入；
The author distanced himself from some of the comments in his book.
作者使自己书中的某些评论不带个人色彩。
2. come up with 想出，提出(计划、想法等)；
The president was moved to come up with these suggestions after the hearings.
听证会促使总统想出了这些建议。
3. in reality 事实上；实际上；
He came across as streetwise, but in reality he was not.
他给人的印象是很适应都市生活，但实际上并非如此。
4. regardless of 不顾；不管；不论；
The club welcomes all new members regardless of age.
俱乐部对所有新成员不分年龄一律欢迎。
