2016年12月六级第3套仔细阅读 Passage 2 原文翻译及答案解析

More than 100 years ago, American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois was concerned that race was being used as a biological explanation for what he understood to be social and cultural differences between different populations of people. He spoke out against the idea of "white" and "black" as distinct groups, claiming that these distinctions ignored the scope of human diversity.

100多年前，美国社会学家W. E. B. Du Bois担心种族被用作他所理解的群体间社会和文化差异的生物学解释。他反对将“白人”和“黑人”视为不同群体的观点，声称这些区分忽视了人类多样性的范围。

Science would favor Du Bois. Today, the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct without biological meaning. In an article published in the journal Science, four scholars say racial categories need to be phased out.

科学会支持Du Bois。如今，科学家们的主流观点是种族是一个没有生物学意义的社会建构。在《科学》杂志上发表的一篇文章中，四位学者表示种族类别需要被淘汰。

"Essentially, I could not agree more with the authors," said Svante Paabo, a biologist and director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. In one example that demonstrated genetic differences were not fixed along racial lines, the full genomes (基因组) of James Watson and Craig Venter, two famous American scientists of European ancestry, were compared to that of a Korean scientist, Seong-Jin Kim. It turned out that Watson and Venter shared fewer variations in their genetic sequences than they each shared with Kim.

"本质上，我完全同意作者的观点，"德国马克斯·普朗克进化人类学研究所所长、生物学家Svante Paabo说。在一个证明遗传差异并非固定沿种族线的例子中，两位欧洲血统的著名美国科学家James Watson和Craig Venter的完整基因组与韩国科学家Seong-Jin Kim的基因组进行了比较。结果发现Watson和Venter在基因序列上的变异比他们各自与Kim的变异更少。

Michael Yudell, a professor of public health at Drexel University in Philadelphia, said that modern genetics research is operating in a paradox: on the one hand, race is understood to be a useful tool to illuminate human genetic diversity, but on the other hand, race is also understood to be a poorly defined marker of that diversity.

费城德雷塞尔大学公共卫生教授Michael Yudell表示，现代遗传学研究正处在一个悖论中：一方面，种族被认为是阐明人类遗传多样性的有用工具；另一方面，种族也被理解为这种多样性定义不清的标记。

Assumptions about genetic differences between people of different races could be particularly dangerous in a medical setting. " If you make clinical predictions based on somebody's race, you're going to be wrong a good chunk of the time," Yudell told Live Science. In the paper, he and his colleagues used the example of cystic fibrosis, which is under diagnosed in people of African ancestry because it is thought of as a "white" disease.

在医疗环境中，关于不同种族间遗传差异的假设可能特别危险。"如果你基于某人的种族做出临床预测，你将会在相当一部分时间里出错，"Yudell告诉生活科学网站。在论文中，他和他的同事们以囊性纤维化为例，这种疾病在非洲血统人群中诊断不足，因为它被认为是一种"白人"疾病。

So what other variables could be used if the racial concept is thrown out? Yudell said scientists need to get more specific with their language, perhaps using terms like "ancestry" or "population" that might more precisely reflect the relationship between humans and their genes, on both the individual and population level. The researchers also acknowledged that there are a few areas where race as a construct might still be useful in scientific research: as a political and social, but not biological, variable.

那么，如果淘汰种族概念，可以使用哪些其他变量？Yudell说，科学家需要使他们的语言更具体，或许使用如"血统"或"群体"这样的术语，这可能更精确地反映人类与其基因之间的关系，在个体和群体层面上。研究人员还承认，在少数领域，种族作为构念在科学研究中可能仍然有用：作为政治和社会变量，而非生物学变量。

While we argue phasing out racial terminology (术语) in the biological sciences, we also acknowledge that using race as a political or social category to study racism, although filled with lots of challenges, remains necessary given our need to understand how structural inequities and discrimination produce health disparities (差异) between groups." Yudell said.

虽然我们主张在生物科学中淘汰种族术语，但我们也承认，将种族作为政治或社会类别来研究种族主义，尽管充满挑战，但由于我们需要理解结构性不平等和歧视如何导致群体间的健康差异，因此仍然是必要的。" Yudell说。