Article ID: CBB053463806

Making and Unmaking Populations (2018)

unapi

Statistics derives its power from classifying data and comparing the resulting distributions. In this paper, I will use two historical examples to highlight the importance of such data practices for statistical reasoning. The two examples I will explore are Franz Boas’s anthropometric studies of native American populations in the early 1890s, which laid the foundation for his later critique of the race concept, and Wilhelm Johannsen’s experiments in barley breeding, which he carried out for the Carlsberg Laboratory around the same time and which prepared the ground for his later distinction of genotype and phenotype. Both examples will show that the manipulation of data depended on complex classificatory practices: the distinction and articulation of “tribes,” “races,” and “family lines” in the case of Boas, and the selection and construction of “populations” and “pure lines” in the case of Johannsen. They also reveal a fundamental difference between data practices in the human and the life sciences: whereas the latter are relatively free to construct populations in the laboratory, the field, or on paper, the former have to rely on social categories shaped by historical accident and self-perception of the subjects under study. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Histories of Data and the Database edited by Soraya de Chadarevian and Theodore M. Porter.

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Article Soraya de Chadarevian; Theodore M. Porter (2018) Introduction: Scrutinizing the Data World. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences (pp. 549-556). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB053463806/

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Authors & Contributors
Roll-Hansen, Nils
Sepkoski, David Christopher
Berry, Dominic
Blanckaert, C.
Challis, Debbie
Degni, Silvia
Journals
Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences
Histoire & Mesure
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews
Journal of Social History
Publishers
University of Michigan
Brill
MIT Press
Springer
University of Chicago Press
Wallstein Verlag
Concepts
Statistics
Population
Data; information
Genetics
Anthropometry
Demography; population research
People
Johannsen, Wilhelm Ludvig
Galton, Francis
Beijerinck, Martinus Willem
Bronn, Heinrich Georg
Du Bois, William Edward B.
Foucault, Michel
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
20th century, late
21st century
Places
Germany
Belgium
Russia
United States
Kansas (U.S.)
Atlantic Ocean
Institutions
Carlsberg Laboratoriet
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