How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
So while it may be the case that "race is purely a social construct" is an untenable and unproductive position, it does not necessarily follow that a solid case for "achievement and behavior is strongly genetic" has been made.
Since intelligence and genetics is the third rail of population genetic studies, isn't the author's specialty, and isn't at all clear, it's a little confusing as to why he went out on this limb. Pinker sure is happy about it though.
A good next read:
https://gcbias.org/2018/03/14/polygenic-scores-and-tea-drink...
Has Reich published significantly on neurogenetics?
The difference here, is that people are taking this genetic concept of "race" and trying to prove their racist points, which always misses the point entirely. It would be a non-issue if the word "race" wasn't so politically charged.
Quick edit for 2 easy examples: People with African descent are more likely to have sickle cell anemia, due to the resistance the gene provides against malaria.
People with European descent are more likely to have cystic fibrosis, due to resistance it provided from cholera and typhoid.
Examples: there is more genetic diversity among Africans (and thus ought to be more races among them) than in the rest of the world combined. A large number of “African Americans” have more European ancestry than African. The previous President was almost always referred to as “black” even though his mother was white, echoing the old “one drop” rules.
The examples I gave should be sufficient to demonstrate that there are at least major discrepancies between the two.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2007/01/metric-on-space-of-geno...
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2007/06/its-all-in-clusters.htm...
(I'm not an expert, and my opinion is formed from following that blog.)
In terms of your example, I'm not sure what "there is more genetic diversity among Africans" means. What is the measure of diversity here? Why would we necessarily expect that measure to mean "more races"?
(I didn't downvote you, by the way. Not sure why so many people on HN seem to enjoy downvoting any discussion on certain topic. :/.)
I think that graphic illustrates what I'm saying fairly well. The non-African populations in the graphic are all grouped at the lower left corner. There are distinctions between them, but less than there are among the African groups.
The current (a key word, as which people go into what race has changed a lot in the recent past) social grouping of races would have us believe that the small purple group hanging off the end is one race, the pinkish group next to it is another race, the red group next to that is another one, the small green group next to those is maybe separate or maybe a subset of one of the others depending on who you ask, and then all the other groups are classified as "black." This pretty clearly makes no sense if you're trying to classify groups genetically. Why should that yellow group sticking way up from the rest in the top right corner be lumped in with so many other groups?
And getting back to your original point, some of the modern sense of race is pretty unsophisticated, like "people with dark skin". That encompasses many distinct populations.
But I think older racial thinking was actually more nuanced, and would consider many different attributes when categorizing "races", which maps pretty well to distinct populations, which maps pretty well to stuff like PCA.
E.g., I suspect the thinking that went into something like like this
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/arts/design/races-of-mank...
did not consider the entierty of Africa as one race.
Yet they seem to match in 99.86% of cases:
"Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity."
I could classify computers based on the case they are in, and I would see some interesting trends given the extent that computer casing is decided by the people the build the computer and there is a very few entities who are responsible for the majority of computers. But does it really make sense to use it when you can compare it based on other factors and combinations of factors, like the internal hardware, manufacturer, and year made?
Race is extremely oversimplified and groups too many people together, and comes with a lot of historical baggage in not just its usage, but the ways we considered certain groups members of certain races.
I think humans can be grouped based on common genetics, but race focuses too much on certain phenotypes instead of being based on overall genotypes. Instead of looking at European or African descent, what about descent of historical population groups? Are groups from northern Africa closer to those from southern Europe or Southern Africa?
Groups that share phenotypes are likely to have similar genotypes on average than those who don't, but why depend on this when we now have access to the genotypes?
But what I can say is that in molecular biology, working scientists have completely ignored this politically charged debate and continued to use the concept this whole time. In one example I am directly familiar with, researchers have continued to use and stratify genome-wide association studies by self-reported race/ethnicity in the search for variants causal for lupus. This is important not only because as with many diseases, there is a difference in likelihood of getting the disease between "races" not attributable to lifestyle, but also because it is entirely possible, even probable, that the mechanisms causing the disease are somewhat different between ethnicities.
Actually, therefore, the understanding that there are real differences between "races" in the context of disease is actually helpful for the smaller groups because it means that special attention is paid to the etiology of their disease apart from the general etiology. In the same way that, for many years, most biology research was done on males and it was just assumed that the findings would always apply to females. That was incorrect, and now studies are done to determine gender differences in treatment and disease etiology.
IMO this whole debate has dragged on as long as it has because too many in the public are seemingly incapable -- or unwilling -- to understand basic concepts about population means and variances, and in particular that in a situation like this where population means are very real but usually small, and the variance is high, knowing what "race" you are usually conveys little information about some other attribute of interest. Usually, but not always, as is particularly the case with many diseases.
I have grown particularly tired of the argument that, because a taxonomy, like any clustering, is fuzzy and the number of clusters is somewhat arbitrary, the whole thing conveys no useful information. It is patently false.
I am not sure I understand your question exactly so I'll give a few different answers. One is that I see no difference whether the phenotype is behavioral or some disease occurring below your neck. It all depends on the statistics and effect sizes of the phenotype and how good a predictor "race" is.
Another is that actually it is much more difficult, obviously, to determine causality than a correlation, regardless of what you are correlating with what.
And a final answer is that we generally consider a causal relationship between genetics and a phenotype proved with acceptable levels of error if the two are correlated, and we control for all the environmental variables we can, and the correlation remains. You can also look at heritability with twins separated at birth and raised in different environments and other such experiments to control for environment.
However, I think our techniques are quite sufficient right now to say X% of the variance in phenotype P is attributable to genetics (i.e., genetics partially cause P). That is a totally different thing from explaining how the genotype causes the phenotype.
> It is true that race is a social construct. It is also true, as Dr. Lewontin wrote, that human populations “are remarkably similar to each other” from a genetic point of view.
> But over the years this consensus has morphed, seemingly without questioning, into an orthodoxy. The orthodoxy maintains that the average genetic differences among people grouped according to today’s racial terms are so trivial when it comes to any meaningful biological traits that those differences can be ignored. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage
> The orthodoxy goes further, holding that we should be anxious about any research into genetic differences among populations. The concern is that such research, no matter how well-intentioned, is located on a slippery slope that leads to the kinds of pseudoscientific arguments about biological difference that were used in the past to try to justify the slave trade, the eugenics movement and the Nazis’ murder of six million Jews.
> I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism. But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among “races.”
* Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/
* Genetic Structure of Human Populations https://rosenberglab.stanford.edu/papers/popstruct.pdf
Sure, there are genetic distinctions among groups of people. But as soon as someone mentions black or white people, the discussion isn't about these kind of fine genetic distinctions. They're about stereotypes that are much more social than they are genetic.
Now in the political realm, the significance of these terms and the groups is completely different because of the way groups have been treated historically on the basis not of these fine genetic distinctions but rather these crude social racial/ethnic identifications.
I'd prefer we avoided using footnotes pointing to scientific publications to oversimplify more complex political discussions or to justify the economic and social marginalization of historically disadvantaged groups based on purposeful misreading.
This wouldn't be a problem if we weren't measuring economic and social marginalization by outcome, particularly when it comes to systemic bias. If we can't have a sober look at the inputs, I'm afraid we can't say anything meaningful about the outputs.
But your point is succinct: just because you can group people using genetic markers into clusters that align well with our society's typical social categorization of race does by no means validate a genetic basis for all the other sociocultural baggage that we associate with those categories. The most it seems to do particularly in regards to the social category of race is show that genetic markers useful for identifying kinship (I'd file that under "duh"). It's interesting to note, for me, that the analysis of the first paper works just fine for 2 clusters as well (basically East Asian and everyone else), but those super-racial groupings don't exist in the US to my knowledge.
Anything that makes it harder for people to attack the enemy is interpreted as aiding the enemy.
Here's a really cool chart from an ancient DNA paper with stacked charts from K=2 to K=20: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/t...
(The paper: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2013/12/23/001552)
Zoom in far enough and the clusters basically replicate national borders: http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2008/09/01/european... so you might use the term "ethnicity" for them.
If not, what rational basis could one have in claiming all races must have equal capacity in other areas?
Frankly, who gives a shit. It seems better to me to live in a world that's .000005% less efficiently allocated than it is to live in the caste system that always emerges from that path.
There absolutely are people advocating creating policy to the specific benefit of some race(s) over others based on the underlying premise that racism/oppression must be the only significant cause of inequal statistical outcomes. This inherently rejects the possibility of different (generalized) capacities between races, among other potential contributors (culture, individuals' decisions).
Do you feel like that, too, cannot end in a moral place?
To be fair, I think a more precise statement would be that nobody within the mainstream advocates for this at this point in time. But they have in the past and people outside of the mainstream advocate for this even now. And it's conceivable that this could enter mainstream discourse again, even if we are pretty far from that point now.
Butterflies are called different species based on much smaller differences. Or for example the two moths in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution
Calling different races different species obviously would upset people, so we don't. But let's not pretend the differences don't exist.
[0] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/defining-species-fuzzy-a...
If this criterion were universally applied, there would be very few plant species, and zero microbial species.
Race: Genetic characteristics common to humans with a shared geographic origin, and that differ from humans from other geographic origins, sometimes distinguishable by appearance.
If our collective memory was wiped today, tomorrow we would distinguish humans by what we call 'races'. But it would require science to clarify what distinguishes a race at the genetic level (physical differences being a decent proxy but often wrong and clearly primitive) and to map the distinct differences between each race.
Why is this controversial?
The idea that it is not a social construct is both dumb and ahistorical. (OTOH, readily apparent phenotype obviously has some correlation to genotype, so there is going to be a degree of correlation between he social construct and genetics, especially when the social construct includes socially-enforced rules discouraging reproduction outside of the socially-ascribed category.)
> If our collective memory was wiped today, tomorrow we would distinguish humans by what we call 'races'.
We'd probably adopt a somewhat similar concept with different dividing lines based on loose association of readily apparent phenotypic traits with the social affinities, power dynamics, and other conflicts and commonalities that formed after the mass forgetting event. This is easily predictable because studies of concepts of race across time and space in history without such mass forgetting events show differences driven by such affinities, shifting (mostly slowly) as those affinities change over time.
> Why is this controversial?
Because it aligns with what some people want very much to believe (hence support for it) but is inconsistent with historical evidence (hence, opposition to it), producing controversy.
How is 'genetic characteristics common to humans with a shared geographic origin' a concept? Did you read the article?
> Groundbreaking advances in DNA sequencing technology...enable us to measure with exquisite accuracy what fraction of an individual’s genetic ancestry traces back to, say, West Africa 500 years ago — before the mixing in the Americas of the West African and European gene pools that were almost completely isolated for the last 70,000 years. With the help of these tools, we are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.
Allow me to emphasise: "differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real".
Wow, what a coincidence given the fact that "differences in genetic ancestry" is exactly what race is.
Maybe you have another definition of race that might be a social construct but "differences in genetic ancestry" is what most people mean when they say 'race'.
It is a concept (pretty much anything that you can refer to in language is a concept), but more to the point it's not the basis of actual racial categories in the real world.
> Maybe you have another definition of race that might be a social construct
Yes, the categories socially ascribed (including legally assigned) and self-identified (which are usually similar, but not always aligned), largely based on trivially observable lphenotype, into which people are sorted as “races”. Which, demonstrably, have a drifting relationship over time and space, driven by social factors, to any genetic-based assignment system you might care to establish, though they obviously have a correlation to genetics (both because geneticd play a role in determining phenotype and because those social categories are often socially enforced, or at least incentivized, boundaries on acceptable mate selection, making them semi-isolated breeding pools.)
If you read any of the old Roman texts, you would not find reference to race rather you would find references to a person's ethnicity. Ethnicity is tied to culture and language.
It is only controversial when you have what is the far right using Mott and Bailey arguments to justify racism.
Black people were not excluded from any profession, and there was no stigma or bias against mixed race relationships in Antiquity.
All of the interaction surface with 'race' in our society is absolutely a social construct which varies dramatically over time and from location to location. Moreover, even if the genetic variations by population do lead to statistically significant differences, that doesn't matter one iota: the qualities of the individual matter far more than whatever statistical distribution they may be drawn from, and to give those poor proxies any kind of social significance is morally wrong and extremely dangerous, as centuries of bloody history have demonstrated.
I'm making zero judgement on any individuals. Can we separate the science from the possible implications, please? Otherwise it's hard to have reasoned debate.
> All of the interaction surface with 'race' in our society is absolutely a social construct
That may well be, but it doesn't lessen the fact that 'race' - i.e "differences in genetic ancestry" - is real.
To whom? Outside of America this is ridiculous. Maybe that's it - The US has so many hangups about race they changed the definition.
Race: "differences in genetic ancestry based on different geographic origin". Just because people exploited the term and used it incorrectly does not mean it does not have an exact definition.
In the middle ages people who carried out trepanning claimed to know about medicine. People who called the Irish non-caucasian claimed to know about race. They didn't (or in the latter case, they did but were prejudice).
Neither medicine nor race need be discredited by past ignorance.
It's obvious that's he's black and Caucasian. Why he's called black in America while in other places he'd be mixed-race is a product of American culture and his own preference I imagine (many mixed-race people decide to 'identify as black', meaning culturally).
But the label he's given does not change his underlying race.
But the real problem is obviously how rather useless it is to sort humans into some set of boxes. Any individual should be treated as such, and judged by their behaviour. Differences in behaviour between "races" are either non-existent or so small it takes extremely high-powered empirical studies to find extremely small effects.
To use an example: say some statistics showed that race A is 2% more intelligent than race B, on average. Using such a data point for decision-making is statistical malpractice. Because the variability of intelligence within each group will mean that any single individual from A only has an advantage of maybe 0.5 percentage points of being smarter than an individual from B.
Now that's not strictly a problem with the science, and more about its misuse. But there really aren't any compelling uses for such research. And even if your work is done with the best intentions, you can't just ignore its possible misuse.
With the world's history of racial animus, the least one should do is not to use the term. The science will actually be better for it, because for any genetic phenomenon you might want to study, the likelihood of it neatly following the "race" borders of the 19th century is no different than random chance–unless you're studying skin colour.
Look at the distribution of the "sickle-cell trait", a mutation that protects against malaria at the cost of increased risk of sickle-cell anaemia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle-cell_disease#/media/Fil...
You'll find that its prevalence neatly corresponds to historical regions with malaria. It does not, however, follow any racial borders. I assure it's the same for anything but skin colour, which follows an almost exact gradient of solar intensity.