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Comment by bobcostas55 | Hacker News Reader

I'm afraid this view is completely incompatible with the findings in population genetics. Two papers to get you started:

* 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

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Glancing at your first citation, nothing in the summary seems to challenge the idea that people of all races see much bigger differences among races (for example, when someone like James Damore start dogwhistling IQ tests in their footnotes) than actually exist genetically.

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.

I agree with you, but I would also note that the original person being replied to seems to be committing a common colloquial misunderstanding in regards to social constructions; just because something is socially constructed does not mean it's not real. Race is absolutely real, regardless of the degree to which genetics does or doesn't correlate with it, because we make it real in our day to day interactions.

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.

Right, but this opens the door to there existing, in theory, racial genetic differences causing variation at the human scale; whether or not these map to racist stereotypes, it becomes harder to argue against them because people can no longer discard them by just denying the concept of racial variation altogether. So they actually have to put the work in to demonstrate that they're untrue, invalid or inapplicable.

Anything that makes it harder for people to attack the enemy is interpreted as aiding the enemy.

>justify the economic and social marginalization of historical 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.

The Rosenberg et al paper just says that at a particular K partition (5 in this case) you get genetic structures that closely map onto what Americans view as race. It also says that at K=1 there are only Africans,and at k=3 there are only Africans, Europeans and Asians. If you’re gonna say these are races, why stop at k=5? Why not look at what STRUCTURE pops out for k= 25?

It's absolutely true that there are genetic clusters on multiple levels, and the choice of K is to a certain extent arbitrary. But the fact that there are multiple ways of slicing things up does not affect the reality of the underlying structure. The use of "race" to denote 25 different groups would probably be a bit confusing though, unfortunately we don't have any better terms ("genetic cluster" is a bit awkward?)

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.

My Masters thesis covered a lot of what is in these papers. Here are a few possibly surprising things people who think genetic clusters point to races may not realize: 1) People from Papua New Guinea and Chinese people would be considered the same race according to genetic clusters at K=4. 2) At k=2 there are only Africans and Asian races. 3) And Europeans and dravidians are part of the same race, at k=5.

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