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Comment by aikah | Hacker News Reader

"behavioural genetics" and something else I will not even talk about for fear of being hunted and bullied by an angry mob on the internet. These topics are so sensitive because of the current political climate that they are literally career suicide for any western scientist.

It has become way too easy to bully people into submission with tools such as Twitter, but not only, too easy to create harassment brigades against anybody over manufactured outrage.

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Do you have evidence of your claim that "These topics are so sensitive because of the current political climate that they are literally career suicide for any western scientist."? For example, an investigative piece similar to the one here, except about behavioral genetics?

See anyone who has touched "differences of iq between races".

What, genetically, is a race?

An ethnic grouping (not necessarily skin color).

There was a movement in the 90s to get rid of the word "race" because scientists said all humans are basically the same. However, that movement has dwindled because we are discovering some important differences between ethnic groups. Such as:

* Blacks are more sensitive to salt

* Blacks are at a greater risk of glaucoma

* etc

I have also heard of medical examples like that. However, this article argues that generalizations based on apparent racial characteristics are medically unreliable.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-...

> Yudell said that modern genetics research is operating in a paradox, which is that race is understood to be a useful tool to elucidate human genetic diversity, but on the other hand, race is also understood to be a poorly defined marker of that diversity and an imprecise proxy for the relationship between ancestry and genetics.

> ...

> "What the study of complete genomes from different parts of the world has shown is that even between Africa and Europe, for example, there is not a single absolute genetic difference, meaning no single variant where all Africans have one variant and all Europeans another one, even when recent migration is disregarded," Pääbo told Live Science. "It is all a question of differences in how frequent different variants are on different continents and in different regions."

> In one example that demonstrated genetic differences were not fixed along racial lines, the full genomes 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 (who, ironically, became ostracized in the scientific community after making racist remarks) and Venter shared fewer variations in their genetic sequences than they each shared with Kim.

> ...

> "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 underdiagnosed in people of African ancestry because it is thought of as a "white" disease.

Humans are not "basically the same" but humans are also not easily divided into a couple of genetically separate races. Many black Americans, for example, have white ancestors. And black Africans are genetically far more diverse than the entire rest of mankind put together. There are people with every possible skin colour between black and white. Our insistence on drawing a handful of arbitrary lines between them is cultural, and not based on a clear genetic separation.

That said, skin colour does have some physiological impact: darker skin blocks the impact of the sun on our skin, which is great for preventing sunburn (and skin cancer, I think?), but reduces the amount of vitamin D our skin creates, and vitamin D deficiency can have an impact on all sorts of things (no idea if glaucoma is one of them). That makes it a trait, though, not a race.

One plausible candidate is which continent a particular individual’s ancestors came from.

That’s something that can be tested for with relative ease.

> Ancestry informative marker sets for determining continental origin and admixture proportions in common populations in America

> ... A comprehensive set of 128 AIMs and subsets as small as 24 AIMs are shown to be useful tools for ascertaining the origin of subjects from particular continents, and to correct for population stratification in admixed population sample sets.

As population genetics becomes more advanced we will become able to distinguish ever smaller ancestry ancestry groups. For example if you don’t try to identify Continental population ancestry, just use k means clustering to divide humans into clusters based on similarity the continental groups arise naturally.

> Genetic Structure of Human Populations

> Genetic Structure of Human Populations Noah A. Rosenberg,1* Jonathan K. Pritchard,2 James L. Weber,3 Howard M. Cann,4 Kenneth K. Kidd,5 Lev A. Zhivotovsky,6 Marcus W. Feldman7 We studied human population structure using genotypes at 377 autosomal microsatellite loci in 1056 individuals from 52 populations. Within-population differences among individuals account for 93 to 95% of genetic variation; differences among major groups constitute only 3 to 5%. Nevertheless, without using prior information about the origins of individuals, we identified six main genetic clusters, five of which correspond to major geographic regions, and subclusters that often correspond to individual populations. General agreement of genetic and predefined populations suggests that self-reported ancestry can facilitate assessments of epidemiological risks but does not obviate the need to use genetic information in genetic association studies.

http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~huatang/gene244/readings/Sci...

A genetic test to see whether someone has ancestry from Melenasia or Sudan or Scotland is likely to give a different result than casual visual classification. The latter is what we commonly call "race".

I can tell the difference between German and Irish people at better than chance and you think people can’t tell the difference between Melanesians, Caucasians and Sub Saharan Africans? Bone structure, skin tone, hair colour and hair texture don’t give as much information as a whole genome sequence but telling the difference between an East Asian and a West Eurasian isn’t rocket surgery. By the same token it’s not hard to tell the difference between an Ethiopian and a Nigerian, or a Swede and a Spaniard, on average.

> You think people can’t tell the difference between Melanesians, Caucasians and Sub Saharan Africans?

Get someone to show you pictures and have you identify them. I bet you'll make a lot of mistakes.

Historically, not only can people not tell the difference objectively, they decide what the difference is subjectively. In the United States, the child of a white slave owner and a black slave, if their parentage was known, was ... black. People of "mixed race" might be deemed a different race than their own full siblings, based on which visible characteristics they got from which ancestor.

Even today, people migrating from one country to another are often surprised that their racial classification is different in the new country than at home.

>> You think people can’t tell the difference between Melanesians, Caucasians and Sub Saharan Africans?

> Get someone to show you pictures and have you identify them. I bet you'll make a lot of mistakes.

I’m going to sleep now but if you find ten pictures of each I’ll be happy to do your survey. I’m sure many others would be too if you put it on surveymonkey.

The overlap in skin tone alone between Caucasians and the other two groups is ~0 so I doubt there would be any mistakes there. I’m sure there would be many more mistakes between Melanesians and Sub Saharan Africans but even just going on whether they have a broad nose or not you’d get pretty far distinguishing SSA from Melanesians. I’m not claiming perfect distinction. I’m claiming that doing better than chance is unremarkable. These groups are visibly different on average. Some groups the population values don’t even overlap. The shortest adult Maasai is taller than the tallest adult Pygmy.

> In the United States, the child of a white slave owner and a black slave was... black.

Who cares about the historical American caste system, with its one drop rule? The social construction of race is a real thing and so is the fact that different ancestry groups are different, and can be distinguished, on average and subject to error. Pretending ancestry is entirely socially constructed is crazy. If you get thirty pictures, 10 East Asian, 10 West Eurasian, and ten people who are first generation crosses from both populations, there is very unlikely to be any mislabelling of the base population individuals.

All human ancestors came from the continent of Africa if you go back far enough. Which specific ancestors are you referring to?

I thought the out of africa theory was recently challenged dye to older human findings elsewhere.

On the coarsest basis the groups that existed 3-5,000 years ago. The major continental ancestry groups of today were pretty much done by then, whether you divide them at K=2 and have SSA and everyone else, SSA, West Eurasian and Asian at 3, add the Americas at 4, and Melanesians, Papuans and the various ethnoi that resemble them from the Aboriginals in Australia to the Andamanese or Negritos at 5. 5,000 years ago those groups all existed in a somewhat recognisable form. Plenty of the modern variety in them didn’t. South Asians didn’t, Northern Europeans, didn’t. Both emerged as a result of population movements and adaptation after that. 5,000 years ago Europeans were blue eyed but either brown or black skinned and the population of the Indian subcontinent were more like modern Andamanese than any other group. Ancestral South Indians are a mix of that group and Iranian plateau agriculturalists and Ancestral North Indians were horse riding milk drinking central Asians.

If you go back far enough all humans come from Africa, and most (at least 90%) comes from the latest Out of Africa expansion, ~200K years ago. But all non SSA humans are 2% Neanderthal, on average, and there’s other archaic hominid introversion that varies by geography. The Tibetan high altitude adaptations are probably 2 million years old.

Which ancestors one refers to will depend on the question you’re asking.

Natural selection acts to increase the fitness of a species relative to its environment. In the human case 'race' is a misnomer. It simply refers to certain features of humans' external appearance, namely melanin. But this does not track any distinct genetic community, which primarily changes as a function of the total sum of environmental pressures, and not just in proportion to UV radiation (i.e. as is true of melanin). It is difficult to take anyone seriously who uses race as a meaningful biological category.

Race is a meaningful medical category since it appears that certain diseases that have a genetic background are more common on some races than others. So it's not a biological race in the sense that you have different genes but the different variations that appear are important( an example is that esophagus cancer is many times more common on Chinese people compared to Western people, a trend that is maintained on immigrants).

Yes but in those cases the role of race is not causal but correlative. It just happens that because more people classified as part of one race have evolved in an environment that has led to medically significant genetic differences from other humans, that those genetic differences correlate with 'race'. But race has nothing to do with it whatsoever. We only use race to speak about statistical medical populations because we lack more precise data about biological populations. This itself is an artefact of racism, i.e. the fact that we classify people according to their melanin, and make this into an important part of society, including census and medical data. Hopefully one of the upshots of the genomic revolution will be to create standardised genetic tests that do away with the need for such crude proxies.

I think you are missing the point. There is something in the Chinese genetic profile that increases the chances of a specific type of cancer. This is useful on it's own. Just because the different "races" converged again before geographical separation was maintained long enough to make them genetically incompatible doesn't mean that some differences haven't already propagated in these populations. The increased risk of cancer is exactly a result of being a member of the specific genetic race and thus carrying said gene, not the other way around. There is clearly a causative role, even if we don't know what it is step by step.

I see what you're saying. But I think it presumes that ordinary racial classifications overlap with homogeneous genetic communities. Specifically, that the human race was broken up and, through the early stages of allopatric speciation, became separate groups with their own homogenous genetic makeup. But this presumes that the only evolutionary force acting upon the human race was allopatric speciation, which I take to be wrong. Even if we assume that, for instance, the 'Chinese race' was sufficiently isolated to experience allopatric speciation - which seems doubtful anyway, given the migratory cross-flows of human groups throughout pre-history - then other evolutionary forces particular to localised regions and sub-communities would means that, medically speaking, those biological communities were more significant than being 'Chinese'. Or at least that's my impression.

Ok, so if "race" only affects external appearance, explain why every single london marathon champion since 2002 is kenyan or ethiopian?

There's no consensus as to the answer to that question. But even if we accept the genetic accounts offered, the explanation would be that certain Ethiopian and Kenyan tribes living in mountainous areas have adapted to living at high altitudes by adapting to increase the efficiency of their oxygen uptake, which, in turn, makes them better long-distance runners. That has nothing to do with melanin, or even with being Kenyan or Ethiopian, but with a localised adaptation to environment. But again - we can only speculate, no one know's the answer.

So you say that tribes can physiologically adapt depending on their environment.

Do you then admit that tribes can adapt cognitively depending on their environment? Or does adaptation only occur below the neck?

In principle genetic populations can adapt to their environment physiologically and cognitively. That follows trivially from natural selection. It is an empirical question if and how that occurs in human groups. I heavily caveated my last reply be because the genetic explanation for Ethiopian and Kenyan running ability is one among many, and entirely unproven. You would have, to validate your thesis, to build up a theoretical case as to why environmental pressures have led to some particular cognitive adaptation, and then to empirically test it. You know as well as I that there is no credible existing such account.

What race are the kenyans and ethopians?

This comment doesn't make sense to me. Like all words, "race" has different meanings, i.e. it can be defined in different ways.

Race can, and has, been defined in a way that is useful to scientists. "Biological races" are different populations of the same species that meet some threshold of genetic variability with respect to each other. When populations are isolated for a long time, this is inevitable.

'"Biological races" are different populations of the same species that meet some threshold of genetic variability with respect to each other. When populations are isolated for a long time, this is inevitable.'

As you must know, the ordinary understanding of race is based upon external appearance, primarily melanin: black, white, yellow, brown, Indian, and so on. If you redefine race as a genetic population, then you will end up with new population categories that have absolutely nothing to do with race as it is ordinarily understood, i.e. as I just pointed out on this thread, it is possible (though I don't know how likely) that certain tribes living at high altitude in Kenya and Ethiopia have adapted to increase the efficiency of their oxygen uptake. But that would be a localised adaptation to environment, not a general feature of 'black' people, or even of Kenyans and Ethiopians.

> As you must know, the ordinary understanding of race is based upon external appearance, primarily melanin: black, white, yellow, brown, Indian, and so on.

This is exactly my point. Race means different things in different contexts. Colloquially, the word is used as you used it here. But it has other definitions, like the one I posted. All words are like this.

> If you redefine race as a genetic population, then you will end up with new population categories that have absolutely nothing to do with race as it is ordinarily understood

I'm not redefining it. It has been defined this way by other people. There are real scientists who use the word race like this.

But I agree: different definitions of the word "race" will result in different race categories. When a scientist uses the term "race" they mean something different than someone using the word race colloquially.

'This is exactly my point. Race means different things in different contexts. Colloquially, the word is used as you used it here. But it has other definitions, like the one I posted. All words are like this.'

You are being obtuse. There are not 'different' definitions of race. There is an overwhelming homogeneity in the dominant definitions of race, i.e. according to melanin. Race, on these terms, has been a major structuring force in modern social relations. If you invent a new definition of race and use it to justify what, with the normal definition of race, is racism, then you are either seriously confused and/or politically malicious.

It's easily to verify that there are different definitions of the word race.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(biology)

I don't think this conversation has much hope of continuing in a productive direction so I'm going to call it a day

I am not saying there are not different definitions of race. I am saying that there is an overwhelming homogeneity in the definition of race that has and does structure modern social relations, and that it is simply unhelpful to use race in a highly atypical way to study biological populations. See, for example:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-...

IQ is a terrible example. It can be trained, with some examples of increases of up to 30 points. It regresses to the mean. Correlation between IQ of parents and children is lower at birth and increases up until around 18 (Wilson Effect). At younger influences it is strongly influenced by your environment. And not too long ago it was found that all the genes associated with IQ were false positives.

The conflict here is one side thinks this is some kind of political correctness scheme when in reality, IQ and race are just terribly unscientific social constructs.

You'll get much less push back from something like "genetic marker found to influence spatial thinking in young children.

I think general terms are used frequently when having a broad discussion.

But, to grant your Argumentum ad dictionarium, it seems like even here (considering the downvotes) the point parent was making still stands. People don't like discussing the connection between "genetic heritage" and "commonly used markers of general intelligence".

I think the problem is that people conflate race and genetics. Race is much more of a socio-economic marker than a genetic one.

When race is correlated with some condition, it's important to first correct for socio-economic status, then environmental factors, then look at potential genetic factors. Since race is a much stronger proxy for the former than the latter.

Right. Leave the racial correlations to the sociologists. Its misleading and needlessly distracting to bring race into a genetics lab.

There is this weird phenomena which can been from the replies to this comment. I can easily tell someone’s race by looking at them and I can make rough rankings of people’s intelligence after knowing them for a while.

But the scientist insists that I can’t. Instead they tell me that race doesn’t exist and “what is intelligence anyways?”

These are distractions.

If you say the wrong-think loud enough, Twitter will be the least of your worries. When the credit card companies and banks start refusing to do business with you, you're completely lost in modern society. This has already happened for some people.

could you point to some documentation on this please?

I know almost NOTHING about the people mentioned below. They're just names that I happened to catch in the news about their accounts being closed or they came up in a google search I just did. I'm certainly not implying support for them or their ideas.

Some comic creator https://boundingintocomics.com/2019/02/21/chase-bank-shuts-d...

Some Proud Boys leader https://bigleaguepolitics.com/chase-bank-shuts-down-proud-bo...

In his most recent appearance on Joe Rogan, Alex Jones reported that he had an excellent credit rating and had several of his accounts closed. This is a statement of fact that, if untrue, the banks could sue for defamation. So it's likely true.

Paypal (bankish) has gone after "hate groups" https://www.foxnews.com/tech/conservatives-call-for-paypal-b...

Mastercard banned Robert Spencer (white supremacist) https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/08/patreon-and-mastercard-ba...

So they are banning terrorists who have possible money laundering schemes. I'm OK with this.

Have any of those characters actually been convicted of money laundering or terrorism? I actually don't know. The only one I'm vaguely familiar with is Alex Jones, and as far as I can tell he's like a modern tabloid guy.

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