Why the African genome project is so useful
economist.com
economist.com
Having worked with genetic data a lot I know that the reason for the wealth of European genetic data therefore lies in the limited generalizability based on more diverse datasets.
If you try to generalize from a worldwide genetic dataset, you will probably fail. Your inferences from this diverse dataset to individual genomes will be abysmal. Predictions are already difficult to make from a country-specific dataset to an inhabitant of such country.
I don't know why people always want to see race everywhere. For scientific reasons, it has been way more convenient to sequence more people of European origin. In my opinion, that has nothing to do with racism. It is a matter of what data has better availability and is more valuable right now (not even in terms of application - simply in terms of being able to detect complex underlying patterns). Now that the cost of sequencing is getting lower and lower and availability increases everywhere, it is great to see more diverse genomes sequenced. This will help us understand more of the genome - still, this is no magic bullet by a long shot. The problems stated above get bigger with dissimilarity. Many discoveries made in African genomes can probably not be generalized unto the remaining world.
Current methods are just not sufficient to dig deep into the genome and its mechanics. At this point, we would probably need to sequence the whole of earths population a few times to be able to make consistently accurate and significant predictions across many complex traits and diseases.
I'm personally interested in human origins, so from my perspective yet another "convenience" dataset from Europe is nearly useless. There's a lot more reasons to build this than just the search for medical magic bullets.
Just to add to this. I work adjacent to a lab developing forensic kits for black South African populations. The kits developed in the US and Europe don't really work on Xhosa or Zulu populations. This is incredibly important due to the high levels of gender violence in the country.
That's a scientific reason to sequence the genes of African people more.
> Europeans are not clones
In terms of genetic diversity, yes, they are. I don't know where you get your opinion from, but in science, the more representitive the scientific sample of the population is better the statistical analysis of that population. A European/Asian only dataset it not representative of the actual human genetic diversity.
I never said that we can infer everything from European data. I never said collecting African genetic data is pointless. I know that Europeans do not vary nearly as much from a genetic standpoint as Africans (although they're definitely not clones). I know you can't generalise using European/Asian data. I know larger samples describe the population better.
All I said is that it's easier to analyse data that is less variable, and that Europeans aren't clones. Both points are true. Finding patterns is more difficult when there is more variance in the data. That doesn't mean it's pointless, it's actually more useful, but it's also more difficult.
It's still a great project though.
https://blogs.bcm.edu/2018/07/19/genetic-diversity-in-africa...
"Africans have world's greatest genetic variation"
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna30502963
This is not surprising, it supports the "out of Africa" model of human origins.
Then you have the bosnian genocide, same skin color and even language. But culturally they were different enough for some other humans to target.
But this was written by a journalist. You have to translate Journalistese into English as you read it. For example "in most parts of the world" means "here where I live". In a similar way, "everybody" means "a cousin of mine", and so on. Once you get used to their language, newspapers start to make more sense. A bit less interesting, but definitely more informative.
Also social class - protecting skin from sun had been a display that you are of non-working class rather then different genetic pool...
When can we be post-race?
Worst racists of today are ones who divide people to privileged and underprivileged simply based on their skin colour, when the reality is way more complicated.
However your comment underestimates racism. It may not have happened in front of your eyes, but in this world there are people who will for example:
- be willing to verbally _or physically_ assault a person because of their skin colour (yes, to the point of serious injury or death)
- deliberately undermine a good candidate's chances of getting a job or promotion _because of their skin colour_
- deliberately undermine a good tenant's chances of finding a place to live close to work or a good school
Most people (including myself) are shocked to learn of situations like this once presented with evidence of it. I'm honestly talking about something as straightforward and undeniably racist as: a landlord asking a real estate startup to screen out any black tenants.
There's also a huge range of experiences where the above happen across lines of race but more accidentally. Racist outcomes without racist intentions. All the kids who can afford to live near the good schools are white, all the informal mentorship happens to people who are similar in background to the founder, etc.
The reason "emphasising importance of race" happens is because there's no chance of avoiding or preventing these situations if we pretend/hope that they don't happen. I might have misinterpreted you, but "trying to get past it" feels like pretend/hope rather than a willingness to fix things.
How can we move past the racial thing, when we focus so much of racial things?
I think it just reinforces the racial thinking, when with every decision concerning other people, the race factor has to be taken into account.
I want to treat humans as humans and this is my solution towards a world without racism. I don't want to have to be nicer to a person because he or she is of black skin color. Or give special reasons in case of other skincolor, why this person did not qualify for a job. Or actually having to employ people because of their skin color. That would be racism to me, even if it might be well intentioned one.
I do not think there is such a thing as "positive discrimination". Discrimination remains discrimination.
No one should be asking you to hire someone simply because they’re of a different skin color. Most of the time in my experience people ask you to be more aware of you and how you feel, and to ask yourself am I doing this perhaps because of some unconscious bias I have?
Where did I say, I am ignoring it? For personal reasons, I am very aware it exists.
I said my personal solution is simply to not treat people different based on race. I rather change the world by giving a good example, than trying to impose my fix onto the world.
"No one should be asking you to hire someone simply because they’re of a different skin color. "
But people are promoting the idea to push positive discrimination - meaning exactly this, employing persons based on their skin color to meet a percentage of minorities - and not on their qualifications. And I believe this is very wrong and not helping the cause.
this is very much what is happening. There are quotas that need to be filled, and it is tied to performance numbers too.
Also, not just for race, for all diversity - like gender, etc.
But right now, you actually object to people saying "racism exists and affects how things turn out".
Your own comment is literally against talking about race or focusing on it. While it does have final note about positive discrimination, the majority is not about positive discrimination.
The applied context in this thread, does.
"The current trend among the woke crowd seems to be emphasizing importance of race, rather than trying to get past it."
I mean why are there laws getting implemented against racism in the shape of "positive discrimination" if various activists would not support it?
But most racist problems actually manifest themselves as socioeconomic problems. And you can tackle those. And when doing so you can even gain allies, because poverty, bad schools and so on affect people regardless of skin color, which means fighting for better schools, higher wages etc. unites people regardless of skin color.
I'm sorry, but I have to ask. How do you feel about affirmative action?
It's outright ridiculous.
Racists aren't idiots, most of them know they can't openly spout racial slurs any more and still be taken seriously, so they use proxy issues framed in ways that do more harm to the groups they hate than to middle class white Americans.
You can't simultaneously solve every single social problem in existence out of fear of being called the real bigots, and making it all about whichever example of bigotry or injustice you're talking about in the moment. Sometimes you have to zoom in on a particular sub problem, be it income, education, crime, pollution, housing, disability, race, class, homelessness, or whatever.
So no, in short I don't think the worst racists of today are the ones who talk about the privileges or difficulties that come with being born into one race or another. The worst racists are still the same people they've always been, the people who try to hurt or kill the racial groups they don't like using every tool at their disposal, be it he media, the police, the law or whatever.
https://physanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statemen...
Or this:
https://www.americananthro.org/ConnectWithAAA/Content.aspx?I...
Those statements also explain why being post-race is more difficult than it should be.
> "The belief in races as a natural aspect of human biology and the institutional and structural inequities (racism) that have emerged in tandem with such beliefs in European colonial contexts are among the most damaging elements in human societies."
The use of the term "European colonial contexts" betrays its intent immediately. I say this as a non-white person, of non-European origin.
> "Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations"
Only smart people could be convinced of such foolishness. A classification system as simple as 'race' may not provide an accurate taxonomy for all scientific purposes. It does however provide a sensible abstraction which has persisted uniformly across cultures and time because of its utility. Regardless of to what extent you believe the concept of 'race' explains population differences, there are clearly quantifiable differences between individuals associated with their genetic origins. This is well known in all biological scientific fields: medicine, forensics, pharmacology...
Now, the relationship between academic and forensic anthropologists is pretty fraught, but not because the regular anthropologists are out there inventing new genders all the time. It's because forensic anthropology uses outdated methodologies widely considered unscientific, including racial identifications. That's why the US National Academy called for forensic science reform back in 2009 and why you still get debates like this between academics and forensic anthropologists: https://doi.org/10.1111/1556-4029.14513
Notions of race (either at the high level of what race in general is, or at the lower level of what defines specific races) are not, even approximately, consistent across either space or time. I mean, I get that it makes building arguments much easier if you can start with your conclusion and just invent whatever premises are convenient to support it, but...
This point falls apart with "mixed-race" individuals. People have mixed since the dawn of man. The real conflict is cultural.On what basis do you state that?
I feel that too often, politically motivated people pick up on such academic statements and use them to justify implying that the very concept of racial difference is inherently empty or wrong and perhaps should even be tabooed. It is a bit of a motte and bailey technique: you first say, "Look at these statements - see, science rejects the very concept of race - any discussion of racial difference is thus unscientific and in any case what are you, some sort of bigot?" And if anyone pushes you more closely on the matter you can just retreat to the actually justifiable position, "Oh well of course I did not mean that there are no identifiable patterns in human genetic diversity, that would be absurd, I just meant that old European racial classifications are inaccurate."
To be scientific about it, you have to be willing to conclude things like that a diverse looking group of people are actually all the same race because they happen to share common genetics, or that what looks like an all white group is really 5 distinct genetic groups that just happen to look similar.
To really find what scientifically accurate genetic group a given person falls into you'd have to be scientific about it, and look at the genetics or at the very least their detailed ancestry. Simply looking at them doesn't cut it. Science is all about precision and eliminating biases.
At that point, what is even the point? You know enough about them to treat them as an individual regardless of what they happen to look like.
By the way, why there is no author?
The way I learned it is that racism is believing that races exists AND that there is a (one dimensional) hierarchy between these races. Europeans are better at lactose tolerance than Africans and Asians. That's a fact. In no way that makes them have more worth as humans being or put them "above" the others. Believing that would be racism.
Because it's the Economist, they never run a byline on any of their published content, normally.
I'm sure there are more things related to black/African people that can be discussed than racism. There is more than one subject out there.