National Academies: We can’t define “race,” so stop using it in science
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Dumb question… why would using ethnicity (which is accepted) solve any issues? And, can people choose their ethnicity or is it determined at birth? Complicated, I bet.
I think you substitute race with precision. If a cluster of different genes or characteristics are commonly found together, say which ones you're talking about, how often they're found together (as opposed to apart), and why you think that's relevant. Talking about race is honestly often ultimately handwaving in the vague direction of 19th century biblical scholars.
[1] https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/style-gui...
So while an individual cannot decide who they descended from, they can choose whether or not to accept a set of cultural norms. People routinely change religions, learn other languages, or follow other traditions outside the ethnic cultural norms they were born into.
The TFA states that ethnicity is only one of many potential "population descriptors" and recommends that researchers "use multiple descriptors rather than a single, overly broad category".
Also, population mixing and movements across time doesn't preclude the existence of more or less distinguishable groups inside the said population.
Why must they lie?
There’s a saying—if you pick two chimpanzees in the same forest, you are likely to find more genetic differences than if you pick two humans on opposite sides of the world. Genetic diversity within a given racial group is much larger than the genetic differences between different racial groups, which makes it very difficult (at best) to come up with some kind of genetic criteria for defining race.
Does skin color not diverge between racial groups, or is it not a significant genetic divergence?
If skin color seems too trivial to be genetically "significant", then what about racial differences that confer an advantage or disadvantage to malarial resistance?
One of the races is “black”, but since most Africans are black, and all humans have African ancestry, the idea of coming up with a genetic basis for “blackness” is completely useless. It would be difficult to come up with some kind of genetic basis for that category that is somehow useful to science, somehow includes most black people, and somehow excludes most non-black people.
It is more useful to talk about genetics in terms of (recent) ancestry. Ancestry is reasonably useful for things like screening for genetic conditions. You want to screen for sickle-cell anemia? Recent African ancestry is a reasonable thing to look for; blackness is a poor proxy. Recall that skin pigmentation is more about what latitude your ancestors are from, and not about what specific part of the world they are from.
(I’ve used the term “African ancestry” to refer both to long-term ancestry and more recent ancestry here, I hope that the usage is clear from context.)
Proves too much: the idea of coming up with a genetic basis for "fishness" is also now completely useless.
I mean, that’s a good analogy, the term “fish” is even worse than “race”. Fish is paraphyletic, just like “tree”. There’s also the colloquial sense of “fish”, which is even less clear.
In casual speech, you can certainly look at an animal and say "this is a fish", or look at a plant and say "that is a tree", but if you actually start to look closer, you find that there's no clear way to define either of those terms that includes everything we think should belong in them, and also excludes everything we think shouldn't.
"Races" among humans are similarly hard to pin down by any kind of genetic taxonomy.
science is for describing what is, and in detail, but science's failure to do that just means we need more science, not that we should quit and claim the above words have no meaning.
Yet show me a picture of any of them and I am confident I could roughly point to the region in Europe where their ancestors have toiled for the last thousand generations. Put them and a dozen Congolese in a group and a 5 year old could easily separate them into their two respective racial groups.
There is clearly a common genetic 'core' among people of the same racial group. There may be much diversity within it, too, but to use that to deny the existence of this shared heritage is downright subversive and disingenuous.
The race classification of humans is racist. As the term implies.
Many people arriving to the US are shocked to be asked their 'race', as if we were dogs. I never know what to answer, are arabs white? Are spaniards latin? Are ouzbeks from Caucase asian? Etc... This is non sense racist shit.
I'm guessing you're older than five, so you probably should adjust to the shock and make an attempt to advance your understanding of the world beyond the level of a child who can't even tie their shoes.
Because ethnicity is commonly understood and has been defined fron the beginning as a social category (that’s what, historically, differentiates it from race.) So using it to describe a social category doesn't have the problem that using race for that purpose does.
> And, can people choose their ethnicity or is it determined at birth?
That’s a false dichotomy, and the answer is “not exactly” to both.
Already a few people saying yeah it's not perfect but it's a rough approximation.
No, that's the whole point, it's not. It's astrology level science. There's no there there.
"Race" is about as real as :) is a face.
No it isn’t, it allows us to make accurate predictions about health. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=35182504&goto=item%3Fi...
That’s real science, saying it doesn’t exist is astrology level pseudoscience.
If you do any kind of clustering on genetic expression data, all kinds of categories much more detailed than racial categories jump out - a good example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:European_genetic_structur... which shows not only that there are extremely distinct genetic clusters between locations like Europe, China, and America, there are actually highly distinct genetic clusters for each individual European nation - in fact there are even moderately distinct genetic clusters for different geographical areas within a single European nation.
To use the astrology metaphor, the scientific critique would be something like “we need to do away with astrology because months don’t capture the differences - there’s actually significant differences on the level of individual days of birth, even on the level of morning/afternoon/night time of birth”. We take the wrong message from these announcements when we conclude that there’s no differences at all.
The correct response is, “well junior you’re just seeing things. Please stop making such observations.”
Your example would make more sense if the kid was asking why 1% of people have red hair. And we can answer that without inventing a ginger race, and with much more interesting science based answers that involve actual genetics:
There are edge cases where people will argue where to draw lines between species. However, it’s profoundly challenging to draw lines between “races” in the first place.
As someone who, as a child, read books on the history of taxonomy and how taxonomy has changed over the centuries, I would love to hear you list what mistaken beliefs about species you claim that I have.
Seriously, though. I am not interested in being the topic of conversation, so please do not make me the subject of your comments.
Example: in the past, "rho factor" was a magical component in a test tube that had a well-defined activity but nobody knew "what" rho was (hence the term "factor"). Eventually, rho factor was isolated and purified to the point where molecular characterization determined it was a protein with a specific function. but that didn't stop people from studying it as a "thing" that had no real "definition" other than the visible activity of its function.
(same if you do "dog breed" for example)
This article describes how members of different ethnic groups have different complications in pregnancy. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7290488/
Here is a review about how race affects Adverse Drug Experiences (In response to commonly prescribed drugs), published in the journal of ethnic and racial health disparities.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40615-015-0101-3
Sure it would be better to sequence each person's genome to accurately place them on the spectrum of human genetic diversity, but that's not practical in a hospital or emergency setting.
Emphasis added. Race != ethnicity; TFA argues against using the former and suggests using the latter (with other things).
> Some of the key recommendations focus on getting rid of the use of race and instead focusing on what the report terms "population descriptors." These can be things like ethnicity, region of residence, and so on.
One of the drugs has a greater risk of nasty side affects for the black patient.
Which drug do you give the patient?
Should the research that tells you which drug to give be banned?
Such research is not being banned or proposed to be banned- in fact, there's a lot more interest now in understanding the relationship between genetic history and response to disease, but the work is still fairly primitive.
Imagine that you're a hospital who takes predominantly black patients, if you could modify the standard treatment to reduce Adverse Drug Experiences by 5-10% would you do it? Or would you say that it's unacceptable to use race as a variable at all, and continue to give the black people the same treatment as white people, resulting in more Adverse Drug Experiences in your black patients?
You can say that Ancestry is better, but often neither you or the patient actually know their ancestry.
You're arguing against a claim that neither TFA nor anyone here made. TFA doesn't suggest doctors should ignore past research that examined race - it argues that future research should examine specific identifiers instead of made-up ones.
> often neither you or the patient actually know their ancestry
Sure - which is why using race as a proxy for ancestry is a bad idea. If a drug has known risks to people of West African ancestry, and you have a patient with unknown ancestry, then you don't know whether that drug presents risks to the patient. Whereas, if the research on that drug had only reported "risks to black people" without examining ancestry, then you would believe you could tell by looking at a patient whether the drug presented a risk - and you'd be wrong.
Which drug do you give him?
This is know as the one drop rule, if one of your ancestors is black you are black. So maybe 95% of your ancestors are from Europe and you are still considered as black.
Latin has even a fuzzier definition. Latin american countries have been build -as the US- with immigration. Immigrants from latin american countries are white, black, asian, etc... Or whatever classification the USA might invent. There is no less diversity in the rest of the Americas than in the USA.
No, and nobody suggested anything like that, so if you're trolling please don't.
The point of TFA is that a study reporting "drug X has greater risks for black people" is weak science, because any given doctor has little way of determining whether their patient is genetically similar to whoever participated in the study. If the study had instead reported risk levels for, say, people of North African ancestry, then the doctor could ask about the patient's background and make an informed decision, instead of just looking at skin color and hoping for the best.
> However, few of these studies were specifically designed to evaluate racial or ethnic disparities, lacking a standardized approach to racial/ethnic categorization as well as control for potential confounders.
The NIH study that the article is about provides concrete recommendations that would help alleviate the precise concerns expressed by your article.
You seem like you might be responding to the headline rather than the underlying content of the NIH study.
Would it not be correct to state that "race" is a social construction intended as a stand-in to identify sets of interconnected factors which impact a particular population, such as historical, social, and biological?
Is the issue that the word "race" has too much baggage, or that the very concept of "race" isn't useful? It sounds to me, based on the argument in the article, that the concept has some usefulness, even if it has been misused in such ways to have significant baggage. It is necessarily less precise than defining each variable independently in a matrix.
I think the problem is that race is so deeply embedded in people's minds that even scientists who try to be objective struggle to disentangle theories from their preconcieved notions.
As for bias and people not consenting to hand over their DNA: this is not a scientific problem, it's a social one.
Look at Native Americans, where the median household income is almost double for some subgroups compared to others. For Asians, the income difference is more than double between Indians and Bangladeshis. American Turks seem to do extremely well, while I expect the numbers for German Turks would be a fair bit lower.
So if you're trying to analyze things, whether for medicine (blood pressure), or sociology (impacts of racism, benefits of economic intervention), racial groups are a pretty poor categorization, vulnerable to Simpson's paradox.
One classic conservative argument against reparations is that it lumps in rich Nigerian immigrants with poor African-American descendants of slavery. Seems like their logic could actually be used to support this change.
That said, your example about Native American income groups isn't the argument you likely think it is. That has been investigated pretty thoroughly and found to be nearly entirely based on shared tribal ownership of businesses like casinos or oil fields, which pay out to the entire tribe. Overall Native Americans in the US are at a socioeconomic disadvantage compared to non-NA populations, primarily because they are in largely undeveloped (from a business/economic perspective) areas of the country, which are not considered targets of development. They suffer from both ethnic disparities as well as the same disparities that generally affect rural vs urban populations.
But yes, everything is a spectrum, boundaries are blurry etc. it’s just often times this line of thinking doesn’t lead you anywhere.
These questions don't have a right or wrong answer. So don't use the word night, or if you do, define exactly what you mean by it.
I dislike this obvious and offensive dishonesty. We can define race quite easily: A race is a largely endogamous extended family group. But but but that means you could call Yoruba people a race! Well sure, you can. Just like we can call the English or even the Cornish a race. When the Angle race and the Saxon race became exogamous with respect to each other, their distinction faded and a new Anglo-Saxon race came to be. We can also talk about a British race, by descent from William the Conqueror. I believe the Chinese have a notion of five Chinese races. In fact, the notion of lumping races as continental scale groups is an American innovation that is of dubious anthropological value. Point being that you can lump up to all humans being a single race going back to the first humans or split down to the nuclear family[1]. It's clear to me that both of those extremes aren't very interesting, but they are valid! As for useful places to lump and split, genetic screening is an obvious one. As an example, choosing to split intelligently will allow a health service to save money by avoiding unnecessarily testing for sickle cell disease.
It follows that for two typical individuals of the same race, you have to go less far up their family tree to find a common ancestor than you would for two typical individuals of different races. This effect is considerably more pronounced if you restrict it to common ancestors from before 1492. Of course 1492 isn't the only date where this effect is seen. For just one example, most Britons have a common ancestor from slightly after 1066.
[1] Nuclear meaning no longer able to be split (physicists weakened that metaphor a bit though!).
Edit: The redefinition goes the other way, as can be seen from public domain sources like Webster's where the first sense of race is "The descendants of a common ancestor; a family, tribe, people, or nation, believed or presumed to belong to the same stock; a lineage; a breed."
I will happily agree that the contemporary lowbrow usage of race to mean black people or white people, and I dunno maybe let's lump everyone else together as asian except some white or black people are hispanic instead doesn't even rise to the level of being childishly stupid.
comments like yours don't add much value to discussions about race.
https://glennloury.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-charles-murr...
Reflexive ... reactions ... suppressing...
>The report offers a decision tree to help researchers choose whether race, ethnicity or indigeneity, geography, genetic ancestry, or genetic similarity are most appropriate for their work.
So, "We can't define 'race' so stop using it in science" is a factually incorrect description of the report and is instead click bait journalism intended incite controversy where none exists.
Sometimes society does things to help organize itself.
No, it's not; a couple of them have names that refer to that trait.
"Entryism (also called entrism, enterism, or infiltration) is a political strategy in which an organisation or state encourages its members or supporters to join another, usually larger, organization in an attempt to expand influence and expand their ideas and program. "