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Comment by dr_dshiv | Hacker News Reader

“In humans, race is a socially constructed designation, a misleading and harmful surrogate for population genetic differences, and has a long history of being incorrectly identified as the major genetic reason for phenotypic differences between groups. Rather, human genetic variation is the result of many forces—historical, social, biological—and no single variable fully represents this complexity. The structure of genetic variation results from repeated human population mixing and movements across time, yet the misconception that human beings can be naturally divided into biologically distinguishable races has been extremely resilient and has become embedded in scientific research, medical practice and technologies, and formal education.”

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.

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To be fair, there is a clear definition of ethnicity as "the quality or fact of belonging to a population group or subgroup made up of people who share a common cultural background or descent".

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".

What would you be using ethnicity for? I don't think they're making a case for some sort of trans-racial ethnic self-identification being used in science as a replacement for race.

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.

This whole line of reasoning can also be used to argue that there is no such thing as culture: neither "French culture", or "English culture", or "New York culture", or "Florida culture", etc. exist.

Also, population mixing and movements across time doesn't preclude the existence of more or less distinguishable groups inside the said population.

Ethnicity is just one of many factors, and is related to your culture, which is related to how you live your life, which can definitely be a factor. But yes, if your "ethnic" groups look like [1], ethnicity is really just another word for race, because you are not asked the bullet points, which certainly are ethnic (English vs. African, for example), but the headers (White vs. Black).

[1] https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/style-gui...

Further down in the article, the answer is given. They are recommending that journals, funding bodies, etc, start to require scientists to define their chosen categories and justify the usage.

> Dumb question… why would using ethnicity (which is accepted) solve any issues?

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.

That doesn't even make sense. Nobody believes that "race" is the cause of phenotypic differences between groups, it's the outcome of it. It's a useful, albeit broad, term to distinguish distinct populations of people who, over many generations, have genetically converged within their own group and genetically diverged from others.

Why must they lie?

That’s factually incorrect—there’s not actually a significant amount of genetic divergence between racial groups.

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.

> there’s not actually a significant amount of genetic divergence between racial groups.

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?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3704235/

It’s not a significant part of genetic divergence. Humans also have a striking lack of genetic diversity in the first place, due to factors like a severe population bottleneck 2 Mya.

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.)

> 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.

Proves too much: the idea of coming up with a genetic basis for "fishness" is also now completely useless.

> 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.

"Fish" are one of the classic examples of a commonly-understood descriptor that has little to no scientific rigor. Another good one is "tree".

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.

fish exist. trees exist. races exist. we have laws about overfishing, laws about cutting trees down, and laws protecting against racial discrimination and these laws largely work. the legal system has developed techniques for dealing with gray areas too.

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.

That sounds like contrived rubbish me. Yes we can pluck a dozen Germans off the street and you might find 5 different eye colours, 6 hair colours, a range of 30 IQ points, a priest and a thug, and over a foot between the tallest and shortest.

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.

Rather than shouting loudly on the internet, I recommend going and reading a bit more about genetic history. There are much more accurate scientific terms for eveyrthing you're talking about.

I dunno, go look at Barack Obama, then look at pictures of his parents, and tell me which group he belongs to.

The common answer is Obama is African American (or black or negro). The reason is the implicit "one drop rule", if a white is contaminated with a little amount of black blood from their ancestors, they are not white anymore but black.

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 feel like I’m being gas lighted by these explanations that race doesn’t exist. A five year old can plainly see race but grownups must pretend it doesn’t exist? It’s a bit Orwellian (a bit like 2+2=5)

You're not being gaslighted, rather you're being made aware that a five year old's naive and immature view of reality is insufficiently grounded in knowledge or nuance to be useful as a basis for adult discussions, much less science.

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.

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