'All of Us' genetics chart stirs unease over controversial depiction of race | Hacker News Reader

'All of Us' genetics chart stirs unease over controversial depiction of race

nature.com

11 pointsXzetaU815 comments

“Our analysis reaffirms that race and ethnicity are social constructs that do not have a basis in genetics”

In what sense is race not genetic?

Adam Rutherford's book "How to Argue with a Racist" is all about this.

I'll read it

I'm going to assume that what they're trying to imply is that some sizable share of genetic information is shared across all humans and the information that is typically used to separate us into racial and ethnic categories is a very small subset (imagine some genetic 'knobs' for hair color, skin color, stature, morphology, etc). Their argument seems really fucking stupid when you consider that we share an estimated 98.8% of our DNA with chimpanzees.

>that is typically used to separate us into racial and ethnic categories is a very small subset (imagine some genetic 'knobs' for hair color, skin color, stature, morphology, etc).

What they're saying is that they're no genetic components that do this at all.

There's no "black dna" or "Asian dna" or genetic component that is present in all peoples of a particular "race" that separates them from other "races".

Race is genetic in the same way ROYGBIV is about wavelengths: wavelengths cause the different colours, but there's no real reason to say "this is red, but this is orange" - the wavelengths don't care how we categorise these things! In the same way, genetics certainly determines a lot about our appearances, but definitions of "black", "white", "Asian", "hispanic", etc are just categories that we humans have defined on top of a much more complex underlying structure.

Person of race A and race B have two children. People tend to think child 1 is race A, people tend to think child 2 is mixed race AB. In the social sense, it could be said that child 1's race is race A, even though genetically it's probably more like AB.

Another common situation: People of race A think child 2 is race B, people of race B think child 2 is race A. And you can imagine more complex examples with more races and more generations. In this manner the categorization of race is primarily social.

And this (and more) happened multiple times in effectively everyones ancestry.

Another observation is that if we ignore the existence of race AB, a person of race A with "mixed" genetics, and a person of race B with mixed genetics, may be closer to eachother genetically than other members of race A and B (since as you say, they're closer to race AB, not A or B).

Defining discrete categorisations for things that exist on a continuum is definitionally arbitrary and misleading.

Don't tell that to psychiatrists though, who do EXACTLY what is being criticised here and slap people who exist on a continuum with an arbitrary label, and yet the DSM-V is still taken seriously by the scientific mainstream.

Many black people are probably way more white than black (and look it) but still choose to identity as black.

Irish and Italian immigrants in America used to not be considered white.

Only in America are Middle Eastern people considered white.

In Europe, there are more groups inside of white, where there is like northern white and central/southern/eastern white.

So genetics plays a role but race is still a social construct.

There are no trademark genes basically. Is there a genetic factor present in all Black people that is not present in any Asian person and some on ? The answer is no, there isn't.

https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-res...

>"Race’ cannot be biologically defined due to genetic variation among human individuals and populations."

"In the Stanford study, over 92% of alleles were found in two or more regions, and almost half of the alleles studied were present in all seven major geographical regions. The observation that the vast majority of the alleles were shared over multiple regions, or even throughout the entire world, points to the fundamental similarity of all people around the world—an idea that has been supported by many other studies (Figure 1B).

If separate racial or ethnic groups actually existed, we would expect to find “trademark” alleles and other genetic features that are characteristic of a single group but not present in any others. However, the 2002 Stanford study found that only 7.4% of over 4000 alleles were specific to one geographical region. Furthermore, even when region-specific alleles did appear, they only occurred in about 1% of the people from that region—hardly enough to be any kind of trademark."

This feels like moving the goal posts… and rather silly. Obviously people are dramatically more similar than different. But the concept of race is about those differences, and seems to be intimately tied to various gene expressions. Of course there isn’t an Asian gene or white gene or black gene, but there are genes that regulate hair color, height, facial structure, eye color, melanin production, etc., and those are what people think of when they think of racial differences. So to say race isn’t genetic seems silly at best.

It's not about being more similar than different.

It's that you literally can't biologically divide people into the categories we divide them into.

Two sub-saharan african men might be more genetically apart than one of those men and some White European fellow. In fact, Africa is more genetically diverse than the rest of the world combined.

Yet those two Africans are "black" and supposed to be the same "race", separate from the white fellow.

If an alien species landed on Earth today, took exhaustive genetic samples of everyone on the planet and did their best to classify us, it wouldn't look anything like our "races". That's the point.

Maybe you think that's goalpost moving but it's not.

This is moving the goal posts. Saying that members of the same racial group can actually be more genetically similar to members of another race has no bearing on whether or not the traits that define racial categories are genetically derived.

Seems like the concern is a purposeful attempt to bias how genetics research is presented to fit an ideological agenda.

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