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Comment by helixten | Hacker News Reader

Sickle cell disease is caused by a mutation in the HBB gene, not by belonging to a specific race. Race is a social construct, meaning it's defined by social factors rather than strictly biological ones. Since someone who is Black in the US often has about 20% European ancestry, how does this compare to someone who is directly from an African country? Where is the line?

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>Race is a social construct, meaning it's defined by social factors rather than strictly biological ones.

that sounds like if a child grows in different social environment it may have different skin color, eye shape and other attributes ascribed to the race. Btw, in USSR in 194x-195x similar theory was a prevalent biological theory (professor Lysenko) greatly supported by the Communist Party against the "bourgeois theory of genetics", and the people who dared to challenge that theory were ostracized, fired, sent to GULAG.

You are just putting to much wieght on skin color. You can't tell someone's race by looking at them. Australia aboriginal people are not really related* the Africans for example.

*Beyond the degree that everyone is related.

It’s more like “people with similar genetics tend to grow up in the same locations for many generations” and out of that comes skin coloration, genetically linked diseases, etc. Race is still a social construct based on factors our imperfect brains have associated with the different races we’ve made up for ourselves.

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