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Comment by Metacelsus | Hacker News Reader

The headline is a bit overstated (i.e., someone of African-American race is almost guaranteed to have at least some African ancestry, admixed with a varying amount of European).

That being said, there are important differences within the traditional "races", such as the finding in this study that people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities for obesity.

Overall I would love it if medical research papers moved away from "race" and started getting more into the fine-grained genetic details. Regardless of the politics involved, this will lead to better medical treatments for everyone.

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>That being said, there are important differences within the traditional "races", such as the finding in this study that people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities for obesity.

"Traditional races" as you call them have changed over time and space, and we are only in this predicament because we lump different ethnicities together today. 150 years ago people could tell the difference between someone of West African or East African descent. And Southern Italians, Irish vs Western Europeans vs Germans... etc.

It's harder now because a) there has been a lot more mixing since then; and b) socioculturally we consolidated many of those ethnicities

It's harder now because now you live in America and are used to seeing all these people as Americans, and then as members of whatever racial consciousness we have in America.

Back in those respective countries, they can tell everyone apart. When my wife (Irish/English by ancestry) visited Hungary, they were immediately able to peg her as a foreigner, and frankly, so was I. They look nothing alike aside from skin color. This is true of basically any country in Europe, Africa, Asia, where people have tended to remain in the same location for thousands of years.

I think even most Americans would be able to tell apart African and European races if they really tried.

I’m calling BS on the “remained in the same place for thousands of years”

Take a course in European history, learn about all the wars, genocides, forced and unenforced migrations, plagues, etc. and even more mundane thinggs like intermarriage outside of immediate community ( very common amongst nobility ) and tell me again with a straight face you believe people have remained in the same place for thousands of years

They may have recognized your wife as “foreign” based on a number of things. The most obvious being language, But it could have also been dress, makeup, demeanor etc.

Prior to industrial revolution, mass immigration was difficult, not only because of logistics but tribalism.

Hungarians mass migrated about a thousand years ago from the Ural Mountains, several thousands of kms from present Hungary. Germans mass migrated to Hungary hundreds of years ago, especially after Mongols and Turks killed most of the population there. Italians lost their appetite to coriander because the mass migration of Germanic people around and after the fall of Rome.

It was more difficult, but it happened many-many times.

Yea, and like you just proved, it was very difficult. Hence the choice to do it in large groups.

And they left very little trace in the genes of modern Hungarians. They did leave their language, of course.

The Turks ruined a large part of Europe but their genetic footprint in Turkey is only about 8%.

Where are you getting these numbers from ?

Without digging up old cemetaries (if they’d still exist) and sequencing DNA, there’s a lot of assumotions and conjecture

Not really no. Any student of linguistics is quickly dispelled of this notion

If I sort out 20 Spaniards from different provinces and regions, you wouldn't guess if they were Spaniards, French, South Germans, North/South Italians or even Irish.

Yeah, and some also look Moorish, middle eastern, Sephardic, etc. too. Not a big surprise when you learn about the migrations that happened in Spain during the past 2000 years or so. We are a mixed bunch.

Yeah, South Italians/moorish, close enough.

Tell it the Vandals, the Goths, the Huns, the Angles (I.e English), the Normans, the Danes, the Mongols, the Turks, etc.

You’re right, but you’re being really rude about it.

It’s rare (but not impossible) for a people to have been in the same place on Earth for thousands of years. It’s more like hundreds.

> It’s rare (but not impossible) for a people to have been in the same place on Earth for thousands of years. It’s more like hundreds.

Is it really rare? That seems to be the norm except for America and Africa that got replaced or displaced by colonization. But in Europe and Asia most areas has been populated by steady groups. Rulers come and go, but the people living there stays the same.

I think its rare for everyone to have been there for a thousand years, but its not rare for a majority of the genes to have stayed in one place for a thosand years.

Genetics strongly suggest Australia was settled by a single broad wave of humans that spread across the continent, finfing their niche, and staying in place whether that be east, west, north south, across desert, coast, rivers, forrest, etc.

This contrasts to earlier "literary" arguments in magazines such as Quadrant that native Australians moved about and fought for territories with invaders supplanting original dwellers long before Europeans arrived.

- https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2016-09-22/world-first-s...

is a national press article on some of that, my original references to the hosted papers on this seems to be offline / unavailable ATM (damn bitrot).

Thousands as in 2,000+ years? From my understanding that’s rare, at least by geography. I could be wrong.

But it’s not like we’re being super precise here. It’s fuzzy enough that lots of takes are correct, depending how you frame it. That’s kind of my point in my other reply. They weren’t wrong but they were being rude about it.

Yeah, I do not know why this is downvoted. This is exactly true about Europe.

In my experience, south asians and middle easterners can easily tell I’m Bengali/Bangladeshi rather than (non-Bengali) Indian or Pakistani. Growing up in America I always assumed I looked Indian, but that’s because my reference point was european americans so I didn’t have sufficient data points in my mental model to work out aggregate tendencies.

Yup! And many Americans would guess some north Indians are white because of convergent selection and shared ancestry. It's just that most prominent Indians tend to be south indian or Bengali in America. For example, most of the big name Indian ceos

There are plenty of Indians who in a literal sense could be classified as white (as in extremely fair pale skin), not just from Kashmir but even from South India. But if you’re Indian you can instantly pick them out as Indian, their entire facial structure etc is different from Europeans. In a sense, it is true, categories like “white”, “black” are social constructs that are meaningless at a genetic standpoint. But categories like, European, Nordic, Indian etc are not, if you put in some effort you can very easily distinguish between because of thousands of years of separate genetic evolution.

I could definitely tell population-level differences between phenotypes in places like UK vs Poland when I visited (and yes I know Polish immigration to the UK is popular), and I can tell differences between the average population-level look in German-dominated descendant areas in the US vs Italian and Jewish and Irish areas like NYC. I think maybe people are expecting it to be easy to do individual-level predictions which is a lot more of a coin toss, but just telling the broad differences isn't super hard.

Yes, it's not that hard to distinguish if it's something you're alert to and have enough input to start recognising the patterns.

I am just travelling around northern Italy (typing this from a Milano-Torino train), and there is a visible difference between people in the Po valley and people from Como, merely 50 km apart.

People from the Po valley, such as the Milanese, are mostly "lighter Mediterranean" types. People around Como Lake are visibly more blond and pale. The ethnic substrate is different, the ancient populations in southern Alps were more Celtic and Germanic, and even though the contemporary folk no longer speaks anything but Italian, the difference to much more mixed places such as Milano is still visible.

Same in northern Spain. Galicia and Asturias have a lot of pale, blue-eyed people who would stand out in an Andalusian crowd. Galicia has Celtic ancestry (they even preserved bagpipes as a folk instrument), and Asturias was the last refuge of the Visigoths when they were crushed by the Arabs in the 8th century.

You can also easily distinguish some other European subpopulations. For example, I met a lot of Lithuanians built as a, uh, brick shithouse. Neighbouring Poles tend to be somewhat less bulky. Many Russians have a visible Tatar admixture, with broad and flat faces. Ukrainians much less so.

And you can usually tell a Greek before they open their mouths. Some of them, especially in their older age, still resemble the old beardy statues from way-before-1-AD.

It isn’t hard at all if you live in east or west Africa. Or if you live in Italy, or if you live in China, you can see local variations that are generalized in other places. It’s always been like, only recently have we made distinctions between Asians in say Iran and Japan (both are technically oriental by medieval European standards) .

> people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities

similarly, when working on genomes a few years back, it used to be said that the two most genetically distinct humans alive right then would both be from Africa, which was memorable because one might guess Inuit vs Africa or something like that naively.

Is that specifically the case? This feels like an area where our language can fail to capture the nuance of what someone is trying to say and it gets misstated as something really similar but different.

To give an example, take 3 people named A, B, and C. A and B are both from Africa, while C is from elsewhere.

A and B have 9 genetic differences. B and C have 1 genetic difference. A and C have 10 genetic differences.

We can make the claim that the genetic difference between someone from Africa and from elsewhere (B to C, thus 1) is much smaller than the difference between two people in Africa (A to B, thus 9). 1 is smaller than 9, so this statement is true, but could easily be misunderstood to saying that the two most genetically distinct individuals are from Africa, which isn't the case because A to C is the most genetically distinct and C is from elsewhere.

The two statements seem nearly equivalent and the wrong one could accidentally be spread by someone who is really just trying to focus on expressing how much genetic diversity is within Africa.

Yes, this is specifically the case.

Non-Africans split from Africa relatively late in human genetic history. So A and B's divergence point(s) can readily be quite a bit earlier than C's. So, as you pointed out, C is likely more closely related one of A or B. Let's say B.

The big difference between B & C is that B is much more likely to incorporate genes from other early branches than C is. Therefore B is likely further away genetically from A than C is.

No, your split argument doesn't make the case you think it does. If groups A, B, and C were once groups A and B (and B split into B and C later), it's true that B and C are likely closely related, but it doesn't mean A and B are more different than A and C.

To put it another way, if we start with groups A and B, and then branch off B' from B, while B and B' are likely similar, that doesn't tell us anything about the relationship between A and B', and it doesn't imply that A and B' are closer than A and B.

The comment above is not making an argument, they are illustrating with an analogy.

There’s no logical argument needed to prove the genetic diversity in Africa, it is an observed fact.

I know that there is higher genetic diversity in Africa, and lower genetic diversity in non-African populations. That doesn't mean that there is greater difference between Africans and other Africans than between Africans and non-Africans; that only means there is greater difference between Africans and other Africans, than there is between non-Africans and other non-Africans.

To put it another way: there is extremely low genetic diversity in peregrine falcons; housecats have much higher diversity. But the two most-different individuals, when taken from a sample that contains both housecats and peregrine falcons, will certainly be a housecat and a peregrine falcon. Despite falcons having lower genetic diversity, they are still more-different from a housecat than any given housecat is from another.

Of course, humans are the same species, so it won't be as dramatic. But high genetic diversity amongst sub-Saharan African populations doesn't mean that sub-Saharan Africans are more different from each other than they are from East Asians (for example) — it only means they're more different from each other, than East Asians are from other East Asians. Pick any two people in China, and they're probably pretty genetically similar; pick any two people in sub-Saharan Africa, and they're probably pretty genetically different. That doesn't imply anything about how different the two Chinese people are from the two African people.

Additionally, non-sub-Saharan populations typically have some non-Homo-Sapiens ancestry: Neanderthal and Denisovan, for East Asians, and just Neanderthal, for Europeans. While genetic diversity within those groups is low, it doesn't mean that genetic distance from any given sub-Saharan group is low.

To expand the second part of my argument: If C' is only descended from C, but B' is descended from B and D and F and Z, then B' has increased its genetic diversity more than C' has.

Africa is the continent on which humanity originated from, and peoples in other continents migrated in waves. So the most insular communities in Africa have had more time to diverge than the most insular communities in other continents.

They are talking with respect to internal diversity I believe.

As an Anglophone you may notice a similar thing in language, and in English you can notice the large diversity in accent in native UK speakers.

Specifically they would both be of Khoi-San ethnicity. The vast majority of humans have been through two population bottlenecks which drastically reduced the genetic diversity of the populations. Most African populations have been through at least one of these bottlenecks, and every population group outside of Africa has been through two. The Khoi-San, however, seem to have broken off prior to either of the bottlenecks and so they retained much higher genetic diversity.

> Specifically they would both be of Khoi-San ethnicity

The you could say that a distinctive trait of Khoi-San ethnicity is its genetic variance. Not to mention the fact that this variance, coming from before two population bottlenecks, must contain a large number of traits not seen in other human populations.

Although this makes you wonder- if they're the most genetically diverse, do they also look diverse? Are there light and dark skinned individuals, blonde and red and black hair, green/ blue/ brown eyes, short and tall, etc.?

The genetic diversity doesn't really translate to diversity in appearance. Much of the genome doesn't code for anything in particular (so called "junk DNA"), so you can have high genetic diversity due to variance in these parts of the genome, but relatively low diversity in the small subset of genes that code for more visible features.

Yes, so in other words "high genetic variance" doesn't really mean much. So all this talk about "variance been higher within ethnic group than between" is not very relevant. The phenotype that we can actually see has differences between ethnic groups that are bigger than the variance within them.

Last of course there's the idea that this variance must be restricted to the visible phenotype. Which sounds a bit like saying that the objects in a dark room must be all in the spot illuminated by the torch, and everywhere else the room is empty.

> so in other words "high genetic variance" doesn't really mean much

>> Although this makes you wonder- if they're the most genetically diverse, do they also look diverse? Are there light and dark skinned individuals, blonde and red and black hair, green/ blue/ brown eyes, short and tall, etc.?

Yes, they do look diverse.

The visual differences will be more readily apparent to people who are familiar with the high genetic variance population since this would allow more (maybe fine-grained) diverse looks. If the person looking does not have much experience distinguishing looks in a "high genetic variance" population then they probably end up generalizing as a default. Not being able to pick up on how diverse these looks are does not make them not there. Only that, the observer is familiar with the visual differences in their non-african population of less genetically diverse humans with some grouped environmental adaptions/mutations. Such as lighter pigment to better absorb vitamin D, and this type of thing being carried as the standard for "diverse looking" (blue/brown/light/dark).

After all, "SLC24A5 encodes a cation exchanger in melanosomes ... A derived, nonsynonymous mutation (rs1426654 ...) in SLC24A5 associated with light skin color has swept to near fixation in Europeans due to positive selection [...] rs1426654 is common in East African populations with high levels of Afroasiatic ancestry [...] Further, SLC24A5 likely experienced positive selection in East Africa after this admixture event. ... rs1426654 is at moderate frequency (5–12%) in the KhoeSan from Botswana, who have substantially lighter skin than equatorial Africans". and also "studies show that the ancestral alleles of many predicted functional pigmentation variants in Africa are associated with lighter skin, suggesting our human ancestors may have had light or moderately pigmented skin" and that dark skin may be a derived trait that also continued to evolve.[0]

But when you only have a hammer...

It's like being introduced to this workshop full of tools with a stacks of wood for any type of joinery desired. Yet, your experience is much more simplistic: hammer, nail (or bolt/screw, whatever), boards; repeat. Without much thought, the human brain has already created the groups: the trusty hammer with some metal fasteners to drive, and that foreign group of absolutely nothing like the trusty hammer and fasteners. But upon closer look there are hammers and nails and screws and all these other metal fasteners in the workshop -- except, instead of them being chosen to put the boards together, a variation of tools are creating a variation of joints in order to put the boards together. The finished product ends up being ~99.9% identical to your nailed product, but it's probably only those familiar with the experience of joinery that are most likely to appreciate an notice the visual diversity between joints, instead of simply noticing that one of the products has a couple spots of metal and the other doesn't.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/hmg/article/30/R1/R88/6089124

It's used because, despite the fact that race doesn't really match with genetic ancestry, it still has impacts on people's lives and health.

For example, a study indicating that "black people in the US are X% more likely to have {some condition}" is useful, even if "black person in the US" doesn't tell much about an individual's ancestry. That's because health conditions are heavily influenced by environmental factors, and someone's race impacts the environmental factors they're exposed to.

This does get complicated, and requires digging deep into the data. Top-level statistics don't indicate root cause, which still needs to be researched. But top-level statistics can indicate that there's a problem that needs to be worked on, which is why medical studies tracking race are still useful.

It’s still correlated enough with ancestry that it can be a useful proxy for health issues related to ancestry—in addition to the environmental factors you pointed out.

If data would include both, one could check which of them is a signal signal and which is noise

The point is that race is a bad proxy for ethnicity. We should expect the environmental factors to also mirror ethnic clustering.

African is a useless label -- Africa alone has as much genetic diversity as the rest of the world combined.

What lead to this?

Founder effect

Africa is where humans originally come from. There’s much more human history in Africa than the rest of the world.

Existence, not history. History requires writing.

That’s a narrow definition of “history”. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth.

The above seems clear as genetic history written in the DNA. Those bottlenecks are a bit like burning the library at Alexandria.

...which needs more to explain it, such as (if true): "the diversity originating in Africa did not migrate out of Africa, and the gene lines that did leave Africa did not develop as much diversity as had existed in the ancestral gene pool, despite facing far more diversity in climate than exists in Africa".

And then I would again ask of the latter, "what? Why not?"

Ultimately: Why did Africa stimulate so much gene pool diversity? It seems more homogenous in environments than the rest of the world that Homo Sapiens emigrated to.

And there would have been cross-breeding between African subpopulations. Environmental barriers in sub-Saharan Africa are minimal in terms of gene movement, aren't they?

Perhaps there simply hasn't been time. Large scale migration out of Africa is a recent phenomenon relative to the existence of anatomically modern humans.

TL;DR: You may be interested in - https://www.nature.com/articles/nature15393

Bottlenecks, small population inbreeding, genetic drift, founder effect, etc

Basically what happened was, an alt-group of African humans decided earth was not safe anymore and its collapse was imminent -- they need to get to Mars. But since they don't have a way to get a spaceship in Africa, they will need to leave Africa and do whatever is necessary to build one, including throwing the people who helped them under the mammoth if need be.

At this point they have a pretty diverse gene pool and represent the humans well. They walk for a bit but came upon some steam vents and decided take a break and steam some food and enjoy the ocean view in the distance. The leader is not happy they stopped for food or rest. Later they are shooketh awake just before fire rains down on them. 3/4th of them make it safely to the ocean, and what luck the water is receding it'll be easier to cross, for the first 2/3rds at least. The tsunami gods demanded a toll and claimed the back 1/3. Not happy with the direction of leadership, half the group decided they could establish a better foundation away from these clowns and forked themselves.

Meanwhile, back in Africa and finally having got rid of that crazy mars dude and his cult followers, they decide to invite all the neighbors to an epoch swinging dance party to celebrate -- complete with the best plant-based party favours they could dig up/gather. Thus, ensuring the larger African population and their descendant would end up with an abundant supply of pokemon variants to swap between'em.

Though, you may want to take a look at the linked paper above for a more precise explanation. I may have paraphrased a bit.

Because of slavery, most African Americans don't know where they originated from so African American is the the most descriptive label you can get.

African-Americans with slave ancestry almost all come from West Africa I would think, as that was the shortest route for the European slave ships between Africa and the New World.

Many didn't go directly. For example Bristol, UK had around half a million slaves traded there.

There are a number of African-Americans with Malgasy descent. It's true that the percentage would be small compared to the percentage of African that came from west Africa.

Not just as much, but it literally includes most of the genetic diversity in the rest of the world.

It’s quick and free to identify someone’s race.

A genetic test takes several days and costs a few hundred dollars.

The patient wants the best treatment right now. If race carries useful information that helps the doctor treat the patient, then the doctor should have access to it.

Is it? What race is someone who's Arab? What about someone who could look black with one haircut but white with another? What about half-Arab, half-Euro?

This might sound like nitpicking, but most black people in the US have significant European ancestry and the admixture can vary wildly even for people with similar skin tones. Our naive view of "race" is not always backed by genetic reality.

> Is it?

Yes, you give them the list and say "What is your race/ethnicity, you may select at least one and as many as you wish." They answer. You are done.

> What race is someone who's Arab?

Whatever they answer (Middle East or Northern African [MENA], under the 2024 revision to the categories, intuitively seems most likely.)

> What about someone who could look black with one haircut but white with another?

Again, whatever they answer.

> What about half-Arab, half-Euro?

Again, whatever they answer. Though the most obvious guess of what they might answer, given the premise, would be one of White, MENA, or both.

The part to question is not, "is it quick and free to determine race" but "does race carry useful information that helps the doctor treat the patient", which is a much thornier question.

> Yes, you give them the list and say "What is your race/ethnicity, you may select at least one and as many as you wish." They answer. You are done.

While I broadly agree with you, there have been notable controversies around people who self-identified as having a particular ancestry [0] that didn't match how other people classified them.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal

> If race carries useful information.

It's pretty low quality information. If you're taking a genetic test you want something that returns susceptibility to sickle cell amenia, cystic fibrosis, tay-sachs, et cetera. Race is a very low quality signal that is used when you lack something better, like a genetic test.

There are zero genetic markers for race. This is because race is purely a social construct.

Genetic differences across Africa shouldn't be surprising when you consider how huge Africa really is. Africa is about as big as the US, China, and Europe combined.

More importantly, humans have lived in Africa far longer than anywhere else in the world, so have had much more time to genetically diversify.

I was under the impression humans migrated from Africa so the rest of the world is all african-X, where the african- part is some subset of the original african population.

"One drop rule" makes everyone black in America

The effect is much larger than that. For most of the evolutionary history of humans, everyone* lived in Africa. Then only quite small groups left, taking with them only a small fraction of the genetic diversity of humans. Even today, the great majority of genetic diversity among living humans is inside Africa.

(* who mattered. There were earlier migrations of hominids, but the mark they left on our genetics is much smaller than the influence from later migrations.)

It's not just about size.

Humans originated in Africa, so populations there have had more time to evolve and become more diverse.

200,000 years of genetic drift versus 20,000 years makes a big difference.

Also population bottlenecks. Only a handful of populations left Africa, whereas many remained back.

> Overall I would love it if medical research papers moved away from "race" and started getting more into the fine-grained genetic details. Regardless of the politics involved, this will lead to better medical treatments for everyone.

More precision is better, but we don't have rapid genetic tests that can distinguish West vs. East African ancestry on the spot, so race is the only proxy available when you're, say, treating a patient in the ER.

We have rapid genetic tests now. They are still expensive and not widely available but this is improving.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2025.02.003

>almost guaranteed to have at least some African ancestry

everyone from everywhere has african ancestry

Very true, but of course you're talking about a different era much further up the tree.

I don’t; unless you are referring to the discredited “out of Africa” theory

Could you elaborate?

I assume you imply that humans evolved not in Africa. Where?

Neanderthals evolved in Europe and Europeans have more Neanderthal ancestry, so he might identify more with his Neanderthal ancestors.

I’ve used Perl a lot.

There’s plenty of evidence to the contrary, including Denisovan and Neanderthal that is not present in any African population; as well, something like up to 20% of West African genome has an as yet unknown source which is usually referred to as “archaic” or ghost DNA which is not found elsewhere in other populations.

Since the OOA theory doesn’t have any explanation for this evidence…

> There’s plenty of evidence to the contrary, including Denisovan and Neanderthal that is not present in any African population

OOA does have an explanation for Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA that isn't found in African populations, and that is that the cross-breeding between anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals and Denisovans occurred after modern humans left Africa.

> as well, something like up to 20% of West African genome has an as yet unknown source which is usually referred to as “archaic” or ghost DNA which is not found elsewhere in other populations.

"Archaic" DNA refers to DNA that appears to have originated with some human group other than modern humans and not be shared among modern human populations (the Denisovan and Neanderthal-origin genomes of Eurasian humans would be included here), but specific to some subpopulation. It is not the case that "20% of West African genome" is archaic, though there is a study in which some specific isolated West African subpopulations had archaic fractions that high, which is not something that OOA has no explanation for (the explanation is that those subgroups were isolated from the ones that participated in the various outbound migrations, and so their particular archaic genome is not shared with the groups that migrated out.)

There may be valid challenges to OOA, but those aren't it.

Homo sapiens didn't evolve from Denisovans and Neanderthals. All are branches of human and existed at the same time and interbred.* Homo sapiens survived while Neanderthals and Denisovans became extinct. The majority of the ancestry of living humans, Homo sapiens, was originally from Africa. Europeans have some Neanderthal ancestry (like 2%) due to interbreeding with Neanderthals, but the vast majority of European DNA is from Africa. Sub-Saharan Africans have less Neanderthal ancestry than Europeans and more Homo sapiens ancestry.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archai...

I don’t think the parts of that theory that have fallen out of fashion include humanity originating in Africa in general. I think it’s more like - maybe more of modern human comes from a branch or branches that changed after Africa exit than we thought previously.

You have missed the point.

“Race” is only reliably visible based on skin color for a single generation. You can be a green eyed redhead with a black West African grandparent.

Americans obsession with “race” and racial superiority means that families both lie about their ancestry (turning African ancestors whose features are passed on into “Native American Princesses”) and misidentify themselves by using skin tone as a proxy for nationality.

Even the idea that people can trust unscientific racial indicators is wrong. Ask a Guyanese person where people think they hail from? And before people say that their have distant African ancestors why does that matter? How many generations count and why must we look further when skin colors are dark than when they are fair?

I.e. King Charles is considered English although his recent forebears were German and Churchill had an American mother and is likewise considered fully British. Yet someone of West African descent whose family has lived in the USA since the founding of Jamestown will still be considered “African” in a way more recent pale skinned immigrants are not.

Any discussion built on an unscientific foundation like “race” will lead to ridiculous and contradictory conclusions based solely on skin tone.

'African ancestry' is itself not a good concept.

Tribes from the Horn of Africa have more common with Swedes than they have with East African tribes.

How is this possible?

I'm not sure about that particular claim, but in general, skin color and phenotype are not perfectly correlated with ancestry. The immediate objection is the obvious one... "What do you mean? Why do Chinese people look Chinese, or Africans African, or Europeans European?".

What I mean is that, you can have two closely related populations with their own distinct phenotypes that are actually closely related.

An interesting example are the Negritos of SE Asia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrito

Here is what they look like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrito#/media/File:Taman_Nega...

Any person simply going off of looks, would obviously assume these people are African.

However, they are indeed most closely related to their sister population, the fair-skinned small-eyed (please no offense, we all know what I'm talking about) East Asians.

Their look is due to convergent selection that favors darker skin, wider noses, etc.

They are actually vastly genetically different than the Africans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrito#/media/File:PCA_of_Ora...

This is what I mean by phenotype and genotype are not perfectly correlated.

The notion of race and ethnicity in biology has been politicised by ideology. Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja clarifies this in point five of their piece [0] in the Skeptical Inquirer.

[0] https://skepticalinquirer.org/2023/06/the-ideological-subver...

I don't know what Jerry Coyne is talking about because genetic vs. environmental causation of behavioral and physical traits, broken down "racially" and otherwise, is a very active field of study.

He isn't saying there isn't such research being done, he's criticizing the attempts made by ideologues to discredit and discourage research along such premises.

Did you even bother to read the piece? He explicitly opens his fifth point with an example of The Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) weaponizing its reputation to do precisely just that. He documented another instance of this in Nature recently as well [0]. If you look at the top subthread here too, Nature Human Behaviour is doing this as well.

Given all that, it seems he's right that the problem with ideologues exists. The success or lack thereof of these ideologues is a separate matter. Your claim that such research still exists doesn't negate the problem he identified. If anything, I don't think we should be comfortable with any kind of intentional distortions to the biology of race and ethnicity. The bad (false) PR could come back and bite, affecting the research and how it might be received. Otherwise, I don't really see any real disagreement here.

[0] https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/05/11/nature-tackles-rac...

Yes, I read the piece, and I find it very difficult to reconcile with the volume and quality of research going on in this area. My feeling is that some people want there to be a kind of Heckler's Veto on "controversies" they're concerned about, so that they can rail against it. But there isn't.

The real issue for people concerned about the politicization of this issue is that the science isn't going their way right now.

Are you just going to outright dismiss the evidence I provided earlier for this politicization? As I explained before, your point is perfectly compatible with his. If you’re able to follow this kind of research, I’m frankly baffled by your inability to grasp the idea that acknowledging attempts to politicize this topic doesn’t imply that research in the area can’t proceed. The evidence for politicization is all over the editorials in your major research journals. If research in this area is booming as you’ve described (I don’t follow this research), all that means is that the politicization attempts have been unsuccessful.

As for your mind reading about the author’s intent, he is, to the best of my understanding, a standard-issue liberal. As such, I don't really get where you're coming from with this.

Yep, I am dismissing it. I evaluated it and found it unpersuasive.

Great, I didn't know we can dismiss evidence without justifying why. The author claims that there is politicization by ideologues, and the evidence he provided flats out suggests that. If anything, the disagreement seems to be the extent or areas where it's actually happening, which is the point I'm trying to make, which you have not engaged with. I'm frankly puzzled by all my (past) interactions with you. It seems we agree a lot in some way or another yet somehow, you always come across as bad faith to me. That's why when you eventually conceded to one of our past discussions, I decided it was no longer worth engaging. I thought Hacker News is a place for reasoned discussion, I guess I'm wrong to come back to it.

No, you can just disagree with someone without devolving into accusations of bad faith. Try it!

The technical term that we use for genetic subgroups beneath the species level is "subspecies".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subspecies

Incorrect: somewhere Ali g the way in your life, someone deeply lied to you.

Race isn’t a subspecies. It’s an artificial social construct created by European elites in the beginning of the last millennium. Its purpose is to sow division. And to other groups of people to make it more palatable to commit crimes against the objectified folk.

The original comment was talking about using a different term than race when doing real biology or medical science. You basically made their point by jumping in with an explanation of race.

Ok, but there are clear morphological, genetical, etc. differences between e.g. a Han Chinese person and a Yoruba person. So putting aside politics, sociology and whatnot, purely on a scientific basis, what term do you use for these differences? When you say that "these people belong to different $INSERT_TERM_HERE", what's the correct term to substitute?

There are also morphological and genetic differences between, say, an average 'white' Swedish person and an average 'white' Spanish person. But our systems of racial classification tend to put them in the same group just because they both happen to have light skin. Naturally, if you take two groups of people who've long inhabited different parts of the world (with little to no historical interaction between the groups), then you'll find genetic differences. The point is that there is no biological motivation for the specific set of racial categories that the US and other societies have developed. An objective Martian biologist studying humans would not group us into 'white humans', 'black humans', ... etc.

>there is no biological motivation for the specific set of racial categories that the US and other societies have developed. An objective Martian biologist studying humans would not group us into 'white humans', 'black humans', ... etc.

Then why do biologists distinguish subspecies of other animals? E.g. look at the subspecies of Panthera tigris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger#Subspecies

Some animals have subspecies. Humans don't. This is something that's widely misunderstood popularly but which is indubitable biologically. For example, many people are not aware that there is vastly more genetic variation between different breeds of dog than there is between any two groups of humans.

But regardless, the more important point is that whatever biologically-motivated categories humans might be grouped by would not correspond to 'races' as normally understood.

There are some (small) genetic populations whose genetics diverged so much, from geographic separation, that they have fertility problems [1].

What's left? Seems like something left over from the old science perspective that "humans are not animals", more than anything.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8600657/

That article doesn't say anything about small populations. The word 'subpopulation' appears in the abstract, but it's talking about subpopulations of sperm in ejaculate.

I have to say, this is a super weird paper to suddenly pull out of nowhere in order to make an argument against the modern biological consensus that there are no subspecies of humans. It says nothing about species or subspecies, or even different populations of humans. Did you just Google some keywords and go with the first result? I'm genuinely puzzled.

> However, in this article, I show that female-mediated sperm selection can also facilitate assortative fusion between genetically compatible gametes. Based on this evidence, I argue that reproductive failure does not necessarily exclusively represent a pathological condition, but can also result from sexual selection (‘mate choice’) at the level of the gametes.

I'm haphazardly suggesting that the above is the same as:

> "There are some (small) genetic populations whose genetics diverged so much, from geographic separation, that they have fertility problems [1].

We have genetic populations that are the result of geographic separation, and we even have genetic divergence that makes reproduction difficult/impossible.

Again, what's left? Why can't we categorize human genetic populations to the same level? Please be specific in what's missing?

> It says nothing about species or subspecies

Why would it? If the categorization of humans included subspecies, I couldn't have responded.

Those two things really aren't the same at all, so I don't see where you're going with this.

If it's an established biological fact that there are different subspecies of humans, then it should be possible to find a reference for that.

> Those two things really aren't the same at all

Precise equality isn't required for a conceptual discussion, especially one that's so ill defined/subjective as the concept of subspecies [1].

It's an established political fact that classifying humans, at any level, could never be presented. That's not a bad thing, but it's also a mostly arbitrary thing.

[1] https://bioone.org/journals/the-auk/volume-132/issue-2/AUK-1...

> Then why do biologists distinguish subspecies of other animals?

They do, when there are things that seem to be subspecies, they don't do it just because there is an arbitrary requirement for every species to have subspecies. There's been dispute about whether various archaic human groups were separate species or subspecies, and if what we now call modern humans weren't the only ones still around, that might be a more acute debate and might be resolved in favor of subspecies, but the others aren't still around, so...

What most people (non-academics) mean when they say "race" is "genetic population". If your goal is to have a conceptual exchange, rather than correcting terminology, you should go in with that perspective. Top level comment put "race" in quotes, understanding this.

Mendel didn't get much attention until 1900 or so. European racism was alive and well long before non-academics had any notion of a "genetic population", or indeed a genetic anything.

Which is completely unrelated to speaking with a someone outside of academia, today.

Yeah, it's quite wild what European elites and scientists believed around late 1800's / early 1900's, and it wasn't limited just to anti-semitism or racism towards Africans, even if those groups had it much worse than most others.

For instance, in late 1800's Swedish scientists stole bunch of skulls from Finnish cemeteries, trying to prove that Finnish people are of different/lesser race than their Scandinavian neighbours. It took until 2024 for those skulls to be returned to Finland for reburial.

https://yle.fi/a/74-20110151

https://ki.se/en/about-ki/history-and-cultural-heritage/medi...

On the other hand:

"In biological taxonomy, race is an informal rank in the taxonomic hierarchy for which various definitions exist. Sometimes it is used to denote a level below that of subspecies, while at other times it is used as a synonym for subspecies."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(biology)

That doesn't seem like a useful definition. There is no case where subspecies could not also satisfy that definition. It's a distinction without a difference.

Yeah. I think it's a synonym. I'd consider it a linguistic quirk, like how we use the term "carcass" for the body of a dead animal, but we use "corpse" for humans.

Much of it, at that level, is a mostly arbitrary construct, with blurry boundaries, left to subjective interpretation, made up long before the very new concept of genetic analysis was even a thing, where a more informed hierarchy could be made. Even then, the end bits of the hierarchy turn into a knotted mess a generation or two after you remove a river or mountain.

Categorization is a fundamental part of our intelligence, but not necessarily a reflection of reality.

There are no human subspecies.

Among the identified human subgroups, some would probably be subspecies of the same species as modern humans (Denisovans, neanderthals, and a few others) if there hadn't been a tendency to assign extinct human groups (or even individual specimens) as distinct species on scant evidence.

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