4 ms·

The study focused a lot on consanguinity's effect on genome - I wonder if there are studies examining children with 'very' unrelated parents, i.e. mixed race?

by pizza 10y ago

JBReefer 10y ago
I have 0 support for this, but it the mixed race people I know tend to be much, much, much healthier. It makes sense when you think about inbreeding, but it's sort of weird to think about. A friend who is 100% Polish Jewish - a people who were forced to live in small shtetls and didn't have a wide genetic pool - just randomly went blind one day. My mixed-race wife is literally never sick. I'm kind of jealous to be honest.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  I have 0 support for this, but it the mixed race people I know tend to be much, much, much healthier. Biology has your back on this. (I have farming background but results should be valid for humans as well.)
  - 0417_airlines 10y ago
    I'd be interested to see if you can find any evidence for this in human populations. From my undergraduate classes (and in my admittedly limited exposure to plant biology), it sounds like you're referring to increased fitness of plant hybrids. In this case, you're falling into the mindset I outlined in my other comment. At least in the simple examples presented at the college biology level, hybrids often combine true-breeding traits (hypothetically, good growth in a certain climate, resistance to a certain temperature, etc). It seems reasonable that an individual with a mixture of such traits would fare better than its true-bred counterparts. In humans, our race labels don't correspond to true-bred traits. While some genetic conditions are most common in certain racial groups, I cannot think of any set of genes where heterozygotes are only formed by mating across racial groups. Note that I'm writing in the US - these points may be less true in homogeneous countries like Norway. But in such groups, we're not seeing the effect of race as much as the effect of small groups of human founders. One interesting point, which could buttress OP's observation, is the finding that immigrants are often healthier than native born individuals[1]. This phenomenon occurs across many measures of health; unfortunately for America, a nation of immigrants, the phenomenon regresses over successive generations. 1. A discussion of weight and immigration. This is the first link I could easily find, but I have seen this discussed more convincingly with respect to low birth weight in African mothers vs Black American mothers: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e645/c696508ccb09cfbd476a86b17af2562023bf.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e645/c696508ccb09cfbd476a86...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
0417_airlines 10y ago
I recognize your point but want to raise an issue that I think many of us do not recognize. Skin color is an easy way to classify people, but the advent of DNA sequencing affords us a lot more data into a person's ancestry. In the early 2000's, there was some debate about the value of race in biomedicine, even to the point of NEJM running two contradictory articles back-to-back [1]. The current consensus view is that human beings vary much more within our 'races' than we do between them - in other words, our skin color does not capture a lot of our genetic variability. I'll look for a good review on this topic and update if I find one 1. http://www.nejm.org/toc/nejm/348/12 http://www.nejm.org/toc/nejm/348/12 - Search for Cooper's and Burchard's articles in this issue EDIT: Here's an article that discusses the difficulties of using race to infer ancestry, with some examples of populations in whom 'race' is an especially poor marker: https://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic185351.files/RACEgen.pdf https://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic185351.files/RAC...
- VygmraMGVl 10y ago
  I think "human beings vary much more within our 'races' than we do between them" is a disingenuous way of describing the relationship between genetics and race. "So, although there might be little variation among groups, it is highly structured and therefore useful for distinguishing groups and allocating individuals into groups" -- from the first article. In other words, statistical description of variance within groups is greater than that between groups, but it is still possible to distinguish between many racial groups genetically. Another part of the article points out that even with the US census' very coarsly drawn racial distinctions, it is more likely that individually are found to be more similar to individuals of the same race as opposed to those of different races.
  - 0417_airlines 10y ago
    I submitted these links to display early 2000's thinking about race. You'll note that the two articles display diametrically-opposed viewpoints. One point that is often missed in discussions about genetic relatedness is that the markers most useful for discriminating between racial groups are in so-called 'junk DNA' regions. For genes that relate to protein function (and thus, organismal function), humans vary little, Here's a quote from the Cooper article: The success of microsatellite loci in classifying persons according to continental group depends in part on the cumulative effect of minor differences in the frequencies of common alleles and in part on the effect of population-specific alleles. In neither case is it apparent that such differences have relevance for traits that are important to health. Most population-specific microsatellite alleles are unlikely to be functional; rather, like a last name, they merely help to verify the geographic origin of a person's ancestry. Accumulated small differences in common alleles will yield differences in population risk only if a disease is caused primarily by interactions among multiple loci, and this is both mathematically and biologically implausible.

The study focused a lot on consanguinity's effect on genome - I wonder if there are studies examining children with 'very' unrelated parents, i.e. mixed race?

by pizza 10y ago

The study focused a lot on consanguinity's effect on genome - I wonder if there are studies examining children with 'very' unrelated parents, i.e. mixed race?

JBReefer 10y ago

I have 0 support for this, but it the mixed race people I know tend to be much, much, much healthier. It makes sense when you think about inbreeding, but it's sort of weird to think about. A friend who is 100% Polish Jewish - a people who were forced to live in small shtetls and didn't have a wide genetic pool - just randomly went blind one day. My mixed-race wife is literally never sick. I'm kind of jealous to be honest.

reitanqild 10y ago
I have 0 support for this, but it the mixed race people I know tend to be much, much, much healthier. Biology has your back on this. (I have farming background but results should be valid for humans as well.)
- 0417_airlines 10y ago
  I'd be interested to see if you can find any evidence for this in human populations. From my undergraduate classes (and in my admittedly limited exposure to plant biology), it sounds like you're referring to increased fitness of plant hybrids. In this case, you're falling into the mindset I outlined in my other comment. At least in the simple examples presented at the college biology level, hybrids often combine true-breeding traits (hypothetically, good growth in a certain climate, resistance to a certain temperature, etc). It seems reasonable that an individual with a mixture of such traits would fare better than its true-bred counterparts. In humans, our race labels don't correspond to true-bred traits. While some genetic conditions are most common in certain racial groups, I cannot think of any set of genes where heterozygotes are only formed by mating across racial groups. Note that I'm writing in the US - these points may be less true in homogeneous countries like Norway. But in such groups, we're not seeing the effect of race as much as the effect of small groups of human founders. One interesting point, which could buttress OP's observation, is the finding that immigrants are often healthier than native born individuals[1]. This phenomenon occurs across many measures of health; unfortunately for America, a nation of immigrants, the phenomenon regresses over successive generations. 1. A discussion of weight and immigration. This is the first link I could easily find, but I have seen this discussed more convincingly with respect to low birth weight in African mothers vs Black American mothers: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e645/c696508ccb09cfbd476a86b17af2562023bf.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e645/c696508ccb09cfbd476a86...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

0417_airlines 10y ago

I recognize your point but want to raise an issue that I think many of us do not recognize. Skin color is an easy way to classify people, but the advent of DNA sequencing affords us a lot more data into a person's ancestry. In the early 2000's, there was some debate about the value of race in biomedicine, even to the point of NEJM running two contradictory articles back-to-back [1]. The current consensus view is that human beings vary much more within our 'races' than we do between them - in other words, our skin color does not capture a lot of our genetic variability. I'll look for a good review on this topic and update if I find one 1. http://www.nejm.org/toc/nejm/348/12 http://www.nejm.org/toc/nejm/348/12 - Search for Cooper's and Burchard's articles in this issue EDIT: Here's an article that discusses the difficulties of using race to infer ancestry, with some examples of populations in whom 'race' is an especially poor marker: https://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic185351.files/RACEgen.pdf https://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic185351.files/RAC...

VygmraMGVl 10y ago
I think "human beings vary much more within our 'races' than we do between them" is a disingenuous way of describing the relationship between genetics and race. "So, although there might be little variation among groups, it is highly structured and therefore useful for distinguishing groups and allocating individuals into groups" -- from the first article. In other words, statistical description of variance within groups is greater than that between groups, but it is still possible to distinguish between many racial groups genetically. Another part of the article points out that even with the US census' very coarsly drawn racial distinctions, it is more likely that individually are found to be more similar to individuals of the same race as opposed to those of different races.
- 0417_airlines 10y ago
  I submitted these links to display early 2000's thinking about race. You'll note that the two articles display diametrically-opposed viewpoints. One point that is often missed in discussions about genetic relatedness is that the markers most useful for discriminating between racial groups are in so-called 'junk DNA' regions. For genes that relate to protein function (and thus, organismal function), humans vary little, Here's a quote from the Cooper article: The success of microsatellite loci in classifying persons according to continental group depends in part on the cumulative effect of minor differences in the frequencies of common alleles and in part on the effect of population-specific alleles. In neither case is it apparent that such differences have relevance for traits that are important to health. Most population-specific microsatellite alleles are unlikely to be functional; rather, like a last name, they merely help to verify the geographic origin of a person's ancestry. Accumulated small differences in common alleles will yield differences in population risk only if a disease is caused primarily by interactions among multiple loci, and this is both mathematically and biologically implausible.