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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

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 9y 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 9y 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.

VygmraMGVl 9y 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 9y 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.