9 ms·

This concept of a "race", in terms of genetics, makes sense for classification purposes, just like all taxonomical classifications of living things. The differ

This concept of a "race", in terms of genetics, makes sense for classification purposes, just like all taxonomical classifications of living things. The difference here, is that people are taking this genetic concept of "race" and trying to prove their racist points, which always misses the point entirely. It would be a non-issue if the word "race" wasn't so politically charged. Quick edit for 2 easy examples: People with African descent are more likely to have sickle cell anemia, due to the resistance the gene provides against malaria. People with European descent are more likely to have cystic fibrosis, due to resistance it provided from cholera and typhoid.

mikeash 9y ago
You hint at this, but I think it’s worth explicitly mentioning that “race” as most people understand it, and “race” as an objective, genetic categorization, are two extremely different things. Examples: there is more genetic diversity among Africans (and thus ought to be more races among them) than in the rest of the world combined. A large number of “African Americans” have more European ancestry than African. The previous President was almost always referred to as “black” even though his mother was white, echoing the old “one drop” rules.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dilap 9y ago
  Is that true? My understanding is that objective categorizations end up matching traditional categories pretty closely, e.g., http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2010/08/connect-dots.html http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2010/08/connect-dots.html
  - mikeash 9y ago
    Do you have something that explains that? The paper is paywalled and I don’t know what to make of the graphic. The examples I gave should be sufficient to demonstrate that there are at least major discrepancies between the two.
    - dilap 9y ago
      It's a popular topic on Hsu's blog. Here's a few earlier posts that dig in more: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2007/01/metric-on-space-of-genomes-and.html http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2007/01/metric-on-space-of-geno... http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2007/06/its-all-in-clusters.html http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2007/06/its-all-in-clusters.htm... (I'm not an expert, and my opinion is formed from following that blog.) In terms of your example, I'm not sure what "there is more genetic diversity among Africans" means. What is the measure of diversity here? Why would we necessarily expect that measure to mean "more races"? (I didn't downvote you, by the way. Not sure why so many people on HN seem to enjoy downvoting any discussion on certain topic. :/.)
      - mikeash 9y ago
        Thank you, I think I get it now that I've read through those. I think that graphic illustrates what I'm saying fairly well. The non-African populations in the graphic are all grouped at the lower left corner. There are distinctions between them, but less than there are among the African groups. The current (a key word, as which people go into what race has changed a lot in the recent past) social grouping of races would have us believe that the small purple group hanging off the end is one race, the pinkish group next to it is another race, the red group next to that is another one, the small green group next to those is maybe separate or maybe a subset of one of the others depending on who you ask, and then all the other groups are classified as "black." This pretty clearly makes no sense if you're trying to classify groups genetically. Why should that yellow group sticking way up from the rest in the top right corner be lumped in with so many other groups?
        dilap 9y ago
        Yeah, that totally makes sense to me. And getting back to your original point, some of the modern sense of race is pretty unsophisticated, like "people with dark skin". That encompasses many distinct populations. But I think older racial thinking was actually more nuanced, and would consider many different attributes when categorizing "races", which maps pretty well to distinct populations, which maps pretty well to stuff like PCA. E.g., I suspect the thinking that went into something like like this https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/arts/design/races-of-mankind-sculptures-long-exiled-return-to-display-at-chicagos-field-museum.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/arts/design/races-of-mank... did not consider the entierty of Africa as one race.
- sampo 9y ago
  > “race” as most people understand it, and “race” as an objective, genetic categorization, are two extremely different things. Yet they seem to match in 99.86% of cases: "Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/
  - thaumasiotes 9y ago
    You can't go around relying on studies with only n = 3636.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    The fact that they’re analyzing African Americans and not anybody currently living in Africa makes me quite suspicious of the general applicability of these results. The former group has mixed a lot more than the latter as a consequence of their tragic history.
  - UncleMeat 9y ago
    The problem is that they are using the existing boundaries. We'd construct different labels if we started with genetics.
- monocasa 9y ago
  And with other social norms you see the opposite. People in Brazil as black as Obama, identifying as white if they come from money.
PurpleBoxDragon 9y ago
>This concept of a "race", in terms of genetics, makes sense for classification purposes, just like all taxonomical classifications of living things. I could classify computers based on the case they are in, and I would see some interesting trends given the extent that computer casing is decided by the people the build the computer and there is a very few entities who are responsible for the majority of computers. But does it really make sense to use it when you can compare it based on other factors and combinations of factors, like the internal hardware, manufacturer, and year made? Race is extremely oversimplified and groups too many people together, and comes with a lot of historical baggage in not just its usage, but the ways we considered certain groups members of certain races. I think humans can be grouped based on common genetics, but race focuses too much on certain phenotypes instead of being based on overall genotypes. Instead of looking at European or African descent, what about descent of historical population groups? Are groups from northern Africa closer to those from southern Europe or Southern Africa? Groups that share phenotypes are likely to have similar genotypes on average than those who don't, but why depend on this when we now have access to the genotypes?

mikeash 9y ago

You hint at this, but I think it’s worth explicitly mentioning that “race” as most people understand it, and “race” as an objective, genetic categorization, are two extremely different things. Examples: there is more genetic diversity among Africans (and thus ought to be more races among them) than in the rest of the world combined. A large number of “African Americans” have more European ancestry than African. The previous President was almost always referred to as “black” even though his mother was white, echoing the old “one drop” rules.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dilap 9y ago
Is that true? My understanding is that objective categorizations end up matching traditional categories pretty closely, e.g., http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2010/08/connect-dots.html http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2010/08/connect-dots.html
- mikeash 9y ago
  Do you have something that explains that? The paper is paywalled and I don’t know what to make of the graphic. The examples I gave should be sufficient to demonstrate that there are at least major discrepancies between the two.
  - dilap 9y ago
    It's a popular topic on Hsu's blog. Here's a few earlier posts that dig in more: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2007/01/metric-on-space-of-genomes-and.html http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2007/01/metric-on-space-of-geno... http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2007/06/its-all-in-clusters.html http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2007/06/its-all-in-clusters.htm... (I'm not an expert, and my opinion is formed from following that blog.) In terms of your example, I'm not sure what "there is more genetic diversity among Africans" means. What is the measure of diversity here? Why would we necessarily expect that measure to mean "more races"? (I didn't downvote you, by the way. Not sure why so many people on HN seem to enjoy downvoting any discussion on certain topic. :/.)
    - mikeash 9y ago
      Thank you, I think I get it now that I've read through those. I think that graphic illustrates what I'm saying fairly well. The non-African populations in the graphic are all grouped at the lower left corner. There are distinctions between them, but less than there are among the African groups. The current (a key word, as which people go into what race has changed a lot in the recent past) social grouping of races would have us believe that the small purple group hanging off the end is one race, the pinkish group next to it is another race, the red group next to that is another one, the small green group next to those is maybe separate or maybe a subset of one of the others depending on who you ask, and then all the other groups are classified as "black." This pretty clearly makes no sense if you're trying to classify groups genetically. Why should that yellow group sticking way up from the rest in the top right corner be lumped in with so many other groups?
      - dilap 9y ago
        Yeah, that totally makes sense to me. And getting back to your original point, some of the modern sense of race is pretty unsophisticated, like "people with dark skin". That encompasses many distinct populations. But I think older racial thinking was actually more nuanced, and would consider many different attributes when categorizing "races", which maps pretty well to distinct populations, which maps pretty well to stuff like PCA. E.g., I suspect the thinking that went into something like like this https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/arts/design/races-of-mankind-sculptures-long-exiled-return-to-display-at-chicagos-field-museum.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/21/arts/design/races-of-mank... did not consider the entierty of Africa as one race.
sampo 9y ago
> “race” as most people understand it, and “race” as an objective, genetic categorization, are two extremely different things. Yet they seem to match in 99.86% of cases: "Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  You can't go around relying on studies with only n = 3636.
- mikeash 9y ago
  The fact that they’re analyzing African Americans and not anybody currently living in Africa makes me quite suspicious of the general applicability of these results. The former group has mixed a lot more than the latter as a consequence of their tragic history.
- UncleMeat 9y ago
  The problem is that they are using the existing boundaries. We'd construct different labels if we started with genetics.
monocasa 9y ago
And with other social norms you see the opposite. People in Brazil as black as Obama, identifying as white if they come from money.

PurpleBoxDragon 9y ago

>This concept of a "race", in terms of genetics, makes sense for classification purposes, just like all taxonomical classifications of living things. I could classify computers based on the case they are in, and I would see some interesting trends given the extent that computer casing is decided by the people the build the computer and there is a very few entities who are responsible for the majority of computers. But does it really make sense to use it when you can compare it based on other factors and combinations of factors, like the internal hardware, manufacturer, and year made? Race is extremely oversimplified and groups too many people together, and comes with a lot of historical baggage in not just its usage, but the ways we considered certain groups members of certain races. I think humans can be grouped based on common genetics, but race focuses too much on certain phenotypes instead of being based on overall genotypes. Instead of looking at European or African descent, what about descent of historical population groups? Are groups from northern Africa closer to those from southern Europe or Southern Africa? Groups that share phenotypes are likely to have similar genotypes on average than those who don't, but why depend on this when we now have access to the genotypes?