4 ms·

How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’

23 points by DamienB 9y ago

ak_yo 9y ago
This is an interesting argument but I think it fails to coherently restate what it means for race to be socially constructed. Nobody is denying that genetic differences between people exist and are important for health. They’re saying that reusing racial categorization schemes in genetics is scientifically ungrounded because these racial categories have no inherent biological content— they’re more like receptacles for political and social debate. It’s not clear what value it adds to use (e.g.) US Census racial categories in genetics research. The salience of racial identification changes over time and is deeply politicized (as the author notes). More sophisticated and granular categories that are actually based on genetics would be much more appropriate than trying to recuperate categories that weren’t developed for science.
- throwaway538 9y ago
  This is because phenotype is a good predictor of genotype and people are good at assessing someone's phenotype very quickly. I can usually tell roughly which European country someone is from by looking at their face. It doesn't work as well with different parts of Eastern Europe but you get the idea.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
nukeop 9y ago
No matter how much the society at large wants to tiptoe the subject, the concept of race has never fell into disuse wherever facts really matters, such as in healthcare or the legal system.
- pavlov 9y ago
  I don’t understand your examples. How does race affect medical treatment of an individual? Should people be treated differently in the eyes of the law depending on skin color?
  - throwaway538 9y ago
    Different disease prevalence. Different response to drugs. Jews for example more likely to have Tay Sachs disease. Sickle cell disease affects blacks disproportionately.
    - nostalgeek 9y ago
      > Jews for example more likely to have Tay Sachs disease. Sure but it's not because they practice Judaism. And since one can convert to judaism, I've never heard about someone who can convert his genes to "jew genes". > Sickle cell disease affects blacks disproportionately. Sure but it isn't necessary because their skin are dark, when you can find people from Sri Lanka or India who have a skin blacker than African people yet they don't have this disease prevalence. See what you are doing here? you are mixing up genetics which can be used to establish statistical facts about gene expressions, and semantics AKA social construct. And this sort of sophism can easily be exploited to make broad generalizations about the behavior of arbitrary racial groups you've established under pretense of science. That's why the notion of race for humans is completely absurd. What race are people living in Madagascar? most of them aren't negro looking, what race the Yemeni? the afghans? they don't look like Arabs...
      - nukeop 9y ago
        Judaism is not a race, being black means more than just a different skin color, you're intentionally trying to derail the discussion.
        nostalgeek 9y ago
        > Judaism is not a race, being black means more than just a different skin color, you're intentionally trying to derail the discussion. no I'm not. What does being black means then? and why bring "jews" into a discussion with race? If we're going to talk about race scientifically using these words, well you'd better have solid arguments as to why you use "jews" and "black" as race discriminant. I'd also like to talk about the fact that most European jews are convert from the medieval era and have very little to do with the "Semites" who lived in what is now Israel 2000 years ago. So what race are you talking about?
- zeth___ 9y ago
  Because race is a very good predictor of class in the US. Are you poor? Probably black. Are you in trouble with the legal system? Probably poor -> black. Can you afford good health care and preventive medicine? Probably not poor -> probably not black. Funnily enough this also explains why redneck whites are looked down on by everyone else.
montrose 9y ago
It's interesting to think that an article so reasonable, and so grounded in knowledge, would also get you called names if you posted it on Twitter. Empirically, this field would appear to be the one most likely to yield Galileos in our time. (As in Galileo's case, without any deliberate attempt on their part to be heretics, just by following the truth where their era's zealots don't want it to lead.)
- jcims 9y ago
  Interesting take on the Galileo angle. I always thought of him as anti-authoritarian, but I'm sure he was a bit of a pariah in many cultural circles as well.
- spamizbad 9y ago
  It's reasonable but also kind of.. straw-manny. Outside of a few crazy fringes, nobody is suggesting that its not "Politically Correct" to point out that certain races are carriers for various genetic disorders or disease risk factors. I've never heard of anybody calling someone racist if they said "People with African heritage can be carriers for sickle cell anemia." Likewise, I've never seen anyone called an anti-semite for pointing out that Jewish people can suffer from or be carriers for "founder effect" genetic disorders. If anything, there's a distinct social justice angle to recognizing minority population health concerns in medicine, so I'm actually kind of surprised things aren't tilting the other way: where the "anti-PC" crowd is angry that researchers aren't focused more on traits that apply to the broader human population, as opposed to the genetics of distinct minorities.
  - montrose 9y ago
    I think the strangeness may come from the fact that the author is thinking of things that genetic research either has discovered or will discover that would be more controversial, but he's being careful not to actually mention any of them.
    - spamizbad 9y ago
      Perhaps, but so far modern scientific discoveries have been fairly devastating towards the various hypotheses of "scientific racism." Just recently it's gotten to the point where some white supremacists are convinced the field if genetics is a Jewish conspiracy because they got their genes tested and... surprise... they're 5% non-white.
door3 9y ago
The problem with this kind of "gene-centered" social thinking is that the implication, almost always, is some sort of regressive or conservative politics about social problems and inequalities being a result of natural forces. A horrifying example of this is, for example, the book "A Natural History of Rape" which makes a biological deterministic argument that explains rape as a natural and evolutionarily selected-for behavior in men. Show me a controlled longitudinal study where (eg) men and women are raised in an identical environment, treated identically, and not even informed of the concept of gender. That doesn't exist, and never will exist. There are massive emergent cultural forces that make biology a pretty useless tool for doing sociology, much like chemistry studies the emergent properties of physics principles, but trying to account for emergent properties of atoms and molecules in terms of quantum mechanics is totally useless. Human societies should be studied on sociological terms, not biological ones. With even the smallest amount of effort, you can see that there are HUGE confounding factors that make any attempt to explain social outcomes biologically totally useless.

23 points by DamienB 9y ago

This is an interesting argument but I think it fails to coherently restate what it means for race to be socially constructed. Nobody is denying that genetic differences between people exist and are important for health. They’re saying that reusing racial categorization schemes in genetics is scientifically ungrounded because these racial categories have no inherent biological content— they’re more like receptacles for political and social debate. It’s not clear what value it adds to use (e.g.) US Census racial categories in genetics research. The salience of racial identification changes over time and is deeply politicized (as the author notes). More sophisticated and granular categories that are actually based on genetics would be much more appropriate than trying to recuperate categories that weren’t developed for science.

throwaway538 9y ago
This is because phenotype is a good predictor of genotype and people are good at assessing someone's phenotype very quickly. I can usually tell roughly which European country someone is from by looking at their face. It doesn't work as well with different parts of Eastern Europe but you get the idea.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

nukeop 9y ago

No matter how much the society at large wants to tiptoe the subject, the concept of race has never fell into disuse wherever facts really matters, such as in healthcare or the legal system.

pavlov 9y ago
I don’t understand your examples. How does race affect medical treatment of an individual? Should people be treated differently in the eyes of the law depending on skin color?
- throwaway538 9y ago
  Different disease prevalence. Different response to drugs. Jews for example more likely to have Tay Sachs disease. Sickle cell disease affects blacks disproportionately.
  - nostalgeek 9y ago
    > Jews for example more likely to have Tay Sachs disease. Sure but it's not because they practice Judaism. And since one can convert to judaism, I've never heard about someone who can convert his genes to "jew genes". > Sickle cell disease affects blacks disproportionately. Sure but it isn't necessary because their skin are dark, when you can find people from Sri Lanka or India who have a skin blacker than African people yet they don't have this disease prevalence. See what you are doing here? you are mixing up genetics which can be used to establish statistical facts about gene expressions, and semantics AKA social construct. And this sort of sophism can easily be exploited to make broad generalizations about the behavior of arbitrary racial groups you've established under pretense of science. That's why the notion of race for humans is completely absurd. What race are people living in Madagascar? most of them aren't negro looking, what race the Yemeni? the afghans? they don't look like Arabs...
    - nukeop 9y ago
      Judaism is not a race, being black means more than just a different skin color, you're intentionally trying to derail the discussion.
      - nostalgeek 9y ago
        > Judaism is not a race, being black means more than just a different skin color, you're intentionally trying to derail the discussion. no I'm not. What does being black means then? and why bring "jews" into a discussion with race? If we're going to talk about race scientifically using these words, well you'd better have solid arguments as to why you use "jews" and "black" as race discriminant. I'd also like to talk about the fact that most European jews are convert from the medieval era and have very little to do with the "Semites" who lived in what is now Israel 2000 years ago. So what race are you talking about?
zeth___ 9y ago
Because race is a very good predictor of class in the US. Are you poor? Probably black. Are you in trouble with the legal system? Probably poor -> black. Can you afford good health care and preventive medicine? Probably not poor -> probably not black. Funnily enough this also explains why redneck whites are looked down on by everyone else.

montrose 9y ago

It's interesting to think that an article so reasonable, and so grounded in knowledge, would also get you called names if you posted it on Twitter. Empirically, this field would appear to be the one most likely to yield Galileos in our time. (As in Galileo's case, without any deliberate attempt on their part to be heretics, just by following the truth where their era's zealots don't want it to lead.)

jcims 9y ago
Interesting take on the Galileo angle. I always thought of him as anti-authoritarian, but I'm sure he was a bit of a pariah in many cultural circles as well.
spamizbad 9y ago
It's reasonable but also kind of.. straw-manny. Outside of a few crazy fringes, nobody is suggesting that its not "Politically Correct" to point out that certain races are carriers for various genetic disorders or disease risk factors. I've never heard of anybody calling someone racist if they said "People with African heritage can be carriers for sickle cell anemia." Likewise, I've never seen anyone called an anti-semite for pointing out that Jewish people can suffer from or be carriers for "founder effect" genetic disorders. If anything, there's a distinct social justice angle to recognizing minority population health concerns in medicine, so I'm actually kind of surprised things aren't tilting the other way: where the "anti-PC" crowd is angry that researchers aren't focused more on traits that apply to the broader human population, as opposed to the genetics of distinct minorities.
- montrose 9y ago
  I think the strangeness may come from the fact that the author is thinking of things that genetic research either has discovered or will discover that would be more controversial, but he's being careful not to actually mention any of them.
  - spamizbad 9y ago
    Perhaps, but so far modern scientific discoveries have been fairly devastating towards the various hypotheses of "scientific racism." Just recently it's gotten to the point where some white supremacists are convinced the field if genetics is a Jewish conspiracy because they got their genes tested and... surprise... they're 5% non-white.

door3 9y ago

The problem with this kind of "gene-centered" social thinking is that the implication, almost always, is some sort of regressive or conservative politics about social problems and inequalities being a result of natural forces. A horrifying example of this is, for example, the book "A Natural History of Rape" which makes a biological deterministic argument that explains rape as a natural and evolutionarily selected-for behavior in men. Show me a controlled longitudinal study where (eg) men and women are raised in an identical environment, treated identically, and not even informed of the concept of gender. That doesn't exist, and never will exist. There are massive emergent cultural forces that make biology a pretty useless tool for doing sociology, much like chemistry studies the emergent properties of physics principles, but trying to account for emergent properties of atoms and molecules in terms of quantum mechanics is totally useless. Human societies should be studied on sociological terms, not biological ones. With even the smallest amount of effort, you can see that there are HUGE confounding factors that make any attempt to explain social outcomes biologically totally useless.