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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,

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.
JohnStrangeII 9y ago
While I agree with many things the authors says in this essay, the article unfortunately has an 'apologistic touch', so to say. The author starts by casually mentioning that six million jews were killed in the name of an ill-conceived and scientifically unsubstantiated race ideology, and then quickly turns to genetic issues and how they support certain differences in isolated populations. The problem with this way of laying things out is that it does not do justice to the often horrific ways 'race' and even well-justified, measurable differences between populations are handled in society. The word 'race' should not be used by anyone in any context any longer, because it has been misunderstood, ill-defined and systematically abused over and over. It would be irresponsible to attempt to reappropriate the term into scientific usage. Apart from that, differences in genetic populations exists just as differences in cultures exist, and I don't think anyone has ever denied that. Researchers need to be aware, though, that there is a bunch of bad human beings out there who will invariably draw the wrong conclusions from such research and advocate policies that are plain evil.

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.

JohnStrangeII 9y ago

While I agree with many things the authors says in this essay, the article unfortunately has an 'apologistic touch', so to say. The author starts by casually mentioning that six million jews were killed in the name of an ill-conceived and scientifically unsubstantiated race ideology, and then quickly turns to genetic issues and how they support certain differences in isolated populations. The problem with this way of laying things out is that it does not do justice to the often horrific ways 'race' and even well-justified, measurable differences between populations are handled in society. The word 'race' should not be used by anyone in any context any longer, because it has been misunderstood, ill-defined and systematically abused over and over. It would be irresponsible to attempt to reappropriate the term into scientific usage. Apart from that, differences in genetic populations exists just as differences in cultures exist, and I don't think anyone has ever denied that. Researchers need to be aware, though, that there is a bunch of bad human beings out there who will invariably draw the wrong conclusions from such research and advocate policies that are plain evil.