11 ms·

"behavioural genetics" and something else I will not even talk about for fear of being hunted and bullied by an angry mob on the internet. These topics are so s

by aikah 8y ago

"behavioural genetics" and something else I will not even talk about for fear of being hunted and bullied by an angry mob on the internet. These topics are so sensitive because of the current political climate that they are literally career suicide for any western scientist. It has become way too easy to bully people into submission with tools such as Twitter, but not only, too easy to create harassment brigades against anybody over manufactured outrage.

SolaceQuantum 8y ago
Do you have evidence of your claim that "These topics are so sensitive because of the current political climate that they are literally career suicide for any western scientist."? For example, an investigative piece similar to the one here, except about behavioral genetics?
- ddorian43 8y ago
  See anyone who has touched "differences of iq between races".
  - nathan_long 8y ago
    What, genetically, is a race?
    - zzocn 8y ago
      Whether you are white or black or have epicanthic fold or stuff like that is 100% encoded in your genes. Someone saying "in terms of IQ, asians > whites > blacks", which is easily provable, will get in big trouble.
      - bryanlarsen 8y ago
        There is significantly more genetic variety in the single black "race" than all others put together. You could try dividing blacks into three or twelve different races but those lines are quite difficult to draw. Any statement which considers black a single race and white and Oriental distinct is automatically suspect.
        ddorian43 8y ago
        Can you compare them after you split them ? Or are you saying you can't even compare them ? Can you compare "black races" with "asian races" ?
        nathan_long 8y ago
        No. Go look at pictures of Melanesians. Are they "black"? Yet: > Among Templeton's conclusions: there is more genetic similarity between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans and between Europeans and Melanesians, inhabitants of islands northeast of Australia, than there is between Africans and Melanesians. Yet, sub-Saharan Africans and Melanesians share dark skin, hair texture and cranial-facial features, traits commonly used to classify people into races. According to Templeton, this example shows that "racial traits" are grossly incompatible with overall genetic differences between human populations. https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/1998-10/WUiS-GSRD-071098.php https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/1998-10/WUiS-GSRD-07...
        jniedrauer 8y ago
        I'm not a geneticist or an anthropologist, but by appearance alone, it seems like there is a much larger genetic difference between the Tutsi and the Pygmies than there is between Chinese and Koreans. And these are two races from the same exact region. There are hundreds of "races" from Africa. It's a massive continent.
        fenomas 8y ago
        You can compare any groups you like, but only after you've decided who goes into which group. The point being made here is that with race, that decision is subjective, and heavily influenced by various social factors unrelated to people's genetics and so forth.
        AnthonyMouse 8y ago
        > There is significantly more genetic variety in the single black "race" than all others put together. You could try dividing blacks into three or twelve different races but those lines are quite difficult to draw. Not only that, people want to continue using the existing (extremely flawed) categories, and that's where it leads you to problems. "More genetic variety in a single race than between races" is a great argument for why you shouldn't discriminate based on race -- even if the mean for some "race" is higher or lower, that doesn't tell you much about the individual before you. But it does tell you something about aggregate statistics. When you discover that some "race" is underrepresented in some field, it's completely possible that a major cause is that the median in that arbitrarily defined racial category is below the median in another arbitrarily defined racial category. Which can be true even when a significant minority in the worse off racial category is above the median in the better off racial category -- which minority constitute most of the people of that "race" who are represented in that field. Ideally the solution is to recognize "race" as a garbage category with no scientific basis and stop using it for anything, ever again. But that is where politics gets in the way, because people have built their political coalitions around the flawed concept that categorization based on race is anything more than an error.
      - llamaz 8y ago
        IQ itself is not even close to science in the sense of physics, chemistry, or even biology. Psychology as a whole is disreputable, literally half its studies fail to replicate. You might as well flip a coin. Sure, IQ is the best that we have. But it's terrible.
        barry-cotter 8y ago
        IQ and the rest of psychometrics replicates, as does personality psychology. Massive sample sizes, people strongly motivated to get things right and generations of intelligent people trying to prove them wrong, many of whom have gone into psychometrics themselves have ensured that psychometrics has very sound backing. Saying psychology as a whole is disreputable is just anti-intellectual know nothingism. The divide between psychophysics (the study of perception) and neuroscience is as great as that between social psychology and sociology, small. Trying to denounce all of psychology by association with social psychology just betrays ignorance. The same applies to many, many papers in the exact sciences. > In cancer science, many “discoveries” don’t hold up > During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53" landmark" publications--papers in top journals, from reputable labs--for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development. Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. He described his findings in a commentary piece published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. http://medicalexposedownloads.com/PDF/Cancer%20science%20Research%20found%20to%20be%20fraudulent.pdf http://medicalexposedownloads.com/PDF/Cancer%20science%20Res...
        llamaz 8y ago
        https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/half-the-time--psychology-results-not-reproducible--study-65117 https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/half-the-time--ps...
      - nathan_long 8y ago
        > Templeton used the same strategy to try to identify race in human populations that evolutionary and population biologists use for non-human species, from salamanders to chimpanzees. He treated human populations as if they were non-human populations. > "I'm not saying these results don't recognize genetic differences among human populations," he cautions. "There are differences, but they don't define historical lineages that have persisted for a long time. The point is, for race to have any scientific validity and integrity it has to have generality beyond any one species. If it doesn't, the concept is meaningless." > ... > Among Templeton's conclusions: there is more genetic similarity between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans and between Europeans and Melanesians, inhabitants of islands northeast of Australia, than there is between Africans and Melanesians. Yet, sub-Saharan Africans and Melanesians share dark skin, hair texture and cranial-facial features, traits commonly used to classify people into races. According to Templeton, this example shows that "racial traits" are grossly incompatible with overall genetic differences between human populations. https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/1998-10/WUiS-GSRD-071098.php https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/1998-10/WUiS-GSRD-07...
      - fenomas 8y ago
        > Whether you are white or black or have epicanthic fold or stuff like that is 100% encoded in your genes. Sure, but that doesn't mean your race is. Race is a subjective classification based on objective characteristics.
        nathan_long 8y ago
        > Race is a subjective classification based on objective characteristics. Perhaps more subjective than you think? Please read about the "one drop rule".
        fenomas 8y ago
        I am familiar with it, and I have no idea what you're trying to suggest.
    - Maximus9000 8y ago
      An ethnic grouping (not necessarily skin color). There was a movement in the 90s to get rid of the word "race" because scientists said all humans are basically the same. However, that movement has dwindled because we are discovering some important differences between ethnic groups. Such as: * Blacks are more sensitive to salt * Blacks are at a greater risk of glaucoma * etc
      - nathan_long 8y ago
        I have also heard of medical examples like that. However, this article argues that generalizations based on apparent racial characteristics are medically unreliable. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-construct-scientists-argue/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-... > Yudell said that modern genetics research is operating in a paradox, which is that race is understood to be a useful tool to elucidate human genetic diversity, but on the other hand, race is also understood to be a poorly defined marker of that diversity and an imprecise proxy for the relationship between ancestry and genetics. > ... > "What the study of complete genomes from different parts of the world has shown is that even between Africa and Europe, for example, there is not a single absolute genetic difference, meaning no single variant where all Africans have one variant and all Europeans another one, even when recent migration is disregarded," Pääbo told Live Science. "It is all a question of differences in how frequent different variants are on different continents and in different regions." > In one example that demonstrated genetic differences were not fixed along racial lines, the full genomes of James Watson and Craig Venter, two famous American scientists of European ancestry, were compared to that of a Korean scientist, Seong-Jin Kim. It turned out that Watson (who, ironically, became ostracized in the scientific community after making racist remarks) and Venter shared fewer variations in their genetic sequences than they each shared with Kim. > ... > "If you make clinical predictions based on somebody's race, you're going to be wrong a good chunk of the time," Yudell told Live Science. In the paper, he and his colleagues used the example of cystic fibrosis, which is underdiagnosed in people of African ancestry because it is thought of as a "white" disease.
      - mcv 8y ago
        Humans are not "basically the same" but humans are also not easily divided into a couple of genetically separate races. Many black Americans, for example, have white ancestors. And black Africans are genetically far more diverse than the entire rest of mankind put together. There are people with every possible skin colour between black and white. Our insistence on drawing a handful of arbitrary lines between them is cultural, and not based on a clear genetic separation. That said, skin colour does have some physiological impact: darker skin blocks the impact of the sun on our skin, which is great for preventing sunburn (and skin cancer, I think?), but reduces the amount of vitamin D our skin creates, and vitamin D deficiency can have an impact on all sorts of things (no idea if glaucoma is one of them). That makes it a trait, though, not a race.
    - barry-cotter 8y ago
      One plausible candidate is which continent a particular individual’s ancestors came from. That’s something that can be tested for with relative ease. > Ancestry informative marker sets for determining continental origin and admixture proportions in common populations in America > ... A comprehensive set of 128 AIMs and subsets as small as 24 AIMs are shown to be useful tools for ascertaining the origin of subjects from particular continents, and to correct for population stratification in admixed population sample sets. As population genetics becomes more advanced we will become able to distinguish ever smaller ancestry ancestry groups. For example if you don’t try to identify Continental population ancestry, just use k means clustering to divide humans into clusters based on similarity the continental groups arise naturally. > Genetic Structure of Human Populations > Genetic Structure of Human Populations Noah A. Rosenberg,1* Jonathan K. Pritchard,2 James L. Weber,3 Howard M. Cann,4 Kenneth K. Kidd,5 Lev A. Zhivotovsky,6 Marcus W. Feldman7 We studied human population structure using genotypes at 377 autosomal microsatellite loci in 1056 individuals from 52 populations. Within-population differences among individuals account for 93 to 95% of genetic variation; differences among major groups constitute only 3 to 5%. Nevertheless, without using prior information about the origins of individuals, we identified six main genetic clusters, five of which correspond to major geographic regions, and subclusters that often correspond to individual populations. General agreement of genetic and predefined populations suggests that self-reported ancestry can facilitate assessments of epidemiological risks but does not obviate the need to use genetic information in genetic association studies. http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~huatang/gene244/readings/Science%202002%20Rosenberg.pdf http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~huatang/gene244/readings/Sci...
      - nathan_long 8y ago
        A genetic test to see whether someone has ancestry from Melenasia or Sudan or Scotland is likely to give a different result than casual visual classification. The latter is what we commonly call "race".
        barry-cotter 8y ago
        I can tell the difference between German and Irish people at better than chance and you think people can’t tell the difference between Melanesians, Caucasians and Sub Saharan Africans? Bone structure, skin tone, hair colour and hair texture don’t give as much information as a whole genome sequence but telling the difference between an East Asian and a West Eurasian isn’t rocket surgery. By the same token it’s not hard to tell the difference between an Ethiopian and a Nigerian, or a Swede and a Spaniard, on average.
  - Emma_Goldman 8y ago
    Natural selection acts to increase the fitness of a species relative to its environment. In the human case 'race' is a misnomer. It simply refers to certain features of humans' external appearance, namely melanin. But this does not track any distinct genetic community, which primarily changes as a function of the total sum of environmental pressures, and not just in proportion to UV radiation (i.e. as is true of melanin). It is difficult to take anyone seriously who uses race as a meaningful biological category.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - HeadsUpHigh 8y ago
      Race is a meaningful medical category since it appears that certain diseases that have a genetic background are more common on some races than others. So it's not a biological race in the sense that you have different genes but the different variations that appear are important( an example is that esophagus cancer is many times more common on Chinese people compared to Western people, a trend that is maintained on immigrants).
      - Emma_Goldman 8y ago
        Yes but in those cases the role of race is not causal but correlative. It just happens that because more people classified as part of one race have evolved in an environment that has led to medically significant genetic differences from other humans, that those genetic differences correlate with 'race'. But race has nothing to do with it whatsoever. We only use race to speak about statistical medical populations because we lack more precise data about biological populations. This itself is an artefact of racism, i.e. the fact that we classify people according to their melanin, and make this into an important part of society, including census and medical data. Hopefully one of the upshots of the genomic revolution will be to create standardised genetic tests that do away with the need for such crude proxies.
        HeadsUpHigh 8y ago
  - jcranberry 8y ago
    IQ is a terrible example. It can be trained, with some examples of increases of up to 30 points. It regresses to the mean. Correlation between IQ of parents and children is lower at birth and increases up until around 18 (Wilson Effect). At younger influences it is strongly influenced by your environment. And not too long ago it was found that all the genes associated with IQ were false positives.
  - jayd16 8y ago
    The conflict here is one side thinks this is some kind of political correctness scheme when in reality, IQ and race are just terribly unscientific social constructs. You'll get much less push back from something like "genetic marker found to influence spatial thinking in young children.
    - ColanR 8y ago
      I think general terms are used frequently when having a broad discussion. But, to grant your Argumentum ad dictionarium, it seems like even here (considering the downvotes) the point parent was making still stands. People don't like discussing the connection between "genetic heritage" and "commonly used markers of general intelligence".
    - mywittyname 8y ago
      I think the problem is that people conflate race and genetics. Race is much more of a socio-economic marker than a genetic one. When race is correlated with some condition, it's important to first correct for socio-economic status, then environmental factors, then look at potential genetic factors. Since race is a much stronger proxy for the former than the latter.
      - jayd16 8y ago
        Right. Leave the racial correlations to the sociologists. Its misleading and needlessly distracting to bring race into a genetics lab.
  - sattoshi 8y ago
    There is this weird phenomena which can been from the replies to this comment. I can easily tell someone’s race by looking at them and I can make rough rankings of people’s intelligence after knowing them for a while. But the scientist insists that I can’t. Instead they tell me that race doesn’t exist and “what is intelligence anyways?” These are distractions.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Consultant32452 8y ago
If you say the wrong-think loud enough, Twitter will be the least of your worries. When the credit card companies and banks start refusing to do business with you, you're completely lost in modern society. This has already happened for some people.
- bluntfang 8y ago
  could you point to some documentation on this please?
  - Consultant32452 8y ago
    I know almost NOTHING about the people mentioned below. They're just names that I happened to catch in the news about their accounts being closed or they came up in a google search I just did. I'm certainly not implying support for them or their ideas. Some comic creator https://boundingintocomics.com/2019/02/21/chase-bank-shuts-down-lady-alchemy-creator-and-trump-supporter-martina-markotas-bank-account/ https://boundingintocomics.com/2019/02/21/chase-bank-shuts-d... Some Proud Boys leader https://bigleaguepolitics.com/chase-bank-shuts-down-proud-boys-leaders-personal-bank-account/ https://bigleaguepolitics.com/chase-bank-shuts-down-proud-bo... In his most recent appearance on Joe Rogan, Alex Jones reported that he had an excellent credit rating and had several of his accounts closed. This is a statement of fact that, if untrue, the banks could sue for defamation. So it's likely true. Paypal (bankish) has gone after "hate groups" https://www.foxnews.com/tech/conservatives-call-for-paypal-boycott-after-ceo-admits-splc-helps-ban-users https://www.foxnews.com/tech/conservatives-call-for-paypal-b... Mastercard banned Robert Spencer (white supremacist) https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/08/patreon-and-mastercard-ban-robert-spencer-without-explanation https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/08/patreon-and-mastercard-ba...
    - bluntfang 8y ago
      So they are banning terrorists who have possible money laundering schemes. I'm OK with this.
      - 8y ago

by aikah 8y ago

SolaceQuantum 8y ago

Do you have evidence of your claim that "These topics are so sensitive because of the current political climate that they are literally career suicide for any western scientist."? For example, an investigative piece similar to the one here, except about behavioral genetics?

ddorian43 8y ago
See anyone who has touched "differences of iq between races".
- nathan_long 8y ago
  What, genetically, is a race?
  - zzocn 8y ago
    Whether you are white or black or have epicanthic fold or stuff like that is 100% encoded in your genes. Someone saying "in terms of IQ, asians > whites > blacks", which is easily provable, will get in big trouble.
    - bryanlarsen 8y ago
      There is significantly more genetic variety in the single black "race" than all others put together. You could try dividing blacks into three or twelve different races but those lines are quite difficult to draw. Any statement which considers black a single race and white and Oriental distinct is automatically suspect.
      - ddorian43 8y ago
        Can you compare them after you split them ? Or are you saying you can't even compare them ? Can you compare "black races" with "asian races" ?
        nathan_long 8y ago
        No. Go look at pictures of Melanesians. Are they "black"? Yet: > Among Templeton's conclusions: there is more genetic similarity between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans and between Europeans and Melanesians, inhabitants of islands northeast of Australia, than there is between Africans and Melanesians. Yet, sub-Saharan Africans and Melanesians share dark skin, hair texture and cranial-facial features, traits commonly used to classify people into races. According to Templeton, this example shows that "racial traits" are grossly incompatible with overall genetic differences between human populations. https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/1998-10/WUiS-GSRD-071098.php https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/1998-10/WUiS-GSRD-07...
        jniedrauer 8y ago
        I'm not a geneticist or an anthropologist, but by appearance alone, it seems like there is a much larger genetic difference between the Tutsi and the Pygmies than there is between Chinese and Koreans. And these are two races from the same exact region. There are hundreds of "races" from Africa. It's a massive continent.
        fenomas 8y ago
        You can compare any groups you like, but only after you've decided who goes into which group. The point being made here is that with race, that decision is subjective, and heavily influenced by various social factors unrelated to people's genetics and so forth.
      - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
        > There is significantly more genetic variety in the single black "race" than all others put together. You could try dividing blacks into three or twelve different races but those lines are quite difficult to draw. Not only that, people want to continue using the existing (extremely flawed) categories, and that's where it leads you to problems. "More genetic variety in a single race than between races" is a great argument for why you shouldn't discriminate based on race -- even if the mean for some "race" is higher or lower, that doesn't tell you much about the individual before you. But it does tell you something about aggregate statistics. When you discover that some "race" is underrepresented in some field, it's completely possible that a major cause is that the median in that arbitrarily defined racial category is below the median in another arbitrarily defined racial category. Which can be true even when a significant minority in the worse off racial category is above the median in the better off racial category -- which minority constitute most of the people of that "race" who are represented in that field. Ideally the solution is to recognize "race" as a garbage category with no scientific basis and stop using it for anything, ever again. But that is where politics gets in the way, because people have built their political coalitions around the flawed concept that categorization based on race is anything more than an error.
    - llamaz 8y ago
      IQ itself is not even close to science in the sense of physics, chemistry, or even biology. Psychology as a whole is disreputable, literally half its studies fail to replicate. You might as well flip a coin. Sure, IQ is the best that we have. But it's terrible.
      - barry-cotter 8y ago
        IQ and the rest of psychometrics replicates, as does personality psychology. Massive sample sizes, people strongly motivated to get things right and generations of intelligent people trying to prove them wrong, many of whom have gone into psychometrics themselves have ensured that psychometrics has very sound backing. Saying psychology as a whole is disreputable is just anti-intellectual know nothingism. The divide between psychophysics (the study of perception) and neuroscience is as great as that between social psychology and sociology, small. Trying to denounce all of psychology by association with social psychology just betrays ignorance. The same applies to many, many papers in the exact sciences. > In cancer science, many “discoveries” don’t hold up > During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53" landmark" publications--papers in top journals, from reputable labs--for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development. Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated. He described his findings in a commentary piece published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. http://medicalexposedownloads.com/PDF/Cancer%20science%20Research%20found%20to%20be%20fraudulent.pdf http://medicalexposedownloads.com/PDF/Cancer%20science%20Res...
        llamaz 8y ago
        https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/half-the-time--psychology-results-not-reproducible--study-65117 https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/half-the-time--ps...
    - nathan_long 8y ago
      > Templeton used the same strategy to try to identify race in human populations that evolutionary and population biologists use for non-human species, from salamanders to chimpanzees. He treated human populations as if they were non-human populations. > "I'm not saying these results don't recognize genetic differences among human populations," he cautions. "There are differences, but they don't define historical lineages that have persisted for a long time. The point is, for race to have any scientific validity and integrity it has to have generality beyond any one species. If it doesn't, the concept is meaningless." > ... > Among Templeton's conclusions: there is more genetic similarity between Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans and between Europeans and Melanesians, inhabitants of islands northeast of Australia, than there is between Africans and Melanesians. Yet, sub-Saharan Africans and Melanesians share dark skin, hair texture and cranial-facial features, traits commonly used to classify people into races. According to Templeton, this example shows that "racial traits" are grossly incompatible with overall genetic differences between human populations. https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/1998-10/WUiS-GSRD-071098.php https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/1998-10/WUiS-GSRD-07...
    - fenomas 8y ago
      > Whether you are white or black or have epicanthic fold or stuff like that is 100% encoded in your genes. Sure, but that doesn't mean your race is. Race is a subjective classification based on objective characteristics.
      - nathan_long 8y ago
        > Race is a subjective classification based on objective characteristics. Perhaps more subjective than you think? Please read about the "one drop rule".
        fenomas 8y ago
        I am familiar with it, and I have no idea what you're trying to suggest.
  - Maximus9000 8y ago
    An ethnic grouping (not necessarily skin color). There was a movement in the 90s to get rid of the word "race" because scientists said all humans are basically the same. However, that movement has dwindled because we are discovering some important differences between ethnic groups. Such as: * Blacks are more sensitive to salt * Blacks are at a greater risk of glaucoma * etc
    - nathan_long 8y ago
      I have also heard of medical examples like that. However, this article argues that generalizations based on apparent racial characteristics are medically unreliable. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-construct-scientists-argue/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-... > Yudell said that modern genetics research is operating in a paradox, which is that race is understood to be a useful tool to elucidate human genetic diversity, but on the other hand, race is also understood to be a poorly defined marker of that diversity and an imprecise proxy for the relationship between ancestry and genetics. > ... > "What the study of complete genomes from different parts of the world has shown is that even between Africa and Europe, for example, there is not a single absolute genetic difference, meaning no single variant where all Africans have one variant and all Europeans another one, even when recent migration is disregarded," Pääbo told Live Science. "It is all a question of differences in how frequent different variants are on different continents and in different regions." > In one example that demonstrated genetic differences were not fixed along racial lines, the full genomes of James Watson and Craig Venter, two famous American scientists of European ancestry, were compared to that of a Korean scientist, Seong-Jin Kim. It turned out that Watson (who, ironically, became ostracized in the scientific community after making racist remarks) and Venter shared fewer variations in their genetic sequences than they each shared with Kim. > ... > "If you make clinical predictions based on somebody's race, you're going to be wrong a good chunk of the time," Yudell told Live Science. In the paper, he and his colleagues used the example of cystic fibrosis, which is underdiagnosed in people of African ancestry because it is thought of as a "white" disease.
    - mcv 8y ago
      Humans are not "basically the same" but humans are also not easily divided into a couple of genetically separate races. Many black Americans, for example, have white ancestors. And black Africans are genetically far more diverse than the entire rest of mankind put together. There are people with every possible skin colour between black and white. Our insistence on drawing a handful of arbitrary lines between them is cultural, and not based on a clear genetic separation. That said, skin colour does have some physiological impact: darker skin blocks the impact of the sun on our skin, which is great for preventing sunburn (and skin cancer, I think?), but reduces the amount of vitamin D our skin creates, and vitamin D deficiency can have an impact on all sorts of things (no idea if glaucoma is one of them). That makes it a trait, though, not a race.
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    One plausible candidate is which continent a particular individual’s ancestors came from. That’s something that can be tested for with relative ease. > Ancestry informative marker sets for determining continental origin and admixture proportions in common populations in America > ... A comprehensive set of 128 AIMs and subsets as small as 24 AIMs are shown to be useful tools for ascertaining the origin of subjects from particular continents, and to correct for population stratification in admixed population sample sets. As population genetics becomes more advanced we will become able to distinguish ever smaller ancestry ancestry groups. For example if you don’t try to identify Continental population ancestry, just use k means clustering to divide humans into clusters based on similarity the continental groups arise naturally. > Genetic Structure of Human Populations > Genetic Structure of Human Populations Noah A. Rosenberg,1* Jonathan K. Pritchard,2 James L. Weber,3 Howard M. Cann,4 Kenneth K. Kidd,5 Lev A. Zhivotovsky,6 Marcus W. Feldman7 We studied human population structure using genotypes at 377 autosomal microsatellite loci in 1056 individuals from 52 populations. Within-population differences among individuals account for 93 to 95% of genetic variation; differences among major groups constitute only 3 to 5%. Nevertheless, without using prior information about the origins of individuals, we identified six main genetic clusters, five of which correspond to major geographic regions, and subclusters that often correspond to individual populations. General agreement of genetic and predefined populations suggests that self-reported ancestry can facilitate assessments of epidemiological risks but does not obviate the need to use genetic information in genetic association studies. http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~huatang/gene244/readings/Science%202002%20Rosenberg.pdf http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~huatang/gene244/readings/Sci...
    - nathan_long 8y ago
      A genetic test to see whether someone has ancestry from Melenasia or Sudan or Scotland is likely to give a different result than casual visual classification. The latter is what we commonly call "race".
      - barry-cotter 8y ago
        I can tell the difference between German and Irish people at better than chance and you think people can’t tell the difference between Melanesians, Caucasians and Sub Saharan Africans? Bone structure, skin tone, hair colour and hair texture don’t give as much information as a whole genome sequence but telling the difference between an East Asian and a West Eurasian isn’t rocket surgery. By the same token it’s not hard to tell the difference between an Ethiopian and a Nigerian, or a Swede and a Spaniard, on average.
- Emma_Goldman 8y ago
  Natural selection acts to increase the fitness of a species relative to its environment. In the human case 'race' is a misnomer. It simply refers to certain features of humans' external appearance, namely melanin. But this does not track any distinct genetic community, which primarily changes as a function of the total sum of environmental pressures, and not just in proportion to UV radiation (i.e. as is true of melanin). It is difficult to take anyone seriously who uses race as a meaningful biological category.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - HeadsUpHigh 8y ago
    Race is a meaningful medical category since it appears that certain diseases that have a genetic background are more common on some races than others. So it's not a biological race in the sense that you have different genes but the different variations that appear are important( an example is that esophagus cancer is many times more common on Chinese people compared to Western people, a trend that is maintained on immigrants).
    - Emma_Goldman 8y ago
      Yes but in those cases the role of race is not causal but correlative. It just happens that because more people classified as part of one race have evolved in an environment that has led to medically significant genetic differences from other humans, that those genetic differences correlate with 'race'. But race has nothing to do with it whatsoever. We only use race to speak about statistical medical populations because we lack more precise data about biological populations. This itself is an artefact of racism, i.e. the fact that we classify people according to their melanin, and make this into an important part of society, including census and medical data. Hopefully one of the upshots of the genomic revolution will be to create standardised genetic tests that do away with the need for such crude proxies.
      - HeadsUpHigh 8y ago
- jcranberry 8y ago
  IQ is a terrible example. It can be trained, with some examples of increases of up to 30 points. It regresses to the mean. Correlation between IQ of parents and children is lower at birth and increases up until around 18 (Wilson Effect). At younger influences it is strongly influenced by your environment. And not too long ago it was found that all the genes associated with IQ were false positives.
- jayd16 8y ago
  The conflict here is one side thinks this is some kind of political correctness scheme when in reality, IQ and race are just terribly unscientific social constructs. You'll get much less push back from something like "genetic marker found to influence spatial thinking in young children.
  - ColanR 8y ago
    I think general terms are used frequently when having a broad discussion. But, to grant your Argumentum ad dictionarium, it seems like even here (considering the downvotes) the point parent was making still stands. People don't like discussing the connection between "genetic heritage" and "commonly used markers of general intelligence".
  - mywittyname 8y ago
    I think the problem is that people conflate race and genetics. Race is much more of a socio-economic marker than a genetic one. When race is correlated with some condition, it's important to first correct for socio-economic status, then environmental factors, then look at potential genetic factors. Since race is a much stronger proxy for the former than the latter.
    - jayd16 8y ago
      Right. Leave the racial correlations to the sociologists. Its misleading and needlessly distracting to bring race into a genetics lab.
- sattoshi 8y ago
  There is this weird phenomena which can been from the replies to this comment. I can easily tell someone’s race by looking at them and I can make rough rankings of people’s intelligence after knowing them for a while. But the scientist insists that I can’t. Instead they tell me that race doesn’t exist and “what is intelligence anyways?” These are distractions.

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Consultant32452 8y ago

If you say the wrong-think loud enough, Twitter will be the least of your worries. When the credit card companies and banks start refusing to do business with you, you're completely lost in modern society. This has already happened for some people.

bluntfang 8y ago
could you point to some documentation on this please?
- Consultant32452 8y ago
  I know almost NOTHING about the people mentioned below. They're just names that I happened to catch in the news about their accounts being closed or they came up in a google search I just did. I'm certainly not implying support for them or their ideas. Some comic creator https://boundingintocomics.com/2019/02/21/chase-bank-shuts-down-lady-alchemy-creator-and-trump-supporter-martina-markotas-bank-account/ https://boundingintocomics.com/2019/02/21/chase-bank-shuts-d... Some Proud Boys leader https://bigleaguepolitics.com/chase-bank-shuts-down-proud-boys-leaders-personal-bank-account/ https://bigleaguepolitics.com/chase-bank-shuts-down-proud-bo... In his most recent appearance on Joe Rogan, Alex Jones reported that he had an excellent credit rating and had several of his accounts closed. This is a statement of fact that, if untrue, the banks could sue for defamation. So it's likely true. Paypal (bankish) has gone after "hate groups" https://www.foxnews.com/tech/conservatives-call-for-paypal-boycott-after-ceo-admits-splc-helps-ban-users https://www.foxnews.com/tech/conservatives-call-for-paypal-b... Mastercard banned Robert Spencer (white supremacist) https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/08/patreon-and-mastercard-ban-robert-spencer-without-explanation https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/08/patreon-and-mastercard-ba...
  - bluntfang 8y ago
    So they are banning terrorists who have possible money laundering schemes. I'm OK with this.
    - 8y ago