5 ms·

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.
    - pas 8y ago
      > 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. Sure, possible, in the sense of theoretically possible. But very unlikely as socioeconomic factors potentially dwarf all of the aggregate group differences.
      - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
        Sure. The issue is the difference that remains even after you [at least attempt to] control for socioeconomic and other factors.
    - nathan_long 8y ago
      > 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. It's possible, yes. It's also possible that perceptions of race influence the subjective decisions that drive those outcomes. How would you determine causality? Eg, you could try sending employers identical resumes with "black sounding" and "white sounding" names and measuring callback rates. This has been done: https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15/jalen-ross/black-name-resume-50-percent-less-likely-get-respo/ https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15...). There are likely many factors in racial disparities, but this appears to be one of them.
  - SamReidHughes 8y ago
    In America, black people descended from slaves are all mixed together. There are not distinct categories like there are in Africa.
- 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.

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.
  - pas 8y ago
    > 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. Sure, possible, in the sense of theoretically possible. But very unlikely as socioeconomic factors potentially dwarf all of the aggregate group differences.
    - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
      Sure. The issue is the difference that remains even after you [at least attempt to] control for socioeconomic and other factors.
  - nathan_long 8y ago
    > 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. It's possible, yes. It's also possible that perceptions of race influence the subjective decisions that drive those outcomes. How would you determine causality? Eg, you could try sending employers identical resumes with "black sounding" and "white sounding" names and measuring callback rates. This has been done: https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15/jalen-ross/black-name-resume-50-percent-less-likely-get-respo/ https://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15...). There are likely many factors in racial disparities, but this appears to be one of them.
- SamReidHughes 8y ago
  In America, black people descended from slaves are all mixed together. There are not distinct categories like there are in Africa.
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.