4 ms·
> As a group, King tells us, the Boas circle championed positions that many of us now take for granted: that categories of race and gender are a product of cult
by deogeo 7y ago
> As a group, King tells us, the Boas circle championed positions that many of us now take for granted: that categories of race and gender are a product of culture, rather than biology
This can be proven by applying PCA to the human genome. If races were a product of biology, you would expect to see clusters approximately corresponding to them. But as can be seen from [1], and especially from [2], no such clusters exist.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Principal_component_analysis_of_human_genetic_diversity https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Principal_compon...
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Individual-level_human_population_structure2.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Individual-level_hum...
- Hitton 7y agoI don't follow. When I look at [2] I clearly see clusters and they look like they correspond with race.
- hoseja 7y agoI don't either. Maybe you need to blind yourself first.
- twic 7y agoThere's a fun paper where the authors plot a rough map of Europe based on PCA of genetic variation: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2735096/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2735096/ Slovakia ends up in the wrong place, but other than that it's not bad!
- mjfisher 7y agoWhat a great example of the power of PCA! I absolutely love that you can give it nothing but a set of raw dimensional data, and it will give you back a set of axes that are (often) human interpretable. I remember the first time I did that for a set of children's ratings data, and got to see games/movies/books spontaneously spread themselves out along fairly clear age and gender lines. I often wonder what other novel applications it can have.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cat199 7y agoand yet there are still X and Y chromosomes.
- dang 7y ago"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- HeroOfAges 7y ago"and yet there are still X and Y chromosomes" Why did you feel the need to remind this member of Hackernews guidelines here? What about the grandparent comment did you construe as flamebait? *edited to make it clear which comment merited a reminder of posting guidelines
- dang 7y agoIt seemed like a clear entry into gender war, which is a familiar hop from race war, but definitely not what we want in HN threads.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ummonk 7y agoAre you blind? The only clusters that seem to significantly overlap with each other are South Asia and Mexican American, and you could probably distinguish those with a 3 axis PCA plot.