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Start with yourself perhaps. The pigeonholing of heritability studies with eugenicist policy is something laughable to everyone who isn't utterly beclouded by F

Start with yourself perhaps. The pigeonholing of heritability studies with eugenicist policy is something laughable to everyone who isn't utterly beclouded by FUD. And great job avoiding to refer to Noah Carl by name, because just imagine someone googling for it and actually checking up on the description ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Carl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Carl ).

scott_s 7y ago
> The pigeonholing of heritability studies with eugenicist policy Where does the author do this?
- dekhn 7y ago
  "As I found while writing my 2019 book Superior: The Return of Race Science, geneticists today rightly treat eugenics as a laughable proposition, and the concept of biological race — the belief that humans can be subdivided into distinct groups with meaningful differences between them — as easily debunked nonsens" Many studies cluster people with different genetic histories into groups with meaningful differences. This is important (for example) when treating people with different genetic histories for disease. AFAICT the article's author gets genetic history and social race mixed up, which does nothing to help their article's point.
  - throwaway6449 7y ago
    Race isn't well-defined. You can't just wave it away with "uhh some PCA/STRUCTURE plot yields clusters so race is real", that's not how popgen or phylogeny works. Nor can you get away with "butbut muh genetic diseases!" when these involve only a few genes that make up a tiny fraction of one's genome. Of course modern scientists in relevant fields know this, that's why race has been discontinued as a concept even though some people (old school doctors or taxonomists or pioneer fund recipients) haven't gotten, or perhaps don't want to get the memo.
- generationP 7y ago
  The author either treats it as inevitable that legitimate human biodiversity research will lead to heavy-handed eugenic policy, or pretends to do so for cheap rhetorical scoring. Try re-reading her argument without taking this causation for granted, and you'll see it doesn't hold up; she is blaming scientists -- and even claiming their science to be debunked -- for on political consequences that she is speculating their research will have.
xyzzyz 7y ago
Unlike Saini, Carl is a scientists who publishes science, while Saini is a journalist who published pseudoscientific drivel designed to push her agenda, which she blatantly admits in her Nature piece above. Real scientists like Carl, or, say, David Reich, recognize her garbage for what it is. She interviews him for her book, and is shocked to learn that the super star Harvard geneticist doesn’t share her absurd positions on biological origins of race, or lack thereof. Saini belongs to a group which in turn Reich calls out in his book for obfuscating, rather than illuminating the issue of the biological origin of correlations between ancestry and phenotypic traits different than the melanin levels. The best example is how Saini in her book completely uncritically and unironically uses Lewontin’s 1972 argument that there can be no significant differences between populations, because majority of variance is within group and not between groups. Bringing this up and not even discussing obvious counterarguments shows that it’s not science that’s being done, but rather agenda pushing. This is of course par for the course, as Lewontin himself was also quite open about the fact that for him, science is only a tool to push his view on how society should be run, and if science disagrees, so much worse for science.
- throwaway6449 7y ago
  Lol Carl is a hack and he got fired because of that. Reich didn't remotely say things racist wanted to hear. Meanwhile Saini's books got inputs and reviews from all prominent scientists in the field (Graham Coop, Ewan Birney etc.) none of which are HBD proponents. HBD proponents and Pioneer Fund recipients like to cry that they're being silenced when the reality is that they suck at science and don't like being called out. From Kanazawa's "the earth is flat" paper to evopsychologists literally admitting in the acknowledgement sections that they had no idea how to look up things in gene ontology databases and had to ask an actual biologist to do it on the condition that their name wouldn't be associated to their work, everything about the HBD clique transpires hackery and fraud.
  - xyzzyz 7y ago
    > Reich didn't remotely say things racist wanted to hear. I don't care much who those racists are, or what they wanted to hear, but at least Reich's positions shocked Saini herself, by being clearly and explicitly against the crap she was pushing in her book: > At the same time he thinks some categories may have more biological meaning to them. Black Americans are mostly West African in ancestry and white Americans tend to be European, both correlating to genuine population groups that were once separated at least partially for seventy thousand years in human history. “There’s a long time separating these two groups,” Reich says. “Enough time for evolution to accumulate differences. We don’t know very much about what those differences are because we’re still at the beginning of collectively trying to identify biologically what differences do.” > He suggests that there may be more than superficial average differences between black and white Americans, possibly even cognitive and psychological ones, because before they arrived in the United States, these population groups had this seventy thousand years apart during which they adapted to their own different environments. Reich implies that natural selection may have acted on them differently within this timescale to produce changes that go further than skin deep. He adds, judiciously, that he doesn’t think these differences will be large—only a fraction as big as the variation between individuals, just as biologist Richard Lewontin estimated in 1972. But he doesn’t expect them to be nonexistent either: as individuals we are so very different from one another that even a fraction of a difference between groups is something. > They are words I never expected to hear from a respected mainstream geneticist. I know that Reich is not a racist. Indeed, like Cavalli-Sforza, he believes that if race research is done, it will only further demolish old prejudices. (...) > Though Reich sees the racists as factually wrong, he also sees some antiracists—those who insist that we are all exactly the same underneath—as not having the full facts either. “It’s a little bit painful to see very well-meaning people saying things that are contradicted by the science, because we want well-meaning people to say things that are correct,” he says. “The way I see what’s going on in this world right now, there are racist people that are just perpetrating falsehoods, and just representing the science in incorrect ways, tendentious ways in order to achieve certain goals. And then there’s people whose perspective on the world I agree with who are actually saying things that are technically incorrect.” Reich means here people like Saini herself. > Reich is technically correct that there could be more profound genetic differences between population groups than we are aware of at the moment. But to date, no scientific research has been able to show any average genetic differences between population groups that go further than the superficial, such as skin color, or that are linked to hard survival, such as those that prevent a geographically linked disease. This is, of course, utterly false, and Reich in his book brings up multiple examples of exactly that. This argument is literally God-of-the-gaps: sure, there might be average genetic differences in skin color, or height, or athletic ability (oh wait, sorry, I forgot that Saini denies that too, even as she watches Olympic finals in 100 metre dash), or disease resistance, or low oxygen environment adaptation, or this, or that, but overall, there are no non-superficial differences in the non-superficial things we actually care about. Yeah, right. > There is no variant of any gene that has been found to exist in everyone of one “race” and not in another. This is rhetorical trick of saying something true, and yet completely irrelevant, par for the course for agenda pushing activists. This is also true, for example, for domestic dogs and wild wolves -- are there no significant differences in average traits between the two as well? Will chihuahua overcome the social construction of its "race", and fit right in a wild wolf tribe? Is the greyhound's speed just a matter of the family environment it grew up in? These arguments as applied to humans are just as absurd as applied to dogs, and the only reason they aren't laughed out of serious discussion is that we want them to be true. David Reich of course recognizes reality for what it is, and is not going to obfuscate the truth just to achieve the social goals he desires: unlike Saini, he understands that the public trust in science is a result of precisely such brutal honesty and courage of taking reality for what it is, and not for what we wish it was. As such, he is repulsed by Saini's approach to kill it, gut the carcass and wear its skin to fool people for the real thing. People might be fooled at the distance, but when you come closer to investigate, you immediately see that it's not science, but only a simulacrum thereof. Butchering your dairy cow might feel good for a while, but sooner than you think you have neither meat nor milk. Saini of course doesn't care, because she's not a scientists, she's a journalist and a writer, and she has no skin in the game.

scott_s 7y ago

> The pigeonholing of heritability studies with eugenicist policy Where does the author do this?

dekhn 7y ago
"As I found while writing my 2019 book Superior: The Return of Race Science, geneticists today rightly treat eugenics as a laughable proposition, and the concept of biological race — the belief that humans can be subdivided into distinct groups with meaningful differences between them — as easily debunked nonsens" Many studies cluster people with different genetic histories into groups with meaningful differences. This is important (for example) when treating people with different genetic histories for disease. AFAICT the article's author gets genetic history and social race mixed up, which does nothing to help their article's point.
- throwaway6449 7y ago
  Race isn't well-defined. You can't just wave it away with "uhh some PCA/STRUCTURE plot yields clusters so race is real", that's not how popgen or phylogeny works. Nor can you get away with "butbut muh genetic diseases!" when these involve only a few genes that make up a tiny fraction of one's genome. Of course modern scientists in relevant fields know this, that's why race has been discontinued as a concept even though some people (old school doctors or taxonomists or pioneer fund recipients) haven't gotten, or perhaps don't want to get the memo.
generationP 7y ago
The author either treats it as inevitable that legitimate human biodiversity research will lead to heavy-handed eugenic policy, or pretends to do so for cheap rhetorical scoring. Try re-reading her argument without taking this causation for granted, and you'll see it doesn't hold up; she is blaming scientists -- and even claiming their science to be debunked -- for on political consequences that she is speculating their research will have.

xyzzyz 7y ago

Unlike Saini, Carl is a scientists who publishes science, while Saini is a journalist who published pseudoscientific drivel designed to push her agenda, which she blatantly admits in her Nature piece above. Real scientists like Carl, or, say, David Reich, recognize her garbage for what it is. She interviews him for her book, and is shocked to learn that the super star Harvard geneticist doesn’t share her absurd positions on biological origins of race, or lack thereof. Saini belongs to a group which in turn Reich calls out in his book for obfuscating, rather than illuminating the issue of the biological origin of correlations between ancestry and phenotypic traits different than the melanin levels. The best example is how Saini in her book completely uncritically and unironically uses Lewontin’s 1972 argument that there can be no significant differences between populations, because majority of variance is within group and not between groups. Bringing this up and not even discussing obvious counterarguments shows that it’s not science that’s being done, but rather agenda pushing. This is of course par for the course, as Lewontin himself was also quite open about the fact that for him, science is only a tool to push his view on how society should be run, and if science disagrees, so much worse for science.

throwaway6449 7y ago
Lol Carl is a hack and he got fired because of that. Reich didn't remotely say things racist wanted to hear. Meanwhile Saini's books got inputs and reviews from all prominent scientists in the field (Graham Coop, Ewan Birney etc.) none of which are HBD proponents. HBD proponents and Pioneer Fund recipients like to cry that they're being silenced when the reality is that they suck at science and don't like being called out. From Kanazawa's "the earth is flat" paper to evopsychologists literally admitting in the acknowledgement sections that they had no idea how to look up things in gene ontology databases and had to ask an actual biologist to do it on the condition that their name wouldn't be associated to their work, everything about the HBD clique transpires hackery and fraud.
- xyzzyz 7y ago
  > Reich didn't remotely say things racist wanted to hear. I don't care much who those racists are, or what they wanted to hear, but at least Reich's positions shocked Saini herself, by being clearly and explicitly against the crap she was pushing in her book: > At the same time he thinks some categories may have more biological meaning to them. Black Americans are mostly West African in ancestry and white Americans tend to be European, both correlating to genuine population groups that were once separated at least partially for seventy thousand years in human history. “There’s a long time separating these two groups,” Reich says. “Enough time for evolution to accumulate differences. We don’t know very much about what those differences are because we’re still at the beginning of collectively trying to identify biologically what differences do.” > He suggests that there may be more than superficial average differences between black and white Americans, possibly even cognitive and psychological ones, because before they arrived in the United States, these population groups had this seventy thousand years apart during which they adapted to their own different environments. Reich implies that natural selection may have acted on them differently within this timescale to produce changes that go further than skin deep. He adds, judiciously, that he doesn’t think these differences will be large—only a fraction as big as the variation between individuals, just as biologist Richard Lewontin estimated in 1972. But he doesn’t expect them to be nonexistent either: as individuals we are so very different from one another that even a fraction of a difference between groups is something. > They are words I never expected to hear from a respected mainstream geneticist. I know that Reich is not a racist. Indeed, like Cavalli-Sforza, he believes that if race research is done, it will only further demolish old prejudices. (...) > Though Reich sees the racists as factually wrong, he also sees some antiracists—those who insist that we are all exactly the same underneath—as not having the full facts either. “It’s a little bit painful to see very well-meaning people saying things that are contradicted by the science, because we want well-meaning people to say things that are correct,” he says. “The way I see what’s going on in this world right now, there are racist people that are just perpetrating falsehoods, and just representing the science in incorrect ways, tendentious ways in order to achieve certain goals. And then there’s people whose perspective on the world I agree with who are actually saying things that are technically incorrect.” Reich means here people like Saini herself. > Reich is technically correct that there could be more profound genetic differences between population groups than we are aware of at the moment. But to date, no scientific research has been able to show any average genetic differences between population groups that go further than the superficial, such as skin color, or that are linked to hard survival, such as those that prevent a geographically linked disease. This is, of course, utterly false, and Reich in his book brings up multiple examples of exactly that. This argument is literally God-of-the-gaps: sure, there might be average genetic differences in skin color, or height, or athletic ability (oh wait, sorry, I forgot that Saini denies that too, even as she watches Olympic finals in 100 metre dash), or disease resistance, or low oxygen environment adaptation, or this, or that, but overall, there are no non-superficial differences in the non-superficial things we actually care about. Yeah, right. > There is no variant of any gene that has been found to exist in everyone of one “race” and not in another. This is rhetorical trick of saying something true, and yet completely irrelevant, par for the course for agenda pushing activists. This is also true, for example, for domestic dogs and wild wolves -- are there no significant differences in average traits between the two as well? Will chihuahua overcome the social construction of its "race", and fit right in a wild wolf tribe? Is the greyhound's speed just a matter of the family environment it grew up in? These arguments as applied to humans are just as absurd as applied to dogs, and the only reason they aren't laughed out of serious discussion is that we want them to be true. David Reich of course recognizes reality for what it is, and is not going to obfuscate the truth just to achieve the social goals he desires: unlike Saini, he understands that the public trust in science is a result of precisely such brutal honesty and courage of taking reality for what it is, and not for what we wish it was. As such, he is repulsed by Saini's approach to kill it, gut the carcass and wear its skin to fool people for the real thing. People might be fooled at the distance, but when you come closer to investigate, you immediately see that it's not science, but only a simulacrum thereof. Butchering your dairy cow might feel good for a while, but sooner than you think you have neither meat nor milk. Saini of course doesn't care, because she's not a scientists, she's a journalist and a writer, and she has no skin in the game.