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But with the taller/shorter, you would commonly have two tallers producing a shorter, or two shorters producing a taller. If we were talking about husbandry, we

But with the taller/shorter, you would commonly have two tallers producing a shorter, or two shorters producing a taller. If we were talking about husbandry, we would say that tallers and shorters don't "breed true". But with race, you never have two white people produce a black person, or vice versa (and no, a black person with albinism is not a white person).

arketyp 5y ago
That's actually an interesting observation, though perhaps a bit besides the point for an analogy that wasn't meant to be perfect. Regression to the mean does not seem to apply the same way to skin color, even though presumably it is also a polygenetic trait to quite some extent.
mcguire 5y ago
The heritibility of human height is 79% (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01157-y https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01157-y). The heritibility of human skin color is 82% (https://www.nature.com/articles/emm201228 https://www.nature.com/articles/emm201228).
- oh_sigh 5y ago
  That's relative lightness/darkness of skin pigmentation of the butt of Mongol people. Of course there is variation even among races, even among family members of the same race in skin tone. Which do you think is more common, based on your quoted stats? a) To see white parents who have a genetic child who has black skin, or black parents who have a genetic child who has white skin (disregarding albinism) or b) two tall parents have a genetic child who is short as an adult, or two short parents to have a genetic child who is tall as an adult
  - runnerup 5y ago
    Whats the point?
    - oh_sigh 5y ago
      The point is showing that the heritability of skin tone and height are about the same is meaningless when talking about skin tone differences among races. Literally, news articles are written and go viral about "black couple has white baby", whereas there has never been an article "Two 6'3" people have an adult child who is only 5'5"" If you had a series of 100,000 parents+genetic children paraded in front of you, do you think it would be more common to see two parents who are both rather taller or both rather shorter than their child, or would it be more common to see two parents who are appear to be of one race, but their child appears to be of a different race? If your answer isn't "I'd expect those things to happen at about the same rate", then you should question what exactly the sources are saying for the person who posted about the heritability of height vs skin tone. The feeling I get is that many people really, really don't want race to be real. Because it if it isn't real, then you can't say there are differences among the races. So, they will argue against common sense and try to say things like height is just as heritable as skin tone as a rebuttal to the fact that pretty much always, two white parents don't give birth to black babies, and two black parents don't give birth to white babies. I see the same kind of mental logic at play with LGBT-supporters, where there is a strong insistence that being gay is genetic, and not a choice. That way, you can't chalk it up to lifestyle choices that you can just change. Personally, I don't really see why it matters whether being gay is genetic or a choice, because there is literally nothing wrong with being gay, whether you are born that way or whether you "just" choose to be that way.
      - mcguire 5y ago
        I admit that my previous comment was tongue-in-cheek; I found it interesting that the two numbers were so close. To make up for it, I'll try a more serious response. I suspect you are making a category error comparing "two parents who are both rather taller or both rather shorter than their child" and "two parents who are appear to be of one race, but their child appears to be of a different race". To put the two into the same category, you could compare "two parents...taller or shorter than their child" and "two parents...lighter skinned or darker skinned than their child"---two aspects that are single traits. And no, I wouldn't be crazy surprised in either case, unless you were specifically thinking about Robert Wadlow and Zeng Jinlian giving birth to Chandra Bahadur Dangi or two parents of Danish descent giving birth to a child with a Bantu skin color. (And no, I don't know the relative frequencies of such events.) The other way to resolve the category error, if you prefer to compare bundles of traits, would be two people of Italian extraction giving birth to a stereotypical Irish child. That sounds pretty unlikely, especially prior to modern travel and migration patterns. But the real, underlying question that is the base for "many people really, really don't want race to be real" is, "So what?" Yes, human beings tend to share traits with other closely related people. So what? Individual variation is pretty large, too. Historically, Italians and Irish were considered to be different races. Not so much today, because "race" is a social construct and the difference between the Irish, southern Europeans, and the canonical northern European isn't a big deal today. Races are defined to be a way of applying a group of conclusions, which may be difficult to perceive directly, to an individual who has an easily perceived marker for the race. That can be more-or-less neutral to somewhat pernicious. ("You are Asian, therefore you must be lactose intolerant!" Well, maybe.) Or it can be straight up evil, especially if the conclusions you are making are simply made up to enforce your superiority to the individual. As a result, race is either not real, or real but completely uninteresting. Any other option is intellectual laziness at best and at worst....well, it leads to poor outcomes. Now, neither you nor I particularly care whether homosexuality is genetic or a choice, but I hope you can see how someone who has to respond to "So just don't be gay!" might prefer one over the other.
runnerup 5y ago
"never" is too strong here. Two black people occasionally produce a white baby without albinism. There's a lot of genes that code skin color and you can have a bunch of recessive "white skin" genes and still be very black-skinned yourself. Then sometimes your child gets all the recessive white-skin genes from both parents. I had a personal friend who was white with two black parents, not albino, and genetic tests proved paternity. However, can I ask what the point of your hypothetical is? I'm not sure what message or conclusion I'm supposed to get from it, in context of the discussion.
- exporectomy 5y ago
  Skin color isn't race. I would expect this AI to detect your white-skinned friend as black because all his other traits would be black-like.
  - vintermann 5y ago
    Well, you would be wrong. Because this AI predicts self-reported race, not ancestry. Think about what this means People who have, say, three black great-grandparents and five white ones, will vary widely in how black they look, and this likely affects how they identify. But there are also invisible markers of ancestry - of the sort you would expect maybe were visible only on an X-ray if you looked carefully. Those could easily break the other way. You could easily get someone who looked white (and thus, probably identified as white), but were "black on the inside", in terms of their less visible characteristics. Yet the algorithm sees through all that, and manages to see what you feel like? Correctly classifying Shaun King as black and Tom Jones as white? From a 8x8 X-ray picture? The people who insist that "race is real" should be the most confused by these results, since we know how fuzzily identity is coupled with ancestry, especially in the main groups studied here, black and white Americans. I'm much more prepared to believe, for instance, that there is something catastrophically bad going on in medical image dataset collection, than I am that self-ID race is nebulously predictable from almost nothing.
    - exporectomy 5y ago
      You're really missing something obvious here. I don't know if it's the statistical nature of ML or the statistical nature of correlation or what. But the fact that everyone else can see how it probably works while you can't should be a red flag that there's a hole in your understanding somewhere.
dekhn 5y ago
Even disregarding albinism, it's possible for people of northern european descent with fair skin to have darker skinned children. For example, in a case where the parents have germ line mutations that they pass on to their child, there could be (improbably) a collection of mutations that greatly increased the quantity of melanin. However, skin color is a complex trait with many small differences coming from a large number of different genes, so large changes in skin color are very unlikely. Nothing of what I am describing is albinism, and would have been part of the process of natural selection for fair-skinned people in northern climates with less solar exposure.

arketyp 5y ago

That's actually an interesting observation, though perhaps a bit besides the point for an analogy that wasn't meant to be perfect. Regression to the mean does not seem to apply the same way to skin color, even though presumably it is also a polygenetic trait to quite some extent.

mcguire 5y ago

The heritibility of human height is 79% (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01157-y https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01157-y). The heritibility of human skin color is 82% (https://www.nature.com/articles/emm201228 https://www.nature.com/articles/emm201228).

oh_sigh 5y ago
That's relative lightness/darkness of skin pigmentation of the butt of Mongol people. Of course there is variation even among races, even among family members of the same race in skin tone. Which do you think is more common, based on your quoted stats? a) To see white parents who have a genetic child who has black skin, or black parents who have a genetic child who has white skin (disregarding albinism) or b) two tall parents have a genetic child who is short as an adult, or two short parents to have a genetic child who is tall as an adult
- runnerup 5y ago
  Whats the point?
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    The point is showing that the heritability of skin tone and height are about the same is meaningless when talking about skin tone differences among races. Literally, news articles are written and go viral about "black couple has white baby", whereas there has never been an article "Two 6'3" people have an adult child who is only 5'5"" If you had a series of 100,000 parents+genetic children paraded in front of you, do you think it would be more common to see two parents who are both rather taller or both rather shorter than their child, or would it be more common to see two parents who are appear to be of one race, but their child appears to be of a different race? If your answer isn't "I'd expect those things to happen at about the same rate", then you should question what exactly the sources are saying for the person who posted about the heritability of height vs skin tone. The feeling I get is that many people really, really don't want race to be real. Because it if it isn't real, then you can't say there are differences among the races. So, they will argue against common sense and try to say things like height is just as heritable as skin tone as a rebuttal to the fact that pretty much always, two white parents don't give birth to black babies, and two black parents don't give birth to white babies. I see the same kind of mental logic at play with LGBT-supporters, where there is a strong insistence that being gay is genetic, and not a choice. That way, you can't chalk it up to lifestyle choices that you can just change. Personally, I don't really see why it matters whether being gay is genetic or a choice, because there is literally nothing wrong with being gay, whether you are born that way or whether you "just" choose to be that way.
    - mcguire 5y ago
      I admit that my previous comment was tongue-in-cheek; I found it interesting that the two numbers were so close. To make up for it, I'll try a more serious response. I suspect you are making a category error comparing "two parents who are both rather taller or both rather shorter than their child" and "two parents who are appear to be of one race, but their child appears to be of a different race". To put the two into the same category, you could compare "two parents...taller or shorter than their child" and "two parents...lighter skinned or darker skinned than their child"---two aspects that are single traits. And no, I wouldn't be crazy surprised in either case, unless you were specifically thinking about Robert Wadlow and Zeng Jinlian giving birth to Chandra Bahadur Dangi or two parents of Danish descent giving birth to a child with a Bantu skin color. (And no, I don't know the relative frequencies of such events.) The other way to resolve the category error, if you prefer to compare bundles of traits, would be two people of Italian extraction giving birth to a stereotypical Irish child. That sounds pretty unlikely, especially prior to modern travel and migration patterns. But the real, underlying question that is the base for "many people really, really don't want race to be real" is, "So what?" Yes, human beings tend to share traits with other closely related people. So what? Individual variation is pretty large, too. Historically, Italians and Irish were considered to be different races. Not so much today, because "race" is a social construct and the difference between the Irish, southern Europeans, and the canonical northern European isn't a big deal today. Races are defined to be a way of applying a group of conclusions, which may be difficult to perceive directly, to an individual who has an easily perceived marker for the race. That can be more-or-less neutral to somewhat pernicious. ("You are Asian, therefore you must be lactose intolerant!" Well, maybe.) Or it can be straight up evil, especially if the conclusions you are making are simply made up to enforce your superiority to the individual. As a result, race is either not real, or real but completely uninteresting. Any other option is intellectual laziness at best and at worst....well, it leads to poor outcomes. Now, neither you nor I particularly care whether homosexuality is genetic or a choice, but I hope you can see how someone who has to respond to "So just don't be gay!" might prefer one over the other.

runnerup 5y ago

"never" is too strong here. Two black people occasionally produce a white baby without albinism. There's a lot of genes that code skin color and you can have a bunch of recessive "white skin" genes and still be very black-skinned yourself. Then sometimes your child gets all the recessive white-skin genes from both parents. I had a personal friend who was white with two black parents, not albino, and genetic tests proved paternity. However, can I ask what the point of your hypothetical is? I'm not sure what message or conclusion I'm supposed to get from it, in context of the discussion.

exporectomy 5y ago
Skin color isn't race. I would expect this AI to detect your white-skinned friend as black because all his other traits would be black-like.
- vintermann 5y ago
  Well, you would be wrong. Because this AI predicts self-reported race, not ancestry. Think about what this means People who have, say, three black great-grandparents and five white ones, will vary widely in how black they look, and this likely affects how they identify. But there are also invisible markers of ancestry - of the sort you would expect maybe were visible only on an X-ray if you looked carefully. Those could easily break the other way. You could easily get someone who looked white (and thus, probably identified as white), but were "black on the inside", in terms of their less visible characteristics. Yet the algorithm sees through all that, and manages to see what you feel like? Correctly classifying Shaun King as black and Tom Jones as white? From a 8x8 X-ray picture? The people who insist that "race is real" should be the most confused by these results, since we know how fuzzily identity is coupled with ancestry, especially in the main groups studied here, black and white Americans. I'm much more prepared to believe, for instance, that there is something catastrophically bad going on in medical image dataset collection, than I am that self-ID race is nebulously predictable from almost nothing.
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    You're really missing something obvious here. I don't know if it's the statistical nature of ML or the statistical nature of correlation or what. But the fact that everyone else can see how it probably works while you can't should be a red flag that there's a hole in your understanding somewhere.

dekhn 5y ago

Even disregarding albinism, it's possible for people of northern european descent with fair skin to have darker skinned children. For example, in a case where the parents have germ line mutations that they pass on to their child, there could be (improbably) a collection of mutations that greatly increased the quantity of melanin. However, skin color is a complex trait with many small differences coming from a large number of different genes, so large changes in skin color are very unlikely. Nothing of what I am describing is albinism, and would have been part of the process of natural selection for fair-skinned people in northern climates with less solar exposure.