4 ms·

I grant you that "Ashkenazi Jew" is not a race by any conventional definition. But no, there's no "genetically distinct haplotype" that defines it. It's "Jews f

by timr 4y ago

I grant you that "Ashkenazi Jew" is not a race by any conventional definition. But no, there's no "genetically distinct haplotype" that defines it. It's "Jews from central and eastern Europe", vs. those from Africa, the Middle East and Spain. [1] It's a broad, vague category, that is nonetheless sometimes still useful. Just like race. We don't pretend that Ashkenazi Jews don't exist, or are verboten from polite discussion because they are a "social construct." > By the way, I don't think "African descent" is a race by any means of my understanding of the word... Well, yeah. I pulled my punches there. I should have just said "black people", but even I felt squeamish about it. A great example of how this stuff confuses language and makes science harder. [1] https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/genetics-dictionary/def/ashkenazi-jews https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/genetics-di...

n4r9 4y ago
So you agree that humans do not have biological races, but you disagree with guidelines that promote a more accurate terminology?
- timr 4y ago
  That is not what these "guidelines" do. I quoted the part where they deny that race is biological at all. There is simply no other way to read the words. Once again: > Race and ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs. Humans do not have biological races, at least based on modern biological criteria for the identification of geographical races or subspecies. This is simply false. It's fiction. A substitution of political ideology for fact. People are attempting to turn "we don't have a precise test for race" into "race does not exist". Even ignoring the fact that today anyone can go to 23andMe and get a genetic test that will assign them a percentage composition by race / ethnic group, it's obvious that race is a useful, if imprecise, real-world categorization. We can acknowledge this without being discriminatory. This entire conversation is the equivalent of someone claiming that water was a "sociopolitical construct" before scientists knew what atoms and elements were, because we couldn't define it chemically. If HN existed in the pre-times, you'd have people chiming in that "other clear liquids exist and can be confused with water! the classification is incomplete!" as proof of claim.
  - n4r9 4y ago
    Is that false? It seems to me to be the current scientific consensus. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737365/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737365/ - "Genetic data sets are used to see if biological races exist in humans and in our closest evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee. Using the two most commonly used biological concepts of race, chimpanzees are indeed subdivided into races but humans are not." https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-reshaping-race-debate-21st-century/ https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-res... - "In the biological and social sciences, the consensus is clear: race is a social construct, not a biological attribute." https://muse.jhu.edu/article/48157/pdf https://muse.jhu.edu/article/48157/pdf - "none of the race concepts is compatible with the patterns of variation revealed by our analyses." > it's obvious that race is a useful, if imprecise, real-world categorization. We can acknowledge this without being discriminatory. The approach of genetic scientists seems to be to use the words "ancestry" or "population", which do not risk as much ambiguity or overlap with the meaning of "race" as applied to other species. >This entire conversation is the equivalent of someone claiming that water was a "sociopolitical construct" before scientists knew what atoms and elements were A more accurate comparison is that of scientists deciding that Pluto isn't actually a planet, because it no longer meets the criteria. There was a bit of a stir about this but eventually it's been accepted, and rightly so as linguistic precision is a good thing!
    - timr 4y ago
      Read the links. Because those aren't providing evidence for the claim. They're just repeatedly asserting what I've already told you is faulty reasoning: we don't have a precise genetic definition of "race" today, therefore it doesn't exist. That's wrong. Regarding the specific papers: The first explicitly admits that race exists in the opening sentence (oops), then proceeds to say "the two most commonly used biological concepts of race" don't work in humans, therefore race doesn't exist ("There are no objective criteria for choosing one adaptive trait over another to define race. As a consequence, adaptive traits do not define races in humans.") This is exactly the fallacious thinking I'm calling out. Great example. The second is not a paper at all, but still admits that there's at least some biological basis for race, even though it's not precise. That's fine -- I'm not claiming it is precise: > Research indicates that the concept of “five races” does, to an extent, describe the way human populations are distributed among the continents—but the lines between races are much more blurred than ancestry testing companies would have us believe The third is saying that a single, specific measurement of genetic diversity fails to define race. Again, that's fine. Saying "test X doesn't define race" != "race does not exist": > These limitations on FST are demonstrated algebraically and in the context of analyzing dinucleotide repeat allele frequencies for a set of eight loci genotyped in eight human groups and in chimpanzees. In our analyses, estimates of FST fail to identify important variation. Overall, these illustrate exactly what I've said: race is clearly real and we know it when we see it, but it's not precise, and we don't have a biological test that defines it. Those who extend this to "race is a sociopolitical construct" are engaged in a through-the-looking-glass form of motivated reasoning. And it's a very convenient form of reasoning, because if you make it "wrong" to say that race exists, you prevent anyone from doing the research that might produce such a test.
- wyager 4y ago
  "Humans do not have biological race" is correct if and only if you change the definition of "race" to whatever definition these academics have made up expressly to make the statement true. If you use any definition that wasn't specifically concocted to make the statement true (i.e. any definition used by normal people or by actual scientists doing real work, say prior to 1990), it remains false.
  - n4r9 4y ago
    What is the implication here, that geneticists decided in 1990 to pack in "real work" in order to work up a grand conspiracy to wipe out an entire concept?
    - rufus_foreman 4y ago
      I think if you were doing scientific work in this area, you would want political cover. "I'm just studying why people whose ancestors grew up in one area are more likely to have a certain gene than people whose ancestors grew up in a different area. It has absolutely nothing to do with race".
    - wyager 4y ago
      No, I'm just guessing that the inflection point of productive scientists being financially displaced by useless academia career optimizers was some time in the last few decades.
  - timr 4y ago
    Yeah, I agree that's what's probably going on here. Being nincompoops, they've likely redefined "biological race" to mean something tautological, like this: > biological race is a collection of N genes that clearly separate all races; no such set of genes exists, therefore biological race doesn't exist. Academics love this kind of stuff. The danger is that this up-is-down wordplay works its way into things that actually matter. Then it's (quite literally) Orwellian. I guarantee that the panel of clerics at Nature won't be so precise in their application of the funhouse rules when it's in their ideological interest to ignore them.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
"Black people" isn't a genetic category either. So maybe you should follow these oh-so Orwellian ethics guidelines and define what you mean by that and note whether it was a class that was self assigned by the group or by yourself or third parties and how that assignment was made.

by timr 4y ago

n4r9 4y ago

So you agree that humans do not have biological races, but you disagree with guidelines that promote a more accurate terminology?

timr 4y ago
That is not what these "guidelines" do. I quoted the part where they deny that race is biological at all. There is simply no other way to read the words. Once again: > Race and ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs. Humans do not have biological races, at least based on modern biological criteria for the identification of geographical races or subspecies. This is simply false. It's fiction. A substitution of political ideology for fact. People are attempting to turn "we don't have a precise test for race" into "race does not exist". Even ignoring the fact that today anyone can go to 23andMe and get a genetic test that will assign them a percentage composition by race / ethnic group, it's obvious that race is a useful, if imprecise, real-world categorization. We can acknowledge this without being discriminatory. This entire conversation is the equivalent of someone claiming that water was a "sociopolitical construct" before scientists knew what atoms and elements were, because we couldn't define it chemically. If HN existed in the pre-times, you'd have people chiming in that "other clear liquids exist and can be confused with water! the classification is incomplete!" as proof of claim.
- n4r9 4y ago
  Is that false? It seems to me to be the current scientific consensus. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737365/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737365/ - "Genetic data sets are used to see if biological races exist in humans and in our closest evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee. Using the two most commonly used biological concepts of race, chimpanzees are indeed subdivided into races but humans are not." https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-reshaping-race-debate-21st-century/ https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-res... - "In the biological and social sciences, the consensus is clear: race is a social construct, not a biological attribute." https://muse.jhu.edu/article/48157/pdf https://muse.jhu.edu/article/48157/pdf - "none of the race concepts is compatible with the patterns of variation revealed by our analyses." > it's obvious that race is a useful, if imprecise, real-world categorization. We can acknowledge this without being discriminatory. The approach of genetic scientists seems to be to use the words "ancestry" or "population", which do not risk as much ambiguity or overlap with the meaning of "race" as applied to other species. >This entire conversation is the equivalent of someone claiming that water was a "sociopolitical construct" before scientists knew what atoms and elements were A more accurate comparison is that of scientists deciding that Pluto isn't actually a planet, because it no longer meets the criteria. There was a bit of a stir about this but eventually it's been accepted, and rightly so as linguistic precision is a good thing!
  - timr 4y ago
    Read the links. Because those aren't providing evidence for the claim. They're just repeatedly asserting what I've already told you is faulty reasoning: we don't have a precise genetic definition of "race" today, therefore it doesn't exist. That's wrong. Regarding the specific papers: The first explicitly admits that race exists in the opening sentence (oops), then proceeds to say "the two most commonly used biological concepts of race" don't work in humans, therefore race doesn't exist ("There are no objective criteria for choosing one adaptive trait over another to define race. As a consequence, adaptive traits do not define races in humans.") This is exactly the fallacious thinking I'm calling out. Great example. The second is not a paper at all, but still admits that there's at least some biological basis for race, even though it's not precise. That's fine -- I'm not claiming it is precise: > Research indicates that the concept of “five races” does, to an extent, describe the way human populations are distributed among the continents—but the lines between races are much more blurred than ancestry testing companies would have us believe The third is saying that a single, specific measurement of genetic diversity fails to define race. Again, that's fine. Saying "test X doesn't define race" != "race does not exist": > These limitations on FST are demonstrated algebraically and in the context of analyzing dinucleotide repeat allele frequencies for a set of eight loci genotyped in eight human groups and in chimpanzees. In our analyses, estimates of FST fail to identify important variation. Overall, these illustrate exactly what I've said: race is clearly real and we know it when we see it, but it's not precise, and we don't have a biological test that defines it. Those who extend this to "race is a sociopolitical construct" are engaged in a through-the-looking-glass form of motivated reasoning. And it's a very convenient form of reasoning, because if you make it "wrong" to say that race exists, you prevent anyone from doing the research that might produce such a test.
wyager 4y ago
"Humans do not have biological race" is correct if and only if you change the definition of "race" to whatever definition these academics have made up expressly to make the statement true. If you use any definition that wasn't specifically concocted to make the statement true (i.e. any definition used by normal people or by actual scientists doing real work, say prior to 1990), it remains false.
- n4r9 4y ago
  What is the implication here, that geneticists decided in 1990 to pack in "real work" in order to work up a grand conspiracy to wipe out an entire concept?
  - rufus_foreman 4y ago
    I think if you were doing scientific work in this area, you would want political cover. "I'm just studying why people whose ancestors grew up in one area are more likely to have a certain gene than people whose ancestors grew up in a different area. It has absolutely nothing to do with race".
  - wyager 4y ago
    No, I'm just guessing that the inflection point of productive scientists being financially displaced by useless academia career optimizers was some time in the last few decades.
- timr 4y ago
  Yeah, I agree that's what's probably going on here. Being nincompoops, they've likely redefined "biological race" to mean something tautological, like this: > biological race is a collection of N genes that clearly separate all races; no such set of genes exists, therefore biological race doesn't exist. Academics love this kind of stuff. The danger is that this up-is-down wordplay works its way into things that actually matter. Then it's (quite literally) Orwellian. I guarantee that the panel of clerics at Nature won't be so precise in their application of the funhouse rules when it's in their ideological interest to ignore them.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

"Black people" isn't a genetic category either. So maybe you should follow these oh-so Orwellian ethics guidelines and define what you mean by that and note whether it was a class that was self assigned by the group or by yourself or third parties and how that assignment was made.