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Its almost as if the policies produced by racist conclusions create the conditions that perpetuate the misleading data. /s Humans are an "INBRED" species. By t

Its almost as if the policies produced by racist conclusions create the conditions that perpetuate the misleading data. /s Humans are an "INBRED" species. By this I mean we have little genetic diversity compared to most other species on the planet. Race isn't even real genetically speaking. It is real in a socioeconomic sense because people believe its real and that has real consequences. But outside of human belief and behavior, race is a load of imaginary divisions.

packetlost 2y ago
I have zero evidence to support this, but I would be more inclined to believe that (sub) cultural environments impact these stats way more than genetics. None of the data or even logical reasoning supports a genetic component.
slibhb 2y ago
> Race isn't even real genetically speaking If you map every human genome in some space, there will be clusters. This is race. You can argue that there are no clear boundaries between clusters but that's true for everything. You can use that argument to say there's no difference between trees and bushes (and so on, applied to every distinction).
- Chabsff 2y ago
  Genetic clustering segregates people into a different set of groups than the ones that are involved in discussions such as this one. It's a different definition of "race".
- mcphage 2y ago
  > If you map every human genome in some space, there will be clusters. This is race. There isn't a reason to think that those clusters would in any way map on to how we culturally, currently talk about race. Nor is there a single, well-defined way to cluster human genomes plotted in some very high dimensional space. > You can use that argument to say there's no difference between trees and bushes That's actually a perfect example. We have a word in English—"tree"—that refers to a large number of different species of plant. And you could plot plant genomes, and do a cluster analysis on them. But there will be no cluster that corresponds to the english word "tree". Genetically, there isn't a single "tree" ancestor, that all trees descended from. Instead, what we call "tree" evolved repeatedly at different points in time, and so no matter how you cluster the genes, what we refer to as "tree" will always be spread out among different clusters.
  - slibhb 2y ago
    > There isn't a reason to think that those clusters would in any way map on to how we culturally, currently talk about race. Of course there is. However loosely, "cultural race" is linked to "genetic race". Regardless, the post I replied to said "Race isn't even real genetically speaking". > Nor is there a single, well-defined way to cluster human genomes plotted in some very high dimensional space. There's very clearly an simple way to talk about genetic differences between groups. I don't know if there's a "single, well-defined way" but there doesn't have to be. > That's actually a perfect example. We have a word in English—"tree"—that refers to a large number of different species of plant. And you could plot plant genomes, and do a cluster analysis on them. But there will be no cluster that corresponds to the english word "tree". Genetically, there isn't a single "tree" ancestor, that all trees descended from. Instead, what we call "tree" evolved repeatedly at different points in time, and so no matter how you cluster the genes, what we refer to as "tree" will always be spread out among different clusters. The point I was making with the trees/bushes aside had nothing to do with whether we define trees genetically. It had to do with the fact that "fuzzy boundaries" or "lack of a single, well-defined boundary" isn't a good reason to discard a distinction. Moreover, humans only evolved once.
    - Chabsff 2y ago
      It makes intuitive sense, but intuition is often misleading and deserves to be double checked. In this particular case, while there does exist a set of alleles against which you can cluster populations in a way that maps roughly to the set of races we define socially, that only represents < 10% of the genetic variation across populations. Basically, that means you need to arbitrarily toss out > 80% of the dimensionality of your data for that clustering to meaningfully map against what we socially construe as "race". This casts a large shadow on the idea that the genetic notion of "race" can serve as support for using the social notion of "race" as a means to treat anyone differently. You may be correct in the strictest technical sense, but the link is so tenuous that it can't really be used for anything useful. "Race is a social construct" is a bit of a misnomer. The proper formulation should probably be something like "Race is only meaningful because we socially decided to make it so."
bitcharmer 2y ago
> Race isn't even real genetically speaking I was expecting a flood of these types of comments but also "facts are racist" and "you can't be racist against white people" and I'm not disappointed. This and seeing the post flagged just speaks volumes about where HN is heading.

packetlost 2y ago

I have zero evidence to support this, but I would be more inclined to believe that (sub) cultural environments impact these stats way more than genetics. None of the data or even logical reasoning supports a genetic component.

slibhb 2y ago

> Race isn't even real genetically speaking If you map every human genome in some space, there will be clusters. This is race. You can argue that there are no clear boundaries between clusters but that's true for everything. You can use that argument to say there's no difference between trees and bushes (and so on, applied to every distinction).

Chabsff 2y ago
Genetic clustering segregates people into a different set of groups than the ones that are involved in discussions such as this one. It's a different definition of "race".
mcphage 2y ago
> If you map every human genome in some space, there will be clusters. This is race. There isn't a reason to think that those clusters would in any way map on to how we culturally, currently talk about race. Nor is there a single, well-defined way to cluster human genomes plotted in some very high dimensional space. > You can use that argument to say there's no difference between trees and bushes That's actually a perfect example. We have a word in English—"tree"—that refers to a large number of different species of plant. And you could plot plant genomes, and do a cluster analysis on them. But there will be no cluster that corresponds to the english word "tree". Genetically, there isn't a single "tree" ancestor, that all trees descended from. Instead, what we call "tree" evolved repeatedly at different points in time, and so no matter how you cluster the genes, what we refer to as "tree" will always be spread out among different clusters.
- slibhb 2y ago
  > There isn't a reason to think that those clusters would in any way map on to how we culturally, currently talk about race. Of course there is. However loosely, "cultural race" is linked to "genetic race". Regardless, the post I replied to said "Race isn't even real genetically speaking". > Nor is there a single, well-defined way to cluster human genomes plotted in some very high dimensional space. There's very clearly an simple way to talk about genetic differences between groups. I don't know if there's a "single, well-defined way" but there doesn't have to be. > That's actually a perfect example. We have a word in English—"tree"—that refers to a large number of different species of plant. And you could plot plant genomes, and do a cluster analysis on them. But there will be no cluster that corresponds to the english word "tree". Genetically, there isn't a single "tree" ancestor, that all trees descended from. Instead, what we call "tree" evolved repeatedly at different points in time, and so no matter how you cluster the genes, what we refer to as "tree" will always be spread out among different clusters. The point I was making with the trees/bushes aside had nothing to do with whether we define trees genetically. It had to do with the fact that "fuzzy boundaries" or "lack of a single, well-defined boundary" isn't a good reason to discard a distinction. Moreover, humans only evolved once.
  - Chabsff 2y ago
    It makes intuitive sense, but intuition is often misleading and deserves to be double checked. In this particular case, while there does exist a set of alleles against which you can cluster populations in a way that maps roughly to the set of races we define socially, that only represents < 10% of the genetic variation across populations. Basically, that means you need to arbitrarily toss out > 80% of the dimensionality of your data for that clustering to meaningfully map against what we socially construe as "race". This casts a large shadow on the idea that the genetic notion of "race" can serve as support for using the social notion of "race" as a means to treat anyone differently. You may be correct in the strictest technical sense, but the link is so tenuous that it can't really be used for anything useful. "Race is a social construct" is a bit of a misnomer. The proper formulation should probably be something like "Race is only meaningful because we socially decided to make it so."

bitcharmer 2y ago

> Race isn't even real genetically speaking I was expecting a flood of these types of comments but also "facts are racist" and "you can't be racist against white people" and I'm not disappointed. This and seeing the post flagged just speaks volumes about where HN is heading.