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Self-reported race, ethnicity don't match genetic ancestry in the U.S.: study
- pseudolus 1y agohttps://archive.ph/jfmTn https://archive.ph/jfmTn
- Metacelsus 1y agoThe headline is a bit overstated (i.e., someone of African-American race is almost guaranteed to have at least some African ancestry, admixed with a varying amount of European). That being said, there are important differences within the traditional "races", such as the finding in this study that people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities for obesity. Overall I would love it if medical research papers moved away from "race" and started getting more into the fine-grained genetic details. Regardless of the politics involved, this will lead to better medical treatments for everyone.
- reverendsteveii 1y ago>almost guaranteed to have at least some African ancestry everyone from everywhere has african ancestry
- DougMerritt 1y agoVery true, but of course you're talking about a different era much further up the tree.
- shrubble 1y agoI don’t; unless you are referring to the discredited “out of Africa” theory
- earnestinger 1y agoCould you elaborate? I assume you imply that humans evolved not in Africa. Where?
- gitremote 1y agoNeanderthals evolved in Europe and Europeans have more Neanderthal ancestry, so he might identify more with his Neanderthal ancestors.
- shrubble 1y agoI’ve used Perl a lot.
- shrubble 1y agoThere’s plenty of evidence to the contrary, including Denisovan and Neanderthal that is not present in any African population; as well, something like up to 20% of West African genome has an as yet unknown source which is usually referred to as “archaic” or ghost DNA which is not found elsewhere in other populations. Since the OOA theory doesn’t have any explanation for this evidence…
- dragonwriter 1y ago> There’s plenty of evidence to the contrary, including Denisovan and Neanderthal that is not present in any African population OOA does have an explanation for Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA that isn't found in African populations, and that is that the cross-breeding between anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals and Denisovans occurred after modern humans left Africa. > as well, something like up to 20% of West African genome has an as yet unknown source which is usually referred to as “archaic” or ghost DNA which is not found elsewhere in other populations. "Archaic" DNA refers to DNA that appears to have originated with some human group other than modern humans and not be shared among modern human populations (the Denisovan and Neanderthal-origin genomes of Eurasian humans would be included here), but specific to some subpopulation. It is not the case that "20% of West African genome" is archaic, though there is a study in which some specific isolated West African subpopulations had archaic fractions that high, which is not something that OOA has no explanation for (the explanation is that those subgroups were isolated from the ones that participated in the various outbound migrations, and so their particular archaic genome is not shared with the groups that migrated out.) There may be valid challenges to OOA, but those aren't it.
- pfannkuchen 1y agoI don’t think the parts of that theory that have fallen out of fashion include humanity originating in Africa in general. I think it’s more like - maybe more of modern human comes from a branch or branches that changed after Africa exit than we thought previously.
- jjtheblunt 1y ago> people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities similarly, when working on genomes a few years back, it used to be said that the two most genetically distinct humans alive right then would both be from Africa, which was memorable because one might guess Inuit vs Africa or something like that naively.
- SkyBelow 1y agoIs that specifically the case? This feels like an area where our language can fail to capture the nuance of what someone is trying to say and it gets misstated as something really similar but different. To give an example, take 3 people named A, B, and C. A and B are both from Africa, while C is from elsewhere. A and B have 9 genetic differences. B and C have 1 genetic difference. A and C have 10 genetic differences. We can make the claim that the genetic difference between someone from Africa and from elsewhere (B to C, thus 1) is much smaller than the difference between two people in Africa (A to B, thus 9). 1 is smaller than 9, so this statement is true, but could easily be misunderstood to saying that the two most genetically distinct individuals are from Africa, which isn't the case because A to C is the most genetically distinct and C is from elsewhere. The two statements seem nearly equivalent and the wrong one could accidentally be spread by someone who is really just trying to focus on expressing how much genetic diversity is within Africa.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoYes, this is specifically the case. Non-Africans split from Africa relatively late in human genetic history. So A and B's divergence point(s) can readily be quite a bit earlier than C's. So, as you pointed out, C is likely more closely related one of A or B. Let's say B. The big difference between B & C is that B is much more likely to incorporate genes from other early branches than C is. Therefore B is likely further away genetically from A than C is.
- reissbaker 1y agoNo, your split argument doesn't make the case you think it does. If groups A, B, and C were once groups A and B (and B split into B and C later), it's true that B and C are likely closely related, but it doesn't mean A and B are more different than A and C. To put it another way, if we start with groups A and B, and then branch off B' from B, while B and B' are likely similar, that doesn't tell us anything about the relationship between A and B', and it doesn't imply that A and B' are closer than A and B.
- MyOutfitIsVague 1y agoGenetic differences across Africa shouldn't be surprising when you consider how huge Africa really is. Africa is about as big as the US, China, and Europe combined.
- bryanlarsen 1y agoMore importantly, humans have lived in Africa far longer than anywhere else in the world, so have had much more time to genetically diversify.
- ty6853 1y agoI was under the impression humans migrated from Africa so the rest of the world is all african-X, where the african- part is some subset of the original african population.
- desktopninja 1y ago"One drop rule" makes everyone black in America
- Tuna-Fish 1y agoThe effect is much larger than that. For most of the evolutionary history of humans, everyone* lived in Africa. Then only quite small groups left, taking with them only a small fraction of the genetic diversity of humans. Even today, the great majority of genetic diversity among living humans is inside Africa. (* who mattered. There were earlier migrations of hominids, but the mark they left on our genetics is much smaller than the influence from later migrations.)
- Shorel 1y agoIt's not just about size. Humans originated in Africa, so populations there have had more time to evolve and become more diverse. 200,000 years of genetic drift versus 20,000 years makes a big difference.
- anon291 1y ago
- bryanlarsen 1y agoAfrican is a useless label -- Africa alone has as much genetic diversity as the rest of the world combined.
- DougMerritt 1y agoWhat lead to this?
- kjkjadksj 1y agoFounder effect
- skywhopper 1y agoAfrica is where humans originally come from. There’s much more human history in Africa than the rest of the world.
- djohnston 1y agoExistence, not history. History requires writing.
- layer8 1y agoThat’s a narrow definition of “history”. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth.
- saltcured 1y agoThe above seems clear as genetic history written in the DNA. Those bottlenecks are a bit like burning the library at Alexandria.
- DougMerritt 1y ago...which needs more to explain it, such as (if true): "the diversity originating in Africa did not migrate out of Africa, and the gene lines that did leave Africa did not develop as much diversity as had existed in the ancestral gene pool, despite facing far more diversity in climate than exists in Africa". And then I would again ask of the latter, "what? Why not?" Ultimately: Why did Africa stimulate so much gene pool diversity? It seems more homogenous in environments than the rest of the world that Homo Sapiens emigrated to. And there would have been cross-breeding between African subpopulations. Environmental barriers in sub-Saharan Africa are minimal in terms of gene movement, aren't they?
- ARandumGuy 1y agoIt's used because, despite the fact that race doesn't really match with genetic ancestry, it still has impacts on people's lives and health. For example, a study indicating that "black people in the US are X% more likely to have {some condition}" is useful, even if "black person in the US" doesn't tell much about an individual's ancestry. That's because health conditions are heavily influenced by environmental factors, and someone's race impacts the environmental factors they're exposed to. This does get complicated, and requires digging deep into the data. Top-level statistics don't indicate root cause, which still needs to be researched. But top-level statistics can indicate that there's a problem that needs to be worked on, which is why medical studies tracking race are still useful.
- sarchertech 1y agoIt’s still correlated enough with ancestry that it can be a useful proxy for health issues related to ancestry—in addition to the environmental factors you pointed out.
- earnestinger 1y agoIf data would include both, one could check which of them is a signal signal and which is noise
- scoofy 1y agoThe point is that race is a bad proxy for ethnicity. We should expect the environmental factors to also mirror ethnic clustering.
- nabla9 1y ago'African ancestry' is itself not a good concept. Tribes from the Horn of Africa have more common with Swedes than they have with East African tribes.
- yupitsme123 1y agoHow is this possible?
- anon291 1y agoI'm not sure about that particular claim, but in general, skin color and phenotype are not perfectly correlated with ancestry. The immediate objection is the obvious one... "What do you mean? Why do Chinese people look Chinese, or Africans African, or Europeans European?". What I mean is that, you can have two closely related populations with their own distinct phenotypes that are actually closely related. An interesting example are the Negritos of SE Asia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrito https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrito Here is what they look like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrito#/media/File:Taman_Negara_(30509997143).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrito#/media/File:Taman_Nega... Any person simply going off of looks, would obviously assume these people are African. However, they are indeed most closely related to their sister population, the fair-skinned small-eyed (please no offense, we all know what I'm talking about) East Asians. Their look is due to convergent selection that favors darker skin, wider noses, etc. They are actually vastly genetically different than the Africans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrito#/media/File:PCA_of_Orang_Asli_and_Andamanese_with_world_populations_in_HGDP.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrito#/media/File:PCA_of_Ora... This is what I mean by phenotype and genotype are not perfectly correlated.
- sjducb 1y agoIt’s quick and free to identify someone’s race. A genetic test takes several days and costs a few hundred dollars. The patient wants the best treatment right now. If race carries useful information that helps the doctor treat the patient, then the doctor should have access to it.
- achierius 1y agoIs it? What race is someone who's Arab? What about someone who could look black with one haircut but white with another? What about half-Arab, half-Euro? This might sound like nitpicking, but most black people in the US have significant European ancestry and the admixture can vary wildly even for people with similar skin tones. Our naive view of "race" is not always backed by genetic reality.
- dragonwriter 1y ago> Is it? Yes, you give them the list and say "What is your race/ethnicity, you may select at least one and as many as you wish." They answer. You are done. > What race is someone who's Arab? Whatever they answer (Middle East or Northern African [MENA], under the 2024 revision to the categories, intuitively seems most likely.) > What about someone who could look black with one haircut but white with another? Again, whatever they answer. > What about half-Arab, half-Euro? Again, whatever they answer. Though the most obvious guess of what they might answer, given the premise, would be one of White, MENA, or both. The part to question is not, "is it quick and free to determine race" but "does race carry useful information that helps the doctor treat the patient", which is a much thornier question.
- david-gpu 1y ago> Yes, you give them the list and say "What is your race/ethnicity, you may select at least one and as many as you wish." They answer. You are done. While I broadly agree with you, there have been notable controversies around people who self-identified as having a particular ancestry [0] that didn't match how other people classified them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal
- CGMthrowaway 1y ago>That being said, there are important differences within the traditional "races", such as the finding in this study that people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities for obesity. "Traditional races" as you call them have changed over time and space, and we are only in this predicament because we lump different ethnicities together today. 150 years ago people could tell the difference between someone of West African or East African descent. And Southern Italians, Irish vs Western Europeans vs Germans... etc. It's harder now because a) there has been a lot more mixing since then; and b) socioculturally we consolidated many of those ethnicities
- anon291 1y agoIt's harder now because now you live in America and are used to seeing all these people as Americans, and then as members of whatever racial consciousness we have in America. Back in those respective countries, they can tell everyone apart. When my wife (Irish/English by ancestry) visited Hungary, they were immediately able to peg her as a foreigner, and frankly, so was I. They look nothing alike aside from skin color. This is true of basically any country in Europe, Africa, Asia, where people have tended to remain in the same location for thousands of years. I think even most Americans would be able to tell apart African and European races if they really tried.
- SJC_Hacker 1y agoI’m calling BS on the “remained in the same place for thousands of years” Take a course in European history, learn about all the wars, genocides, forced and unenforced migrations, plagues, etc. and even more mundane thinggs like intermarriage outside of immediate community ( very common amongst nobility ) and tell me again with a straight face you believe people have remained in the same place for thousands of years They may have recognized your wife as “foreign” based on a number of things. The most obvious being language, But it could have also been dress, makeup, demeanor etc.
- pkkkzip 1y agoPrior to industrial revolution, mass immigration was difficult, not only because of logistics but tribalism.
- naasking 1y ago> Overall I would love it if medical research papers moved away from "race" and started getting more into the fine-grained genetic details. Regardless of the politics involved, this will lead to better medical treatments for everyone. More precision is better, but we don't have rapid genetic tests that can distinguish West vs. East African ancestry on the spot, so race is the only proxy available when you're, say, treating a patient in the ER.
- nradov 1y agoWe have rapid genetic tests now. They are still expensive and not widely available but this is improving. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2025.02.003 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2025.02.003
- peanutcrisis 1y agoThe notion of race and ethnicity in biology has been politicised by ideology. Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja clarifies this in point five of their piece [0] in the Skeptical Inquirer. [0] https://skepticalinquirer.org/2023/06/the-ideological-subversion-of-biology/ https://skepticalinquirer.org/2023/06/the-ideological-subver...
- tptacek 1y agoI don't know what Jerry Coyne is talking about because genetic vs. environmental causation of behavioral and physical traits, broken down "racially" and otherwise, is a very active field of study.
- peanutcrisis 1y agoHe isn't saying there isn't such research being done, he's criticizing the attempts made by ideologues to discredit and discourage research along such premises. Did you even bother to read the piece? He explicitly opens his fifth point with an example of The Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) weaponizing its reputation to do precisely just that. He documented another instance of this in Nature recently as well [0]. If you look at the top subthread here too, Nature Human Behaviour is doing this as well. Given all that, it seems he's right that the problem with ideologues exists. The success or lack thereof of these ideologues is a separate matter. Your claim that such research still exists doesn't negate the problem he identified. If anything, I don't think we should be comfortable with any kind of intentional distortions to the biology of race and ethnicity. The bad (false) PR could come back and bite, affecting the research and how it might be received. Otherwise, I don't really see any real disagreement here. [0] https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/05/11/nature-tackles-race-and-eugenics-in-a-torturous-and-tortuous-article/ https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/05/11/nature-tackles-rac...
- tptacek 1y agoYes, I read the piece, and I find it very difficult to reconcile with the volume and quality of research going on in this area. My feeling is that some people want there to be a kind of Heckler's Veto on "controversies" they're concerned about, so that they can rail against it. But there isn't. The real issue for people concerned about the politicization of this issue is that the science isn't going their way right now.
- alphazard 1y agoThe technical term that we use for genetic subgroups beneath the species level is "subspecies". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subspecies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subspecies
- paxys 1y agoThere are no human subspecies.
- dragonwriter 1y agoAmong the identified human subgroups, some would probably be subspecies of the same species as modern humans (Denisovans, neanderthals, and a few others) if there hadn't been a tendency to assign extinct human groups (or even individual specimens) as distinct species on scant evidence.
- malcolmgreaves 1y agoIncorrect: somewhere Ali g the way in your life, someone deeply lied to you. Race isn’t a subspecies. It’s an artificial social construct created by European elites in the beginning of the last millennium. Its purpose is to sow division. And to other groups of people to make it more palatable to commit crimes against the objectified folk.
- alphazard 1y agoThe original comment was talking about using a different term than race when doing real biology or medical science. You basically made their point by jumping in with an explanation of race.
- meindnoch 1y agoOk, but there are clear morphological, genetical, etc. differences between e.g. a Han Chinese person and a Yoruba person. So putting aside politics, sociology and whatnot, purely on a scientific basis, what term do you use for these differences? When you say that "these people belong to different $INSERT_TERM_HERE", what's the correct term to substitute?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- MrSkelter 1y agoYou have missed the point. “Race” is only reliably visible based on skin color for a single generation. You can be a green eyed redhead with a black West African grandparent. Americans obsession with “race” and racial superiority means that families both lie about their ancestry (turning African ancestors whose features are passed on into “Native American Princesses”) and misidentify themselves by using skin tone as a proxy for nationality. Even the idea that people can trust unscientific racial indicators is wrong. Ask a Guyanese person where people think they hail from? And before people say that their have distant African ancestors why does that matter? How many generations count and why must we look further when skin colors are dark than when they are fair? I.e. King Charles is considered English although his recent forebears were German and Churchill had an American mother and is likewise considered fully British. Yet someone of West African descent whose family has lived in the USA since the founding of Jamestown will still be considered “African” in a way more recent pale skinned immigrants are not. Any discussion built on an unscientific foundation like “race” will lead to ridiculous and contradictory conclusions based solely on skin tone.
- Al-Khwarizmi 1y agoNot very surprising that the official US races are BS. If I understand them correctly, officially someone from Portugal or France is supposed to be Caucasian, whereas someone from Spain is supposed to be Hispanic, which makes zero sense from any point of view.
- pram 1y agoFWIW "hispanic" isn't a race on those forms, it's an ethnicity. You can choose any race with it.
- octopoc 1y agoYeah and it actually kinda makes sense--in Mexico, there are white Hispanics who descended from Spanish Jews and have not interbred much with the natives. They are tall and white. Then there are people with little or no European blood in them, and they are short and brown, generally speaking. So it makes sense that you could be a Caucasian Hispanic.
- lazide 1y agoThe really weird thing is why a bunch of other things aren’t also ethnicities.
- dragonwriter 1y agoWhat other ethnicities do you think there is an equally strong case to include in the list of minimum reporting categories (which is what the official scheme defines) on par with the one current ethnic and six current (with the recent addition of Middle East and North African) racial categories?
- lazide 1y agoChinese. Indian. Northern European (Nordic countries). English. These all have just as much claim from a cultural-diaspora perspective eh? With a wide variety of phenotypes, if we go back a bit. Though Indian should probably be more finely divided if we’re being honest. If you really wanted to piss people off, we could of course lump Indian, Singaporean, Australian, American, etc. under English Ethnicity. The only reason Hispanic is one is because the conquistadors were really, really persistent, murderous, and shameless eh?
- yupitsme123 1y agoThis sounds like the same split that has happened with sex and gender in recent years.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- boston_clone 1y agoHuh? No, those have been definitively distinct for a very very long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex%E2%80%93gender_distinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex%E2%80%93gender_distinction
- ilaksh 1y agoThere is urgent need for education on these types of topics in the United States.
- ebiester 1y agoIt's there in every university. It's in every sociology and anthropology field at least. But in general, it gets dismissed as "Woke."
- Jensson 1y agoThose are the ones pushing for this though, its the woke that wants to collect all these self reported data. They say its nonsense but then go and make admittance decisions based on it.
- contagiousflow 1y agoThis is literally Critical Race Theory
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- notepad0x90 1y agoOn one hand, science tells us race as defined in western countries is not backed by actual biological differences. On the other hand, scientists use "race" in their research as if it is a legitimate means of categorizing people. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there are no differences between ethnicities, just that those differences are based on ancestry not race. People of a specific "race" don't share the same ancestry all the time, some times they have more in common with a different "race" than their own. Race as we know it today is a means of classifying humans that came about at a time when colonial expansion was booming. Classifying people based on their outward appearance was all too convenient. It's like someone learning how to code who found out there are thousands of programming languages and categorized them using terms like "curly brace language","lots of parenthesis language","indentation oriented language". It's lazy and childish. But once you learn more about the languages you should abandon the old ways of classifying things.
- energy123 1y ago> Race as we know it today is a means of classifying ... That's it. It's a classification system, a taxonomy, a social construction, a coarse categorization (all these things). But it's a bad one that only loosely correlates with a small handful of phenotypes. There isn't zero correlation which is why I disagree, as a matter of precision, with people who say race doesn't exist. The quality of a given taxonomy exists on a spectrum and race is a pretty damn bad one when you consider how inaccurately it separates the phenotypes it claims to care about, and how many genotypes/phenotypes (the vast majority) it fails to separate at all beyond a coin flip.
- n4r9 1y ago> scientists use "race" in their research as if it is a legitimate means of categorizing people The journal Nature Human Behaviour published ethics guidelines in Aug 2022 which touch on this: > 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. > Studies that use the constructs of race and/or ethnicity should explicitly motivate their use. Race/ethnicity should not be used as proxies for other variables — for example, socioeconomic status or income. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2 There was a furore here in the discussion of it on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32595083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32595083
- makotech221 1y ago[flagged]
- ty6853 1y agoThe Nazi garbage is when you try to put it in policy. For example those with genotypes that produce black skin predictably score lower on average on an IQ test (which means nothing beyond exactly that, nor does it mean the gene itself causes that), though we don't really know why, nor should that information be used to decide who to hire or what laws or policies should be in place. I don't think the problem is the science, it's the non-scientific conclusions.
- haroldb1 1y ago[flagged]
- ty6853 1y agoI would say racist but nothing wrong with it, as purely my subjective opinion. I am only bothered by instances of racism where you violate the individual liberties of others. ex Nazis I don't really care the Germans hated Jews, I do care they put them in camps and executed them. Pre-emptively slapping them would violate their individual liberties, walking across the street infringes on no one, and indeed if I tried to control the right to people to freely travel based on thought-police it would be far more dystopic than any potential racism.
- haroldb1 1y ago[dead]
- makotech221 1y ago> For example those with genotypes that produce black skin predictably score lower on average on an IQ test This is also nazi garbage. IQ isn't a real thing.
- GolfPopper 1y agoI seem to recall (but cannot find) a variant of the Weinreich witticism[1], which goes something like, "a nation is a language with an army and an origin story". (Meaning 'nation' in the sense of "a people" rather than "a state".[2]) 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with... 2. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/nation https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/nation
- kelseyfrog 1y agoI was assigned Italian at birth. There is no changing that, legally, illegally, by 23andMe, or anyone else.
- nonethewiser 1y agoIs Italian a race now? If you can be assigned Italian I'm not sure what's stopping you from being reassigned to something else.
- amanaplanacanal 1y agoIt hasn't been very long since "Irish" was considered by many to be a separate race.
- VOIPThrowaway2 1y agoWe've only recently stopped thinking of "Italian" as being separate. For good and bad.
- cjbgkagh 1y agoI have Northern Italian friends who consider themselves very separate to the Southern Italians. The Lega Nord party was originally about Padania (Northern Italy) separatism.
- bombcar 1y agoAlmost any group identified from the outside has internal divisions that they insist are incredibly important. What did the Elves say? “To sheep other sheep no doubt appear different. Or to shepherds. But Mortals have not been our study.” People can get really prickly about it, for example lumping all people south of the US border as "Hispanic" or calling everyone in the UK "English".
- kelseyfrog 1y agoWho is the epistemic authority on someone's culture or ethnicity?
- gotoeleven 1y ago[flagged]
- breakyerself 1y ago[flagged]
- lazide 1y agoBank account balance seems to be popular now.
- runarberg 1y agoI don't know if you are being serious but usually privilege is proportional to wealth. White men are on average the richest demographic and thus have the greatest privilege. Also critical race theory is compatible with these results. Critical race theory holds that race is as social construct, and can only be found in culture, not in genetics.
- ebiester 1y agoNobody wins the oppression olympics.
- dang 1y agoPlease don't post flamebait to HN. We've had to ask you this before. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- duxup 1y agoI recall a newspaper story about a Black writer who did not know his ancestry. He took a genetic test to find out he was more native American than black. He told his mother who responded "I'm too old to stop being a black woman." I think that is an understandable feeling and I think that says a lot about the concept of race. Her statement doesn't make race any less real, but it does indicate what race IS.
- tokai 1y agoYour comment made me remember this short reportage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9mtCLL8rI0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9mtCLL8rI0 Culture is definitely the major part of 'race'.
- pkkkzip 1y ago[flagged]
- DoctorOW 1y agoI don't think that's what they were arguing: > Her statement doesn't make race any less real, but it does indicate what race IS.
- ilamont 1y agoPart of the problem with self-reported ethnic or racial backgrounds is the explosion of cheap DNA tests from the likes of Ancestry and the now-bankrupt 23andme. All of a sudden, people have the ability to determine if distant ancestors came from a different continent. Even if it's just 1 or 2% or even a trace amount, they're checking off boxes identifying themselves as multiracial. For the 2020 census, it resulted in a 276% increase in the number of people self-identifying with more than one racial group. This is far more than could be explained by immigration or children born to parents from different backgrounds since 2010. This NPR article (https://www.npr.org/2021/08/28/1030139666/2020-census-results-data-race-multiracial-dna-ancestry-test-mixed-biracial https://www.npr.org/2021/08/28/1030139666/2020-census-result...) explains the dynamic: Its findings suggest adults 50 and up are most likely to self-identify as multiracial on surveys after receiving a report about the potential roots of their family tree based on a DNA analysis of their saliva. The study of more than 100,000 adults registered as potential bone marrow donors in the U.S. also found that DNA test takers were especially likely to identify with three or more racial groups. ... "Native American was the one identity people really wanted to have and really wanted to prove," Roth says, adding that she has also found that some people stopped claiming Native American identity after the results of a test did not show any genetic ancestry. You can imagine the problem when self-reported racial identities could really cloud the waters for determining a suitable bone marrow donor or other health application.
- y-c-o-m-b 1y ago> Even if it's just 1 or 2% or even a trace amount, they're checking off boxes identifying themselves as multiracial. This is not necessarily wrong though. In many cases I've seen where children of grandparents from a particular region showing up on those products as having low percentage heritage from those areas. If your grandmother was born in China and is - for all intents and purposes - clearly Chinese, yet you show up with 3% Chinese DNA on these products, does that mean you can't identify as having Chinese in your family background? Who determines where this line is drawn?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Freedom2 1y agoI remember a few years back, I was at a tech conference – one of those big ones in San Francisco, you know, where everyone is talking about the latest in AI and blockchain. Anyway, during a coffee break, I overheard this intense discussion about ancestry DNA kits. One guy, who looked very much like he could have stepped out of a Swedish travel brochure, was absolutely flabbergasted because his DNA results showed a significant percentage of Sub-Saharan African ancestry. He kept repeating, "But my family has been in Nebraska for generations!" It's almost like our perceived identity is just a user interface, and the genetic code is the raw assembly language underneath. It makes me wonder, how much of our cultural narrative is shaped by these historical "coding errors" or, perhaps, deliberate obfuscations? And what happens when more and more people start running these genetic "debuggers" on their own personal history? Are we headed for a significant "reboot" of how we understand race and identity in society? Just food for thought.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoIt has always been like that. “My family has always been christian” except before that critical generation where the village shrine to the pagan gods were burned, the women raped, the men and children put to the sword by christians with a directive from a christian king to put all pagans to the sword, and your surviving pagan ancestor fleeing to the woods and eventually hiding all indications of their former faith out of survival. People talk about the irony of Black people adopting the faith of their oppressors when really that is the case for most monotheists today when you start to consider the historical contexts of why their lineage adopted the monotheistic faith at the time.
- mistrial9 1y agothe truth you speak there is a) not representative of all the conversion stories and b) is very representative of Christian conversion in the North East of Europe e.g. Saint Boniface and Donar's Oak. Africans in the USA is certainly a special sociological case due to the largest importation of agricultural slaves in Western history. As almost everyone knows, not all people shipped in chains to the US South were illiterate. Literacy is a central feature of Christian practice. All else aside, literate people in chains adopting the literate religion does not sound too far fetched to me.
- kome 1y agorace science is bogus, news at 11
- cjbgkagh 1y agoOne of the problems now is if you use SNP statistics for Germans you have to take into account the N% of Turks in that population which changes over time, with DNA they really should be separate groups. The assumption that the genes will blend doesn't really pan out quickly enough for it to be ignored in the near term. Race was a crude approximation and better techniques are available today. There is a push to use a wider variety of reference genomes which makes sense especially now that that computers are more powerful. There seems to be an assumption by others here that going from an unsophisticated crude approximation to a sophisticated one will somehow validate their other assumption that 'race is only skin deep'. I am not as optimistic.
- haroldb1 1y ago[dead]
- like_any_other 1y ago> Rather than fitting into clear-cut genetic clusters based on self-reported racial or ethnic labels, most participants’ genomes revealed different gradients of ancestry spanning continents, the team reports today. I assume this refers to figure 7 of the study [1]. Figure 7C shows 63/124,341 self-identified Whites had predicted African ancestry from their genome, 45,206/45,761 Blacks, and 19/7,419 Asians. Figure 7D shows predicted European ancestry, which was 120,127/124,341 for Whites, 110/45,761, and 39/7,419 for Asians. This seems like remarkably good correspondence to me? > Race, ethnicity don’t match genetic ancestry The title is missing "self-reported" at the start. Without that, the article isn't even self-consistent - "race is meaningless, it does not perfectly match genetic ancestry from historical geographical groups"? You haven't done away with race, you just renamed it to "African ancestry", "European ancestry", "Asian ancestry", etc.., and found that they have somewhat intermixed in the US. But it has been known since literally ancient Greece that races can intermix, and that their variation is geographically gradual, so the study hasn't discovered or disproven anything new. It's amusing to contrast this with science's findings on non-human animals: there are 16 subspecies of brown bear, 38 subspecies of wolf, 46 subspecies of red fox, 9 subspecies of tiger, and 12 subspecies of house sparrow. [1] https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(25)00173-9 https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(25)00173-9
- like_any_other 1y agoCorrection: Line 3 was supposed to read "110/45,761 for Blacks"
- MisterBastahrd 1y agoJust look at Louisiana for a second. There are hispanic creoles, native american creoles, german creoles, italian creoles, so forth and so on. Because to be a Louisiana creole isn't to rely on any racial marker at all. It just signifies that your ancestors lived here at a particular time. So if someone says that they're Cajun, not creole, they're lying to you. ALL cajuns, without exception, are creole. And most people who claim to be Cajun are either not Cajun at all or they've mistaken their surname for being Cajun. Like a guy who told me I was wrong about a food item and he knew better because he's a Cajun, being a Champagne from Golden Meadow. Only problem is that Champagne isn't a cajun surname. The Champagne family came over directly from France. You might have seen Isaac Toups on TV hawking a cookbook. The Toups surname is actually German (originally spelled Dubs but the French authorities did their thing), and they landed in the US in 1718-19 in Biloxi, MS. And so on, and so on... I think that some "cajuns" would be more willing to call themselves creole if they knew that in addition to the native americans, the other group that saved their asses when they came to the territory were the German creoles. Those people had it far, far harsher than the Acadian disapora ever did. When they got to the territory, they were not allowed to use beasts of burden for a full decade. This means that when they were dropped off and told to go farm rice (which none of them had ever done before), they had to till their fields and deliver their product to New Orleans from the River Parishes, up to 60 miles away without horses. By the time the Cajuns got here, there were plenty of horses for working the land and other livestock that you were legally allowed to eat. Anyway, that's just one little speck of a much larger ethnic pie.
- selimthegrim 1y agoYou beat me to it. I definitely know Cajuns from Breaux Bridge with the last name Rees for example. The registrar of births in Orleans Parish used to essentially blackmail several prominent families about how far back the black was in their birth certificates and lineage.
- genewitch 1y agoWhere do coon-asses fit in this scheme?
- 1y ago
- msgodel 1y agoMy parents got DNA tested the other year. I was surprised to find out: 1) I'm mostly British/Irish (largely Welsh apparently) 2) I have no African or Asian heritage idk I had always just called myself "American" and assumed I'd be a mix of a lot of things.
- bombcar 1y agoI know some people who would spend hours at the tavern explaining why "British/Irish (largely Welsh apparently)" is an almost incomprehensible statement :D
- MrDrDr 1y agoI found the following paper helpful in understanding the evolutionary pressures on a species (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abg5391 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abg5391). It's possible for two different genetic ancestries to arrive at the same phenotype independently where there environment is virtually identical. The example here, cichlid fish in lakes like Tanganyika and Victoria, evolved similar traits independently from different genetic lineages. One could imagine (climate change not withstanding) that different geographic human populations would always tend to evolve to the same phenotype over time.
- systemstops 1y agoRace is a social construct, but one loosely based on biological reality. As we unravel the mystery of human origins using ancient DNA, we are starting to get a better understanding of the how different groups came to be. The idea what we are a homogenous species with no biologically important distinctions between groups - which became popular in the postwar period - is coming to end. But, we are also not returning to racial essentialism of the past. The new narrative of human differences will be far more complicated. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-025-02117-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-025-02117-1
- pkkkzip 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- systemstops 1y agoIt's a social construct in the way that all categories are. The question is whether or not a category is useful. I'm saying there are genetic differences between groups, but our structuring of these groups is pretty flexible. There are genetic differences between "continental groups" but there is also a good amount of genetic diversity within sub-Saharan Africa populations because those people did not go through the genetic bottleneck that Eurasians did. Our understanding of race have been historically contingent. Both the racial essentialism of the colonial period and the "we are all the same under the skin" anti-racism of post-WW2 were based more on political ideologies than reality.
- nitwit005 1y agoIf you tell me you have a test that can distinguish a Japanese person from a Finn, I'd say sure. If you told me you had one that could distinguish a French person from a German, I'd laugh.
- Jensson 1y ago
- rayiner 1y ago> Geneticists have long established that race and ethnicity are sociocultural constructs and not good proxies to describe genetic differences in disease risks and traits among groups I’m Asian and I grew up in the U.S. and for years I didn’t realize the stomach problems I was having were from drinking milk when most asians cannot drink milk, while most European Americans can: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/16jcecc/map_of_lactase_persistence_throughout_eurasia_and/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/16jcecc/map_of_lac.... Is race a rough proxy? Sure. But it’s an easy proxy to administer which in the medical context gives it a certain value for making people aware of differences that may be salient.
- kelnos 1y agoIt's very rough, though. I know many (East, South, Southeast) Asians who can drink milk just fine. But I -- white with European ancestry -- am lactose intolerant. Not a really useful rubric from my perspective, and I think if a doctor (re: your "medical context") were to say something like, "you're Asian so your stomach distress is probably caused by dairy" or "you're white so we should look deeper for some unusual cause of your stomach distress", I would look for a new doctor immediately.
- rayiner 1y agoThink about the probabilities. Lactose intolerance in the UK (as a proxy for British Americans) is under 10%, while in my home country it is over 85%. Meanwhile, drinking milk is universal among white American children (it’s served in schools). If a white kid has stomach problems, there’s a 90% chance it’s not lactose intolerance. But if an Asian kid presents with stomach problems, lactose intolerance is probably the single likeliest explanation. And it can be assessed by asking a couple of simple questions. Our kids are half white so we were unsure if they’d be lactose intolerant. At the first sign of stomach problems in the youngest, we switched him to lactose free milk and the problem went away immediately. If we took him to a doctor we might’ve gone down a whole rabbit hole of dead ends. And if we weren’t aware of the issue and looking out for it, we may have not done anything and just let him deal with the discomfort. After all, kids get tummy aches for a million reasons.
- readthenotes1 1y ago[flagged]
- southernplaces7 1y agoUnsurprising. Many, many people claim their ethnicity is X third this or that based on some half-checked thing some older relative told them a while back, and then base their claims on that, despite having all kinds of different possible ancestry combos. I myself, being from the Balkans, don't even pretend to have a clue of what my genetic ancestry might be, and don't feel like finding out through some Find Your DNA ancestry (parasitic data harvesting) startup.
- Peacefulz 1y agoI'm multiracial, but I only ever choose White on forms. I don't really have anything to do with the other side of my family, and I don't relate to their culture. I have also lived in predominantly rural areas, and I didn't feel it benefitted me to claim my other half on forms that held any importance to me.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nitwit005 1y agoThis is genuinely in the question. The US census doesn't ask about your ancestry, they ask about your race. You couldn't accurately fill out your ancestry on the form, even if you wanted to.
- cabrafilo 1y agoI was surprised that in Barcelona, foreigners asked me for directions in Spanish (I'm American). I suppose it's not unusual for a local to have my pigmentation/phenotype, but I think if you put 20 locals and I in a room and asked Spaniards and Americans who was the sore thumb, I'd be the guess of most.
- Muslims4Porky 1y ago[flagged]
- nycticorax 1y agoDOI link to original article: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2025.04.012 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2025.04.012