8 ms·

The 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 amo

The 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 ago
  Very true, but of course you're talking about a different era much further up the tree.
- shrubble 1y ago
  I don’t; unless you are referring to the discredited “out of Africa” theory
  - earnestinger 1y ago
    Could you elaborate? I assume you imply that humans evolved not in Africa. Where?
    - gitremote 1y ago
      Neanderthals evolved in Europe and Europeans have more Neanderthal ancestry, so he might identify more with his Neanderthal ancestors.
      - shrubble 1y ago
        I’ve used Perl a lot.
    - shrubble 1y ago
      There’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.
      - gitremote 1y ago
        Homo sapiens didn't evolve from Denisovans and Neanderthals. All are branches of human and existed at the same time and interbred.* Homo sapiens survived while Neanderthals and Denisovans became extinct. The majority of the ancestry of living humans, Homo sapiens, was originally from Africa. Europeans have some Neanderthal ancestry (like 2%) due to interbreeding with Neanderthals, but the vast majority of European DNA is from Africa. Sub-Saharan Africans have less Neanderthal ancestry than Europeans and more Homo sapiens ancestry. * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archai...
  - pfannkuchen 1y ago
    I 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 ago
  Is 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 ago
    Yes, 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 ago
      No, 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 ago
Genetic 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 ago
  More 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 ago
  I 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 ago
  The 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 ago
  It'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 ago
African is a useless label -- Africa alone has as much genetic diversity as the rest of the world combined.
- DougMerritt 1y ago
  What lead to this?
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    Founder effect
  - skywhopper 1y ago
    Africa is where humans originally come from. There’s much more human history in Africa than the rest of the world.
    - djohnston 1y ago
      Existence, not history. History requires writing.
      - layer8 1y ago
        That’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 ago
        The 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 ago
It'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 ago
  It’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 ago
    If data would include both, one could check which of them is a signal signal and which is noise
- scoofy 1y ago
  The 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 ago
  How is this possible?
  - anon291 1y ago
    I'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 ago
It’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 ago
  Is 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 ago
  It'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 ago
    I’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 ago
      Prior 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 ago
  We 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 ago
The 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    He 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 ago
      Yes, 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 ago
The 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 ago
  There are no human subspecies.
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    Among 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 ago
  Incorrect: 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 ago
    The 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 ago
    Ok, 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 ago
You 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.

reverendsteveii 1y ago

>almost guaranteed to have at least some African ancestry everyone from everywhere has african ancestry

DougMerritt 1y ago
Very true, but of course you're talking about a different era much further up the tree.
shrubble 1y ago
I don’t; unless you are referring to the discredited “out of Africa” theory
- earnestinger 1y ago
  Could you elaborate? I assume you imply that humans evolved not in Africa. Where?
  - gitremote 1y ago
    Neanderthals evolved in Europe and Europeans have more Neanderthal ancestry, so he might identify more with his Neanderthal ancestors.
    - shrubble 1y ago
      I’ve used Perl a lot.
  - shrubble 1y ago
    There’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.
    - gitremote 1y ago
      Homo sapiens didn't evolve from Denisovans and Neanderthals. All are branches of human and existed at the same time and interbred.* Homo sapiens survived while Neanderthals and Denisovans became extinct. The majority of the ancestry of living humans, Homo sapiens, was originally from Africa. Europeans have some Neanderthal ancestry (like 2%) due to interbreeding with Neanderthals, but the vast majority of European DNA is from Africa. Sub-Saharan Africans have less Neanderthal ancestry than Europeans and more Homo sapiens ancestry. * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archaic_and_modern_humans https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archai...
- pfannkuchen 1y ago
  I 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 ago
Is 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 ago
  Yes, 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 ago
    No, 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 ago

Genetic 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 ago
More 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 ago
I 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 ago
The 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 ago
It'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 ago

African is a useless label -- Africa alone has as much genetic diversity as the rest of the world combined.

DougMerritt 1y ago
What lead to this?
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  Founder effect
- skywhopper 1y ago
  Africa is where humans originally come from. There’s much more human history in Africa than the rest of the world.
  - djohnston 1y ago
    Existence, not history. History requires writing.
    - layer8 1y ago
      That’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 ago
      The 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 ago

It'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 ago
It’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 ago
  If data would include both, one could check which of them is a signal signal and which is noise
scoofy 1y ago
The 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 ago
How is this possible?
- anon291 1y ago
  I'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 ago

It’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 ago
Is 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 ago
It'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 ago
  I’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 ago
    Prior 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 ago
We 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 ago

The 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 ago
I 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 ago
  He 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 ago
    Yes, 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 ago

The 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 ago
There are no human subspecies.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  Among 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 ago
Incorrect: 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 ago
  The 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 ago
  Ok, 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 ago

You 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.