Vox reports that CRISPR gene editing technology is great, but it has a problem:
Most of the available reference genomes are representative of white Europeans. That’s a problem because not everybody’s DNA is identical: Recent sequencing of African genomes shows that they have 10 percent more DNA than the standard reference genome available to researchers.
....So while those studies can help identify genes of importance that could lead to effective treatments for the population whose genes make up the majority of the reference data — i.e., white people — the same treatments may not work as well for other nonwhite populations.
....Although the vast majority of human genomes are the same, a small fraction of the letters making up our genes can differ from person to person and from population to population, with potentially significant medical implications.
The word "black" is never used in this piece—with one exception: to describe how the Tukegee experiment eroded Black trust in the medical system. Despite this careful excision, I'm still a little surprised the article made it through Vox's famously woke editorial gauntlet. After all, everyone understands that "ancestry group" is just another word for race.
In other words, race is a social construct. Except when it's not. Genomes differ more from person to person than from group to group. Except when it matters anyway. It's absurd to believe there are meaningful genetic differences between races population groups. Except when it's not. It all depends on whether it's good or bad for the narrative.
There's more genetic diversity in Africa than the rest of the world combined. Why? Because we as a species originated there. It's that simple. Even if black people weren't (understandably) averse to the healthcare system it'd be really difficult for them to catalogue their genomes to the extent of Europeans who are largely very homogenous. You don't have to resort to racist dog whistling.
Exactly. Analogy: vertebrate fish diversified early in the history of life. Then one branch of those fish made their way onto the land. So there are some fish (who more recently diverged from the lineage that led to land animals) that are more closely related to every living land vertebrate than they are to some other fish who diverged further back in time. Some people of strictly Africa descent are more closely related to the populations that emigrated to Europe and Asia than they are to other population groups in Africa.
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This strikes me as weird. People whose ancestors were geographically distinct are going to have some level of genetic distinctiveness but that might not necessarily perfectly align with skin tone. It does align much better with people groups (Burmese people, Shan people, etc. etc.) and thats why you make a distinction.
At this rate Kevin is going to vote for Trump in November just to show us he's no big deal and everyone is hysterical.
Have you ever noticed the strange fact that people groups, especially for those without a lot of mixing with other people groups, tend to have pretty homogenous skin tone?
Nobody ever claimed they didn't, weirdo. When people point out that race is socially constructed they don't mean the ridiculous strawman of "anyone could be born with any skin color regardless of the genetics of their parents," they mean "skin color is not actually a useful category, or even a particularly helpful heuristic, for analyzing the implications of genetic diversity (medical, sociological, etc.) at the population level, there are a hundred other variables people should pay more attention to than skin color for these purposes, and the fact that laypeople refuse to do so is just another obvious piece of evidence that "race" is socially constructed rather than grounded in relevant biological facts."
I am in fact a lay person
It's rather amazing how much "race is a social construct" has become rooted as dogma on the left. You must agree, or you are breaking some terrible taboo. Even scientists have been intimidated into nodding and saying, yes, race is 100% a social construct. They don't want to get booted from their institutions by saying otherwise. It's such nonsense.
In biology, you have species and sub-specifies. But sometimes you have populations that differ, but not enough to be called sub-species, so the word race is used instead. In biology, race is a term used rather loosely, such as when talking about humans whose biological roots are from different ancestral regions. There does not need to be an exact number of races. When investigating different population groups of humans, genetic clusters can be defined many different ways. You can have 5 races or 50, depending on what you are looking for.
US government institutions regularly refer to different races, as do ordinary people, and they aren't ignorant dopes for doing this. Spare me the dogma demanding that we all declare that race is purely a social construct.
"US government institutions regularly refer to different races, as do ordinary people"
That's pretty much the definition of "socially constructed". Regular people and even government meteorological reports say every day that the "sun rises." That doesn't confirm a geocentric universe.
LMAO this is like every fallacy in the book about race, plus the laughable throw-in conflating the colloquial/US government usage of "race" (literally socially constructed categories) within an assertion that race isn't a social construct.
You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about biology. This is not how most 21st-century biologists describe populations, unless we're specifically referring to like mycologists. "Buh race is a taxonomic group below a subspecies!" is like the biological version of the ultimate smoothbrained politics take of "Buh we're a republic not a democracy!"
bw nailed it, your ignorance of biology couldn't be more obvious, race is fake and has always been fake, and is an ignorant notion long before we became informed about genetics (even more so than Freud's coke-binged colonial/victorian "psychology", Marx's half-baked "utopia", and Hegel's imaginative nonsense), which doesn't and won't justify ignorant and (quite frankly) malevolent notions of "race" by profoundly ignorant people before the age of science (and trust me, race never has been subjected to rigorous scientific thought and testing, it's pre-science "observation" and classification of surface attributes in an era of profound bigotry and prejudice)
So what race is Barack Obama? And why?
Are Ashkenazi Jews who are predisposed to Tay-Sachs disease a “race”?
Obama clearly proves that race does not exist.
Equally, the existence of grey proves that white and black are not real.
Or perhaps there can be this concept of a "mixture"? We could call someone like Obama "interracial". Would that make sense?
Usually, we Ashkenazi Jews are considered an ethnic group. A lower level of classification than race, but without a clear dividing line.
This is similar to uncontroversial biological concepts like sub-species, species, and genus where the decision to classify two population groups of organisms as separate sub-species, species, or genus is often quite arbitrary.
Obama is Black. Literally nobody discussing the matter in good faith is confused about this. Certainly Barack Obama is not confused about this.
In some other cultures, Obama's race would be constructed socially in a different fashion. But in the US, he's Black.
So this is where you get the difference between race as a social construct and as biological reality.
Socially, Obama is black.
Biologically, Obama is an interracial mix, 50% sub-Saharan African and 50% Caucasian.
That's still a social construct. There's an awful lot of variation between different groups of sub-Saharan Africans. You could talk about Obama being a partial member of the Eurasian race if that race had been socially constructed.
Sure... but then in the same way the difference between sub-species, species, and genus is socially constructed. That does not mean that the concept is not real and useful. It just means that we categorize somewhat arbitrarily. It would be perfectly reasonable to talk about a Eurasian race and the Caucasian and Asian subraces. You would then probably want to break Asians up into even more sub-sub-races - South Asian, North East Asian, South East Asia, Arab, etc.
All of these correspond to groups that drop out of any reasonable clustering algorithm if you hand it a diverse groups of human genomes and tell it to divide into 2, 3, or more clusters.
There is no issue to talk about genetic differences between ancestry groups. But one has to be careful with the usage of words and "race" is particularly susceptible to be misused, misinterpreted, misunderstood by people. It is not easy to communicate complex subtle scientific facts to the population at large without it being distorted by people of bad faith. You talk about mutations of the protein hemoglobin found in africans (which leads to sickle cell anemia) and soon people are concluding that all blacks based on genetics have a lower average IQ than whites.
You see this same sort of discrimination with creation scientists. They've basically been blackballed by biology departments at universities in the US. And it's not just the schools. This happens in industry, too. Oil companies, for instance, have banded together to refuse to hire creationist geologists.
Climate scientists are subject to the same sort of discrimination. You can see that vast, vast majorities of scholars regard climate change as a fact. Universities almost exclusively hire people whose minds are completely closed on that subject.
It's as you say: "[S]cientists have been intimidated into nodding."
And don't get me started on the persecution of flat earth proponents.
"When investigating different population groups of humans, genetic clusters can be defined many different ways. You can have 5 races or 50, depending on what you are looking for."
which pretty much makes the term meaningless.
JFC Kevin. I’ve read your writing for @20 years, and this has to be one of the worst posts I’ve seen. Are the cancer meds causing cognitive decline? Because race and genetics are entirely distinct. I’m sorry for your health issues, but please do better.
"everyone understands that 'ancestry group' is just another word for race"
Hmm. Maybe that's upside-down? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that "race" is a clumsy and imprecise shorthand colloquialism for "ancestry group"?
Consider kkseattle's example of Tay-Sachs. We know enough about European genetics to say that a particular subgroup of Europeans has a strong tendency toward a specific mutation. How useful is "white" to describe what's happening there? Can't we say that's about "ancestry group" more than "race"?
The article (which is confusingly written in general, btw, enough to be irritating) points specifically to Africa and South Asia as areas where much more genomic mapping is needed to establish better base models. Would you use "black" to describe both these areas, or to describe people with ancestry there?
When for diagnostic or therapeutic purposes what we're really trying to get at is an *individual's* genetics, a gross appearance-based category like "race" is a very weak proxy. It can arguably be useful for screening because we're not going to spend the money to sequence everybody, though ultimately that's one place where medical genetics can go. But it's badly imprecise to begin with, and will be increasingly so as the world's population slowly intermixes more.
In the meantime we have things like eGFR with and without "racial" factors in the equations, where "race" is/was a clumsy and imprecise shorthand for ancestry group, which was the really meaningful thing the distinction was intended to get at.
And with a big enough genomic knowledge base, it might eventually be possible to identify specific African subgroup patterns, as researchers have been able to do among Europeans. Appearance then will be even less useful as a guide than it is now.
I'd say this was more of a hot take than most posts, KD, dyspeptic even, but can I suggest counting to 10 and asking whether folks might have an underlying reason for the particular jargon they're using?
Exactly.
"In other words, race is a social construct. Except when it's not. Genomes differ more from person to person than from group to group. Except when it matters anyway. It's absurd to believe there are meaningful genetic difference between races population groups. Except when it's not. It all depends on whether it's good or bad for the narrative."
Correct. Now let's drag in the genetic differences between humans who are genetically XY, XX, and all other viable cominations of X and/or Y. Oh, and let's not forget chimeras. More common that most realize.
Both of these things can be true:
1. Race is a social construct
2. There are differences in the frequency of some genes, or at least alleles, among groups that we call "races."
Number one is true because "race" is simply a way of dividing humans into groups, so of course those groups are socially constructed. The boundaries are drawn by society, and different societies draw them differently. The "one-drop" rule is an obvious example. Other countries draw boundaries differently. https://socialsci.libretexts.org/Courses/HACC_Central_Pennsylvania's_Community_College/ANTH_205%3A_Cultures_of_the_World_-_Perspectives_on_Culture_(Scheib)/11%3A_Race_and_Ethnicity/11.04%3A_Race_In_Three_Nations
No. 2 is true because the fact that racial categories are socially constructed does not mean that they are wholly arbitrary. And indeed we see that the frequency of the allele for blond hair is higher in the group we (in the US) call "white" than in the one we call "black." There are obviously many other examples. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1798268/
+1
Well said. Kevin confuses "race" with "genetic difference among groups." That's how he's able to cite "Black" as a race despite the massive genetic distinctions among people labeled "Black." On the other hand, in Kevin's world, "Italian" doesn't seem to be a race at all.
I haven't got the biology chops to be sure, but I'd betcha that there are groups of "Blacks" that are genetically closer to Italians than they are to other "Blacks."
This just suggests that a particular region has more genetic diversity. It doesn't really lend any credibility to the idea of race as biology.
This post is still up without any addendum or explanation, huh?
This may be OT, but then, perhaps not.
I always found it fascinating that Romans had no construct of "race" analogous to modern concepts. The empire obviously included a multitude of peoples and cultures but they used geographical and cultural categories to distinguish people not colour. Also, they would enslave anyone, regardless of colour. As far as I can tell, that social attitude existed for all the ancient civilizations.
The concept of "race" as we understand and use it, only appeared in the 16th century - during the Age of Enlightenment and only in Europe and then the Americas. It was a social construct that developed in the context of European colonization and the transatlantic slave trade, and was later reinforced through scientific theories and studies that attempted to prove biological differences between groups of people. Says a lot.