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.
fine, Kevin, you can say the n word.
"10 percent more DNA"?
Do they actually mean 10% more variability?
Also obviously the extra variability of African populations is a problem in any medical issue, not only when using CRISPR.
According to:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0273-y
"The APG sequences contain 296.5 Mb, equal to 10% of the genome, regions that will necessarily be missed by any efforts relying only on GRCh38 to study human variation"
So it looks like 10% more generic variatiosnnot contained in the reference sample.
This article also says in the abstract:
"... demonstrating that the African pan-genome contains ~10% more DNA than the current human reference genome. "
Which is quite misleading, because it does say "more DNA", rather than variable regions (contigs) that don't match the reference genome, which is what they actuallty found.
Needs to add that these contigs came from 910 different individuals, and they say that " On average, each individual contained 859 of these inserted sequences, with a single sequence being shared among six individuals (Table 2). "
The 859 is 0.7% of the number of contigs ( 125,715), so assuming equal length contigs on average, each of these individuals has on average 0.7% * 10% variable contigs, i.e. 0.0007 (or 0.07%) of the genome.
We already have evidence that African genes have more variations than the genetic material form other areas. This is not race per se, bu rather tracking of the migration patterns.
And it is genetic subgroups not races.
In short this is not a statement about blacks perhaps in the US, but of the genetic makeup in various genetic pools.
That jerkoff Carl Linneus invented the concept of race out of thin air and immediately ranked them, putting white europeans at the top.
"Every Living Thing" but Jason Roberts
Linneus may have attempted to systematize the concept of race, but he most certainly didn't invent it. It precedes him by thousands of years and is the product of simple observation.
The ignorant product of simple observation, like much folklore.
Uncharacteristically testy and scientifically ignorant attitude today.
Don't be so f**king stupid Kevin. You know (much) better than this.
The question is not whether there are genes that determine skiin color, or the shape of someone's nose, or whether they might be more susceptible to sickle-cell anemia. And so on.
The question is whether it is meaningful to gather up a grab bag of genetically-determined characteristics and use it to create a category of Them and assign people with even one of those characteristics to that group.
This post comes off as mocking those who say "race is a social construct". It is very disappointing.
I think those of us who want to see the country and the world more inclusive, and to see less racial violence and privilege would be working on ways to discuss this in down-to-earth everyday language, rather than mocking the admittedly somewhat stilted and formulaic language that was the first stab at this.
Work on making things better, not throwing rocks at people who are trying. C'mon, you don't even have to like those other guys.
If you think I'm exaggerating, let me tell you about something that happened to me. A person who is rabidly anti-Jewish decided that I was Jewish on the thinnest of evidence (my last name, which is Germanic, but not really anything remotely associated with Judaism, and my grad school, Stanford. Which is kind of nuts.) He then spread this "insight" to other students, which is eventually how it came to me in the form of another student sayiing, "Hey, you're eating ham!"
I don't object to being thought of as Jewish, but this process seems a serious problem, and the person doing it a poor excuse of a human being.
So the thing is, he has created a social construct of "Judaism". Jewishness has a genetic and a cultural element. What this person did was purely cultural. This is the big-ass problem.
Please, Kevin, I implore you to work on finding better solutions, rather than throwing rocks.
Those who say "race is a social construct" deserve to be mocked. Race is an easily observable fact.
Really?
so what race is contained among those on the Indian subcontinent?
How about Iran?
And what is the actual genetic make up of blacks in the US? Comments on the Y chromosome?
You're clearly out of your depth in this conversation, so I would just have a seat for a while.
I'm curious about something. Would you describe yourself as someone who would like to see the country and the world be more inclusive?
Much of what is ascribed as "racial characteristics" is utter nonsense. The fact of race is undeniable, and recognizing that has nothing whatsoever to do with "inclusive" or not.
So what race is Barack Obama? And why?
Is it the “one drop” rule? Or is it an octoroon? Or a quadroon?
"So what race is Barack Obama? And why?"
He is of mixed race because his parents were of different races.
just like my grandpappy always said, plantation owners weren't racist, they were only interested in suppressing all that primal genetic variability
10% more DNA huh? All Africans, have 10% more DNA too, huh? So the little twerp frat boy from Mississippi was wrong to be making chimpanzee noises at a Black woman because (checking notes) chimpanzees DNA differs from human by only around 2%? So at 10% difference he should have been making, I dunno, fruit bat or chipmunk noises instead?
Being generous I’m… pretty sure VOX got their interpretation wrong, and even more sure Kevin’s inferences were even more wrong.
Kevin, along with not being a lawyer, you are not a geneticist. Race is not DEFINED by DNA. That's all. Because it is a social construct. That doesn't mean that people who are members of socially-constructed racial groups can't have genetic similarities based on ancestry.
If genes determined the matter, then passing as a member of another race wouldn't be a thing, amirite?
This is a weak post. "everyone understands that "ancestry group" is just another word for race"? If you undertand that you are wrong. One is biologically meaningful and the other is about establishing and maintaining social hierchies. Race is way too crude to be used by geneticists, it was invented for entirely different purposes.
Obviously people from different areas have different genetics. That is how genetics and evolution works. If human genetics were all the same there would be no variations. The Dutch would not be especially tall, epicanthal folds would be equally distributed. A lot of the variation can't be seen, it shows up in medical resistance or susceptibility to disease, for example.
For lots of reasons including straight-up racism Euro-derived people are more studied and therefore better genetically understood. If you are a scientist part of doing good work is chasing that down.
????????????????????
If Africa is the origin of the species (which I don't doubt), Africa would be expected to have the highest genetic diversity. The hinterlands (Europe and elsewhere) that got colonized by a relatively few individuals would be expected to show somewhat less diversity because of founder effects and inbreeding. Unfortunately, our science of genetics and our understanding of the human genome was first elaborated by the European sub-group, apparently missing about 10 percent of the true diversity.
This is the closest thing to a genetically accurate assessment of the problem Kevin is having that I've seen here. Africans have the highest genetic diversity in the world. Insofar as "race" might be thought of as a genetic concept, as opposed to a social construct, this means that Africa has dozens upon dozens of "races," and to them the rest of the world looks like a single "race." "Race," however, is not the term that geneticists use for such groupings, and of course the distinctions being made do not track all that well with the characteristics that we normally assign to "race" the social construct.
Exactly. KD has it dead wrong. Ancestral groups is not a nynonuym for race, it is how geneticists analyze data.
Race was invented for entirelydifferent purposes and is not useful for genetic analysis.
KD is usually science-savvy, this post surprises me.
Why do I get the impression that Kevin's formulation is like pointing out that people have been convicted of witchcraft as proof that witches do so exist?
Kevin, if 'black' contains 10% more variability, how is this race? It's more evidence that race isn't a useful category because of this.
It is my understanding that Africa, being the birthplace of mankind, has the humanoids with the greatest genetic diversity (e.g., you have the tallest and shortest people) and due geographical and historical factors, Asia has the the least, so science should plan accordingly, that’s all.
Race is not a scientifically supported concept, it is more akin to folklore.
Genetics supports we are all mongrels, with a small percentage of distinctive genetic clustering in certain ancestral groups, which may very well have medical and/or other physical implications (darker skin).
Like race, our morals, ethics, and liberty are also not scientifically derived, these are cultural constructs, and the genetic differences mentioned above have no bearing on them or the law (or shouldn't).
The problem here is trying to square ignorant classical ideas of "race" with modern genetic findings, let the old stupid ideas and terms die and let the scientifically accurate distinctions lead where they may, at least where it comes to scientific disciplines like medicine, and resist applying them to rehashed ideologies and prejudices or law and liberty, where genetics will never tell us anything useful (or ever explain or justify all being equal under the law, and with equal liberty).
"Genomes differ more from person to person than from group to group."
You are the first person I have ever heard of to make this claim. If you think you are wrong, then why are you making it? This onanistic exercise in self-refutation is a bit weird.
The actual scientific consensus is "there is more genetic variation in the population of Africa than there is in the entire world population of people not of recent African descent." A little different, right? And more to the point, it doesn't contradict the claim that including more people of African descent would improve genomic coverage, it supports it.
The problem of course is that "race" is fungible.
"White" didn't include Italians (they were Mediterranean) or Irish (they were Catholic) at one time.
"Asians" include Chinese and Indians.
"Blacks" include basically all the ethnic groups from Africa--which is rather large.
The point is there are larger differences in a given group then there are between groups Using skin color to differentiate people is easier then using eye color, or right handedness, or... Then people demagogue about it.
Sickle cell anemia indicates one's parents have black ancestry. But it's not just black ancestry, their ancestors came from a specific region in Africa. It's a function of "tribe" not race.
i'd also like to notify the conservative media that 'semitic' does not equal 'jewish'
Africa has the most diverse genomic variation of any continent, and to lump them all together into one group is PROOF that race is a social construct and not a real thing. If it were a "real thing" based on common genetics then there would be dozens of races in Africa, but instead they're all lumped together because their skin is darker than European or Asian skin.
Are there genetic differences between people with different regional ancestries? Yes, and it's idiotic to think otherwise. Do those genetic difference impact what kind of health risks people face? Sure.
But to categorize me with my almost pure Scottish ancestry and someone from the steppes of Russia as "white" is about race, not genetics. And to conflate all Africans together is about "race", not genetics.
Well said.
People really, really need to stop conflating Africans (an incredibly diverse group from a genetic standpoint, even just south of the Sahara) with African-Americans, a far less genetically diverse group, with the majority African part of its ancestry almost entirely from certain portions of West Africa.
Beyond that, our conceptions of "race" are based on particular samples of the broad sweep of human regional genetic diversity that happened to arrive on our shores in large numbers historically (or which were already here), ignoring all the messy gray areas in between that came in small numbers or which didn't come here at all.
Race may seem simple if you're just looking at the surface appearances of Europeans, African-Americans, and East Asians. When you start looking at the rest of humanity, and you look beyond the mere surface appearances that people inaccurately think represent the genetic diversity of humanity, all historic racial classifications break down.
That's not 'woke', that's cold, hard science.
Good point on African Americans. The fact that Ethiopian-Americans are lumped together with African American descendents of slaves proves that race is a social construct and ancestral groupings has sbientific meaning.
I guess Kevin is cranky today.
Maybe he should consider moonlighting at NR. At least he won't get as much push back with this sort of thing there. Call it affiliation arbitrage.
Other commenters have mostly covered the ground here, but I'll make two observations:
1. This post is pretty much like scoffing at Vox's overly simplistic and biased understanding of a complex concept, while at the same time asserting an overly simplistic view of the same concept.
2. Kevin, you know there's no country called "Africa," right? And that someone that was born on the African continent may or may not fit into the more diverse genetic category being described in the Vox article. What is Elon Musk, for example? If you wanted to be precise about what's being described genetically, you'd need to be thinking about someone's ancestry, not the continent on which they were born. And gee whiz, that's exactly the language Vox uses that you're mocking them for!
And lo and behold, Africa is not just full of nations, but of languages and cultures as well. Even within the USA, there's lots of different kinds of ancestral Africans with different skin colors, different languages, and different cultures. There's even different cultures, skin colors and languages and accents amongst American white people! Unless you're stopping at skin color and genetics (and even that is foolish: George Hamilton may be very tan, but that doesn't mean he is of Mexican ancestry), I don't see any of those other items that are determined by DNA sequences. And yet people in this country can generally understand if you say someone is "talking black" or a Black American is "acting white." What is that if not cultural, especially given that the same question in Nigera is going to get radically different responses if you ask what "talking black" or "acting white" means.
2. Next thing you know, Kevin is going to be shocked by Elon Musk having essentially zero risk of sickle cell anemia despite being 100% African.
Kevin must have had lunch today with one of his Republican "But I'm One Of The Good Ones" friends in Orange County.
Human Geneticist here with a few quick comments.
Yes, there is more genetic variation in humans with African ancestry, as you might expect from evolutionary + migration effects. It's not a big surprise.
Don't confuse populations that can be defined by their genetic variation with cultural and political categories of race and ethnicity. E.g., the U.S. census category of "Black" generally refers to individuals whose ancestral DNA variants mostly came from a few groups in Africa + a minor mix of a variety of European ancestral groups. This political/social category is not a good substitute for describing the genetics of multiple, genetically distinct ancestral groups in Africa. c) We (geneticists) have long known that the reference genomes we use for most research and clinical testing (e.g., GRCh38) are inadequate. Their flaws has been due to a combination of technologic problems, study design, and genome structure. E.g., until recently, it was not possible to sequence 7-8% of the genome due to the presence of highly repetitive DNA sequences. Another factor has been the expense of sequencing multiple individuals' genomes. So, the GRCh38 reference genome was put together from the sequences of less than a dozen people, with around 70% coming from one guy in Buffalo, NY. It is only in the last few years that we've started looking for genomic diversity on a large scale. Demonstrating that African populations, in aggregate, have hundreds of millions of bases of DNA that are not in the GRCh38 reference is part of that effort. Going forward, we are on track to fix many of these issues, as we build "pangenomes" that more accurately represent the diversity of humans.
+1
This entire "race is a social construct" thing strikes me and I think most people as an attempt to redefine the word "race."
Because most people consider race as the large groups of people with genetically based differences hailing from different regions of the world (and yes, we all know that there are mixed race people as well as areas where they have blended). If you start saying that is not what race is, it's just a social construct, you lose the argument with most people right there. They view this sort of thing as just another attempt by academic leftists to screw around with English terms in order to advance some agenda.
Now, no serious person denies that people are treated differently and differently in different places and times as a result of these genetic differences that we call race. That is the social construct part. But until folks stop denying the common definition of the word race, the rest of your arguments will be largely ignored.
You're assuming that there are genetically defined races and some areas where they mixed. That's not what the genes say.
The racial categories we know were derived from long-ago visual observations of limited subsets of human beings by particular people with an ax to grind. To believe that these types defined long ago are the main thing and the people 'racially' in between are just some mixing of these primary types is to make a big assumption.
You're also assuming that the visually apparent characteristics of humans track well with overall genetic character. Again, that's not true. For example, sub-Saharan Africans have more genetic diversity than all the rest of humanity combined.
You and most people might think "race is a social construct" is some sort of woke redefinition, but it isn't.
Racism has a history, it is not very old, emerging in the 1600's in Virginia. It was useful to whites economically, legally, and socially, so it was invented and people have elaborated on it since.
You might be right that most people don't realize that race was a thing that didn't exist, until it did. Once you do it is clear it was an invented for use.
"Racism has a history, it is not very old, emerging in the 1600's in Virginia."
I'm sure jewish people in Europe in the 1200s suffering discrimination and worse at the hands of gentiles would be relieved to know that it wasn't antisemitism because racism wouldn't be invented for another four centuries.
Sarcasm aside, the idea that "racism" was invented in Virginia in the 17th century depends on restricting the definition of racism to bizarre degree.
It just takes a little effort to overcome mistaken and prejudiced notions of historical folk before the age of science. We invite you to join us.
If black people have 10% more variation than everyone else, it's probably stupid to use "black" as any reliable kind of genetic indicator.
Likewise, if you find some genetic something that's predominantly black, you have to be real careful about calling it a "black people" gene because race *is* a social construct, and race mixing is a thing, so someone who might not think of themselves as black might still carry the gene!
Genetics is a different topic from Race, and when discussing statistics regarding it one needs to be careful, clear and precise.
People's mixing and matching genetic information with race classifications is just standard political dishonesty.
No one takes blood and analyses it for, say, Duffy Antigen sensitivity to assign race, those concerned with race look and attach the mores and standards they've learned to what they see.
The thing about "race" is that it's a concept that's based more on folk conceptions of genetics -- often old ones from centuries ago that pre-date Mendel -- so it kinda sorta fits the facts, except when it doesn't. It doesn't help that a lot of the ideas on race were developed to justify why it was acceptable for "better" races (read "White Europeans") to subjugate or even enslave "lesser" races (read "pretty much everyone else").
If one takes "race is a social construct" as a way to deny that there are genetic subgroups among humans, then it's obviously absurd. However, one can also see "race is a social construct" to mean that we categorize people into groups based on superficial similarities and crude understandings of their ancestry that sort of map onto reality but also lend themselves to the wonkiness that lumps both Mariah Carey and Yaphet Kotto together as Black despite their obvious differences.
Nothing makes sense unless you understand what interest is being served, and then everything makes sense.
The interest being served is "my" tribe. Some people, like Citizen Donald, are the only member of their tribe. For other people, the tribe is white rich guys. For the good guys, the tribe is comprised of roughly eight billion humans.
Race is like colors - literally like the ones in a box of crayons.
Is color a useful concept? Obviously
Are there a fixed number of colors? No
Are there clear definitions of and boundaries between colors? No
Do people of different backgrounds perceive colors in the same way? No
Does color matter? Sometimes a lot, domes not at all.
Such is true of any classification system in general: the borders may be quite arbitrary, but they are still useful
Race is not a useful classification from a modern enlightenment perspective, and never was.