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[flagged] How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’ (nytimes.com)
23 points by DamienB on March 24, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 26 comments



This is an interesting argument but I think it fails to coherently restate what it means for race to be socially constructed. Nobody is denying that genetic differences between people exist and are important for health. They’re saying that reusing racial categorization schemes in genetics is scientifically ungrounded because these racial categories have no inherent biological content— they’re more like receptacles for political and social debate.

It’s not clear what value it adds to use (e.g.) US Census racial categories in genetics research. The salience of racial identification changes over time and is deeply politicized (as the author notes). More sophisticated and granular categories that are actually based on genetics would be much more appropriate than trying to recuperate categories that weren’t developed for science.


This is because phenotype is a good predictor of genotype and people are good at assessing someone's phenotype very quickly.

I can usually tell roughly which European country someone is from by looking at their face.

It doesn't work as well with different parts of Eastern Europe but you get the idea.


The problem with this kind of "gene-centered" social thinking is that the implication, almost always, is some sort of regressive or conservative politics about social problems and inequalities being a result of natural forces. A horrifying example of this is, for example, the book "A Natural History of Rape" which makes a biological deterministic argument that explains rape as a natural and evolutionarily selected-for behavior in men.

Show me a controlled longitudinal study where (eg) men and women are raised in an identical environment, treated identically, and not even informed of the concept of gender. That doesn't exist, and never will exist. There are massive emergent cultural forces that make biology a pretty useless tool for doing sociology, much like chemistry studies the emergent properties of physics principles, but trying to account for emergent properties of atoms and molecules in terms of quantum mechanics is totally useless. Human societies should be studied on sociological terms, not biological ones. With even the smallest amount of effort, you can see that there are HUGE confounding factors that make any attempt to explain social outcomes biologically totally useless.


It's interesting to think that an article so reasonable, and so grounded in knowledge, would also get you called names if you posted it on Twitter. Empirically, this field would appear to be the one most likely to yield Galileos in our time. (As in Galileo's case, without any deliberate attempt on their part to be heretics, just by following the truth where their era's zealots don't want it to lead.)


While I agree with many things the authors says in this essay, the article unfortunately has an 'apologistic touch', so to say. The author starts by casually mentioning that six million jews were killed in the name of an ill-conceived and scientifically unsubstantiated race ideology, and then quickly turns to genetic issues and how they support certain differences in isolated populations. The problem with this way of laying things out is that it does not do justice to the often horrific ways 'race' and even well-justified, measurable differences between populations are handled in society.

The word 'race' should not be used by anyone in any context any longer, because it has been misunderstood, ill-defined and systematically abused over and over. It would be irresponsible to attempt to reappropriate the term into scientific usage.

Apart from that, differences in genetic populations exists just as differences in cultures exist, and I don't think anyone has ever denied that. Researchers need to be aware, though, that there is a bunch of bad human beings out there who will invariably draw the wrong conclusions from such research and advocate policies that are plain evil.


It's reasonable but also kind of.. straw-manny. Outside of a few crazy fringes, nobody is suggesting that its not "Politically Correct" to point out that certain races are carriers for various genetic disorders or disease risk factors.

I've never heard of anybody calling someone racist if they said "People with African heritage can be carriers for sickle cell anemia." Likewise, I've never seen anyone called an anti-semite for pointing out that Jewish people can suffer from or be carriers for "founder effect" genetic disorders.

If anything, there's a distinct social justice angle to recognizing minority population health concerns in medicine, so I'm actually kind of surprised things aren't tilting the other way: where the "anti-PC" crowd is angry that researchers aren't focused more on traits that apply to the broader human population, as opposed to the genetics of distinct minorities.


I think the strangeness may come from the fact that the author is thinking of things that genetic research either has discovered or will discover that would be more controversial, but he's being careful not to actually mention any of them.


Perhaps, but so far modern scientific discoveries have been fairly devastating towards the various hypotheses of "scientific racism." Just recently it's gotten to the point where some white supremacists are convinced the field if genetics is a Jewish conspiracy because they got their genes tested and... surprise... they're 5% non-white.


Interesting take on the Galileo angle. I always thought of him as anti-authoritarian, but I'm sure he was a bit of a pariah in many cultural circles as well.


No matter how much the society at large wants to tiptoe the subject, the concept of race has never fell into disuse wherever facts really matters, such as in healthcare or the legal system.


I don’t understand your examples. How does race affect medical treatment of an individual? Should people be treated differently in the eyes of the law depending on skin color?


There are some situations where both illnesses and treatments behave differently depending on race-linked genetics; sickle-cell aenemia vs malaria is the famous one, but there's a long tail of medicines that are slightly less effective in nonwhite people because of who happened to be in the clinical trials.


How strong is the link to race? There is a great number of diseases and conditions affected by genes that have no correlation with skin pigment.

Swedes and Finns have quite different profiles of hereditary diseases. Are Finns a different race based on that?

In the 1930s, Finnish scientists spent a lot of time “proving” to their German counterparts that Finns are an Aryan group rather than part of the Mongolic race. That seems completely absurd today. Hopefully in 80 years we’ll be able to say the same about present-day race obsessions.


People of different races are predisposed to different diseases.

If you see medical care as going beyond just treatment but also inclusive of education and preventative measures, then if you don't factor in race you will be doing a disservice to members of races that are more susceptible to certain diseases.


There are no "members of races", there are different genetic indicators that can be clustered and ordered in different ways. Surely if someone has a (measured) propensity towards a certain disease might have to be tested earlier or treated slightly differently.

A doctor's subjective perception of phenotypical 'race' is not the right diagnostic tool. Questions about ancestors and diseases in the family can very well be, if they are supported by statistical evidence.


People of different races have different metabolisms and physical characteristics, making them more susceptible to some illnesses but not others, and respond to different medicines differently. This is also important when considering the impact of biology on forensic methods in legal system. Race is also a good predictor of other factors.


> People of different races have different metabolisms and physical characteristics

how many human races? if you're going to talk about categories of humans you need to precisely define them. So how many human races known exactly?


Race is a predictor of susceptibility to a wide variety of diseases.


Different disease prevalence. Different response to drugs.

Jews for example more likely to have Tay Sachs disease.

Sickle cell disease affects blacks disproportionately.


> Jews for example more likely to have Tay Sachs disease.

Sure but it's not because they practice Judaism. And since one can convert to judaism, I've never heard about someone who can convert his genes to "jew genes".

> Sickle cell disease affects blacks disproportionately.

Sure but it isn't necessary because their skin are dark, when you can find people from Sri Lanka or India who have a skin blacker than African people yet they don't have this disease prevalence.

See what you are doing here? you are mixing up genetics which can be used to establish statistical facts about gene expressions, and semantics AKA social construct. And this sort of sophism can easily be exploited to make broad generalizations about the behavior of arbitrary racial groups you've established under pretense of science. That's why the notion of race for humans is completely absurd.

What race are people living in Madagascar? most of them aren't negro looking, what race the Yemeni? the afghans? they don't look like Arabs...


Judaism is not a race, being black means more than just a different skin color, you're intentionally trying to derail the discussion.


> Judaism is not a race, being black means more than just a different skin color, you're intentionally trying to derail the discussion.

no I'm not. What does being black means then? and why bring "jews" into a discussion with race? If we're going to talk about race scientifically using these words, well you'd better have solid arguments as to why you use "jews" and "black" as race discriminant.

I'd also like to talk about the fact that most European jews are convert from the medieval era and have very little to do with the "Semites" who lived in what is now Israel 2000 years ago. So what race are you talking about?


>no I'm not. What does being black means then? and why bring "jews" into a discussion with race?

Because Jews have different risks of falling ill to many diseases than people of other races. You are still trying to conflate race with religion which makes it clear that you're here to derail the discussion.


> Because Jews have different risks of falling ill to many diseases than people of other races. You are still trying to conflate race with religion which makes it clear that you're here to derail the discussion.

quoting myself:

> I'd also like to talk about the fact that most European jews are convert from the medieval era and have very little to do with the "Semites" who lived in what is now Israel 2000 years ago. So what race are you talking about?

You didn't answer about "blacks", what are blacks?


Safartic or Ashkenazi? Both are Jews, only one is st risk of passing on Tay-Sachs. Which is the “race” hm?


Because race is a very good predictor of class in the US.

Are you poor? Probably black.

Are you in trouble with the legal system? Probably poor -> black.

Can you afford good health care and preventive medicine? Probably not poor -> probably not black.

Funnily enough this also explains why redneck whites are looked down on by everyone else.




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