
How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’ - DamienB
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html
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ak_yo
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.

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throwaway538
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.

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door3
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.

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montrose
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.)

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spamizbad
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.

~~~
montrose
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.

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spamizbad
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.

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nukeop
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.

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pavlov
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?

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pjc50
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.

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pavlov
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.

