
New forms of 'racism' arise in science research - kshatrea
http://m.timesofindia.com/home/science/New-forms-of-racism-rise-in-science-research/articleshow/30439080.cms
======
d0
If it's a fact, it's not racism. It's not personal. The fact that races
diverged thousands of years ago suggest that they are genetically different
through evolution. There's a lot to learn from genetic diversity rather than
applying the racism badge to it every fucking time and ignoring it to pacify
some over-sensitive idiots. This attitude is no better than witch hunts and
mandatory religious laws.

The contents and tone of the article are awful and an affront to science and
assume everything will result in Nazi eugenics programmes.

~~~
rtpg
>If it's a fact, it's not racism.

So many apologists here seem to think that you can just list facts, context-
free, in some sort of objective manner. The way facts are presented are almost
invariably enabling some sort of value judgement.

For example, if you were to do a study on prison population in the US, you
could end up presenting two facts :

> blacks are dis-proportionally present in the prison population

> poor people are dis-proportionally present in the prison population

These are both facts, but the one you choose to present gives a soundbite to
somebody. Just because you are so magnificent as to not fall into the
correlation=causality trap doesn't mean that you're not enabling racism.

By even presenting the first fact, you are implying that it is a fact worth
mentioning to begin with. If you also found out that people who wear hats on
Sunday are disproportionately present, would you mention it? presenting the
fact shows that you believe the link between the two needs to be investigated
in the first place.

We could also go into the whole "black/white is not a race" debate too, but
the notion of race (as it is defined in common culture) has no place in many
studies. Shared ancestry can be relevant in other studies too, but one of the
defining characteristics of racist attitudes is how genetics/ancestry define
you so much that it is OK to discriminate based on those factors alone.
Enabling that sort of thinking (for very little scientific gain) is rarely
worth it.

~~~
jamesrcole
> The way facts are presented are almost invariably enabling some sort of
> value judgement.

Yes, but then the problem is not with the facts themselves, but the way they
have been used, and I took the grandparent statement to be talking about the
facts themselves.

~~~
rtpg
you can't just present facts (even an excel spreadsheet of raw data will show
what you tested against), so there is always at least some form of choosing
mechanism.

~~~
jamesrcole
> _you can 't just present facts (even an excel spreadsheet of raw data will
> show what you tested against)_

A 'fact' is something that is fairly well established. Of course we can never
know anything with absolute certainty. Given that notion of 'fact', are you
saying there are no facts in, say, physics, or chemistry, or biology? And on
top of that, are you saying they can't simply be presented?

------
sgt101
I think that humans are extremely homogenous

[http://www.ashg.org/education/pdf/geneticvariation.pdf](http://www.ashg.org/education/pdf/geneticvariation.pdf)

That is to say that the differences between me and the most different human
(with not chromosomal disaster like Downs) are so small as to make arranging
humans into groups according to their genetics meaningless.

~~~
_delirium
One issue (this also applies to some discussion of gender differences) is that
people often organize discussion of group differences around comparing
population means on some trait, and trying to come up with studies that have
large enough statistical power to show a difference in means. What often gives
a clearer picture, though, is to estimate the full distribution of some trait
in different groups, not only a point estimate of the mean. In that case, the
result often ends up much less impressive: you end up with two bell curves
that almost exactly coincide. If they don't _exactly_ coincide, a study with
large enough statistical power can show a difference in means. But people
often imagine that when you read a result like "men are more X than women,
with p < 0.05", the result is two disjoint bell curves, rather than two
nearly-coincident bell curves.

~~~
ef4
> But people often imagine that when you read a result like "men are more X
> than women, with p < 0.05", the result is two disjoint bell curves, rather
> than two nearly-coincident bell curves.

Which just means people are bad at understanding statistics. They have a folk
understanding of "mean" that doesn't allow for differences in distribution.

Which is an endless source of unjustified outrage whenever you try to make
demonstrably true statements about population means.

The whole educational fad to teach everyone to code is fine and all, but I
want to see a fad for statistics...

~~~
_delirium
I think the people attempting to make technically true but scientifically
uninteresting statements about population means often have ulterior political
motives (which is why they don't do analyses that are actually scientifically
interesting), so I don't think the outrage is always unjustified. This can be
seen in their paper titles and abstracts, and particularly their press
releases, which make typically claims about differences between groups
unsupported by the data. There's a whole cottage industry of "men are like X,
women are like Y" folks who are rather tendentiously misrepresenting data to
sell their books.

In particular, that two populations have differing means is trivially true for
nearly any two population groups and choice of traits, even randomly split
ones, so simply demonstrating a population mean difference is nearly never
interesting. If you choose _any_ trait that can vary between people, and you
manage to find every person in two finite population groups and compute a mean
(so at this point you have zero sampling error, since you have a complete
population count), the two means will very rarely be literally identical.
There is some exact rational number that is "the average height of HN posters
who registered on a January 2" and a rational number that is "the average
height of HN posters who registered on a January 3", and these numbers are
almost certainly different. Therefore demonstrating a difference in means is
simply an exercise in getting a large enough sample size to prove something
that is nearly always true. But going through the effort to collect the sample
to "prove" that Jan-2nders are taller than Jan-3rders or vice-versa is not
scientifically interesting, even though one of the two is almost certainly
true. And it would certainly not be justified to hang much interpretation off
my result, in which I speculated wildly about how evolutionary differences
resulted in the Jan-3rders having (slightly) shorter height.

Now if you could show unexpectedly large differences, like many Jan-2nders are
> 6ft while very few Jan-3rders are < 6ft, such that the population curves
differ by more than a trivial amount, that could be an interesting result that
merits further study. But then you need to be talking about distribution
estimates and comparing curves and error bands, not talking about population
means and quoting p-values.

------
001sky
_But she warned that science could be "misused" to propagate the belief that
people inherently have different abilities

...

based on skin colour or ethnic background_

Is the issue the variability or the link to causality? Because surely there is
variability. The other issues get into statistical considerations relating to
interpreting the genome itself. The argument that there is no genetic basis of
{race} seems highly flawed at face value. So the question still remains about
the co-variance matrices between the two sets of variations. This is where
there seems to be a fine line with respect to identifying the data;
understandin the data; and drawing conclusions (right or wrong) from the data.
But without doing any of that work, it seems highly presumptive to argue there
is no information {in that data} per-se, and/or to completely disregard it
(out of hand). None of this has anything to do as of yet with granting
political or social priveledge to certain people or others.

------
adamnemecek
"...spreading the belief that races exist and are different in terms of
biology, behaviour and culture,..."

Wait, is this not generally accepted? (As in, not generally accepted that they
are different).

~~~
bradyd
"There is a wide consensus that the racial categories that are common in
everyday usage are socially constructed, and that racial groups cannot be
biologically defined."[1]

From a genetic perspective there is basically no basis for the traditional
categorization of race. Two people of the same skin color, from the same
country, who would be considered by traditional definitions to be the same
race, can have completely different genetic lineages. There is a National
Geographic documentary that discusses this called "The Human Family Tree" that
is available on Netflix.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28human_classification%2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28human_classification%29#Complications_and_various_definitions_of_the_concept)

~~~
adamnemecek
> basically no basis

what's "basically no basis"?

> can have completely different genetic lineages

yeah so what? that does not really prove that the concept of race does not
exist.

~~~
XorNot
Is it really important to you that race be traced back to genetics?

I mean, is it really important we have this concept?

You realize that your brain is not your skin right? The whole concept of race
not existing is that if you look at genetic diversity for markers we can
correlate to function, there is no difference between the "races" greater then
the difference we find within each population - i.e. the population does not
exist, beyond visual cues.

But you know, it's probably really important we be utterly pedantic on this
point. Because heaven help us if we don't acknowledge people's skin color can
be different in a consistent way. That seems really important and we must
mention it a lot. For some reason.

------
kremlin
This stuff really makes my head spin. I consider myself a rationalist, a
Bayesian even. If something is true, I'd like to believe it; if something is
false, I'd like to believe it is false.

Whatever is true of race, I would like to believe. Even if it's politically
incorrect, or even if it's not, I would like to believe whatever is true.

But I don't know what to believe. There doesn't even seem to be a noticeable
leaning in the evidence for one side or the other. Experts in the appropriate
fields say 'There is no scientific basis for the concept of race.' Experts in
the appropriate fields also say 'Clearly there are racial differences.'

Is it a semantic issue mostly? Are some people just afraid of the inconvenient
truth? Or is the other side peddling an 'inconvenient truth' for racists-
motivated reasons? I am not coming close to having a grasp on this issue.

I only want to believe that which is true.

~~~
bayesianhorse
Racism is not about having a belief about a property. That "Bayesianism".

Racism is defined as making a judgement of value across ethnical boundaries.

"Blacks in the US get sick more often" is not racism, it's a scientific belief
with evidence. "Africans are genetically more prone to have bad health" is a
belief without enough evidence, which might be fueled by a subconscious
judgement.

"We don't need to put an effort into improving African-American Health,
because they are disease-riddled anyway" clearly is a value judgement and
devoiding a part of the human species of rights the other part enjoys.

------
yoha
It was never said that all humans where alike and to be handled the same way.
You won't give the same birth control methods to male and female individual
for instance. When speaking of equality, I think it is implied equality before
society: equal rights, same laws, no irrelevant discrimination (I don't know
how it works but I guess sellers are partially chosen depending on how they
look and how attractive they are). It would not mean that you mean to be blind
to factual and neutral evidence which leads to technical efficiency. From the
original article:

> Published research has shown that blacks are more likely than whites to have
> a blood type that causes sickle cell disease and can protect against
> malaria, and are more likely to have a certain gene called APOL1, which
> protects against a parasite that causes sleeping sickness.

It is quite a good example of information that could help put a diagnosis on a
person taking into account racial aspects. And I doubt it would count as
racist in any way. Because not everything is black or white, they is a grey
area:

> She cited new research urging that children be identified based on their
> genetically predetermined educational abilities and then put in separate
> schools that could be used to foster different kinds of learning.

This is a border line case: technically, it might mean more proficient
teaching using adapted methods for both groups. However, this is also
segregation. A way to draw some line would be to avoid discriminating social
interactions: in this case, X kids are only interacting with X kids, which
make a bias on the population distribution.

tl;dr: calling "racism" on non-biased factual evidence is quite harsh, but we
need to be cautious when using such facts

Note: "non-biased" because Nazis did pretend to have factual evidence against
Jews, but it was only pseudo-science propaganda (and, well, they only used it
to justify arbitrary discrimination)

~~~
yk
The problem with

> She cited new research urging that children be identified based on their
> genetically predetermined educational abilities and then put in separate
> schools that could be used to foster different kinds of learning.

is, we already know that constructing social categories based on biological
traits is bullshit, simply because the relevant criteria are not given by
science. Science can only give a classification of some measure, but it can
not reasonably define if the measure is relevant. For an extreme example, even
if you get a "obviously relevant" distribution, you have to choose at which
values you draw the line.

But lets assume for the sake of the argument, that there is initially no
difference in the outcome of the education ( defining this is left as an
exercise to the reader), one of the school types will be perceived as better.
So it will get more applications, can afford harsher selection criteria and
actually become better. At which point the better school will probably get
more resources, and the cycle continues.

So calling "racism" on non-biased factual evidence is harsh. Assuming that
non-biased factual evidence includes citations to the roughly 100 years of
research how oppressive structures develop. (These 100 years of research are
usually called feminism.) But we know that precisely these footnotes are the
first to be dropped.

------
b3tta
I think ignoring the differences between races (e.g. hypertension medicine
targeted at african americans) is as wrong as ignoring the fact, that genetic
differences between 2 people, which might be considered as being from the same
"race", might be much greater.

Furthermore "white knighting" for races (i.e. probably non-caucasian ones) is
very likely not much better than racism itself (same as the people fighting
"for" women and against the jerks at conferences etc.).

------
vixen99
"the belief that people inherently have different abilities based on skin
colour or ethnic background.". It certainly appears at present that this is
largely true.

It's odd that on the one hand some people proclaim they are from a certain
'race'. On the other hand they don't want any characteristics of this 'race'
to be drawn to anyone's attention because that's 'racism'. Meanwhile we get on
with our lives and treat folk as we find them.

------
known
[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15/a-fascinating-
map-of-the-worlds-most-and-least-racially-tolerant-countries/)

------
powertower
That entire article is nothing but moral supremacy dribble that's attacking
science by using the R word to immediately claim victory and stop all
discussion.

The people that used to wear white sheets on their heads, are now the same
group of people that the author belongs to... They've just found a new way to
make themselves feel superior.

They are the people that claim they are open minded, stand for diversity of
ideas, and open discussions.

Yet the moment you present a counter-view to what they believe, you're a
racist, a Nazi, your work should be shunned, and you should lose all chances
of gainful employment.

------
futurist
And then there is _speciesism_ :
[http://i.word.com/idictionary/speciesism](http://i.word.com/idictionary/speciesism)

------
tokenadult
I see after I awaken in my time zone that there have been quite a few
thoughtful comments on the interesting article kindly submitted here, many of
them replies to top-level comments. For participants on Hacker News who like
to read whole books or scientific articles on facts about the world they live
in, I recommend a specialized bibliography on race

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/Anthropo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:WeijiBaikeBianji/AnthropologyHumanBiologyRaceCitations)

kept in Wikipedia user space and updated from time to time. The actual
articles on Wikipedia about the topic of "race" are mostly very low in quality
and frequently edit-warred, with one of those articles being one of the ten
most edit-warred articles on all of English Wikipedia.

The basic fact we can all rely on as we think about these issues is that we
are all very closely related to one another, throughout humankind. Every human
being is more closely related to and more similar to every other human being
than most people imagine. That's a consistent finding of molecular genetics
research.

The United States Census Bureau says

"The U.S. Census Bureau collects race data in accordance with guidelines
provided by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and these data are
based on self-identification. The racial categories included in the census
questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this
country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or
genetically. In addition, it is recognized that the categories of the race
item include racial and national origin or sociocultural groups. People may
choose to report more than one race to indicate their racial mixture, such as
'American Indian' and 'White.' People who identify their origin as Hispanic,
Latino, or Spanish may be of any race."

[http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_RHI525211.htm](http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_RHI525211.htm)

In other words, "race" categories used by the United States government are
arbitrary and are not based on science. A confirmation of this fact is the
disagreement between any two countries' categories for "race"\--the same
individual can change categories as the individual crosses national borders.

Feldman, Marcus W.; Lewontin, Richard C. (2008). "Chapter 5: Race, Ancestry,
and Medicine". In Koenig, Barbara A.; Lee, Sandra Soo-jin; Richardson, Sarah
S. _Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age._ New Brunswick (NJ): Rutgers University
Press. ISBN 978-0-8135-4324-6. is a good current book chapter on medical
implications of race research informed by genetics. The article notes on page
93 "Finally, it must be borne in mind that the taxonomic problem cannot be
inverted. That is, while clustering methods are capable of assigning an
individual to a geographic population with a high degree of certainty, given
that individual's genotype, it is not possible to predict accurately the
genotype of an individual given his or her geographical origin. Thus, knowing
an individual's ancestry only slightly improves the ability to predict his or
her genotype. The more polymorphic the markers, the more difficult this is."
Another book chapter, Harpending, Henry (2007). "Chapter 16: Anthropological
Genetics: Present and Future". In Crawford, Michael. _Anthropological
Genetics: Theory, Methods and Applications._ Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. p. 457. ISBN 978-0-521-54697-3, points out that "On the other hand,
information about the race of patients will be useless as soon as we discover
and can type cheaply the underlying genes that are responsible for the
associations. Can races be enumerated in any unambiguous way? Of course not,
and this is well known not only to scientists but also to anyone on the
street." A specific example of "race" failing to explain a medical observation
is hypertension (high blood pressure), already mentioned in this thread before
I posted. The book chapter by a specialist on the development of blood
pressure medicines, Kahn, Jonathan (13 August 2013). "Chapter 7: Bidil and
Racialized Medicine". In Krimsky, Sheldon; Sloan, Kathleen. _Race and the
Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture._ Columbia University Press. p.
132. ISBN 978-0-231-52769-9. points out that "In medical practice what matters
is our shifting understanding of the correlations between such evolving social
identities and the evolving economic, political, and environmental conditions
to which they may be related. For example, what are we to make of the fact
that African Americans suffer from disproportionately high rates of
hypertension, but Africans in Nigeria have among the world's lowest rates of
hypertension, far lower than the overwhelmingly white population of Germany?
Genetics certainly plays a role in hypertension. But any role it plays in
explaining such differences must surely be vanishingly small."

I have been to different parts of the world, and have met people from all over
the world. Sometimes I have met persons of one "race" who look just about
exactly like people I know from another "race," and I have found kindred
people (as to any personal characteristic you care to name) among people from
all over the world of all different "races." The race categories are not
informative, or at least not informative about individual genomes. In some
societies, "race" is a salient enough category that an individual's personal
experience can be profoundly influenced by race categorization. If you haven't
read the book before, you could read the book _Black Like Me_ by John Howard
Griffin to learn more about that.

------
dhfjgkrgjg
Some people have massive, powerful shoulders. And they need them. To carry
that chip on their shoulder for so long.

Whether their personal chip is racism, sexism, or any other -ism, their chip
is the real problem. So, how do we stop them foisting their chips onto the
rest of civilised society?

~~~
Einstalbert
Focus on how they got the chip on their shoulder and then make sure it doesn't
happen to anyone without one.

~~~
dhfjgkrgjg
Sounds far too simplistic. Some people are born arseholes, some blame the
world for their bad lot in life, others still take pleasure in causing
problems and generally trolling. Finally a small honest few may derive their
chip from personal experience, the most honest experience. I agree we should
review what happened in their respective situations, and work to avoid that in
the future. But the rest? Not worth the attention they so desperately seek.

------
_random_
"spreading the belief that races exist and are different in terms of biology,
behaviour and culture" \- D'oh!

~~~
_random_
Different but none better the others.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_classification)#Mod...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_\(human_classification\)#Modern_debate)

