
How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’ - marchenko
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html
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tptacek
This piece makes an important argument, but if you look around Twitter for the
academic reaction to it, it is not unanimously positive. In particular, you
can find neurogeneticists taking issue with a thesis built from "there has
been enough time for natural selection in human populations" _and_ "genes
probably play a role in intelligence"; the story is apparently not that simple
given what we apparently know about genes and intelligence (polygenic, impact
multiple other things besides intelligence).

So while it may be the case that "race is purely a social construct" is an
untenable and unproductive position, it does not necessarily follow that a
solid case for "achievement and behavior is strongly genetic" has been made.

Since intelligence and genetics is the third rail of population genetic
studies, isn't the author's specialty, and isn't at all clear, it's a little
confusing as to why he went out on this limb. Pinker sure is happy about it
though.

A good next read:

[https://gcbias.org/2018/03/14/polygenic-scores-and-tea-
drink...](https://gcbias.org/2018/03/14/polygenic-scores-and-tea-drinking/)

~~~
hyperbovine
David is arguably the the most influential geneticist alive today. In my
opinion he is plenty well qualified to discuss this topic. And, absolutely
nowhere in the piece does he say anything to the effect of "achievement and
behavior is strongly genetic". I really don't get your second paragraph at
all.

~~~
tptacek
The entire second half of the piece rebuts the implicit notion that there is
little science to support a genetic relationship between races and
intelligence. But: there is little science to support a genetic relationship
between races and intelligence.

Has Reich published significantly on neurogenetics?

~~~
hyperbovine
The negation of “there is little science to support a genetic relationship
between races and intelligence” is not “achievement and behavior is strongly
genetic”. I suggest you learn about heritability. And yes, he has published
extensively on the genetic risk factors of MS.

~~~
tptacek
That's rude, and also doesn't respond to my question, which is pretty simple.

------
Chardok
This concept of a "race", in terms of genetics, makes sense for classification
purposes, just like all taxonomical classifications of living things.

The difference here, is that people are taking this genetic concept of "race"
and trying to prove their racist points, which always misses the point
entirely. It would be a non-issue if the word "race" wasn't so politically
charged.

Quick edit for 2 easy examples: People with African descent are more likely to
have sickle cell anemia, due to the resistance the gene provides against
malaria.

People with European descent are more likely to have cystic fibrosis, due to
resistance it provided from cholera and typhoid.

~~~
mikeash
You hint at this, but I think it’s worth explicitly mentioning that “race” as
most people understand it, and “race” as an objective, genetic categorization,
are two extremely different things.

Examples: there is more genetic diversity among Africans (and thus ought to be
more races among them) than in the rest of the world combined. A large number
of “African Americans” have more European ancestry than African. The previous
President was almost always referred to as “black” even though his mother was
white, echoing the old “one drop” rules.

~~~
sampo
> “race” as most people understand it, and “race” as an objective, genetic
> categorization, are two extremely different things.

Yet they seem to match in 99.86% of cases:

 _" Of 3,636 subjects of varying race/ethnicity, only 5 (0.14%) showed genetic
cluster membership different from their self-identified race/ethnicity."_

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/)

~~~
UncleMeat
The problem is that they are using the existing boundaries. We'd construct
different labels if we started with genetics.

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cgiles
I have no idea whether the overall pendulum is swinging back from "race is a
purely social construct". I hope so, because it has always seemed absurd to
me, for the very reasons the author cites, just as absurd as the idea that
race is a hard determinant of anything.

But what I can say is that in molecular biology, working scientists have
completely ignored this politically charged debate and continued to use the
concept this whole time. In one example I am directly familiar with,
researchers have continued to use and stratify genome-wide association studies
by self-reported race/ethnicity in the search for variants causal for lupus.
This is important not only because as with many diseases, there is a
difference in likelihood of getting the disease between "races" not
attributable to lifestyle, but also because it is entirely possible, even
probable, that the mechanisms causing the disease are somewhat different
between ethnicities.

Actually, therefore, the understanding that there are real differences between
"races" in the context of disease is actually helpful for the smaller groups
because it means that special attention is paid to the etiology of their
disease apart from the general etiology. In the same way that, for many years,
most biology research was done on males and it was just assumed that the
findings would always apply to females. That was incorrect, and now studies
are done to determine gender differences in treatment and disease etiology.

IMO this whole debate has dragged on as long as it has because too many in the
public are seemingly incapable -- or unwilling -- to understand basic concepts
about population means and variances, and in particular that in a situation
like this where population means are very real but usually small, and the
variance is high, knowing what "race" you are _usually_ conveys little
information about some other attribute of interest. Usually, but not always,
as is particularly the case with many diseases.

I have grown particularly tired of the argument that, because a taxonomy, like
any clustering, is fuzzy and the number of clusters is somewhat arbitrary, the
whole thing conveys no useful information. It is patently false.

~~~
tptacek
Is it not the case that biologists are simply on firmer ground working on the
premise of causal genetic relationships with populations and genes, and far
shakier ground when they try to correlate genes to behavior?

~~~
cgiles
The typical path to determining causality for a variant is: Variant -> (Gene
expression or some other molecular-level phenomenon) -> Phenotype. Actually,
associating a variant with a phenotype is the easy part, determining what
happens in between is much harder. Another hard part is determining _which_
variant does something since variants are highly correlated with each other.

I am not sure I understand your question exactly so I'll give a few different
answers. One is that I see no difference whether the phenotype is behavioral
or some disease occurring below your neck. It all depends on the statistics
and effect sizes of the phenotype and how good a predictor "race" is.

Another is that actually it is much more difficult, obviously, to determine
causality than a correlation, regardless of what you are correlating with
what.

And a final answer is that we generally consider a causal relationship between
genetics and a phenotype proved with acceptable levels of error if the two are
correlated, and we control for all the environmental variables we can, and the
correlation remains. You can also look at heritability with twins separated at
birth and raised in different environments and other such experiments to
control for environment.

~~~
tptacek
I'd probably start with the question of: isn't it easier to understand the
causal relationships in a lot of diseases than it is to understand behavior,
the biology of which we barely understand _without_ bringing genetics into it?

~~~
cgiles
Except for Mendelian diseases, not really. The sad fact is that for the so-
called "complex diseases", we have very little idea what is going on inside
the black box. I won't presume to guess whether we know less about them or
about behavior, but the ignorance level is very high in both cases. They are
called "complex" because we don't understand them, and because they seem to
have many causes, both individual genetic loci and environmental variables,
each contributing a little bit rather than something like sickle-cell anemia
which has one big cause.

However, I think our techniques are quite sufficient right now to say X% of
the variance in phenotype P is attributable to genetics (i.e., genetics
partially cause P). That is a totally different thing from explaining _how_
the genotype causes the phenotype.

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darepublic
Reading between the lines; using genetics to justify racism against group X is
dreadfully wrong, but let's not close the door on our ability to use genetics
to justify racism against group Y.

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apk-d
There is no race, it's all just brains doing overactive classification. I wish
that we got over this as a species already.

~~~
bobcostas55
I'm afraid this view is completely incompatible with the findings in
population genetics. Two papers to get you started:

* Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/)

* Genetic Structure of Human Populations [https://rosenberglab.stanford.edu/papers/popstruct.pdf](https://rosenberglab.stanford.edu/papers/popstruct.pdf)

~~~
klenwell
Glancing at your first citation, nothing in the summary seems to challenge the
idea that people of all races see much bigger differences among races (for
example, when someone like James Damore start dogwhistling IQ tests in their
footnotes) than actually exist genetically.

Sure, there are genetic distinctions among groups of people. But as soon as
someone mentions black or white people, the discussion isn't about these kind
of fine genetic distinctions. They're about stereotypes that are much more
social than they are genetic.

Now in the political realm, the significance of these terms and the groups is
completely different because of the way groups have been treated historically
on the basis not of these fine genetic distinctions but rather these crude
social racial/ethnic identifications.

I'd prefer we avoided using footnotes pointing to scientific publications to
oversimplify more complex political discussions or to justify the economic and
social marginalization of historically disadvantaged groups based on
purposeful misreading.

~~~
Berobero
I agree with you, but I would also note that the original person being replied
to seems to be committing a common colloquial misunderstanding in regards to
social constructions; just because something is socially constructed does not
mean it's not real. Race is absolutely real, regardless of the degree to which
genetics does or doesn't correlate with it, because we make it real in our day
to day interactions.

But your point is succinct: just because you can group people using genetic
markers into clusters that align well with our society's typical social
categorization of race does by no means validate a genetic basis for all the
other sociocultural baggage that we associate with those categories. The most
it seems to do particularly in regards to the social category of race is show
that genetic markers useful for identifying kinship (I'd file that under
"duh"). It's interesting to note, for me, that the analysis of the first paper
works just fine for 2 clusters as well (basically East Asian and everyone
else), but those super-racial groupings don't exist in the US to my knowledge.

~~~
FeepingCreature
Right, but this opens the door to there existing, in theory, racial genetic
differences causing variation at the human scale; whether or not these map to
racist stereotypes, it becomes harder to argue against them because people can
no longer discard them by just denying the concept of racial variation
altogether. So they actually have to put the work in to demonstrate that
they're untrue, invalid or inapplicable.

Anything that makes it harder for people to attack the enemy is interpreted as
aiding the enemy.

------
factsaresacred
The idea that race is a social construct is simply dumb.

Race: Genetic characteristics common to humans with a shared geographic
origin, and that differ from humans from other geographic origins, sometimes
distinguishable by appearance.

If our collective memory was wiped today, tomorrow we would distinguish humans
by what we call 'races'. But it would require science to clarify what
distinguishes a race at the genetic level (physical differences being a decent
proxy but often wrong and clearly primitive) and to map the distinct
differences between each race.

Why is this controversial?

~~~
scottshamus
Irish and Italian people were previously considered separate races but have
merged into the "white" race. Have the genetics of Ireland changed drastically
in the past 100 years? Or was it the social construct of "race" that changed?
Why do some countries consider certain groups a different race and other
countries view them as a socioeconomic class e.g. gypsies? Humans migrate and
interbreed with different genetic groups and have been doing so for a long,
long time. We are really a spectrum of genetic differences and not really a
bunch of grouped individuals.

[https://academic.udayton.edu/race/01race/white13.htm](https://academic.udayton.edu/race/01race/white13.htm)

~~~
factsaresacred
> Irish and Italian people were previously considered separate races

To whom? Outside of America this is ridiculous. Maybe that's it - The US has
so many hangups about race they changed the definition.

Race: "differences in genetic ancestry based on different geographic origin".
Just because people exploited the term and used it incorrectly does not mean
it does not have an exact definition.

In the middle ages people who carried out trepanning claimed to know about
medicine. People who called the Irish non-caucasian claimed to know about
race. They didn't (or in the latter case, they did but were prejudice).

Neither medicine nor race need be discredited by past ignorance.

