
People from Mexico show stunning amount of genetic diversity - oscarwao
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/06/people-mexico-show-stunning-amount-genetic-diversity
======
jpablo
As a Mexican I find the comment section nitpicking every word of the article
as racist very funny. Americans have really thin skin. Political correctness
is indeed drowning the exchange of ideas!

~~~
rayiner
Americans have really thin skin because they fought a civil war over whether
people with one color of skin could own people with a different color of skin.
And until very recently,[1] people with one color of skin had to go to
different schools than everyone else, they couldn't get married to each other,
etc.

[1] To put things into context, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Jeff
Bezos, and the other tech luminaries in their generation would have gone to
segregated schools had they been born in the south instead of in California
and Washington. If Ken Thompson had exercised his right to vote in his native
Louisiana when he turned 18, he would have done so on ballots that, pursuant
to state law, listed the race of each candidate.

The Voting Rights Act (which made it illegal to have "whites-only" hotels) and
Loving v. Virginia (which ended laws banning interracial marriage) are roughly
contemporaneous with UNIX--both being products of the late 1960s.

One more fun fact: Americans' approval for black-white marriage crossed the
50% mark sometime between the release of Windows 95 and Windows 98:
[http://www.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-
wh...](http://www.gallup.com/poll/163697/approve-marriage-blacks-whites.aspx).

~~~
aaron-lebo
I'm from the South where this has been beat into us from youth. It's not fun
to know that your state at one point seceded so the wealthiest elites could
practice slavery. That and the Jim Crow laws are to our eternal embarrassment.
The only good thing about it is our opportunity to learn from it.

I take some exception to your response, however, which seems very directed.
There is not a single spot on this earth which hasn't had problems with
racism, or a single one of us who has an ancestor who wasn't a racist. Latin
America has its own problems with racism, as does Europe, Asia, and god-forbid
even enlightened parts of the North and Pacific Northwest, too.

I don't disagree with your point, but I'm not sure of its relevance.

~~~
tptacek
Of the "western democracies", or the "industrialized western countries", or
however you want to lump those countries together:

* The US has unusual size, both geographically (which matters here) and population

* The US has unusual diversity

* The US has an unusually toxic history with racial diversity, in large part because unlike (say) Belgium, their racial history occurred almost entirely within their own borders

The argument therefore isn't that the US is distinctively racist. It's not!
Japan, for instance, is far more racist: it's an overt part of the culture.
No, the issue is instead that racism _germinated_ and produced _toxic effects_
in the US _to a greater degree_ than it did in other countries.

We're still grappling with those effects. We incarcerate a huge percentage of
our population, and almost 45% of our prison population is black. The median
income of a black family is just over half that of a white family. Black
people are poorly represented in executive ranks. Look around you: they're
poorly represented in technology as a whole! As a demographic, they get less
value from the public school system than any other, and so we have persistent
pipeline problems reinforcing these disparities. Black people can't even
reliably rent rooms on Airbnb. In 2016.

"Race realists" and "HBD people" would have you believe those phenomenon are
due either to biological differences between black and white people, or to our
pathological responses to those biological differences. That's horseshit, as
the HBD's aptly demonstrate when they try to deploy and extrapolate from their
corpus of dubious or cherry-picked statistics.

So I'd say: unless you truly believe that the black/white disparity in the US
is genetic, the evidence for the US's outlier cultural issues with racism is
right there in the numbers.

We're politically correct in part because we're right in the middle of trying
to fix these problems.

Political correctness isn't a good thing. Also: when I take antibiotics, they
wipe out my gut bacteria and give me stomach problems. That's not a good thing
either! It is, in fact: a bad thing! But I don't call the whole enterprise of
eradicating a bacterial infection in my body into question over it, nor do I
back off the dose to try to minimize the bad side effect.

~~~
aaron-lebo
> The argument therefore isn't that the US is distinctively racist. It's not!
> Japan, for instance, is far more racist: it's an overt part of the culture.
> No, the issue is instead that racism germinated and produced toxic effects
> in the US to a greater degree than it did in other countries.

I think this is completely fair, but I also wonder if it's just because of
America's inherent exposure. In Latin America, for example, "race" isn't as
pointed (see the notion of a Mexican race), but skin color sure as hell does
matter on a lot of levels, and that's because the rulers (Spanish) were light-
skinned. That divide is still endemic and the cause of many issues in those
countries. Is that any less toxic than what's happening in America? If you are
one of those affected there, obviously not, and even to those not directly
affected, it is arguable, or rather, it can't be argued at all.

> We're still grappling with those effects. We incarcerate a huge percentage
> of our population, and almost 45% of our prison population is black.

Absolutely. The system targets African-Americans. But what might be even more
important is what % of our prison population is poor. Poor people go to prison
because the system doesn't care about them, whether that's due to skin color
or being born into the wrong family in a small town or any number of issues.

> The median income of a black family is just over half that of a white
> family. Black people are poorly represented in executive ranks. Look around
> you: they're poorly represented in technology as a whole!

This is undoubtedly true, but keep in mind that African-Americans are only
about 12% of the population, in other words, they should be 1/10th of your co-
workers (if we're going by ratio of the entire US population), which isn't as
extreme as the racial disparities we might expect. Hey, in the Southwest, the
bigger disparity lies with Hispanics - they are not represented fairly in
tech, but we often don't think about them to the same extent.

If I'm trying to make a point, it's that these issues are endemic, and they
are hugely problematic, but we have an undue focus on different parts of our
society, whereas the problems that create them are often much wider in scope.
We're looking for a bug in function B when it's really in function A and it's
causing problems in function C, too...

What's happening is our modern economic system is balanced against a lot of
people. If you are poor, your condition sucks, no matter your skin color.
African-Americans see this disparity and it enrages them (as it should), and
that creates movements (political or not). Poor whites see their condition and
their (incorrect) recourse is to fight against this vague notion of "political
correctness", and then you see the rise of Trumpism and other bad things.

I think trying to focus too much on race is to miss the larger systematic
issue in our society, which is crony capitalism combined with globalism, and
that doesn't care about your race.

~~~
tptacek
I believe crony capitalism and poorly managed "globalism" are serious
problems, but I see time and again direct evidence that economic circumstances
aside, there is a black/white racism problem in the US, and I object to the
pretense that we can ignore it while working on some fundamental root problem
that will be a cure-all for other problems as well.

Wealthy black people have trouble getting rooms on Airbnb. Wealthy black
people get stopped by the police at a disproportionate rate. The cops aren't
doing that because Alcoa told them to.

~~~
aaron-lebo
I don't advocate ignoring it. In fact, I'd prefer that we did a much better
job of desegregating the major cities (especially the school districts). It
just doesn't do us any good to act like race in America is a southern problem,
and it's odd to only cast it as such, which is what the OP did.

It's the same issue. You can't ignore problems, but you can't also assign them
to a different scope than they are.

~~~
kbenson
> It just doesn't do us any good to act like race in America is a southern
> problem, and it's odd to only cast it as such.

I don't think that's what was being said. The original comment was very
specifically talking about the south in the _past_ , and how past southern
practices may have informed peoples experiences if they grew up there, and how
recent some changes are.

~~~
aaron-lebo
But again, why bother talking about the south at all?

We are now far afield, and I'll stop arguing the point after this, but the
topic is about Mexico, which then led to a discussion about "political
correctness", and then the post in question which tried to say the reason
Americans have issues with race are...only southern examples specifically cast
against Western states.

Those same Western states have issues with racism; they would be just as
effective to cite.

~~~
kbenson
> But again, why bother talking about the south at all?

To specifically cast the experiences of people growing up in different parts
of the country with different against each other to highlight how their views
on race and racism may differ. The South is not being used for the purpose of
vilifying it, but to explain how as a country people over a certain age may
have had _very_ different experiences with race in different areas of the
country. It says absolutely _nothing_ directly about the _current_ state of
the South, that's something you seem to have inferred from the comment (and
whether it was meant as an implication is debatable, but it is not factual).

A statement could be made comparing and contrasting experiences of certain
citizens of the United States 150 years ago and some other country that did
not allow slavery. I wouldn't necessarily think that's meant to cast the US in
bad light, but to use it as a tool to illustrate a point. It's obvious the US
of today is not the same as the US of 150 years ago. It's also obvious the
South of 40-50 years ago is not the same as the South today.

I think perhaps you're just a bit more emotionally invested in the perception
of the South, and have seen the South as it currently is denigrated unfairly
to a degree, which I'm sure happens, and you are conflating that type of
occurrence and this. I just don't think they are equivalent.

~~~
aaron-lebo
I am emotionally invested, sure.

However, if you are trying to contrast things fairly, we could say:

* talk about racist policies against the Chinese in California in the 1800s

* talk about racist policies against the Irish and sentiments against Catholics throughout the country even just prior to JFK's election in 1960

* talk about racist views and policies towards interracial marriage in the South and Southwest

That's contrasting different experiences in time and place. That's being fair.
The alternative...

~~~
kbenson
> * talk about racist policies against the Chinese in California in the 1800s

Which does not _directly_ affect current discourse, being removed by multiple
generations from those alive today.

> * talk about racist policies against the Irish and sentiments against
> Catholics throughout the country even just prior to JFK's election in 1960

Sure, but then you're bringing religion into the mix. That seems unwise when
trying to make a specific point that to that point has not included religion.
It will just muddy the waters.

> * talk about racist views and policies towards interracial marriage in the
> South and Southwest

Also applicable, but less well known.

The point isn't to correctly spread the blame for bad behavior around equally,
it was to explain why Americans have thin skin regarding race issues. The
South is a valid example of this,and is the _common_ example because it is so
well known and recent. That may strike you as unfair, but fairness wasn't the
point, communication was.

------
tuna-piano
I've often wondered why Mexican people look so different from people in the
US. Wikipedia makes me believe that Mexicans are generally a mix of European
and native ancestry. But why does Mexico have so much more of that than the
US? Especially considering we stole much of our land from them...

Why does the average person in Texas (excluding Mexico->US immigrants) look so
different from the average person a few hundred miles south, but yet looks
similiar to someone a few hundred (or thousand) miles north?

~~~
w1ntermute
Because the population density was much lower in pre-Columbian America than in
pre-Columbian Mexico[0]. Note how Argentina has a similarly low population
density - their current population also has a low level of indigenous
ancestry.

There are some other nuances as well, like how the existing social structure
was preserved in Mexico. Check out _Why Nations Fail_ [1] for the details.

0: [http://i.imgur.com/RI3uplJ.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/RI3uplJ.jpg)

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Nations_Fail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Nations_Fail)

~~~
mrtree
"Population density"is a nice way to put it but hides fact that the local
population was exterminated in the british colonies, and not in the spanish
ones. That's why there is so few people of aboriginal descent in the US and
not in Latin America.

~~~
w1ntermute
Population density isn't "a nice way to put it", it's data from before
colonization began. Regardless of what happened afterwards, the starting
conditions were very different in what is now the US and Mexico.

------
sandworm101
Why the surprise? Mexico is part of a land bridge between two continents. Both
have been invaded multiple times by distant populations. It's next to the
Caribbean, a host of islands which are known to accelerate genetic changes.
With all these peoples coming and going I'd be shocked if it wasn't so
diverse.

~~~
noahc
Why are the islands known to accelerate genetic changes specifically? Is it
because of sun exposure?

~~~
rmcfeeley
Isolation. See The Galapagos + Darwin's studies on the birds there. Also:
Madagascar (film + land mass)

------
vondur
Well, it's not surprising given the racial makeup of the Iberian peninsula
over history. (Celts, Romans, Vandals, North Africans) and then sending them
to America to mix with native Indian populations and imported Africans.

~~~
crpatino
That's what I thought at first. The interesting thing about the article is
that it shows the native population was already pretty diverse by the time of
first contact with the Europeans.

Also, a minor nit picking. Even if slaves brought to Mexico came from a very
specific Portuguese enclaves within the African continent, the population
within Africa is extremely diverse. It would not surprise me if they brought
about as much diversity as the other two source "races", for lack of a better
word. It seems a bit too simple to have them reduced to a note margin as in
"imported Africans".

------
betolink
I remember a little while ago my dad went to an academic lunch with Dr. Craig
Venter in Chiapas (MX), he was talking about sampling DNA from the Americas to
register genes that could potentially help medical research and are endemic to
the region.

------
BurningFrog
My understanding is that all native american populations are from a relatively
small and homogenous population that walked into Alaska 16000 years ago.

Which means that they're much less genetically diverse than the rest of the
world.

This is hard to reconcile with the claims in this article.

~~~
hx87
While founder effects do reduce genetic diversity within a given population,
reproduction and adaptation do increase it.

Also, Mexican =/= Native American

~~~
BurningFrog
The article is about the native populations.

------
jkot
> _Imagine if people from Kansas and California were as genetically distinct
> from each other as someone from Germany is from someone from Japan._

Is not this a case? People immigrated to america from many continents.

------
amelius
Genetic diversity is said to result in better traits. So what are these traits
in this case?

------
HillaryBriss
conjecture: the population of Los Angeles County, if measured using the same
approach employed by this study, would show more genetic diversity than the
population of Mexico

