The headline is a bit overstated (i.e., someone of African-American race is almost guaranteed to have at least some African ancestry, admixed with a varying amount of European).
That being said, there are important differences within the traditional "races", such as the finding in this study that people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities for obesity.
Overall I would love it if medical research papers moved away from "race" and started getting more into the fine-grained genetic details. Regardless of the politics involved, this will lead to better medical treatments for everyone.
>That being said, there are important differences within the traditional "races", such as the finding in this study that people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities for obesity.
"Traditional races" as you call them have changed over time and space, and we are only in this predicament because we lump different ethnicities together today. 150 years ago people could tell the difference between someone of West African or East African descent. And Southern Italians, Irish vs Western Europeans vs Germans... etc.
It's harder now because a) there has been a lot more mixing since then; and b) socioculturally we consolidated many of those ethnicities
It's harder now because now you live in America and are used to seeing all these people as Americans, and then as members of whatever racial consciousness we have in America.
Back in those respective countries, they can tell everyone apart. When my wife (Irish/English by ancestry) visited Hungary, they were immediately able to peg her as a foreigner, and frankly, so was I. They look nothing alike aside from skin color. This is true of basically any country in Europe, Africa, Asia, where people have tended to remain in the same location for thousands of years.
I think even most Americans would be able to tell apart African and European races if they really tried.
I am just travelling around northern Italy (typing this from a Milano-Torino train), and there is a visible difference between people in the Po valley and people from Como, merely 50 km apart.
People from the Po valley, such as the Milanese, are mostly "lighter Mediterranean" types. People around Como Lake are visibly more blond and pale. The ethnic substrate is different, the ancient populations in southern Alps were more Celtic and Germanic, and even though the contemporary folk no longer speaks anything but Italian, the difference to much more mixed places such as Milano is still visible.
Same in northern Spain. Galicia and Asturias have a lot of pale, blue-eyed people who would stand out in an Andalusian crowd. Galicia has Celtic ancestry (they even preserved bagpipes as a folk instrument), and Asturias was the last refuge of the Visigoths when they were crushed by the Arabs in the 8th century.
In my experience, south asians and middle easterners can easily tell I’m Bengali/Bangladeshi rather than (non-Bengali) Indian or Pakistani. Growing up in America I always assumed I looked Indian, but that’s because my reference point was european americans so I didn’t have sufficient data points in my mental model to work out aggregate tendencies.
There are plenty of Indians who in a literal sense could be classified as white (as in extremely fair pale skin), not just from Kashmir but even from South India. But if you’re Indian you can instantly pick them out as Indian, their entire facial structure etc is different from Europeans. In a sense, it is true, categories like “white”, “black” are social constructs that are meaningless at a genetic standpoint. But categories like, European, Nordic, Indian etc are not, if you put in some effort you can very easily distinguish between because of thousands of years of separate genetic evolution.
Yup! And many Americans would guess some north Indians are white because of convergent selection and shared ancestry. It's just that most prominent Indians tend to be south indian or Bengali in America. For example, most of the big name Indian ceos
I could definitely tell population-level differences between phenotypes in places like UK vs Poland when I visited (and yes I know Polish immigration to the UK is popular), and I can tell differences between the average population-level look in German-dominated descendant areas in the US vs Italian and Jewish and Irish areas like NYC. I think maybe people are expecting it to be easy to do individual-level predictions which is a lot more of a coin toss, but just telling the broad differences isn't super hard.
I’m calling BS on the “remained in the same place for thousands of years”
Take a course in European history, learn about all the wars, genocides, forced and unenforced migrations, plagues, etc. and even more mundane thinggs like intermarriage outside of immediate community ( very common amongst nobility ) and tell me again with a straight face you believe people have remained in the same place for thousands of years
They may have recognized your wife as “foreign” based on a number of things. The most obvious being language, But it could have also been dress, makeup, demeanor etc.
> It’s rare (but not impossible) for a people to have been in the same place on Earth for thousands of years. It’s more like hundreds.
Is it really rare? That seems to be the norm except for America and Africa that got replaced or displaced by colonization. But in Europe and Asia most areas has been populated by steady groups. Rulers come and go, but the people living there stays the same.
I think its rare for everyone to have been there for a thousand years, but its not rare for a majority of the genes to have stayed in one place for a thosand years.
Thousands as in 2,000+ years? From my understanding that’s rare, at least by geography. I could be wrong.
But it’s not like we’re being super precise here. It’s fuzzy enough that lots of takes are correct, depending how you frame it. That’s kind of my point in my other reply. They weren’t wrong but they were being rude about it.
Genetics strongly suggest Australia was settled by a single broad wave of humans that spread across the continent, finfing their niche, and staying in place whether that be east, west, north south, across desert, coast, rivers, forrest, etc.
This contrasts to earlier "literary" arguments in magazines such as Quadrant that native Australians moved about and fought for territories with invaders supplanting original dwellers long before Europeans arrived.
Hungarians mass migrated about a thousand years ago from the Ural Mountains, several thousands of kms from present Hungary. Germans mass migrated to Hungary hundreds of years ago, especially after Mongols and Turks killed most of the population there. Italians lost their appetite to coriander because the mass migration of Germanic people around and after the fall of Rome.
It was more difficult, but it happened many-many times.
If I sort out 20 Spaniards from different provinces and regions, you wouldn't guess if they were Spaniards, French, South Germans, North/South Italians or even Irish.
Yeah, and some also look Moorish, middle eastern, Sephardic, etc. too. Not a big surprise when you learn about the migrations that happened in Spain during the past 2000 years or so. We are a mixed bunch.
I don't know what that person meant but, like many in the region, Koreans have family registries (戶籍) that record their family lineage. At least among people I've known who have spoken about theirs, Korean family registry records tend to go back much further than the median east Asian country.
The names of the systems related to this registry are slightly different in Chinese, Japanese and Korean but you can see links to Wikipedia entries for each of them from here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%88%B6%E7%B1%8D
> "Maintain the purest racial pedigree"? What does this even mean in actual terms?
It’s usually, as it is in this case, genetically meaningless. Culturally, it means someone picked an arbitrary point in the past, counted up the cohort of people within some group (and a metric for testing in-ness), and then deemed descendents of only that group to be pure, descendents of that group in part to be impure, and people who have no ancestors in that group to be outsiders.
In practice, recordkeeping past a handful of generations gets annoying, so most cultures set this line somewhere within 200 years ago. (The concept correlates with nativeness to varying degrees.)
It's used because, despite the fact that race doesn't really match with genetic ancestry, it still has impacts on people's lives and health.
For example, a study indicating that "black people in the US are X% more likely to have {some condition}" is useful, even if "black person in the US" doesn't tell much about an individual's ancestry. That's because health conditions are heavily influenced by environmental factors, and someone's race impacts the environmental factors they're exposed to.
This does get complicated, and requires digging deep into the data. Top-level statistics don't indicate root cause, which still needs to be researched. But top-level statistics can indicate that there's a problem that needs to be worked on, which is why medical studies tracking race are still useful.
It’s still correlated enough with ancestry that it can be a useful proxy for health issues related to ancestry—in addition to the environmental factors you pointed out.
> people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities
similarly, when working on genomes a few years back, it used to be said that the two most genetically distinct humans alive right then would both be from Africa, which was memorable because one might guess Inuit vs Africa or something like that naively.
Specifically they would both be of Khoi-San ethnicity. The vast majority of humans have been through two population bottlenecks which drastically reduced the genetic diversity of the populations. Most African populations have been through at least one of these bottlenecks, and every population group outside of Africa has been through two. The Khoi-San, however, seem to have broken off prior to either of the bottlenecks and so they retained much higher genetic diversity.
> Specifically they would both be of Khoi-San ethnicity
The you could say that a distinctive trait of Khoi-San ethnicity is its genetic variance. Not to mention the fact that this variance, coming from before two population bottlenecks, must contain a large number of traits not seen in other human populations.
Although this makes you wonder- if they're the most genetically diverse, do they also look diverse? Are there light and dark skinned individuals, blonde and red and black hair, green/ blue/ brown eyes, short and tall, etc.?
The genetic diversity doesn't really translate to diversity in appearance. Much of the genome doesn't code for anything in particular (so called "junk DNA"), so you can have high genetic diversity due to variance in these parts of the genome, but relatively low diversity in the small subset of genes that code for more visible features.
Yes, so in other words "high genetic variance" doesn't really mean much. So all this talk about "variance been higher within ethnic group than between" is not very relevant. The phenotype that we can actually see has differences between ethnic groups that are bigger than the variance within them.
Last of course there's the idea that this variance must be restricted to the visible phenotype. Which sounds a bit like saying that the objects in a dark room must be all in the spot illuminated by the torch, and everywhere else the room is empty.
> so in other words "high genetic variance" doesn't really mean much
>> Although this makes you wonder- if they're the most genetically diverse, do they also look diverse? Are there light and dark skinned individuals, blonde and red and black hair, green/ blue/ brown eyes, short and tall, etc.?
Yes, they do look diverse.
The visual differences will be more readily apparent to people who are familiar with the high genetic variance population since this would allow more (maybe fine-grained) diverse looks. If the person looking does not have much experience distinguishing looks in a "high genetic variance" population then they probably end up generalizing as a default. Not being able to pick up on how diverse these looks are does not make them not there. Only that, the observer is familiar with the visual differences in their non-african population of less genetically diverse humans with some grouped environmental adaptions/mutations. Such as lighter pigment to better absorb vitamin D, and this type of thing being carried as the standard for "diverse looking" (blue/brown/light/dark).
After all, "SLC24A5 encodes a cation exchanger in melanosomes ... A derived, nonsynonymous mutation (rs1426654 ...) in SLC24A5 associated with light skin color has swept to near fixation in Europeans due to positive selection [...] rs1426654 is common in East African populations with high levels of Afroasiatic ancestry [...] Further, SLC24A5 likely experienced positive selection in East Africa after this admixture event. ... rs1426654 is at moderate frequency (5–12%) in the KhoeSan from Botswana, who have substantially lighter skin than equatorial Africans". and also "studies show that the ancestral alleles of many predicted functional pigmentation variants in Africa are associated with lighter skin, suggesting our human ancestors may have had light or moderately pigmented skin" and that dark skin may be a derived trait that also continued to evolve.[0]
But when you only have a hammer...
It's like being introduced to this workshop full of tools with a stacks of wood for any type of joinery desired. Yet, your experience is much more simplistic: hammer, nail (or bolt/screw, whatever), boards; repeat. Without much thought, the human brain has already created the groups: the trusty hammer with some metal fasteners to drive, and that foreign group of absolutely nothing like the trusty hammer and fasteners. But upon closer look there are hammers and nails and screws and all these other metal fasteners in the workshop -- except, instead of them being chosen to put the boards together, a variation of tools are creating a variation of joints in order to put the boards together. The finished product ends up being ~99.9% identical to your nailed product, but it's probably only those familiar with the experience of joinery that are most likely to appreciate an notice the visual diversity between joints, instead of simply noticing that one of the products has a couple spots of metal and the other doesn't.
Is that specifically the case? This feels like an area where our language can fail to capture the nuance of what someone is trying to say and it gets misstated as something really similar but different.
To give an example, take 3 people named A, B, and C. A and B are both from Africa, while C is from elsewhere.
A and B have 9 genetic differences. B and C have 1 genetic difference. A and C have 10 genetic differences.
We can make the claim that the genetic difference between someone from Africa and from elsewhere (B to C, thus 1) is much smaller than the difference between two people in Africa (A to B, thus 9). 1 is smaller than 9, so this statement is true, but could easily be misunderstood to saying that the two most genetically distinct individuals are from Africa, which isn't the case because A to C is the most genetically distinct and C is from elsewhere.
The two statements seem nearly equivalent and the wrong one could accidentally be spread by someone who is really just trying to focus on expressing how much genetic diversity is within Africa.
Africa is the continent on which humanity originated from, and peoples in other continents migrated in waves. So the most insular communities in Africa have had more time to diverge than the most insular communities in other continents.
They are talking with respect to internal diversity I believe.
As an Anglophone you may notice a similar thing in language, and in English you can notice the large diversity in accent in native UK speakers.
Non-Africans split from Africa relatively late in human genetic history. So A and B's divergence point(s) can readily be quite a bit earlier than C's. So, as you pointed out, C is likely more closely related one of A or B. Let's say B.
The big difference between B & C is that B is much more likely to incorporate genes from other early branches than C is. Therefore B is likely further away genetically from A than C is.
No, your split argument doesn't make the case you think it does. If groups A, B, and C were once groups A and B (and B split into B and C later), it's true that B and C are likely closely related, but it doesn't mean A and B are more different than A and C.
To put it another way, if we start with groups A and B, and then branch off B' from B, while B and B' are likely similar, that doesn't tell us anything about the relationship between A and B', and it doesn't imply that A and B' are closer than A and B.
To expand the second part of my argument: If C' is only descended from C, but B' is descended from B and D and F and Z, then B' has increased its genetic diversity more than C' has.
Bottlenecks, small population inbreeding, genetic drift, founder effect, etc
Basically what happened was, an alt-group of African humans decided earth was not safe anymore and its collapse was imminent -- they need to get to Mars. But since they don't have a way to get a spaceship in Africa, they will need to leave Africa and do whatever is necessary to build one, including throwing the people who helped them under the mammoth if need be.
At this point they have a pretty diverse gene pool and represent the humans well. They walk for a bit but came upon some steam vents and decided take a break and steam some food and enjoy the ocean view in the distance. The leader is not happy they stopped for food or rest. Later they are shooketh awake just before fire rains down on them. 3/4th of them make it safely to the ocean, and what luck the water is receding it'll be easier to cross, for the first 2/3rds at least. The tsunami gods demanded a toll and claimed the back 1/3. Not happy with the direction of leadership, half the group decided they could establish a better foundation away from these clowns and forked themselves.
Meanwhile, back in Africa and finally having got rid of that crazy mars dude and his cult followers, they decide to invite all the neighbors to an epoch swinging dance party to celebrate -- complete with the best plant-based party favours they could dig up/gather. Thus, ensuring the larger African population and their descendant would end up with an abundant supply of pokemon variants to swap between'em.
Though, you may want to take a look at the linked paper above for a more precise explanation. I may have paraphrased a bit.
African-Americans with slave ancestry almost all come from West Africa I would think, as that was the shortest route for the European slave ships between Africa and the New World.
Genetic differences across Africa shouldn't be surprising when you consider how huge Africa really is. Africa is about as big as the US, China, and Europe combined.
The effect is much larger than that. For most of the evolutionary history of humans, everyone* lived in Africa. Then only quite small groups left, taking with them only a small fraction of the genetic diversity of humans. Even today, the great majority of genetic diversity among living humans is inside Africa.
(* who mattered. There were earlier migrations of hominids, but the mark they left on our genetics is much smaller than the influence from later migrations.)
I was under the impression humans migrated from Africa so the rest of the world is all african-X, where the african- part is some subset of the original african population.
A genetic test takes several days and costs a few hundred dollars.
The patient wants the best treatment right now. If race carries useful information that helps the doctor treat the patient, then the doctor should have access to it.
Is it? What race is someone who's Arab? What about someone who could look black with one haircut but white with another? What about half-Arab, half-Euro?
This might sound like nitpicking, but most black people in the US have significant European ancestry and the admixture can vary wildly even for people with similar skin tones. Our naive view of "race" is not always backed by genetic reality.
Yes, you give them the list and say "What is your race/ethnicity, you may select at least one and as many as you wish." They answer. You are done.
> What race is someone who's Arab?
Whatever they answer (Middle East or Northern African [MENA], under the 2024 revision to the categories, intuitively seems most likely.)
> What about someone who could look black with one haircut but white with another?
Again, whatever they answer.
> What about half-Arab, half-Euro?
Again, whatever they answer. Though the most obvious guess of what they might answer, given the premise, would be one of White, MENA, or both.
The part to question is not, "is it quick and free to determine race" but "does race carry useful information that helps the doctor treat the patient", which is a much thornier question.
> Yes, you give them the list and say "What is your race/ethnicity, you may select at least one and as many as you wish." They answer. You are done.
While I broadly agree with you, there have been notable controversies around people who self-identified as having a particular ancestry [0] that didn't match how other people classified them.
It's pretty low quality information. If you're taking a genetic test you want something that returns susceptibility to sickle cell amenia, cystic fibrosis, tay-sachs, et cetera. Race is a very low quality signal that is used when you lack something better, like a genetic test.
I don’t think the parts of that theory that have fallen out of fashion include humanity originating in Africa in general. I think it’s more like - maybe more of modern human comes from a branch or branches that changed after Africa exit than we thought previously.
There’s plenty of evidence to the contrary, including Denisovan and Neanderthal that is not present in any African population; as well, something like up to 20% of West African genome has an as yet unknown source which is usually referred to as “archaic” or ghost DNA which is not found elsewhere in other populations.
Since the OOA theory doesn’t have any explanation for this evidence…
> There’s plenty of evidence to the contrary, including Denisovan and Neanderthal that is not present in any African population
OOA does have an explanation for Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA that isn't found in African populations, and that is that the cross-breeding between anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals and Denisovans occurred after modern humans left Africa.
> as well, something like up to 20% of West African genome has an as yet unknown source which is usually referred to as “archaic” or ghost DNA which is not found elsewhere in other populations.
"Archaic" DNA refers to DNA that appears to have originated with some human group other than modern humans and not be shared among modern human populations (the Denisovan and Neanderthal-origin genomes of Eurasian humans would be included here), but specific to some subpopulation. It is not the case that "20% of West African genome" is archaic, though there is a study in which some specific isolated West African subpopulations had archaic fractions that high, which is not something that OOA has no explanation for (the explanation is that those subgroups were isolated from the ones that participated in the various outbound migrations, and so their particular archaic genome is not shared with the groups that migrated out.)
There may be valid challenges to OOA, but those aren't it.
Homo sapiens didn't evolve from Denisovans and Neanderthals. All are branches of human and existed at the same time and interbred.* Homo sapiens survived while Neanderthals and Denisovans became extinct. The majority of the ancestry of living humans, Homo sapiens, was originally from Africa. Europeans have some Neanderthal ancestry (like 2%) due to interbreeding with Neanderthals, but the vast majority of European DNA is from Africa. Sub-Saharan Africans have less Neanderthal ancestry than Europeans and more Homo sapiens ancestry.
The notion of race and ethnicity in biology has been politicised by ideology. Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja clarifies this in point five of their piece [0] in the Skeptical Inquirer.
I don't know what Jerry Coyne is talking about because genetic vs. environmental causation of behavioral and physical traits, broken down "racially" and otherwise, is a very active field of study.
He isn't saying there isn't such research being done, he's criticizing the attempts made by ideologues to discredit and discourage research along such premises.
Did you even bother to read the piece? He explicitly opens his fifth point with an example of The Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) weaponizing its reputation to do precisely just that. He documented another instance of this in Nature recently as well [0]. If you look at the top subthread here too, Nature Human Behaviour is doing this as well.
Given all that, it seems he's right that the problem with ideologues exists. The success or lack thereof of these ideologues is a separate matter. Your claim that such research still exists doesn't negate the problem he identified. If anything, I don't think we should be comfortable with any kind of intentional distortions to the biology of race and ethnicity. The bad (false) PR could come back and bite, affecting the research and how it might be received. Otherwise, I don't really see any real disagreement here.
Yes, I read the piece, and I find it very difficult to reconcile with the volume and quality of research going on in this area. My feeling is that some people want there to be a kind of Heckler's Veto on "controversies" they're concerned about, so that they can rail against it. But there isn't.
The real issue for people concerned about the politicization of this issue is that the science isn't going their way right now.
Are you just going to outright dismiss the evidence I provided earlier for this politicization? As I explained before, your point is perfectly compatible with his. If you’re able to follow this kind of research, I’m frankly baffled by your inability to grasp the idea that acknowledging attempts to politicize this topic doesn’t imply that research in the area can’t proceed. The evidence for politicization is all over the editorials in your major research journals. If research in this area is booming as you’ve described (I don’t follow this research), all that means is that the politicization attempts have been unsuccessful.
As for your mind reading about the author’s intent, he is, to the best of my understanding, a standard-issue liberal. As such, I don't really get where you're coming from with this.
Great, I didn't know we can dismiss evidence without justifying why. The author claims that there is politicization by ideologues, and the evidence he provided flats out suggests that. If anything, the disagreement seems to be the extent or areas where it's actually happening, which is the point I'm trying to make, which you have not engaged with. I'm frankly puzzled by all my (past) interactions with you. It seems we agree a lot in some way or another yet somehow, you always come across as bad faith to me. That's why when you eventually conceded to one of our past discussions, I decided it was no longer worth engaging. I thought Hacker News is a place for reasoned discussion, I guess I'm wrong to come back to it.
"In biological taxonomy, race is an informal rank in the taxonomic hierarchy for which various definitions exist. Sometimes it is used to denote a level below that of subspecies, while at other times it is used as a synonym for subspecies."
That doesn't seem like a useful definition. There is no case where subspecies could not also satisfy that definition. It's a distinction without a difference.
Much of it, at that level, is a mostly arbitrary construct, with blurry boundaries, left to subjective interpretation, made up long before the very new concept of genetic analysis was even a thing, where a more informed hierarchy could be made. Even then, the end bits of the hierarchy turn into a knotted mess a generation or two after you remove a river or mountain.
Categorization is a fundamental part of our intelligence, but not necessarily a reflection of reality.
Yeah. I think it's a synonym. I'd consider it a linguistic quirk, like how we use the term "carcass" for the body of a dead animal, but we use "corpse" for humans.
Among the identified human subgroups, some would probably be subspecies of the same species as modern humans (Denisovans, neanderthals, and a few others) if there hadn't been a tendency to assign extinct human groups (or even individual specimens) as distinct species on scant evidence.
Incorrect: somewhere Ali g the way in your life, someone deeply lied to you.
Race isn’t a subspecies. It’s an artificial social construct created by European elites in the beginning of the last millennium. Its purpose is to sow division. And to other groups of people to make it more palatable to commit crimes against the objectified folk.
Yeah, it's quite wild what European elites and scientists believed around late 1800's / early 1900's, and it wasn't limited just to anti-semitism or racism towards Africans, even if those groups had it much worse than most others.
For instance, in late 1800's Swedish scientists stole bunch of skulls from Finnish cemeteries, trying to prove that Finnish people are of different/lesser race than their Scandinavian neighbours. It took until 2024 for those skulls to be returned to Finland for reburial.
Ok, but there are clear morphological, genetical, etc. differences between e.g. a Han Chinese person and a Yoruba person. So putting aside politics, sociology and whatnot, purely on a scientific basis, what term do you use for these differences? When you say that "these people belong to different $INSERT_TERM_HERE", what's the correct term to substitute?
There are also morphological and genetic differences between, say, an average 'white' Swedish person and an average 'white' Spanish person. But our systems of racial classification tend to put them in the same group just because they both happen to have light skin. Naturally, if you take two groups of people who've long inhabited different parts of the world (with little to no historical interaction between the groups), then you'll find genetic differences. The point is that there is no biological motivation for the specific set of racial categories that the US and other societies have developed. An objective Martian biologist studying humans would not group us into 'white humans', 'black humans', ... etc.
>there is no biological motivation for the specific set of racial categories that the US and other societies have developed. An objective Martian biologist studying humans would not group us into 'white humans', 'black humans', ... etc.
> Then why do biologists distinguish subspecies of other animals?
They do, when there are things that seem to be subspecies, they don't do it just because there is an arbitrary requirement for every species to have subspecies. There's been dispute about whether various archaic human groups were separate species or subspecies, and if what we now call modern humans weren't the only ones still around, that might be a more acute debate and might be resolved in favor of subspecies, but the others aren't still around, so...
Some animals have subspecies. Humans don't. This is something that's widely misunderstood popularly but which is indubitable biologically. For example, many people are not aware that there is vastly more genetic variation between different breeds of dog than there is between any two groups of humans.
But regardless, the more important point is that whatever biologically-motivated categories humans might be grouped by would not correspond to 'races' as normally understood.
That article doesn't say anything about small populations. The word 'subpopulation' appears in the abstract, but it's talking about subpopulations of sperm in ejaculate.
I have to say, this is a super weird paper to suddenly pull out of nowhere in order to make an argument against the modern biological consensus that there are no subspecies of humans. It says nothing about species or subspecies, or even different populations of humans. Did you just Google some keywords and go with the first result? I'm genuinely puzzled.
> However, in this article, I show that female-mediated sperm selection can also facilitate assortative fusion between genetically compatible gametes. Based on this evidence, I argue that reproductive failure does not necessarily exclusively represent a pathological condition, but can also result from sexual selection (‘mate choice’) at the level of the gametes.
I'm haphazardly suggesting that the above is the same as:
> "There are some (small) genetic populations whose genetics diverged so much, from geographic separation, that they have fertility problems [1].
We have genetic populations that are the result of geographic separation, and we even have genetic divergence that makes reproduction difficult/impossible.
Again, what's left? Why can't we categorize human genetic populations to the same level? Please be specific in what's missing?
> It says nothing about species or subspecies
Why would it? If the categorization of humans included subspecies, I couldn't have responded.
Precise equality isn't required for a conceptual discussion, especially one that's so ill defined/subjective as the concept of subspecies [1].
It's an established political fact that classifying humans, at any level, could never be presented. That's not a bad thing, but it's also a mostly arbitrary thing.
The original comment was talking about using a different term than race when doing real biology or medical science. You basically made their point by jumping in with an explanation of race.
What most people (non-academics) mean when they say "race" is "genetic population". If your goal is to have a conceptual exchange, rather than correcting terminology, you should go in with that perspective. Top level comment put "race" in quotes, understanding this.
Mendel didn't get much attention until 1900 or so. European racism was alive and well long before non-academics had any notion of a "genetic population", or indeed a genetic anything.
I'm not sure about that particular claim, but in general, skin color and phenotype are not perfectly correlated with ancestry. The immediate objection is the obvious one... "What do you mean? Why do Chinese people look Chinese, or Africans African, or Europeans European?".
What I mean is that, you can have two closely related populations with their own distinct phenotypes that are actually closely related.
An interesting example are the Negritos of SE Asia.
Any person simply going off of looks, would obviously assume these people are African.
However, they are indeed most closely related to their sister population, the fair-skinned small-eyed (please no offense, we all know what I'm talking about) East Asians.
Their look is due to convergent selection that favors darker skin, wider noses, etc.
> Overall I would love it if medical research papers moved away from "race" and started getting more into the fine-grained genetic details. Regardless of the politics involved, this will lead to better medical treatments for everyone.
More precision is better, but we don't have rapid genetic tests that can distinguish West vs. East African ancestry on the spot, so race is the only proxy available when you're, say, treating a patient in the ER.
On one hand, science tells us race as defined in western countries is not backed by actual biological differences. On the other hand, scientists use "race" in their research as if it is a legitimate means of categorizing people.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there are no differences between ethnicities, just that those differences are based on ancestry not race. People of a specific "race" don't share the same ancestry all the time, some times they have more in common with a different "race" than their own. Race as we know it today is a means of classifying humans that came about at a time when colonial expansion was booming. Classifying people based on their outward appearance was all too convenient. It's like someone learning how to code who found out there are thousands of programming languages and categorized them using terms like "curly brace language","lots of parenthesis language","indentation oriented language". It's lazy and childish. But once you learn more about the languages you should abandon the old ways of classifying things.
> scientists use "race" in their research as if it is a legitimate means of categorizing people
The journal Nature Human Behaviour published ethics guidelines in Aug 2022 which touch on this:
> Race and ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs. Humans do not have biological races, at least based on modern biological criteria for the identification of geographical races or subspecies.
> Studies that use the constructs of race and/or ethnicity should explicitly motivate their use. Race/ethnicity should not be used as proxies for other variables — for example, socioeconomic status or income.
We use breeds for other species, like cats, dogs, horses, etc. Humans could probably be categorized by breeds —breeds of course would not parallel ‘races’ but could still subdivide our species in new ways like we do with other animal species.
That won't work because people breed dogs for a purpose, that's why we have breeds. We don't breed to have better hunting humans for example. We practice eugenics on dogs, but we don't practice it at scale on ourselves.
Cats are interesting, tabby cats are most like humans, because they are very "mixed" but not with a purpose, just at random and by convenience. Orange cats have specific behavioral traits, but they weren't bred on purpose either.
The "on purpose" part is important because in those cases, we keep breeding them until specific traits are exaggerated to the max. With human reproduction, if having a blonde hair is considered ideal in a specific part of a country over several hundred years, then yeah, you'll see blondes mate more than non-blondes and you'll have lots of blondes, but you'll still see blondes marry non-blondes so their great-grandchildren could have red or black hair just the same. Now instead of hair consider behavioral traits. Those are even more complicated because us humans don't operate on a purely instinctual directive like animals. if a person has a genetic propensity for violence for example, that doesn't mean much because they can still decide to act against their "genetics" (otherwise, it doesn't make sense to punish them). Even dogs bred for their violent nature can be trained out of it to a large extent.
We probably could - but people don't like it, and some huge percentage of everyone would be various "mutts".
But the whole arena is fraught with the risk of disaster. It's apparently OK to admit that a group of people are likely to be better at X because they're on average taller, but going further gets very dangerous.
On the other hand, it could help people look beyond race and instead look at other traits like athleticism, math proficiency, wordsmithing, artistry, endurance, high altitude adaptation, seamanship, gift of the gab, etc…
If you're suggesting categorising according to genetics, then I don't think the scientific consensus is with you. Pet breeds have clear biological divisions that humans do not. See e.g. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.23882
> Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations. Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters.
> In a recent study, published in Lancet Digital Health, NIH-funded researchers found that AI models could accurately predict self-reported race in several different types of radiographic images—a task not possible for human experts.
ethnicity is what you mean. unless you are claiming, the AI's model didn't have the concept of "race" in it's training data but was able to come up with a novel classification scheme that aligns with society's concept of race.
AI confirming human bias because it was trained on it doesn't mean much.
x-rays don't measure purely innate, genetic factors, they reflect things that are influenced by nurture as well as nature (and might, in principle, even have detectable difference based on differences in how technicians treat and react to the patient.)
> Race as we know it today is a means of classifying ...
That's it. It's a classification system, a taxonomy, a social construction, a coarse categorization (all these things). But it's a bad one that only loosely correlates with a small handful of phenotypes. There isn't zero correlation which is why I disagree, as a matter of precision, with people who say race doesn't exist. The quality of a given taxonomy exists on a spectrum and race is a pretty damn bad one when you consider how inaccurately it separates the phenotypes it claims to care about, and how many genotypes/phenotypes (the vast majority) it fails to separate at all beyond a coin flip.
> We are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.
My summary would be that race is a heuristic. It's not perfect but it's a broadly accurate and often useful category. For example, whether someone has dark skin says quite a bit about their propensity for skin cancer. Whether someone is Jewish says a lot about their propensity for certain rare genetic diseases.
There are bunch of unrelated people that do research with vastly different opinions and methods. (Thing in common: scientific method and review,publications)
When it comes down to layperson, research results are averaged out and de-nuanced by jounalists.
I have the impression that a lot if these talks about race being an entirely unscientific idea are related to the US dividing the entire world in four "races" as such: white, black, asian, and latino. Which is comically imprecise and arbitrary, and yet Americans seem to be obsessed with it.
it's not the US alone, this concept originated from the UK. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was used by the ruling class (think, east India company directors and such) to divide humans into sub-species with different levels of evolution. This would allow them the moral justification they needed to continue their conquest. There is a reason "all people are created equal" is the phrase used to abolish things like slavery. people focus on the "created" part, but the equal part is just as relevant.
This concept of race is designed so that one race can claim better evolution than the other, as a whole that is. People with specific ancestry might be better at specific things (provided they pursue those things to their potential), but associating that with an entire race was only useful at the time of this social constructs' creation because Europe needed to conquer the world and what do Europeans have in common the rest of the world doesn't have? Skin color. Which due to the latitude of Europe as a continent, people whose ancestors are from there have less melanin in their skin to account for lesser sunlight (You can see the same effect with north-east Asians). If you think about it, the western classification of "race" has more to do with geography than genealogy.
> the US dividing the entire world in four "races" as such: white, black, Asian, and latino.
The US government scheme has more than four top-level racial categories, and "Hispanic or Latino", in that system, is an ethnicity, not one of the races.
I recall a newspaper story about a Black writer who did not know his ancestry. He took a genetic test to find out he was more native American than black. He told his mother who responded "I'm too old to stop being a black woman."
I think that is an understandable feeling and I think that says a lot about the concept of race. Her statement doesn't make race any less real, but it does indicate what race IS.
There are hispanic creoles, native american creoles, german creoles, italian creoles, so forth and so on. Because to be a Louisiana creole isn't to rely on any racial marker at all. It just signifies that your ancestors lived here at a particular time.
So if someone says that they're Cajun, not creole, they're lying to you. ALL cajuns, without exception, are creole.
And most people who claim to be Cajun are either not Cajun at all or they've mistaken their surname for being Cajun. Like a guy who told me I was wrong about a food item and he knew better because he's a Cajun, being a Champagne from Golden Meadow.
Only problem is that Champagne isn't a cajun surname. The Champagne family came over directly from France.
You might have seen Isaac Toups on TV hawking a cookbook. The Toups surname is actually German (originally spelled Dubs but the French authorities did their thing), and they landed in the US in 1718-19 in Biloxi, MS.
And so on, and so on...
I think that some "cajuns" would be more willing to call themselves creole if they knew that in addition to the native americans, the other group that saved their asses when they came to the territory were the German creoles. Those people had it far, far harsher than the Acadian disapora ever did. When they got to the territory, they were not allowed to use beasts of burden for a full decade. This means that when they were dropped off and told to go farm rice (which none of them had ever done before), they had to till their fields and deliver their product to New Orleans from the River Parishes, up to 60 miles away without horses. By the time the Cajuns got here, there were plenty of horses for working the land and other livestock that you were legally allowed to eat.
Anyway, that's just one little speck of a much larger ethnic pie.
Coonass is a pejorative that Cajuns from Louisiana received during WWII when they were asked to be translators for the French resistance. The language in Louisiana diverged into cajun French and Kouri Vini (creole French) over the 200 years since Louisiana was first colonized, so modern French didn't line up and there was still a bit of a language barrier. The French called these people connasse, which basically means stupid because of this, but the cajuns took it as a kind-hearted nickname and brought it back home with them. Many cajuns were and still are upset that the term is ever still used to refer to them because it's a coarse word they feel belittles their culture, so if you're in the company of them and you don't know how they'll react, you might want to wait until they bring it up.
I love this site, this is the second thing about louisiana culture i've learned in the past month by asking a question like this. The other one was that Cajun is derived from Acadian.
And i got to share that "creole" has many meanings, including the stuff that forms on the inside of a BBQ itself.
You beat me to it. I definitely know Cajuns from Breaux Bridge with the last name Rees for example.
The registrar of births in Orleans Parish used to essentially blackmail several prominent families about how far back the black was in their birth certificates and lineage.
> Rather than fitting into clear-cut genetic clusters based on self-reported racial or ethnic labels, most participants’ genomes revealed different gradients of ancestry spanning continents, the team reports today.
I assume this refers to figure 7 of the study [1]. Figure 7C shows 63/124,341 self-identified Whites had predicted African ancestry from their genome, 45,206/45,761 Blacks, and 19/7,419 Asians.
Figure 7D shows predicted European ancestry, which was 120,127/124,341 for Whites, 110/45,761, and 39/7,419 for Asians. This seems like remarkably good correspondence to me?
> Race, ethnicity don’t match genetic ancestry
The title is missing "self-reported" at the start. Without that, the article isn't even self-consistent - "race is meaningless, it does not perfectly match genetic ancestry from historical geographical groups"? You haven't done away with race, you just renamed it to "African ancestry", "European ancestry", "Asian ancestry", etc.., and found that they have somewhat intermixed in the US. But it has been known since literally ancient Greece that races can intermix, and that their variation is geographically gradual, so the study hasn't discovered or disproven anything new.
It's amusing to contrast this with science's findings on non-human animals: there are 16 subspecies of brown bear, 38 subspecies of wolf, 46 subspecies of red fox, 9 subspecies of tiger, and 12 subspecies of house sparrow.
I seem to recall (but cannot find) a variant of the Weinreich witticism[1], which goes something like, "a nation is a language with an army and an origin story". (Meaning 'nation' in the sense of "a people" rather than "a state".[2])
> Geneticists have long established that race and ethnicity are sociocultural constructs and not good proxies to describe genetic differences in disease risks and traits among groups
I’m Asian and I grew up in the U.S. and for years I didn’t realize the stomach problems I was having were from drinking milk when most asians cannot drink milk, while most European Americans can: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/16jcecc/map_of_lac.... Is race a rough proxy? Sure. But it’s an easy proxy to administer which in the medical context gives it a certain value for making people aware of differences that may be salient.
It's very rough, though. I know many (East, South, Southeast) Asians who can drink milk just fine. But I -- white with European ancestry -- am lactose intolerant. Not a really useful rubric from my perspective, and I think if a doctor (re: your "medical context") were to say something like, "you're Asian so your stomach distress is probably caused by dairy" or "you're white so we should look deeper for some unusual cause of your stomach distress", I would look for a new doctor immediately.
Think about the probabilities. Lactose intolerance in the UK (as a proxy for British Americans) is under 10%, while in my home country it is over 85%. Meanwhile, drinking milk is universal among white American children (it’s served in schools). If a white kid has stomach problems, there’s a 90% chance it’s not lactose intolerance. But if an Asian kid presents with stomach problems, lactose intolerance is probably the single likeliest explanation. And it can be assessed by asking a couple of simple questions.
Our kids are half white so we were unsure if they’d be lactose intolerant. At the first sign of stomach problems in the youngest, we switched him to lactose free milk and the problem went away immediately. If we took him to a doctor we might’ve gone down a whole rabbit hole of dead ends. And if we weren’t aware of the issue and looking out for it, we may have not done anything and just let him deal with the discomfort. After all, kids get tummy aches for a million reasons.
Race is a social construct, but one loosely based on biological reality. As we unravel the mystery of human origins using ancient DNA, we are starting to get a better understanding of the how different groups came to be.
The idea what we are a homogenous species with no biologically important distinctions between groups - which became popular in the postwar period - is coming to end. But, we are also not returning to racial essentialism of the past. The new narrative of human differences will be far more complicated.
Related: A New DNA Test Can ID a Suspect's Race, But Police Won't Touch It
> Tony Clayton, a black man and a prosecutor who tried one of the Baton Rouge murder cases, concedes the benefits of the test: "Had it not been for Frudakis, we would still be looking for the white guy in the white pickup." Nevertheless, Clayton says he dislikes anything that implies we don't all "bleed the same blood." He adds, "If I could push a button and make this technology disappear, I would."
It's a social construct in the way that all categories are. The question is whether or not a category is useful. I'm saying there are genetic differences between groups, but our structuring of these groups is pretty flexible. There are genetic differences between "continental groups" but there is also a good amount of genetic diversity within sub-Saharan Africa populations because those people did not go through the genetic bottleneck that Eurasians did.
Our understanding of race have been historically contingent. Both the racial essentialism of the colonial period and the "we are all the same under the skin" anti-racism of post-WW2 were based more on political ideologies than reality.
If you tell me you have a test that can distinguish a Japanese person from a Finn, I'd say sure. If you told me you had one that could distinguish a French person from a German, I'd laugh.
> If you told me you had one that could distinguish a French person from a German, I'd laugh.
They are neighbors, so there is of course some overlap if you take some French village close to Germany and a German village close to France. But French native and Polish native, you can, which is why we can track genetic ancestry like this.
Northern Spaniard here; in the North you woudn't be able to distinguish an Asturian from a village from the average Irish (non-redhead, altough there are tons in Galicia and Asturias).
Europe isn't like that; you will find Atlantic/Mediterranean mixes everywhere, and with any gamma inbetween.
Unsurprising. Many, many people claim their ethnicity is X third this or that based on some half-checked thing some older relative told them a while back, and then base their claims on that, despite having all kinds of different possible ancestry combos.
I myself, being from the Balkans, don't even pretend to have a clue of what my genetic ancestry might be, and don't feel like finding out through some Find Your DNA ancestry (parasitic data harvesting) startup.
I know some people who would spend hours at the tavern explaining why "British/Irish (largely Welsh apparently)" is an almost incomprehensible statement :D
Part of the problem with self-reported ethnic or racial backgrounds is the explosion of cheap DNA tests from the likes of Ancestry and the now-bankrupt 23andme.
All of a sudden, people have the ability to determine if distant ancestors came from a different continent. Even if it's just 1 or 2% or even a trace amount, they're checking off boxes identifying themselves as multiracial.
For the 2020 census, it resulted in a 276% increase in the number of people self-identifying with more than one racial group. This is far more than could be explained by immigration or children born to parents from different backgrounds since 2010.
Its findings suggest adults 50 and up are most likely to self-identify as multiracial on surveys after receiving a report about the potential roots of their family tree based on a DNA analysis of their saliva. The study of more than 100,000 adults registered as potential bone marrow donors in the U.S. also found that DNA test takers were especially likely to identify with three or more racial groups. ...
"Native American was the one identity people really wanted to have and really wanted to prove," Roth says, adding that she has also found that some people stopped claiming Native American identity after the results of a test did not show any genetic ancestry.
You can imagine the problem when self-reported racial identities could really cloud the waters for determining a suitable bone marrow donor or other health application.
> Even if it's just 1 or 2% or even a trace amount, they're checking off boxes identifying themselves as multiracial.
This is not necessarily wrong though. In many cases I've seen where children of grandparents from a particular region showing up on those products as having low percentage heritage from those areas.
If your grandmother was born in China and is - for all intents and purposes - clearly Chinese, yet you show up with 3% Chinese DNA on these products, does that mean you can't identify as having Chinese in your family background? Who determines where this line is drawn?
It does seem a little silly. My great-great grandfather on one side was from germany, but i don't identify as german. The link is too weak and i have no cultural connection.
Why is that a problem? Self identification is a good thing. The real problem is people using the box you check for real world decisions like college admissions, jobs and scholarships.
Re: the bone marrow thing, no one is using self identification as a way of doing blood or organ transplants ("you say you are black so your marrow will probably work for him"). There are real medical tests to check for all this.
The problem comes when, well, did anyone ever verify Ancestry data?
My understanding from the sidelines was that the reported ethnicity of "oh you have a little french in you" had no meaningful basis, and was absurdly inaccurate. People treating it as anything more than fiction were making a mistake.
I found the following paper helpful in understanding the evolutionary pressures on a species (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abg5391). It's possible for two different genetic ancestries to arrive at the same phenotype independently where there environment is virtually identical. The example here, cichlid fish in lakes like Tanganyika and Victoria, evolved similar traits independently from different genetic lineages.
One could imagine (climate change not withstanding) that different geographic human populations would always tend to evolve to the same phenotype over time.
I'm multiracial, but I only ever choose White on forms. I don't really have anything to do with the other side of my family, and I don't relate to their culture. I have also lived in predominantly rural areas, and I didn't feel it benefitted me to claim my other half on forms that held any importance to me.
One of the problems now is if you use SNP statistics for Germans you have to take into account the N% of Turks in that population which changes over time, with DNA they really should be separate groups. The assumption that the genes will blend doesn't really pan out quickly enough for it to be ignored in the near term.
Race was a crude approximation and better techniques are available today. There is a push to use a wider variety of reference genomes which makes sense especially now that that computers are more powerful. There seems to be an assumption by others here that going from an unsophisticated crude approximation to a sophisticated one will somehow validate their other assumption that 'race is only skin deep'. I am not as optimistic.
Not very surprising that the official US races are BS. If I understand them correctly, officially someone from Portugal or France is supposed to be Caucasian, whereas someone from Spain is supposed to be Hispanic, which makes zero sense from any point of view.
To be fair, in the eyes of the US government, Hispanic is an ethnicity and not a race so you can be White and Hispanic. However, this distinction is lost among most and ethnicity and race are commonly used interchangeably.
To be fair, in the eyes of the US government, races are non-exclusive and you can be White, Black or African American, American Indian or Native Alaskan, and all the other racial categories simultaneously, as well as either having or not having Hispanic or Latino ethnicity.
The kicker is that if you select "American Indian or Native Alaskan" they start asking for tribal documentation. But you can check Black or White or Hispanic (Not White) or anything else all you want. Who will gainsay?
> The kicker is that if you select "American Indian or Native Alaskan" they start asking for tribal documentation.
No, for most purposes they never did (in fact, for many purposes where this is used, it is immediately separated from anything that would associate it with the submitter, so it would be hard for them to come back and ask you for anything), and the 2024 revisions to the definitions of the minimum categories removes the language about maintaining an ongoing affiliation ("who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment") from the definition of that category. [0]
No Wikipedia explicitly states that people from Spain are not included;
"The term commonly applies to Spaniards and Spanish-speaking populations and countries in Hispanic America and Hispanic Africa" I.e. not mainland Spain.
A friend in college from Spain had way too much fun pretending to be stereotypically hispanic and would insist that he had more a claim to it, being from Hispaniola, after all.
Yeah and it actually kinda makes sense--in Mexico, there are white Hispanics who descended from Spanish Jews and have not interbred much with the natives. They are tall and white. Then there are people with little or no European blood in them, and they are short and brown, generally speaking.
So it makes sense that you could be a Caucasian Hispanic.
What other ethnicities do you think there is an equally strong case to include in the list of minimum reporting categories (which is what the official scheme defines) on par with the one current ethnic and six current (with the recent addition of Middle East and North African) racial categories?
Chinese. Indian. Northern European (Nordic countries). English.
These all have just as much claim from a cultural-diaspora perspective eh? With a wide variety of phenotypes, if we go back a bit. Though Indian should probably be more finely divided if we’re being honest.
If you really wanted to piss people off, we could of course lump Indian, Singaporean, Australian, American, etc. under English Ethnicity.
The only reason Hispanic is one is because the conquistadors were really, really persistent, murderous, and shameless eh?
The case for including an ethnicity in the minimum reporting categories starts with, largely, that it is both a large community and that it significantly cuts across rather than existing largely within a category already defined as a racial category; "Ethnicities" which would fall almost entirely within the Asian, Asian, or White racial categories don't really have a strong case.
That said, there is probably a good argument for breaking out at least South Asian from Asian as a distinct top-level racial category, in the same way that MENA recently was. (But note that all of the top-level categories also have more detailed breakdowns available, and recent revisions have also moved to require the more detailed options to collected in a wider range of circumstances.)
> The only reason Hispanic is one is because the conquistadors were really, really persistent, murderous, and shameless eh?
Mostly, the opposite: that the successors to the conquistadors were less genocidal and more assimilationist than their British and British-descended North American counterparts.
American born Ethnic Chinese would like a word. As would a very large number of other groups.
The only reason these groups are included this way is because of lobbying power (for and against) and $$ and privileges related to being in or out of various categories.
From an ontological perspective, your argument is BS looking at the actual distributions and ground truth of these groups.
Realistically the US has different ethnicities just considering the differences between north and south, east, midwest and its spectrum, and then the west. For some the differences are so great the language spoken is no longer mutually intelligible.
The entire US "race" discourse is pretty stupid, to be fair, too bad it has infected much of the rest of the world because of the influence of the US media.
Every place in the world I've looked into has stupid "race" issues that make no sense to anyone outside. There is a human tribal tendancy to want to find someone "different and lesser" than us that we can then look down on. Exactly what those things are vary a lot from place to place (and over history even in one place) depending on various factors. However there always is some group that is seen as lesser for no good reason.
I think you need to replace the first "US" with "European imperialist" and "US media" at the end with "European imperialism", and adjust your timeline for the origin of the problem.
Parent was not talking about the origin though. Present day obsession with so called "race" is absolutely a US phenomenon. Classifying people as "caucasian" for instance always trips me up because it's something that people would call you a nazi for elsewhere.
I don't think paganel's claim is that all race discourse is derived from the US. Rather, that (1) the race discourse in the US is stupid and (2) that much race discourse elsewhere these days is derived from the US's and is therefore similarly stupid. (Other independent race discourse might also be stupid but in different ways.)
Race discourse in the US is not stupid. Nazis from Germany mass murdered people because of white supremacy before US critical race theory. It's important to talk about Nazis and white supremacy instead of ignoring the problem and hoping it will go away by itself.
Hispanic can be any race, from African Black to Nordic White.
Also, there can be huge differences between Hispanic themselves, an Argentinian, Mexican, Peruvian and Asturian might share common traits (Catholic Culture -not beliefs, culture, something affecting even Atheists, and I am not talking about superstitions- , food) but their customs and worldview can be totally alien between ourselves.
Just compare a Mexican Mariachi with an Asturian folk guy playing Celtic songs with bagpipes. Or the differences on ideology, state support, progressiveness... as much as a Brit and the average North American if not more.
> Not very surprising that the official US races are BS.
The modern concept of "race" in general is a BS construct that was invented to support and justify European imperialism, and which has long been recognized as having only the loosest relation to biological reality despite in its own terms being conceptualized as a biological reality of some importance.
OTOH, its also produced very real communities of differentiated experience, identity, and treatment, and it is largely that which the US government system of race (plus one ethnicity, in the minimum scheme) is designed to gather data related to.
> If I understand them correctly,
You do not.
> officially someone from Portugal or France is supposed to be Caucasian
"Caucasian" is not part of the official race/ethnicity scheme used in US federal government reporting. Someone who has prehistoric ancestors who were from the region which is now Portugal or France, and who identifies with the racial group into which people with that ancestry are categorized, would be White, possibly with another racial and/or ethnic category depending on what other ancestry they identified with.
> whereas someone from Spain is supposed to be Hispanic
With the same description as above, replacing "Portugal or France" with "Spain", the person would still be White.
A person who also identifies with Spanish or South, Central, or North American (south of the US border) national/cultural origin would be Hispanic or Latino by ethnicity (the only ethnic category in the scheme) as well as any racial category or categories they identify with.
Here's a news release on 2024 updates to the scheme, which involve combine the race/ethnicity questions into a single multiple answer allowed question (the race question was already multiple answers allowed, but the presence or absence of the one ethnic category was a separate question) as well as other updates to the scheme: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2024/...
Regardless of what specific term is used, it is used (and abused!) equivalently pretty much everywhere humans exist.
Is ‘caste’, race? Because it sure is used that way (or worse) in places that have it. And that’s been going on for longer than what we currently call European civilization.
Caste is synonymous with social class. There is no genetic or racial component to it, and no one is claiming as such (including the people who are discriminating on the basis of caste).
The study shows the reverse effect. Because of the emergence of the caste system and rigid classes people stopped intermixing across caste boundaries and now 2000 years later you can find certain genetic differentiators between them.
The reality is the same for "Race" and "Ethnicity", and all sorts of other words that humans have used to categorize "not my family".
French colonists to the new world freely intermarried (and had kids) with Native Americans and people brought over from Africa, and eventually those same groups were prevented from marrying under racist american laws.
So there's lots of french blood in black people in the southern united states, but they were eventually prevented from marrying white french people, even when they were literally part of the same large family tree! There are long lines and families of black people who literally descend from my ancestors that I wouldn't have been allowed to marry!
Which should clearly demonstrate that it was never about your genetic or biologic ancestry, as modern science knows.
Wikipedia claims America's "blacks can't marry whites" laws have no precedent.
Similarly, there was lots of inter-racial relations before some colonies banned it, and other colonies never banned it.
I remember a few years back, I was at a tech conference – one of those big ones in San Francisco, you know, where everyone is talking about the latest in AI and blockchain. Anyway, during a coffee break, I overheard this intense discussion about ancestry DNA kits. One guy, who looked very much like he could have stepped out of a Swedish travel brochure, was absolutely flabbergasted because his DNA results showed a significant percentage of Sub-Saharan African ancestry. He kept repeating, "But my family has been in Nebraska for generations!"
It's almost like our perceived identity is just a user interface, and the genetic code is the raw assembly language underneath. It makes me wonder, how much of our cultural narrative is shaped by these historical "coding errors" or, perhaps, deliberate obfuscations? And what happens when more and more people start running these genetic "debuggers" on their own personal history? Are we headed for a significant "reboot" of how we understand race and identity in society? Just food for thought.
It has always been like that. “My family has always been christian” except before that critical generation where the village shrine to the pagan gods were burned, the women raped, the men and children put to the sword by christians with a directive from a christian king to put all pagans to the sword, and your surviving pagan ancestor fleeing to the woods and eventually hiding all indications of their former faith out of survival.
People talk about the irony of Black people adopting the faith of their oppressors when really that is the case for most monotheists today when you start to consider the historical contexts of why their lineage adopted the monotheistic faith at the time.
the truth you speak there is a) not representative of all the conversion stories and b) is very representative of Christian conversion in the North East of Europe e.g. Saint Boniface and Donar's Oak.
Africans in the USA is certainly a special sociological case due to the largest importation of agricultural slaves in Western history. As almost everyone knows, not all people shipped in chains to the US South were illiterate. Literacy is a central feature of Christian practice. All else aside, literate people in chains adopting the literate religion does not sound too far fetched to me.
Northern or Southern? What about your ancestry prior to the existence of Italy?
And what does that mean, anyway? That some people in your family were born inside some arbitrary lines drawn on the ground? Who cares?
This sort of classification is meaningless.
(I, too, have Italian ancestry, but that's a small part of the overall picture, and has little to do with anything "real" about me, like my health or looks.)
I have Northern Italian friends who consider themselves very separate to the Southern Italians. The Lega Nord party was originally about Padania (Northern Italy) separatism.
And that's the intersection between race, genetic background, ethnicity, heritage, and culture.
You joke, but "assigned at birth" is probably apt. You may have discomfort or comfort in identifying with it. It may subtly change your perceptions and perceptions of you.
I don't know if you are being serious but usually privilege is proportional to wealth. White men are on average the richest demographic and thus have the greatest privilege.
Also critical race theory is compatible with these results. Critical race theory holds that race is as social construct, and can only be found in culture, not in genetics.
The Nazi garbage is when you try to put it in policy. For example those with genotypes that produce black skin predictably score lower on average on an IQ test (which means nothing beyond exactly that, nor does it mean the gene itself causes that), though we don't really know why, nor should that information be used to decide who to hire or what laws or policies should be in place.
I don't think the problem is the science, it's the non-scientific conclusions.
IQ is a real thing. It's just not the thing racists (and fetishistic nerds) understand it to be. It's a diagnostic tool that is useful (in a battery of diagnostics) in detecting problems in individual patients. It's not a reliable or meaningful "ranking" of intelligence across populations.
I know BS in psychology is not a high degree, but I did learn at least that... IQ is pretty much a bogus thing. At least when it comes to population IQ.
The theory of general intelligence is now 100 years old and has produced nothing of value. It holds no predictive power which is not better explained with better metrics (such as SES). The only thing which population IQ has done is attempting to push (or otherwise popularize) racist pseudo-science into the field of psychology. We have no deeper understanding, no new models, no new predictions, as a result of describing intelligence as a set of covarying factors which are measurable and distributes normally among the population.
Now, assessing an individual IQ is a different matter, but even then it holds no scientific value. Developmental psychologists may use IQ tests to detect disabilities, but there are other and better tests which do the same thing. IQ tests have the benefit of being extremely well standardized and available so many developmental psychologists use them, but that doesn’t tell you anything about the underlying theory, especially since you can detect the same disability with other tools which do not claim to measure a general intelligence.
What is more popular though (at least in the literature the last I checked) is to use only the most relevant subtests and never actually assess the full IQ. But even if IQ is useful to diagnose disabilities among individuals, that tells us nothing about how to describe intelligence, just like how breathalyzers might tell whether a driver is dangerous on the road, but cannot tell you anything about how alcohol impairs driving abilities in the population.
IQ is actually rather easy to debunk on its own merit, and it doesn’t even pass the sniff test. We can tell from experience that intelligence is not evenly distributed, even if you assume that intelligence can be measured as a set of covarying factors (of which there is no proof), our own experience shows that an IQ of 70 is much more mentally impaired than an IQ of 130 is mentally superior. The difference between a 70 and a 100 is much much much greater than the difference between 100 and a 130. This suggests that IQ (if such a thing exits) is negatively skewed, which contradicts one of the fundamental assumptions of psychometricians.
To summarize. The theory of general intelligence (i.e. IQ) is at best an old theory which never amounted to anything (a scientific dead end if you will; I have my suspicion string theory might be on the same track) and at worst it is a racist pseudo-science, used to push racist believes in the field of Psychology.
You think IQ is a real thing because people administer IQ tests to find disabilities. I beg to differ. I think that IQ is indeed a made up construct, and whether or not a test which claims to measure it is used or not has no bearing on whether or not that thing exists or not.
Note that your argument is a whole another argument from what your grandparent made (and what your parent was arguing against), which is why I went ahead and explained the pseudo-scientific nature of population IQ (which your grandparent is arguing against my in a nibling thread).
One should never dismiss the link between IQ and the eugenics movement. IQ is not a good theory, nor is it good science, we can (and should) do without it.
I'm obviously not dismissing the link between IQ and the eugenics movement.
I get why you want to write all these paragraphs; I feel the same way whenever IQ comes up on HN. But you picked the wrong person to write them to. I recommend you check the search bar to see why.
You seem to have a similar view as Eric Turkheimer. Believe in IQ without all the racist stuff (and obviously don‘t believe it is inherited). I want to go even further. I think I remember Kareem Carr had a nice debate with Turkheimer on Twitter, where Carr said:
> In my opinion, I think we would all be better off if we thought of IQ not as "intelligence" but as a measure of "standardized test taking ability".
In my opinion we need to sunset the term IQ. It has a troubled history and is just bad science. I also think the whole field of psychometrics has a lot to answer for. I’m not sure that field has a future (at least not as a science).
No, I'm a Gusev person (like, reading within-families papers grade Gusevian), and I'm deeply skeptical of psychometrics. I was radicalized by Shalizi. But lots of tools that don't produce coherent metrics or have valid axiomatic derivations are nonetheless useful in clinical settings, and by denying that you concede to your opponents --- the "race scientists" --- the idea that you're dismissive of science that serious practitioners still deem valid. Don't surrender that card so easily.
(btw: if you're not up with Sasha Gusev yet, run don't walk --- midwit race scientists are constantly bouncing off him and it drives people crazy. curtis yarvin threatened to have imprisoned. i love him so much.)
> IQ may not be real but IQ tests are and black expressing genotypes
"Black expressing genotypes" is the kind of phrase you'd expect someone to come up with if they wanted to mean "phenotype" but had a political motive for wanting something that sounded like "gene" to be in it.
> reliably score lower on them on average.
No, they don't. In the US there has been a significant—but inconsistent over time, racial IQ gap—but both the variability over time in that gap and all the studies that explore more details besides just broad racial contours show that that gap is at least largely and likely entirely due to socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental factors correlated with race, and not genetic.
You're mixing causation and correlation. Those with genotypes that produce black skin score lower on IQ tests on average but I never claimed the gene caused it and even disclaimed it above:
>> nor does it mean the gene itself causes that
So re:
>No, they don't.
Yes, they do, but you just jumped the gun straight to your strawman because you thought you were saying 'no' to something I didn't even say, maybe because of some political motive.
You didn't respond to anything the previous commenter said, but instead just repeated your point. You're not demonstrating any familiarity with the literature on this subject, unlike the person you're replying to.
Giving a nonsense test to people and recording a correlation between the nonsense score and genotype is science, even if the questions are bunk. Never once have I claimed that the actual test results mean anything in particular -- just that the measured score is lower on average in those with genes that express as black skin which is a scientific observation.
No, that is at best surveying. It is as scientific as asking people their favorite color or who they will vote for in the next election.
Science is working with a theory and gathering evidence for that theory. The theory behind IQ is called general intelligence and it has been completely exposed as nothing but racist pseudo-science. Removing the theory from the metrics just gives you a bunch of data, which may or may not describe a useful model of nature (but most likely it won’t).
It isn't unscientific to hypothesize that if you give people a certain set of bunk questions that based on some arbitrary scoring system that the differences will appear correlated to genotype, and then test it and find out genotype results in some weak correlation of the results. In my case, the bunk questions I am referring to are those in one or two tests commonly referred to as 'IQ tests.' It might not be scientific to decide it measures intelligence, but it is scientific to test and observe the difference.
What you're attempting to do here is debase your argument to semantics, by excluding what you don't like out of science, which is quite typical on HN when you have nada for an argument. I simply unequivocally reject this sort of 'heads I win, tails you lose' redefinition of science.
What is your hypotheses? What are you trying to predict? If you don’t have any hypothesis, if the only thing you are predicting is what you measure, you are by definition not doing science.
Science is more then mere observations. You can observe all the white swans you like, and if your only prediction is “all the swans I have seen are white” that isn’t science, it is just bird watching.
If you want to measure IQ and you observe differences in population, and you don’t give a theory as to why that is, and you don’t make any further predictins based on your observations, you are just surveying.
Now, somebody might create a model based on these observations, and make predictions based on that model, then-and-only then are you doing science. If Tycho Brave had only been observing the stars, never developing the Tychonic system, he would have just been an excellent astrologer, and as you know astrology is not a science. When Kepler later used that data to prove Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, then—and only then—would we consider his observation to be scientific.
In IQ testing, the only people making predictions with the data are psychometricians. They are using it to try to prove the existence of the g-factor. This effort is in vein, as this theory has long been debunked. It is modern day alchemy (or phrenology if you will). Nobody else is making any other predictions with IQ data. The only people who are using IQ data are using it to make predictions in a futile effort to prove their race pseudo-science. And they keep failing at it.
I would say racist but nothing wrong with it, as purely my subjective opinion.
I am only bothered by instances of racism where you violate the individual liberties of others. ex Nazis I don't really care the Germans hated Jews, I do care they put them in camps and executed them. Pre-emptively slapping them would violate their individual liberties, walking across the street infringes on no one, and indeed if I tried to control the right to people to freely travel based on thought-police it would be far more dystopic than any potential racism.
If people perceive someone as black, and treat them differently based on that perception, then yes, even if under the perceived skin color there is no difference.
https://archive.ph/jfmTn
The headline is a bit overstated (i.e., someone of African-American race is almost guaranteed to have at least some African ancestry, admixed with a varying amount of European).
That being said, there are important differences within the traditional "races", such as the finding in this study that people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities for obesity.
Overall I would love it if medical research papers moved away from "race" and started getting more into the fine-grained genetic details. Regardless of the politics involved, this will lead to better medical treatments for everyone.
>That being said, there are important differences within the traditional "races", such as the finding in this study that people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities for obesity.
"Traditional races" as you call them have changed over time and space, and we are only in this predicament because we lump different ethnicities together today. 150 years ago people could tell the difference between someone of West African or East African descent. And Southern Italians, Irish vs Western Europeans vs Germans... etc.
It's harder now because a) there has been a lot more mixing since then; and b) socioculturally we consolidated many of those ethnicities
It's harder now because now you live in America and are used to seeing all these people as Americans, and then as members of whatever racial consciousness we have in America.
Back in those respective countries, they can tell everyone apart. When my wife (Irish/English by ancestry) visited Hungary, they were immediately able to peg her as a foreigner, and frankly, so was I. They look nothing alike aside from skin color. This is true of basically any country in Europe, Africa, Asia, where people have tended to remain in the same location for thousands of years.
I think even most Americans would be able to tell apart African and European races if they really tried.
I am just travelling around northern Italy (typing this from a Milano-Torino train), and there is a visible difference between people in the Po valley and people from Como, merely 50 km apart.
People from the Po valley, such as the Milanese, are mostly "lighter Mediterranean" types. People around Como Lake are visibly more blond and pale. The ethnic substrate is different, the ancient populations in southern Alps were more Celtic and Germanic, and even though the contemporary folk no longer speaks anything but Italian, the difference to much more mixed places such as Milano is still visible.
Same in northern Spain. Galicia and Asturias have a lot of pale, blue-eyed people who would stand out in an Andalusian crowd. Galicia has Celtic ancestry (they even preserved bagpipes as a folk instrument), and Asturias was the last refuge of the Visigoths when they were crushed by the Arabs in the 8th century.
In my experience, south asians and middle easterners can easily tell I’m Bengali/Bangladeshi rather than (non-Bengali) Indian or Pakistani. Growing up in America I always assumed I looked Indian, but that’s because my reference point was european americans so I didn’t have sufficient data points in my mental model to work out aggregate tendencies.
There are plenty of Indians who in a literal sense could be classified as white (as in extremely fair pale skin), not just from Kashmir but even from South India. But if you’re Indian you can instantly pick them out as Indian, their entire facial structure etc is different from Europeans. In a sense, it is true, categories like “white”, “black” are social constructs that are meaningless at a genetic standpoint. But categories like, European, Nordic, Indian etc are not, if you put in some effort you can very easily distinguish between because of thousands of years of separate genetic evolution.
Yup! And many Americans would guess some north Indians are white because of convergent selection and shared ancestry. It's just that most prominent Indians tend to be south indian or Bengali in America. For example, most of the big name Indian ceos
Yes, it's not that hard to distinguish if it's something you're alert to and have enough input to start recognising the patterns.
I could definitely tell population-level differences between phenotypes in places like UK vs Poland when I visited (and yes I know Polish immigration to the UK is popular), and I can tell differences between the average population-level look in German-dominated descendant areas in the US vs Italian and Jewish and Irish areas like NYC. I think maybe people are expecting it to be easy to do individual-level predictions which is a lot more of a coin toss, but just telling the broad differences isn't super hard.
I’m calling BS on the “remained in the same place for thousands of years”
Take a course in European history, learn about all the wars, genocides, forced and unenforced migrations, plagues, etc. and even more mundane thinggs like intermarriage outside of immediate community ( very common amongst nobility ) and tell me again with a straight face you believe people have remained in the same place for thousands of years
They may have recognized your wife as “foreign” based on a number of things. The most obvious being language, But it could have also been dress, makeup, demeanor etc.
You’re right, but you’re being really rude about it.
It’s rare (but not impossible) for a people to have been in the same place on Earth for thousands of years. It’s more like hundreds.
> It’s rare (but not impossible) for a people to have been in the same place on Earth for thousands of years. It’s more like hundreds.
Is it really rare? That seems to be the norm except for America and Africa that got replaced or displaced by colonization. But in Europe and Asia most areas has been populated by steady groups. Rulers come and go, but the people living there stays the same.
I think its rare for everyone to have been there for a thousand years, but its not rare for a majority of the genes to have stayed in one place for a thosand years.
Thousands as in 2,000+ years? From my understanding that’s rare, at least by geography. I could be wrong.
But it’s not like we’re being super precise here. It’s fuzzy enough that lots of takes are correct, depending how you frame it. That’s kind of my point in my other reply. They weren’t wrong but they were being rude about it.
You did not read much about European history, did you?
Genetics strongly suggest Australia was settled by a single broad wave of humans that spread across the continent, finfing their niche, and staying in place whether that be east, west, north south, across desert, coast, rivers, forrest, etc.
This contrasts to earlier "literary" arguments in magazines such as Quadrant that native Australians moved about and fought for territories with invaders supplanting original dwellers long before Europeans arrived.
- https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2016-09-22/world-first-s...
is a national press article on some of that, my original references to the hosted papers on this seems to be offline / unavailable ATM (damn bitrot).
Yeah, I do not know why this is downvoted. This is exactly true about Europe.
Prior to industrial revolution, mass immigration was difficult, not only because of logistics but tribalism.
Hungarians mass migrated about a thousand years ago from the Ural Mountains, several thousands of kms from present Hungary. Germans mass migrated to Hungary hundreds of years ago, especially after Mongols and Turks killed most of the population there. Italians lost their appetite to coriander because the mass migration of Germanic people around and after the fall of Rome.
It was more difficult, but it happened many-many times.
Yea, and like you just proved, it was very difficult. Hence the choice to do it in large groups.
Tell it the Vandals, the Goths, the Huns, the Angles (I.e English), the Normans, the Danes, the Mongols, the Turks, etc.
If I sort out 20 Spaniards from different provinces and regions, you wouldn't guess if they were Spaniards, French, South Germans, North/South Italians or even Irish.
Yeah, and some also look Moorish, middle eastern, Sephardic, etc. too. Not a big surprise when you learn about the migrations that happened in Spain during the past 2000 years or so. We are a mixed bunch.
Not really no. Any student of linguistics is quickly dispelled of this notion
[flagged]
"Maintain the purest racial pedigree"? What does this even mean in actual terms? And there is no desire to accept what?
I don't know what that person meant but, like many in the region, Koreans have family registries (戶籍) that record their family lineage. At least among people I've known who have spoken about theirs, Korean family registry records tend to go back much further than the median east Asian country.
The names of the systems related to this registry are slightly different in Chinese, Japanese and Korean but you can see links to Wikipedia entries for each of them from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%88%B6%E7%B1%8D
> "Maintain the purest racial pedigree"? What does this even mean in actual terms?
It’s usually, as it is in this case, genetically meaningless. Culturally, it means someone picked an arbitrary point in the past, counted up the cohort of people within some group (and a metric for testing in-ness), and then deemed descendents of only that group to be pure, descendents of that group in part to be impure, and people who have no ancestors in that group to be outsiders.
In practice, recordkeeping past a handful of generations gets annoying, so most cultures set this line somewhere within 200 years ago. (The concept correlates with nativeness to varying degrees.)
Hmm..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koreans_in_Japan
Sheesh
It's used because, despite the fact that race doesn't really match with genetic ancestry, it still has impacts on people's lives and health.
For example, a study indicating that "black people in the US are X% more likely to have {some condition}" is useful, even if "black person in the US" doesn't tell much about an individual's ancestry. That's because health conditions are heavily influenced by environmental factors, and someone's race impacts the environmental factors they're exposed to.
This does get complicated, and requires digging deep into the data. Top-level statistics don't indicate root cause, which still needs to be researched. But top-level statistics can indicate that there's a problem that needs to be worked on, which is why medical studies tracking race are still useful.
It’s still correlated enough with ancestry that it can be a useful proxy for health issues related to ancestry—in addition to the environmental factors you pointed out.
If data would include both, one could check which of them is a signal signal and which is noise
The point is that race is a bad proxy for ethnicity. We should expect the environmental factors to also mirror ethnic clustering.
> people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities
similarly, when working on genomes a few years back, it used to be said that the two most genetically distinct humans alive right then would both be from Africa, which was memorable because one might guess Inuit vs Africa or something like that naively.
Specifically they would both be of Khoi-San ethnicity. The vast majority of humans have been through two population bottlenecks which drastically reduced the genetic diversity of the populations. Most African populations have been through at least one of these bottlenecks, and every population group outside of Africa has been through two. The Khoi-San, however, seem to have broken off prior to either of the bottlenecks and so they retained much higher genetic diversity.
> Specifically they would both be of Khoi-San ethnicity
The you could say that a distinctive trait of Khoi-San ethnicity is its genetic variance. Not to mention the fact that this variance, coming from before two population bottlenecks, must contain a large number of traits not seen in other human populations.
Although this makes you wonder- if they're the most genetically diverse, do they also look diverse? Are there light and dark skinned individuals, blonde and red and black hair, green/ blue/ brown eyes, short and tall, etc.?
The genetic diversity doesn't really translate to diversity in appearance. Much of the genome doesn't code for anything in particular (so called "junk DNA"), so you can have high genetic diversity due to variance in these parts of the genome, but relatively low diversity in the small subset of genes that code for more visible features.
Yes, so in other words "high genetic variance" doesn't really mean much. So all this talk about "variance been higher within ethnic group than between" is not very relevant. The phenotype that we can actually see has differences between ethnic groups that are bigger than the variance within them.
Last of course there's the idea that this variance must be restricted to the visible phenotype. Which sounds a bit like saying that the objects in a dark room must be all in the spot illuminated by the torch, and everywhere else the room is empty.
> so in other words "high genetic variance" doesn't really mean much
>> Although this makes you wonder- if they're the most genetically diverse, do they also look diverse? Are there light and dark skinned individuals, blonde and red and black hair, green/ blue/ brown eyes, short and tall, etc.?
Yes, they do look diverse.
The visual differences will be more readily apparent to people who are familiar with the high genetic variance population since this would allow more (maybe fine-grained) diverse looks. If the person looking does not have much experience distinguishing looks in a "high genetic variance" population then they probably end up generalizing as a default. Not being able to pick up on how diverse these looks are does not make them not there. Only that, the observer is familiar with the visual differences in their non-african population of less genetically diverse humans with some grouped environmental adaptions/mutations. Such as lighter pigment to better absorb vitamin D, and this type of thing being carried as the standard for "diverse looking" (blue/brown/light/dark).
After all, "SLC24A5 encodes a cation exchanger in melanosomes ... A derived, nonsynonymous mutation (rs1426654 ...) in SLC24A5 associated with light skin color has swept to near fixation in Europeans due to positive selection [...] rs1426654 is common in East African populations with high levels of Afroasiatic ancestry [...] Further, SLC24A5 likely experienced positive selection in East Africa after this admixture event. ... rs1426654 is at moderate frequency (5–12%) in the KhoeSan from Botswana, who have substantially lighter skin than equatorial Africans". and also "studies show that the ancestral alleles of many predicted functional pigmentation variants in Africa are associated with lighter skin, suggesting our human ancestors may have had light or moderately pigmented skin" and that dark skin may be a derived trait that also continued to evolve.[0]
But when you only have a hammer...
It's like being introduced to this workshop full of tools with a stacks of wood for any type of joinery desired. Yet, your experience is much more simplistic: hammer, nail (or bolt/screw, whatever), boards; repeat. Without much thought, the human brain has already created the groups: the trusty hammer with some metal fasteners to drive, and that foreign group of absolutely nothing like the trusty hammer and fasteners. But upon closer look there are hammers and nails and screws and all these other metal fasteners in the workshop -- except, instead of them being chosen to put the boards together, a variation of tools are creating a variation of joints in order to put the boards together. The finished product ends up being ~99.9% identical to your nailed product, but it's probably only those familiar with the experience of joinery that are most likely to appreciate an notice the visual diversity between joints, instead of simply noticing that one of the products has a couple spots of metal and the other doesn't.
[0] https://academic.oup.com/hmg/article/30/R1/R88/6089124
Is that specifically the case? This feels like an area where our language can fail to capture the nuance of what someone is trying to say and it gets misstated as something really similar but different.
To give an example, take 3 people named A, B, and C. A and B are both from Africa, while C is from elsewhere.
A and B have 9 genetic differences. B and C have 1 genetic difference. A and C have 10 genetic differences.
We can make the claim that the genetic difference between someone from Africa and from elsewhere (B to C, thus 1) is much smaller than the difference between two people in Africa (A to B, thus 9). 1 is smaller than 9, so this statement is true, but could easily be misunderstood to saying that the two most genetically distinct individuals are from Africa, which isn't the case because A to C is the most genetically distinct and C is from elsewhere.
The two statements seem nearly equivalent and the wrong one could accidentally be spread by someone who is really just trying to focus on expressing how much genetic diversity is within Africa.
Africa is the continent on which humanity originated from, and peoples in other continents migrated in waves. So the most insular communities in Africa have had more time to diverge than the most insular communities in other continents.
They are talking with respect to internal diversity I believe.
As an Anglophone you may notice a similar thing in language, and in English you can notice the large diversity in accent in native UK speakers.
Yes, this is specifically the case.
Non-Africans split from Africa relatively late in human genetic history. So A and B's divergence point(s) can readily be quite a bit earlier than C's. So, as you pointed out, C is likely more closely related one of A or B. Let's say B.
The big difference between B & C is that B is much more likely to incorporate genes from other early branches than C is. Therefore B is likely further away genetically from A than C is.
No, your split argument doesn't make the case you think it does. If groups A, B, and C were once groups A and B (and B split into B and C later), it's true that B and C are likely closely related, but it doesn't mean A and B are more different than A and C.
To put it another way, if we start with groups A and B, and then branch off B' from B, while B and B' are likely similar, that doesn't tell us anything about the relationship between A and B', and it doesn't imply that A and B' are closer than A and B.
The comment above is not making an argument, they are illustrating with an analogy.
There’s no logical argument needed to prove the genetic diversity in Africa, it is an observed fact.
To expand the second part of my argument: If C' is only descended from C, but B' is descended from B and D and F and Z, then B' has increased its genetic diversity more than C' has.
African is a useless label -- Africa alone has as much genetic diversity as the rest of the world combined.
Not just as much, but it literally includes most of the genetic diversity in the rest of the world.
What lead to this?
TL;DR: You may be interested in - https://www.nature.com/articles/nature15393
Bottlenecks, small population inbreeding, genetic drift, founder effect, etc
Basically what happened was, an alt-group of African humans decided earth was not safe anymore and its collapse was imminent -- they need to get to Mars. But since they don't have a way to get a spaceship in Africa, they will need to leave Africa and do whatever is necessary to build one, including throwing the people who helped them under the mammoth if need be.
At this point they have a pretty diverse gene pool and represent the humans well. They walk for a bit but came upon some steam vents and decided take a break and steam some food and enjoy the ocean view in the distance. The leader is not happy they stopped for food or rest. Later they are shooketh awake just before fire rains down on them. 3/4th of them make it safely to the ocean, and what luck the water is receding it'll be easier to cross, for the first 2/3rds at least. The tsunami gods demanded a toll and claimed the back 1/3. Not happy with the direction of leadership, half the group decided they could establish a better foundation away from these clowns and forked themselves.
Meanwhile, back in Africa and finally having got rid of that crazy mars dude and his cult followers, they decide to invite all the neighbors to an epoch swinging dance party to celebrate -- complete with the best plant-based party favours they could dig up/gather. Thus, ensuring the larger African population and their descendant would end up with an abundant supply of pokemon variants to swap between'em.
Though, you may want to take a look at the linked paper above for a more precise explanation. I may have paraphrased a bit.
Africa is where humans originally come from. There’s much more human history in Africa than the rest of the world.
Existence, not history. History requires writing.
That’s a narrow definition of “history”. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Earth.
Founder effect
Because of slavery, most African Americans don't know where they originated from so African American is the the most descriptive label you can get.
African-Americans with slave ancestry almost all come from West Africa I would think, as that was the shortest route for the European slave ships between Africa and the New World.
Many didn't go directly. For example Bristol, UK had around half a million slaves traded there.
Genetic differences across Africa shouldn't be surprising when you consider how huge Africa really is. Africa is about as big as the US, China, and Europe combined.
The effect is much larger than that. For most of the evolutionary history of humans, everyone* lived in Africa. Then only quite small groups left, taking with them only a small fraction of the genetic diversity of humans. Even today, the great majority of genetic diversity among living humans is inside Africa.
(* who mattered. There were earlier migrations of hominids, but the mark they left on our genetics is much smaller than the influence from later migrations.)
I was under the impression humans migrated from Africa so the rest of the world is all african-X, where the african- part is some subset of the original african population.
"One drop rule" makes everyone black in America
More importantly, humans have lived in Africa far longer than anywhere else in the world, so have had much more time to genetically diversify.
It's not just about size.
Humans originated in Africa, so populations there have had more time to evolve and become more diverse.
200,000 years of genetic drift versus 20,000 years makes a big difference.
Also population bottlenecks. Only a handful of populations left Africa, whereas many remained back.
It’s quick and free to identify someone’s race.
A genetic test takes several days and costs a few hundred dollars.
The patient wants the best treatment right now. If race carries useful information that helps the doctor treat the patient, then the doctor should have access to it.
Is it? What race is someone who's Arab? What about someone who could look black with one haircut but white with another? What about half-Arab, half-Euro?
This might sound like nitpicking, but most black people in the US have significant European ancestry and the admixture can vary wildly even for people with similar skin tones. Our naive view of "race" is not always backed by genetic reality.
> Is it?
Yes, you give them the list and say "What is your race/ethnicity, you may select at least one and as many as you wish." They answer. You are done.
> What race is someone who's Arab?
Whatever they answer (Middle East or Northern African [MENA], under the 2024 revision to the categories, intuitively seems most likely.)
> What about someone who could look black with one haircut but white with another?
Again, whatever they answer.
> What about half-Arab, half-Euro?
Again, whatever they answer. Though the most obvious guess of what they might answer, given the premise, would be one of White, MENA, or both.
The part to question is not, "is it quick and free to determine race" but "does race carry useful information that helps the doctor treat the patient", which is a much thornier question.
> Yes, you give them the list and say "What is your race/ethnicity, you may select at least one and as many as you wish." They answer. You are done.
While I broadly agree with you, there have been notable controversies around people who self-identified as having a particular ancestry [0] that didn't match how other people classified them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal
> If race carries useful information.
It's pretty low quality information. If you're taking a genetic test you want something that returns susceptibility to sickle cell amenia, cystic fibrosis, tay-sachs, et cetera. Race is a very low quality signal that is used when you lack something better, like a genetic test.
There are zero genetic markers for race. This is because race is purely a social construct.
>almost guaranteed to have at least some African ancestry
everyone from everywhere has african ancestry
Very true, but of course you're talking about a different era much further up the tree.
I don’t; unless you are referring to the discredited “out of Africa” theory
I don’t think the parts of that theory that have fallen out of fashion include humanity originating in Africa in general. I think it’s more like - maybe more of modern human comes from a branch or branches that changed after Africa exit than we thought previously.
Could you elaborate?
I assume you imply that humans evolved not in Africa. Where?
There’s plenty of evidence to the contrary, including Denisovan and Neanderthal that is not present in any African population; as well, something like up to 20% of West African genome has an as yet unknown source which is usually referred to as “archaic” or ghost DNA which is not found elsewhere in other populations.
Since the OOA theory doesn’t have any explanation for this evidence…
> There’s plenty of evidence to the contrary, including Denisovan and Neanderthal that is not present in any African population
OOA does have an explanation for Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA that isn't found in African populations, and that is that the cross-breeding between anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals and Denisovans occurred after modern humans left Africa.
> as well, something like up to 20% of West African genome has an as yet unknown source which is usually referred to as “archaic” or ghost DNA which is not found elsewhere in other populations.
"Archaic" DNA refers to DNA that appears to have originated with some human group other than modern humans and not be shared among modern human populations (the Denisovan and Neanderthal-origin genomes of Eurasian humans would be included here), but specific to some subpopulation. It is not the case that "20% of West African genome" is archaic, though there is a study in which some specific isolated West African subpopulations had archaic fractions that high, which is not something that OOA has no explanation for (the explanation is that those subgroups were isolated from the ones that participated in the various outbound migrations, and so their particular archaic genome is not shared with the groups that migrated out.)
There may be valid challenges to OOA, but those aren't it.
Homo sapiens didn't evolve from Denisovans and Neanderthals. All are branches of human and existed at the same time and interbred.* Homo sapiens survived while Neanderthals and Denisovans became extinct. The majority of the ancestry of living humans, Homo sapiens, was originally from Africa. Europeans have some Neanderthal ancestry (like 2%) due to interbreeding with Neanderthals, but the vast majority of European DNA is from Africa. Sub-Saharan Africans have less Neanderthal ancestry than Europeans and more Homo sapiens ancestry.
* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archai...
Neanderthals evolved in Europe and Europeans have more Neanderthal ancestry, so he might identify more with his Neanderthal ancestors.
I’ve used Perl a lot.
The notion of race and ethnicity in biology has been politicised by ideology. Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja clarifies this in point five of their piece [0] in the Skeptical Inquirer.
[0] https://skepticalinquirer.org/2023/06/the-ideological-subver...
I don't know what Jerry Coyne is talking about because genetic vs. environmental causation of behavioral and physical traits, broken down "racially" and otherwise, is a very active field of study.
He isn't saying there isn't such research being done, he's criticizing the attempts made by ideologues to discredit and discourage research along such premises.
Did you even bother to read the piece? He explicitly opens his fifth point with an example of The Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) weaponizing its reputation to do precisely just that. He documented another instance of this in Nature recently as well [0]. If you look at the top subthread here too, Nature Human Behaviour is doing this as well.
Given all that, it seems he's right that the problem with ideologues exists. The success or lack thereof of these ideologues is a separate matter. Your claim that such research still exists doesn't negate the problem he identified. If anything, I don't think we should be comfortable with any kind of intentional distortions to the biology of race and ethnicity. The bad (false) PR could come back and bite, affecting the research and how it might be received. Otherwise, I don't really see any real disagreement here.
[0] https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/05/11/nature-tackles-rac...
Yes, I read the piece, and I find it very difficult to reconcile with the volume and quality of research going on in this area. My feeling is that some people want there to be a kind of Heckler's Veto on "controversies" they're concerned about, so that they can rail against it. But there isn't.
The real issue for people concerned about the politicization of this issue is that the science isn't going their way right now.
Are you just going to outright dismiss the evidence I provided earlier for this politicization? As I explained before, your point is perfectly compatible with his. If you’re able to follow this kind of research, I’m frankly baffled by your inability to grasp the idea that acknowledging attempts to politicize this topic doesn’t imply that research in the area can’t proceed. The evidence for politicization is all over the editorials in your major research journals. If research in this area is booming as you’ve described (I don’t follow this research), all that means is that the politicization attempts have been unsuccessful.
As for your mind reading about the author’s intent, he is, to the best of my understanding, a standard-issue liberal. As such, I don't really get where you're coming from with this.
Yep, I am dismissing it. I evaluated it and found it unpersuasive.
Great, I didn't know we can dismiss evidence without justifying why. The author claims that there is politicization by ideologues, and the evidence he provided flats out suggests that. If anything, the disagreement seems to be the extent or areas where it's actually happening, which is the point I'm trying to make, which you have not engaged with. I'm frankly puzzled by all my (past) interactions with you. It seems we agree a lot in some way or another yet somehow, you always come across as bad faith to me. That's why when you eventually conceded to one of our past discussions, I decided it was no longer worth engaging. I thought Hacker News is a place for reasoned discussion, I guess I'm wrong to come back to it.
The technical term that we use for genetic subgroups beneath the species level is "subspecies".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subspecies
On the other hand:
"In biological taxonomy, race is an informal rank in the taxonomic hierarchy for which various definitions exist. Sometimes it is used to denote a level below that of subspecies, while at other times it is used as a synonym for subspecies."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(biology)
That doesn't seem like a useful definition. There is no case where subspecies could not also satisfy that definition. It's a distinction without a difference.
Much of it, at that level, is a mostly arbitrary construct, with blurry boundaries, left to subjective interpretation, made up long before the very new concept of genetic analysis was even a thing, where a more informed hierarchy could be made. Even then, the end bits of the hierarchy turn into a knotted mess a generation or two after you remove a river or mountain.
Categorization is a fundamental part of our intelligence, but not necessarily a reflection of reality.
Yeah. I think it's a synonym. I'd consider it a linguistic quirk, like how we use the term "carcass" for the body of a dead animal, but we use "corpse" for humans.
There are no human subspecies.
Among the identified human subgroups, some would probably be subspecies of the same species as modern humans (Denisovans, neanderthals, and a few others) if there hadn't been a tendency to assign extinct human groups (or even individual specimens) as distinct species on scant evidence.
Incorrect: somewhere Ali g the way in your life, someone deeply lied to you.
Race isn’t a subspecies. It’s an artificial social construct created by European elites in the beginning of the last millennium. Its purpose is to sow division. And to other groups of people to make it more palatable to commit crimes against the objectified folk.
Yeah, it's quite wild what European elites and scientists believed around late 1800's / early 1900's, and it wasn't limited just to anti-semitism or racism towards Africans, even if those groups had it much worse than most others.
For instance, in late 1800's Swedish scientists stole bunch of skulls from Finnish cemeteries, trying to prove that Finnish people are of different/lesser race than their Scandinavian neighbours. It took until 2024 for those skulls to be returned to Finland for reburial.
https://yle.fi/a/74-20110151
https://ki.se/en/about-ki/history-and-cultural-heritage/medi...
Ok, but there are clear morphological, genetical, etc. differences between e.g. a Han Chinese person and a Yoruba person. So putting aside politics, sociology and whatnot, purely on a scientific basis, what term do you use for these differences? When you say that "these people belong to different $INSERT_TERM_HERE", what's the correct term to substitute?
There are also morphological and genetic differences between, say, an average 'white' Swedish person and an average 'white' Spanish person. But our systems of racial classification tend to put them in the same group just because they both happen to have light skin. Naturally, if you take two groups of people who've long inhabited different parts of the world (with little to no historical interaction between the groups), then you'll find genetic differences. The point is that there is no biological motivation for the specific set of racial categories that the US and other societies have developed. An objective Martian biologist studying humans would not group us into 'white humans', 'black humans', ... etc.
>there is no biological motivation for the specific set of racial categories that the US and other societies have developed. An objective Martian biologist studying humans would not group us into 'white humans', 'black humans', ... etc.
Then why do biologists distinguish subspecies of other animals? E.g. look at the subspecies of Panthera tigris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger#Subspecies
> Then why do biologists distinguish subspecies of other animals?
They do, when there are things that seem to be subspecies, they don't do it just because there is an arbitrary requirement for every species to have subspecies. There's been dispute about whether various archaic human groups were separate species or subspecies, and if what we now call modern humans weren't the only ones still around, that might be a more acute debate and might be resolved in favor of subspecies, but the others aren't still around, so...
Some animals have subspecies. Humans don't. This is something that's widely misunderstood popularly but which is indubitable biologically. For example, many people are not aware that there is vastly more genetic variation between different breeds of dog than there is between any two groups of humans.
But regardless, the more important point is that whatever biologically-motivated categories humans might be grouped by would not correspond to 'races' as normally understood.
There are some (small) genetic populations whose genetics diverged so much, from geographic separation, that they have fertility problems [1].
What's left? Seems like something left over from the old science perspective that "humans are not animals", more than anything.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8600657/
That article doesn't say anything about small populations. The word 'subpopulation' appears in the abstract, but it's talking about subpopulations of sperm in ejaculate.
I have to say, this is a super weird paper to suddenly pull out of nowhere in order to make an argument against the modern biological consensus that there are no subspecies of humans. It says nothing about species or subspecies, or even different populations of humans. Did you just Google some keywords and go with the first result? I'm genuinely puzzled.
> However, in this article, I show that female-mediated sperm selection can also facilitate assortative fusion between genetically compatible gametes. Based on this evidence, I argue that reproductive failure does not necessarily exclusively represent a pathological condition, but can also result from sexual selection (‘mate choice’) at the level of the gametes.
I'm haphazardly suggesting that the above is the same as:
> "There are some (small) genetic populations whose genetics diverged so much, from geographic separation, that they have fertility problems [1].
We have genetic populations that are the result of geographic separation, and we even have genetic divergence that makes reproduction difficult/impossible.
Again, what's left? Why can't we categorize human genetic populations to the same level? Please be specific in what's missing?
> It says nothing about species or subspecies
Why would it? If the categorization of humans included subspecies, I couldn't have responded.
Those two things really aren't the same at all, so I don't see where you're going with this.
If it's an established biological fact that there are different subspecies of humans, then it should be possible to find a reference for that.
> Those two things really aren't the same at all
Precise equality isn't required for a conceptual discussion, especially one that's so ill defined/subjective as the concept of subspecies [1].
It's an established political fact that classifying humans, at any level, could never be presented. That's not a bad thing, but it's also a mostly arbitrary thing.
[1] https://bioone.org/journals/the-auk/volume-132/issue-2/AUK-1...
The original comment was talking about using a different term than race when doing real biology or medical science. You basically made their point by jumping in with an explanation of race.
What most people (non-academics) mean when they say "race" is "genetic population". If your goal is to have a conceptual exchange, rather than correcting terminology, you should go in with that perspective. Top level comment put "race" in quotes, understanding this.
Mendel didn't get much attention until 1900 or so. European racism was alive and well long before non-academics had any notion of a "genetic population", or indeed a genetic anything.
Which is completely unrelated to speaking with a someone outside of academia, today.
'African ancestry' is itself not a good concept.
Tribes from the Horn of Africa have more common with Swedes than they have with East African tribes.
How is this possible?
I'm not sure about that particular claim, but in general, skin color and phenotype are not perfectly correlated with ancestry. The immediate objection is the obvious one... "What do you mean? Why do Chinese people look Chinese, or Africans African, or Europeans European?".
What I mean is that, you can have two closely related populations with their own distinct phenotypes that are actually closely related.
An interesting example are the Negritos of SE Asia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrito
Here is what they look like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrito#/media/File:Taman_Nega...
Any person simply going off of looks, would obviously assume these people are African.
However, they are indeed most closely related to their sister population, the fair-skinned small-eyed (please no offense, we all know what I'm talking about) East Asians.
Their look is due to convergent selection that favors darker skin, wider noses, etc.
They are actually vastly genetically different than the Africans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrito#/media/File:PCA_of_Ora...
This is what I mean by phenotype and genotype are not perfectly correlated.
> Overall I would love it if medical research papers moved away from "race" and started getting more into the fine-grained genetic details. Regardless of the politics involved, this will lead to better medical treatments for everyone.
More precision is better, but we don't have rapid genetic tests that can distinguish West vs. East African ancestry on the spot, so race is the only proxy available when you're, say, treating a patient in the ER.
We have rapid genetic tests now. They are still expensive and not widely available but this is improving.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2025.02.003
On one hand, science tells us race as defined in western countries is not backed by actual biological differences. On the other hand, scientists use "race" in their research as if it is a legitimate means of categorizing people.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there are no differences between ethnicities, just that those differences are based on ancestry not race. People of a specific "race" don't share the same ancestry all the time, some times they have more in common with a different "race" than their own. Race as we know it today is a means of classifying humans that came about at a time when colonial expansion was booming. Classifying people based on their outward appearance was all too convenient. It's like someone learning how to code who found out there are thousands of programming languages and categorized them using terms like "curly brace language","lots of parenthesis language","indentation oriented language". It's lazy and childish. But once you learn more about the languages you should abandon the old ways of classifying things.
> scientists use "race" in their research as if it is a legitimate means of categorizing people
The journal Nature Human Behaviour published ethics guidelines in Aug 2022 which touch on this:
> Race and ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs. Humans do not have biological races, at least based on modern biological criteria for the identification of geographical races or subspecies.
> Studies that use the constructs of race and/or ethnicity should explicitly motivate their use. Race/ethnicity should not be used as proxies for other variables — for example, socioeconomic status or income.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2
There was a furore here in the discussion of it on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32595083
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We use breeds for other species, like cats, dogs, horses, etc. Humans could probably be categorized by breeds —breeds of course would not parallel ‘races’ but could still subdivide our species in new ways like we do with other animal species.
People typically don't like to be categorized on how they are "bred".
That won't work because people breed dogs for a purpose, that's why we have breeds. We don't breed to have better hunting humans for example. We practice eugenics on dogs, but we don't practice it at scale on ourselves.
Cats are interesting, tabby cats are most like humans, because they are very "mixed" but not with a purpose, just at random and by convenience. Orange cats have specific behavioral traits, but they weren't bred on purpose either.
The "on purpose" part is important because in those cases, we keep breeding them until specific traits are exaggerated to the max. With human reproduction, if having a blonde hair is considered ideal in a specific part of a country over several hundred years, then yeah, you'll see blondes mate more than non-blondes and you'll have lots of blondes, but you'll still see blondes marry non-blondes so their great-grandchildren could have red or black hair just the same. Now instead of hair consider behavioral traits. Those are even more complicated because us humans don't operate on a purely instinctual directive like animals. if a person has a genetic propensity for violence for example, that doesn't mean much because they can still decide to act against their "genetics" (otherwise, it doesn't make sense to punish them). Even dogs bred for their violent nature can be trained out of it to a large extent.
We probably could - but people don't like it, and some huge percentage of everyone would be various "mutts".
But the whole arena is fraught with the risk of disaster. It's apparently OK to admit that a group of people are likely to be better at X because they're on average taller, but going further gets very dangerous.
On the other hand, it could help people look beyond race and instead look at other traits like athleticism, math proficiency, wordsmithing, artistry, endurance, high altitude adaptation, seamanship, gift of the gab, etc…
Who has more athleticism, Aaron Rodgers or Ruth Chepngetich?
They’d be the same breed! Or at least American athletic vs Kenyan athletic breed, like we have different terriers or different shepherd dog breeds .
If you're suggesting categorising according to genetics, then I don't think the scientific consensus is with you. Pet breeds have clear biological divisions that humans do not. See e.g. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.23882
> Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations. Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters.
I’m saying we sidestep race altogether or at least treat it like cat coats and categorize people along other lines, some cultural some genetic.
> science tells us race as defined in western countries is not backed by actual biological differences.
That’s not true. AI can determine race from even from x-rays: https://www.nibib.nih.gov/news-events/newsroom/study-finds-a...
> In a recent study, published in Lancet Digital Health, NIH-funded researchers found that AI models could accurately predict self-reported race in several different types of radiographic images—a task not possible for human experts.
ethnicity is what you mean. unless you are claiming, the AI's model didn't have the concept of "race" in it's training data but was able to come up with a novel classification scheme that aligns with society's concept of race.
AI confirming human bias because it was trained on it doesn't mean much.
Ethnicity is what I mean.
In Spain and not to mention Latin America with even Japanese and German people in Brazil it would collapse.
I absolutely promise you it would fail massively in my case.
Why?
x-rays don't measure purely innate, genetic factors, they reflect things that are influenced by nurture as well as nature (and might, in principle, even have detectable difference based on differences in how technicians treat and react to the patient.)
> Race as we know it today is a means of classifying ...
That's it. It's a classification system, a taxonomy, a social construction, a coarse categorization (all these things). But it's a bad one that only loosely correlates with a small handful of phenotypes. There isn't zero correlation which is why I disagree, as a matter of precision, with people who say race doesn't exist. The quality of a given taxonomy exists on a spectrum and race is a pretty damn bad one when you consider how inaccurately it separates the phenotypes it claims to care about, and how many genotypes/phenotypes (the vast majority) it fails to separate at all beyond a coin flip.
The idea that "science tells us race as defined in western countries is not backed by actual biological differences" is a hotly debated subject. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-r...
One quote from that:
> We are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.
My summary would be that race is a heuristic. It's not perfect but it's a broadly accurate and often useful category. For example, whether someone has dark skin says quite a bit about their propensity for skin cancer. Whether someone is Jewish says a lot about their propensity for certain rare genetic diseases.
There is no “the science”.
There are bunch of unrelated people that do research with vastly different opinions and methods. (Thing in common: scientific method and review,publications)
When it comes down to layperson, research results are averaged out and de-nuanced by jounalists.
I have the impression that a lot if these talks about race being an entirely unscientific idea are related to the US dividing the entire world in four "races" as such: white, black, asian, and latino. Which is comically imprecise and arbitrary, and yet Americans seem to be obsessed with it.
it's not the US alone, this concept originated from the UK. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was used by the ruling class (think, east India company directors and such) to divide humans into sub-species with different levels of evolution. This would allow them the moral justification they needed to continue their conquest. There is a reason "all people are created equal" is the phrase used to abolish things like slavery. people focus on the "created" part, but the equal part is just as relevant.
This concept of race is designed so that one race can claim better evolution than the other, as a whole that is. People with specific ancestry might be better at specific things (provided they pursue those things to their potential), but associating that with an entire race was only useful at the time of this social constructs' creation because Europe needed to conquer the world and what do Europeans have in common the rest of the world doesn't have? Skin color. Which due to the latitude of Europe as a continent, people whose ancestors are from there have less melanin in their skin to account for lesser sunlight (You can see the same effect with north-east Asians). If you think about it, the western classification of "race" has more to do with geography than genealogy.
> the US dividing the entire world in four "races" as such: white, black, Asian, and latino.
The US government scheme has more than four top-level racial categories, and "Hispanic or Latino", in that system, is an ethnicity, not one of the races.
I recall a newspaper story about a Black writer who did not know his ancestry. He took a genetic test to find out he was more native American than black. He told his mother who responded "I'm too old to stop being a black woman."
I think that is an understandable feeling and I think that says a lot about the concept of race. Her statement doesn't make race any less real, but it does indicate what race IS.
Your comment made me remember this short reportage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9mtCLL8rI0
Culture is definitely the major part of 'race'.
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I don't think that's what they were arguing:
> Her statement doesn't make race any less real, but it does indicate what race IS.
Just look at Louisiana for a second.
There are hispanic creoles, native american creoles, german creoles, italian creoles, so forth and so on. Because to be a Louisiana creole isn't to rely on any racial marker at all. It just signifies that your ancestors lived here at a particular time.
So if someone says that they're Cajun, not creole, they're lying to you. ALL cajuns, without exception, are creole.
And most people who claim to be Cajun are either not Cajun at all or they've mistaken their surname for being Cajun. Like a guy who told me I was wrong about a food item and he knew better because he's a Cajun, being a Champagne from Golden Meadow.
Only problem is that Champagne isn't a cajun surname. The Champagne family came over directly from France.
You might have seen Isaac Toups on TV hawking a cookbook. The Toups surname is actually German (originally spelled Dubs but the French authorities did their thing), and they landed in the US in 1718-19 in Biloxi, MS.
And so on, and so on...
I think that some "cajuns" would be more willing to call themselves creole if they knew that in addition to the native americans, the other group that saved their asses when they came to the territory were the German creoles. Those people had it far, far harsher than the Acadian disapora ever did. When they got to the territory, they were not allowed to use beasts of burden for a full decade. This means that when they were dropped off and told to go farm rice (which none of them had ever done before), they had to till their fields and deliver their product to New Orleans from the River Parishes, up to 60 miles away without horses. By the time the Cajuns got here, there were plenty of horses for working the land and other livestock that you were legally allowed to eat.
Anyway, that's just one little speck of a much larger ethnic pie.
Where do coon-asses fit in this scheme?
Coonass is a pejorative that Cajuns from Louisiana received during WWII when they were asked to be translators for the French resistance. The language in Louisiana diverged into cajun French and Kouri Vini (creole French) over the 200 years since Louisiana was first colonized, so modern French didn't line up and there was still a bit of a language barrier. The French called these people connasse, which basically means stupid because of this, but the cajuns took it as a kind-hearted nickname and brought it back home with them. Many cajuns were and still are upset that the term is ever still used to refer to them because it's a coarse word they feel belittles their culture, so if you're in the company of them and you don't know how they'll react, you might want to wait until they bring it up.
I love this site, this is the second thing about louisiana culture i've learned in the past month by asking a question like this. The other one was that Cajun is derived from Acadian.
And i got to share that "creole" has many meanings, including the stuff that forms on the inside of a BBQ itself.
You beat me to it. I definitely know Cajuns from Breaux Bridge with the last name Rees for example.
The registrar of births in Orleans Parish used to essentially blackmail several prominent families about how far back the black was in their birth certificates and lineage.
> Rather than fitting into clear-cut genetic clusters based on self-reported racial or ethnic labels, most participants’ genomes revealed different gradients of ancestry spanning continents, the team reports today.
I assume this refers to figure 7 of the study [1]. Figure 7C shows 63/124,341 self-identified Whites had predicted African ancestry from their genome, 45,206/45,761 Blacks, and 19/7,419 Asians.
Figure 7D shows predicted European ancestry, which was 120,127/124,341 for Whites, 110/45,761, and 39/7,419 for Asians. This seems like remarkably good correspondence to me?
> Race, ethnicity don’t match genetic ancestry
The title is missing "self-reported" at the start. Without that, the article isn't even self-consistent - "race is meaningless, it does not perfectly match genetic ancestry from historical geographical groups"? You haven't done away with race, you just renamed it to "African ancestry", "European ancestry", "Asian ancestry", etc.., and found that they have somewhat intermixed in the US. But it has been known since literally ancient Greece that races can intermix, and that their variation is geographically gradual, so the study hasn't discovered or disproven anything new.
It's amusing to contrast this with science's findings on non-human animals: there are 16 subspecies of brown bear, 38 subspecies of wolf, 46 subspecies of red fox, 9 subspecies of tiger, and 12 subspecies of house sparrow.
[1] https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(25)00173-9
Correction: Line 3 was supposed to read "110/45,761 for Blacks"
I seem to recall (but cannot find) a variant of the Weinreich witticism[1], which goes something like, "a nation is a language with an army and an origin story". (Meaning 'nation' in the sense of "a people" rather than "a state".[2])
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with...
2. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/nation
> Geneticists have long established that race and ethnicity are sociocultural constructs and not good proxies to describe genetic differences in disease risks and traits among groups
I’m Asian and I grew up in the U.S. and for years I didn’t realize the stomach problems I was having were from drinking milk when most asians cannot drink milk, while most European Americans can: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/16jcecc/map_of_lac.... Is race a rough proxy? Sure. But it’s an easy proxy to administer which in the medical context gives it a certain value for making people aware of differences that may be salient.
It's very rough, though. I know many (East, South, Southeast) Asians who can drink milk just fine. But I -- white with European ancestry -- am lactose intolerant. Not a really useful rubric from my perspective, and I think if a doctor (re: your "medical context") were to say something like, "you're Asian so your stomach distress is probably caused by dairy" or "you're white so we should look deeper for some unusual cause of your stomach distress", I would look for a new doctor immediately.
Think about the probabilities. Lactose intolerance in the UK (as a proxy for British Americans) is under 10%, while in my home country it is over 85%. Meanwhile, drinking milk is universal among white American children (it’s served in schools). If a white kid has stomach problems, there’s a 90% chance it’s not lactose intolerance. But if an Asian kid presents with stomach problems, lactose intolerance is probably the single likeliest explanation. And it can be assessed by asking a couple of simple questions.
Our kids are half white so we were unsure if they’d be lactose intolerant. At the first sign of stomach problems in the youngest, we switched him to lactose free milk and the problem went away immediately. If we took him to a doctor we might’ve gone down a whole rabbit hole of dead ends. And if we weren’t aware of the issue and looking out for it, we may have not done anything and just let him deal with the discomfort. After all, kids get tummy aches for a million reasons.
I had the same problem as a child.
Race is a social construct, but one loosely based on biological reality. As we unravel the mystery of human origins using ancient DNA, we are starting to get a better understanding of the how different groups came to be.
The idea what we are a homogenous species with no biologically important distinctions between groups - which became popular in the postwar period - is coming to end. But, we are also not returning to racial essentialism of the past. The new narrative of human differences will be far more complicated.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-025-02117-1
Related: A New DNA Test Can ID a Suspect's Race, But Police Won't Touch It
> Tony Clayton, a black man and a prosecutor who tried one of the Baton Rouge murder cases, concedes the benefits of the test: "Had it not been for Frudakis, we would still be looking for the white guy in the white pickup." Nevertheless, Clayton says he dislikes anything that implies we don't all "bleed the same blood." He adds, "If I could push a button and make this technology disappear, I would."
https://www.wired.com/2007/12/ps-dna/
He could push a bunch of buttons and draft legislation to prevent it from being used in Louisiana.
I'm sure they'll use it whenever possible, regardless of his quote.
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It's a social construct in the way that all categories are. The question is whether or not a category is useful. I'm saying there are genetic differences between groups, but our structuring of these groups is pretty flexible. There are genetic differences between "continental groups" but there is also a good amount of genetic diversity within sub-Saharan Africa populations because those people did not go through the genetic bottleneck that Eurasians did.
Our understanding of race have been historically contingent. Both the racial essentialism of the colonial period and the "we are all the same under the skin" anti-racism of post-WW2 were based more on political ideologies than reality.
If you tell me you have a test that can distinguish a Japanese person from a Finn, I'd say sure. If you told me you had one that could distinguish a French person from a German, I'd laugh.
> If you told me you had one that could distinguish a French person from a German, I'd laugh.
They are neighbors, so there is of course some overlap if you take some French village close to Germany and a German village close to France. But French native and Polish native, you can, which is why we can track genetic ancestry like this.
People have been moving across Europe, and further, for thousands of years. There is nothing truly genetically unique to the populations.
There is an average genetic difference across the populations, but nothing that will function at the level of individuals.
Northern Spaniard here; in the North you woudn't be able to distinguish an Asturian from a village from the average Irish (non-redhead, altough there are tons in Galicia and Asturias).
Europe isn't like that; you will find Atlantic/Mediterranean mixes everywhere, and with any gamma inbetween.
Unsurprising. Many, many people claim their ethnicity is X third this or that based on some half-checked thing some older relative told them a while back, and then base their claims on that, despite having all kinds of different possible ancestry combos.
I myself, being from the Balkans, don't even pretend to have a clue of what my genetic ancestry might be, and don't feel like finding out through some Find Your DNA ancestry (parasitic data harvesting) startup.
My parents got DNA tested the other year. I was surprised to find out:
1) I'm mostly British/Irish (largely Welsh apparently)
2) I have no African or Asian heritage
idk I had always just called myself "American" and assumed I'd be a mix of a lot of things.
I know some people who would spend hours at the tavern explaining why "British/Irish (largely Welsh apparently)" is an almost incomprehensible statement :D
Part of the problem with self-reported ethnic or racial backgrounds is the explosion of cheap DNA tests from the likes of Ancestry and the now-bankrupt 23andme.
All of a sudden, people have the ability to determine if distant ancestors came from a different continent. Even if it's just 1 or 2% or even a trace amount, they're checking off boxes identifying themselves as multiracial.
For the 2020 census, it resulted in a 276% increase in the number of people self-identifying with more than one racial group. This is far more than could be explained by immigration or children born to parents from different backgrounds since 2010.
This NPR article (https://www.npr.org/2021/08/28/1030139666/2020-census-result...) explains the dynamic:
Its findings suggest adults 50 and up are most likely to self-identify as multiracial on surveys after receiving a report about the potential roots of their family tree based on a DNA analysis of their saliva. The study of more than 100,000 adults registered as potential bone marrow donors in the U.S. also found that DNA test takers were especially likely to identify with three or more racial groups. ...
"Native American was the one identity people really wanted to have and really wanted to prove," Roth says, adding that she has also found that some people stopped claiming Native American identity after the results of a test did not show any genetic ancestry.
You can imagine the problem when self-reported racial identities could really cloud the waters for determining a suitable bone marrow donor or other health application.
> Even if it's just 1 or 2% or even a trace amount, they're checking off boxes identifying themselves as multiracial.
This is not necessarily wrong though. In many cases I've seen where children of grandparents from a particular region showing up on those products as having low percentage heritage from those areas.
If your grandmother was born in China and is - for all intents and purposes - clearly Chinese, yet you show up with 3% Chinese DNA on these products, does that mean you can't identify as having Chinese in your family background? Who determines where this line is drawn?
It does seem a little silly. My great-great grandfather on one side was from germany, but i don't identify as german. The link is too weak and i have no cultural connection.
Why is that a problem? Self identification is a good thing. The real problem is people using the box you check for real world decisions like college admissions, jobs and scholarships.
Re: the bone marrow thing, no one is using self identification as a way of doing blood or organ transplants ("you say you are black so your marrow will probably work for him"). There are real medical tests to check for all this.
The problem comes when, well, did anyone ever verify Ancestry data?
My understanding from the sidelines was that the reported ethnicity of "oh you have a little french in you" had no meaningful basis, and was absurdly inaccurate. People treating it as anything more than fiction were making a mistake.
I mean, the real problem was that race was always a social construct but racists wanted to to be a biological one instead
I found the following paper helpful in understanding the evolutionary pressures on a species (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abg5391). It's possible for two different genetic ancestries to arrive at the same phenotype independently where there environment is virtually identical. The example here, cichlid fish in lakes like Tanganyika and Victoria, evolved similar traits independently from different genetic lineages.
One could imagine (climate change not withstanding) that different geographic human populations would always tend to evolve to the same phenotype over time.
I'm multiracial, but I only ever choose White on forms. I don't really have anything to do with the other side of my family, and I don't relate to their culture. I have also lived in predominantly rural areas, and I didn't feel it benefitted me to claim my other half on forms that held any importance to me.
There is urgent need for education on these types of topics in the United States.
It's there in every university. It's in every sociology and anthropology field at least.
But in general, it gets dismissed as "Woke."
Those are the ones pushing for this though, its the woke that wants to collect all these self reported data.
They say its nonsense but then go and make admittance decisions based on it.
This is literally Critical Race Theory
This sounds like the same split that has happened with sex and gender in recent years.
This is genuinely in the question. The US census doesn't ask about your ancestry, they ask about your race.
You couldn't accurately fill out your ancestry on the form, even if you wanted to.
One of the problems now is if you use SNP statistics for Germans you have to take into account the N% of Turks in that population which changes over time, with DNA they really should be separate groups. The assumption that the genes will blend doesn't really pan out quickly enough for it to be ignored in the near term.
Race was a crude approximation and better techniques are available today. There is a push to use a wider variety of reference genomes which makes sense especially now that that computers are more powerful. There seems to be an assumption by others here that going from an unsophisticated crude approximation to a sophisticated one will somehow validate their other assumption that 'race is only skin deep'. I am not as optimistic.
Not very surprising that the official US races are BS. If I understand them correctly, officially someone from Portugal or France is supposed to be Caucasian, whereas someone from Spain is supposed to be Hispanic, which makes zero sense from any point of view.
To be fair, in the eyes of the US government, Hispanic is an ethnicity and not a race so you can be White and Hispanic. However, this distinction is lost among most and ethnicity and race are commonly used interchangeably.
To be fair, in the eyes of the US government, races are non-exclusive and you can be White, Black or African American, American Indian or Native Alaskan, and all the other racial categories simultaneously, as well as either having or not having Hispanic or Latino ethnicity.
The kicker is that if you select "American Indian or Native Alaskan" they start asking for tribal documentation. But you can check Black or White or Hispanic (Not White) or anything else all you want. Who will gainsay?
> The kicker is that if you select "American Indian or Native Alaskan" they start asking for tribal documentation.
No, for most purposes they never did (in fact, for many purposes where this is used, it is immediately separated from anything that would associate it with the submitter, so it would be hard for them to come back and ask you for anything), and the 2024 revisions to the definitions of the minimum categories removes the language about maintaining an ongoing affiliation ("who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment") from the definition of that category. [0]
[0] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/03/29/2024-06...
The ACA definitely follows up, because tribal membership changes how the health benefits are billed to the government.
Actually, ironically I don't think that someone from Spain is intended to be considered Hispanic. Which also doesn't make sense, I know.
Technically, they're included.
In practical usage, they'd far more likely be called Spanish or European in the US context.
Technically according to what? These labels were based on implicit understanding that shifted over time and place.
Technically according to Wikipedia, at the very least.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic
No Wikipedia explicitly states that people from Spain are not included;
"The term commonly applies to Spaniards and Spanish-speaking populations and countries in Hispanic America and Hispanic Africa" I.e. not mainland Spain.
“The term commonly applies to Spaniards AND…”
This is not a complex sentence.
A friend in college from Spain had way too much fun pretending to be stereotypically hispanic and would insist that he had more a claim to it, being from Hispaniola, after all.
To be pedantic, if he was from Spain, he would be from Hispania[1] not Hispaniola[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispania
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispaniola
FWIW "hispanic" isn't a race on those forms, it's an ethnicity. You can choose any race with it.
Yeah and it actually kinda makes sense--in Mexico, there are white Hispanics who descended from Spanish Jews and have not interbred much with the natives. They are tall and white. Then there are people with little or no European blood in them, and they are short and brown, generally speaking.
So it makes sense that you could be a Caucasian Hispanic.
The really weird thing is why a bunch of other things aren’t also ethnicities.
What other ethnicities do you think there is an equally strong case to include in the list of minimum reporting categories (which is what the official scheme defines) on par with the one current ethnic and six current (with the recent addition of Middle East and North African) racial categories?
Chinese. Indian. Northern European (Nordic countries). English.
These all have just as much claim from a cultural-diaspora perspective eh? With a wide variety of phenotypes, if we go back a bit. Though Indian should probably be more finely divided if we’re being honest.
If you really wanted to piss people off, we could of course lump Indian, Singaporean, Australian, American, etc. under English Ethnicity.
The only reason Hispanic is one is because the conquistadors were really, really persistent, murderous, and shameless eh?
The case for including an ethnicity in the minimum reporting categories starts with, largely, that it is both a large community and that it significantly cuts across rather than existing largely within a category already defined as a racial category; "Ethnicities" which would fall almost entirely within the Asian, Asian, or White racial categories don't really have a strong case.
That said, there is probably a good argument for breaking out at least South Asian from Asian as a distinct top-level racial category, in the same way that MENA recently was. (But note that all of the top-level categories also have more detailed breakdowns available, and recent revisions have also moved to require the more detailed options to collected in a wider range of circumstances.)
> The only reason Hispanic is one is because the conquistadors were really, really persistent, murderous, and shameless eh?
Mostly, the opposite: that the successors to the conquistadors were less genocidal and more assimilationist than their British and British-descended North American counterparts.
American born Ethnic Chinese would like a word. As would a very large number of other groups.
The only reason these groups are included this way is because of lobbying power (for and against) and $$ and privileges related to being in or out of various categories.
From an ontological perspective, your argument is BS looking at the actual distributions and ground truth of these groups.
> American born Ethnic Chinese would like a word.
What racial groups in the minimum reporting scheme does this ethnic group cut across, and in what rough proportions?
Realistically the US has different ethnicities just considering the differences between north and south, east, midwest and its spectrum, and then the west. For some the differences are so great the language spoken is no longer mutually intelligible.
The entire US "race" discourse is pretty stupid, to be fair, too bad it has infected much of the rest of the world because of the influence of the US media.
Every place in the world I've looked into has stupid "race" issues that make no sense to anyone outside. There is a human tribal tendancy to want to find someone "different and lesser" than us that we can then look down on. Exactly what those things are vary a lot from place to place (and over history even in one place) depending on various factors. However there always is some group that is seen as lesser for no good reason.
I think you need to replace the first "US" with "European imperialist" and "US media" at the end with "European imperialism", and adjust your timeline for the origin of the problem.
Parent was not talking about the origin though. Present day obsession with so called "race" is absolutely a US phenomenon. Classifying people as "caucasian" for instance always trips me up because it's something that people would call you a nazi for elsewhere.
You live under a rock if you think "race discourse" originated (presumably recently) from US media or the US at all.
I don't think paganel's claim is that all race discourse is derived from the US. Rather, that (1) the race discourse in the US is stupid and (2) that much race discourse elsewhere these days is derived from the US's and is therefore similarly stupid. (Other independent race discourse might also be stupid but in different ways.)
Yes that is how it reads now that they’ve edited to say “the US race discourse.”
Race discourse in the US is not stupid. Nazis from Germany mass murdered people because of white supremacy before US critical race theory. It's important to talk about Nazis and white supremacy instead of ignoring the problem and hoping it will go away by itself.
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actual detail about this evolving topic here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic
> whereas someone from Spain is supposed to be Hispanic, which makes zero sense from any point of view.
Hispanics are Caucasian in the original classification:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race
Hispanic can be any race, from African Black to Nordic White. Also, there can be huge differences between Hispanic themselves, an Argentinian, Mexican, Peruvian and Asturian might share common traits (Catholic Culture -not beliefs, culture, something affecting even Atheists, and I am not talking about superstitions- , food) but their customs and worldview can be totally alien between ourselves.
Just compare a Mexican Mariachi with an Asturian folk guy playing Celtic songs with bagpipes. Or the differences on ideology, state support, progressiveness... as much as a Brit and the average North American if not more.
> Not very surprising that the official US races are BS.
The modern concept of "race" in general is a BS construct that was invented to support and justify European imperialism, and which has long been recognized as having only the loosest relation to biological reality despite in its own terms being conceptualized as a biological reality of some importance.
OTOH, its also produced very real communities of differentiated experience, identity, and treatment, and it is largely that which the US government system of race (plus one ethnicity, in the minimum scheme) is designed to gather data related to.
> If I understand them correctly,
You do not.
> officially someone from Portugal or France is supposed to be Caucasian
"Caucasian" is not part of the official race/ethnicity scheme used in US federal government reporting. Someone who has prehistoric ancestors who were from the region which is now Portugal or France, and who identifies with the racial group into which people with that ancestry are categorized, would be White, possibly with another racial and/or ethnic category depending on what other ancestry they identified with.
> whereas someone from Spain is supposed to be Hispanic
With the same description as above, replacing "Portugal or France" with "Spain", the person would still be White.
A person who also identifies with Spanish or South, Central, or North American (south of the US border) national/cultural origin would be Hispanic or Latino by ethnicity (the only ethnic category in the scheme) as well as any racial category or categories they identify with.
Here's a news release on 2024 updates to the scheme, which involve combine the race/ethnicity questions into a single multiple answer allowed question (the race question was already multiple answers allowed, but the presence or absence of the one ethnic category was a separate question) as well as other updates to the scheme: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2024/...
Regardless of what specific term is used, it is used (and abused!) equivalently pretty much everywhere humans exist.
Is ‘caste’, race? Because it sure is used that way (or worse) in places that have it. And that’s been going on for longer than what we currently call European civilization.
Caste is synonymous with social class. There is no genetic or racial component to it, and no one is claiming as such (including the people who are discriminating on the basis of caste).
There absolutely are genetic and racial components to how it’s used. [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC311057/]. Caste is hereditary. Marriages between castes are typically heavily managed/controlled by elders within the castes/families involved [https://hms.harvard.edu/news/what-dna-testing-reveals-about-...].
Regional customs vary, but southern indian cousin marriage traditions in particular are heavily caste oriented.
The only thing not ‘race’ about it, is the word.
Spain and it’s colonies also had a ‘casta’ system with simpler and more explicit rules.
The study shows the reverse effect. Because of the emergence of the caste system and rigid classes people stopped intermixing across caste boundaries and now 2000 years later you can find certain genetic differentiators between them.
The reality is the same for "Race" and "Ethnicity", and all sorts of other words that humans have used to categorize "not my family".
French colonists to the new world freely intermarried (and had kids) with Native Americans and people brought over from Africa, and eventually those same groups were prevented from marrying under racist american laws.
So there's lots of french blood in black people in the southern united states, but they were eventually prevented from marrying white french people, even when they were literally part of the same large family tree! There are long lines and families of black people who literally descend from my ancestors that I wouldn't have been allowed to marry!
Which should clearly demonstrate that it was never about your genetic or biologic ancestry, as modern science knows.
Wikipedia claims America's "blacks can't marry whites" laws have no precedent.
Similarly, there was lots of inter-racial relations before some colonies banned it, and other colonies never banned it.
You really might want to re-read what I wrote, and what you wrote again. Because you’re agreeing with me.
I remember a few years back, I was at a tech conference – one of those big ones in San Francisco, you know, where everyone is talking about the latest in AI and blockchain. Anyway, during a coffee break, I overheard this intense discussion about ancestry DNA kits. One guy, who looked very much like he could have stepped out of a Swedish travel brochure, was absolutely flabbergasted because his DNA results showed a significant percentage of Sub-Saharan African ancestry. He kept repeating, "But my family has been in Nebraska for generations!"
It's almost like our perceived identity is just a user interface, and the genetic code is the raw assembly language underneath. It makes me wonder, how much of our cultural narrative is shaped by these historical "coding errors" or, perhaps, deliberate obfuscations? And what happens when more and more people start running these genetic "debuggers" on their own personal history? Are we headed for a significant "reboot" of how we understand race and identity in society? Just food for thought.
It has always been like that. “My family has always been christian” except before that critical generation where the village shrine to the pagan gods were burned, the women raped, the men and children put to the sword by christians with a directive from a christian king to put all pagans to the sword, and your surviving pagan ancestor fleeing to the woods and eventually hiding all indications of their former faith out of survival.
People talk about the irony of Black people adopting the faith of their oppressors when really that is the case for most monotheists today when you start to consider the historical contexts of why their lineage adopted the monotheistic faith at the time.
the truth you speak there is a) not representative of all the conversion stories and b) is very representative of Christian conversion in the North East of Europe e.g. Saint Boniface and Donar's Oak.
Africans in the USA is certainly a special sociological case due to the largest importation of agricultural slaves in Western history. As almost everyone knows, not all people shipped in chains to the US South were illiterate. Literacy is a central feature of Christian practice. All else aside, literate people in chains adopting the literate religion does not sound too far fetched to me.
I was assigned Italian at birth. There is no changing that, legally, illegally, by 23andMe, or anyone else.
Northern or Southern? What about your ancestry prior to the existence of Italy?
And what does that mean, anyway? That some people in your family were born inside some arbitrary lines drawn on the ground? Who cares?
This sort of classification is meaningless.
(I, too, have Italian ancestry, but that's a small part of the overall picture, and has little to do with anything "real" about me, like my health or looks.)
Is Italian a race now? If you can be assigned Italian I'm not sure what's stopping you from being reassigned to something else.
It hasn't been very long since "Irish" was considered by many to be a separate race.
We've only recently stopped thinking of "Italian" as being separate. For good and bad.
I have Northern Italian friends who consider themselves very separate to the Southern Italians. The Lega Nord party was originally about Padania (Northern Italy) separatism.
Almost any group identified from the outside has internal divisions that they insist are incredibly important.
What did the Elves say? “To sheep other sheep no doubt appear different. Or to shepherds. But Mortals have not been our study.”
People can get really prickly about it, for example lumping all people south of the US border as "Hispanic" or calling everyone in the UK "English".
Who is the epistemic authority on someone's culture or ethnicity?
And that's the intersection between race, genetic background, ethnicity, heritage, and culture.
You joke, but "assigned at birth" is probably apt. You may have discomfort or comfort in identifying with it. It may subtly change your perceptions and perceptions of you.
race science is bogus, news at 11
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Please don't post flamebait to HN. We've had to ask you this before.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Nobody wins the oppression olympics.
Bank account balance seems to be popular now.
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I don't know if you are being serious but usually privilege is proportional to wealth. White men are on average the richest demographic and thus have the greatest privilege.
Also critical race theory is compatible with these results. Critical race theory holds that race is as social construct, and can only be found in culture, not in genetics.
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What? No!
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The Nazi garbage is when you try to put it in policy. For example those with genotypes that produce black skin predictably score lower on average on an IQ test (which means nothing beyond exactly that, nor does it mean the gene itself causes that), though we don't really know why, nor should that information be used to decide who to hire or what laws or policies should be in place.
I don't think the problem is the science, it's the non-scientific conclusions.
> For example those with genotypes that produce black skin predictably score lower on average on an IQ test
This is also nazi garbage. IQ isn't a real thing.
IQ is a real thing. It's just not the thing racists (and fetishistic nerds) understand it to be. It's a diagnostic tool that is useful (in a battery of diagnostics) in detecting problems in individual patients. It's not a reliable or meaningful "ranking" of intelligence across populations.
I know BS in psychology is not a high degree, but I did learn at least that... IQ is pretty much a bogus thing. At least when it comes to population IQ.
The theory of general intelligence is now 100 years old and has produced nothing of value. It holds no predictive power which is not better explained with better metrics (such as SES). The only thing which population IQ has done is attempting to push (or otherwise popularize) racist pseudo-science into the field of psychology. We have no deeper understanding, no new models, no new predictions, as a result of describing intelligence as a set of covarying factors which are measurable and distributes normally among the population.
Now, assessing an individual IQ is a different matter, but even then it holds no scientific value. Developmental psychologists may use IQ tests to detect disabilities, but there are other and better tests which do the same thing. IQ tests have the benefit of being extremely well standardized and available so many developmental psychologists use them, but that doesn’t tell you anything about the underlying theory, especially since you can detect the same disability with other tools which do not claim to measure a general intelligence.
What is more popular though (at least in the literature the last I checked) is to use only the most relevant subtests and never actually assess the full IQ. But even if IQ is useful to diagnose disabilities among individuals, that tells us nothing about how to describe intelligence, just like how breathalyzers might tell whether a driver is dangerous on the road, but cannot tell you anything about how alcohol impairs driving abilities in the population.
IQ is actually rather easy to debunk on its own merit, and it doesn’t even pass the sniff test. We can tell from experience that intelligence is not evenly distributed, even if you assume that intelligence can be measured as a set of covarying factors (of which there is no proof), our own experience shows that an IQ of 70 is much more mentally impaired than an IQ of 130 is mentally superior. The difference between a 70 and a 100 is much much much greater than the difference between 100 and a 130. This suggests that IQ (if such a thing exits) is negatively skewed, which contradicts one of the fundamental assumptions of psychometricians.
To summarize. The theory of general intelligence (i.e. IQ) is at best an old theory which never amounted to anything (a scientific dead end if you will; I have my suspicion string theory might be on the same track) and at worst it is a racist pseudo-science, used to push racist believes in the field of Psychology.
Yes, this is indeed a (much) longer way to say what I just said. ;)
You think IQ is a real thing because people administer IQ tests to find disabilities. I beg to differ. I think that IQ is indeed a made up construct, and whether or not a test which claims to measure it is used or not has no bearing on whether or not that thing exists or not.
Note that your argument is a whole another argument from what your grandparent made (and what your parent was arguing against), which is why I went ahead and explained the pseudo-scientific nature of population IQ (which your grandparent is arguing against my in a nibling thread).
One should never dismiss the link between IQ and the eugenics movement. IQ is not a good theory, nor is it good science, we can (and should) do without it.
I'm obviously not dismissing the link between IQ and the eugenics movement.
I get why you want to write all these paragraphs; I feel the same way whenever IQ comes up on HN. But you picked the wrong person to write them to. I recommend you check the search bar to see why.
I see: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
You seem to have a similar view as Eric Turkheimer. Believe in IQ without all the racist stuff (and obviously don‘t believe it is inherited). I want to go even further. I think I remember Kareem Carr had a nice debate with Turkheimer on Twitter, where Carr said:
> In my opinion, I think we would all be better off if we thought of IQ not as "intelligence" but as a measure of "standardized test taking ability".
https://en.rattibha.com/thread/1653076849717825536
In my opinion we need to sunset the term IQ. It has a troubled history and is just bad science. I also think the whole field of psychometrics has a lot to answer for. I’m not sure that field has a future (at least not as a science).
No, I'm a Gusev person (like, reading within-families papers grade Gusevian), and I'm deeply skeptical of psychometrics. I was radicalized by Shalizi. But lots of tools that don't produce coherent metrics or have valid axiomatic derivations are nonetheless useful in clinical settings, and by denying that you concede to your opponents --- the "race scientists" --- the idea that you're dismissive of science that serious practitioners still deem valid. Don't surrender that card so easily.
(btw: if you're not up with Sasha Gusev yet, run don't walk --- midwit race scientists are constantly bouncing off him and it drives people crazy. curtis yarvin threatened to have imprisoned. i love him so much.)
You're arguing against a straw man here. No one here is arguing a higher IQ test score means a person or population is more intelligent.
Huh? You very clearly (and wrongly) did? I don't get how you get to high-horse this.
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> IQ may not be real but IQ tests are and black expressing genotypes
"Black expressing genotypes" is the kind of phrase you'd expect someone to come up with if they wanted to mean "phenotype" but had a political motive for wanting something that sounded like "gene" to be in it.
> reliably score lower on them on average.
No, they don't. In the US there has been a significant—but inconsistent over time, racial IQ gap—but both the variability over time in that gap and all the studies that explore more details besides just broad racial contours show that that gap is at least largely and likely entirely due to socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental factors correlated with race, and not genetic.
You're mixing causation and correlation. Those with genotypes that produce black skin score lower on IQ tests on average but I never claimed the gene caused it and even disclaimed it above:
>> nor does it mean the gene itself causes that
So re:
>No, they don't.
Yes, they do, but you just jumped the gun straight to your strawman because you thought you were saying 'no' to something I didn't even say, maybe because of some political motive.
You didn't respond to anything the previous commenter said, but instead just repeated your point. You're not demonstrating any familiarity with the literature on this subject, unlike the person you're replying to.
There is nothing scientific about IQ tests.
Just because you throw a bunch of statistics behind a nonsence theory, that doesn’t make your nonsence theory any better.
Giving a nonsense test to people and recording a correlation between the nonsense score and genotype is science, even if the questions are bunk. Never once have I claimed that the actual test results mean anything in particular -- just that the measured score is lower on average in those with genes that express as black skin which is a scientific observation.
No, that is at best surveying. It is as scientific as asking people their favorite color or who they will vote for in the next election.
Science is working with a theory and gathering evidence for that theory. The theory behind IQ is called general intelligence and it has been completely exposed as nothing but racist pseudo-science. Removing the theory from the metrics just gives you a bunch of data, which may or may not describe a useful model of nature (but most likely it won’t).
It isn't unscientific to hypothesize that if you give people a certain set of bunk questions that based on some arbitrary scoring system that the differences will appear correlated to genotype, and then test it and find out genotype results in some weak correlation of the results. In my case, the bunk questions I am referring to are those in one or two tests commonly referred to as 'IQ tests.' It might not be scientific to decide it measures intelligence, but it is scientific to test and observe the difference.
What you're attempting to do here is debase your argument to semantics, by excluding what you don't like out of science, which is quite typical on HN when you have nada for an argument. I simply unequivocally reject this sort of 'heads I win, tails you lose' redefinition of science.
What is your hypotheses? What are you trying to predict? If you don’t have any hypothesis, if the only thing you are predicting is what you measure, you are by definition not doing science.
Science is more then mere observations. You can observe all the white swans you like, and if your only prediction is “all the swans I have seen are white” that isn’t science, it is just bird watching.
If you want to measure IQ and you observe differences in population, and you don’t give a theory as to why that is, and you don’t make any further predictins based on your observations, you are just surveying.
Now, somebody might create a model based on these observations, and make predictions based on that model, then-and-only then are you doing science. If Tycho Brave had only been observing the stars, never developing the Tychonic system, he would have just been an excellent astrologer, and as you know astrology is not a science. When Kepler later used that data to prove Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, then—and only then—would we consider his observation to be scientific.
In IQ testing, the only people making predictions with the data are psychometricians. They are using it to try to prove the existence of the g-factor. This effort is in vein, as this theory has long been debunked. It is modern day alchemy (or phrenology if you will). Nobody else is making any other predictions with IQ data. The only people who are using IQ data are using it to make predictions in a futile effort to prove their race pseudo-science. And they keep failing at it.
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I would say racist but nothing wrong with it, as purely my subjective opinion.
I am only bothered by instances of racism where you violate the individual liberties of others. ex Nazis I don't really care the Germans hated Jews, I do care they put them in camps and executed them. Pre-emptively slapping them would violate their individual liberties, walking across the street infringes on no one, and indeed if I tried to control the right to people to freely travel based on thought-police it would be far more dystopic than any potential racism.
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If people perceive someone as black, and treat them differently based on that perception, then yes, even if under the perceived skin color there is no difference.
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