I love the links that the Editors give for the “repeatedly “”disproven” idea that race exists.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/22/science/do-races-differ-not-really-genes-show.html?pagewanted=all
This is a cutting edge article from 2000 in that famous scientific publication, the NY Times.
But, we are given a link to a much more up to date article from that other great scientific journal, Newsweek (are they still in business?)
http://www.newsweek.com/there-no-such-thing-race-283123
In this article, the author begs the question by conflating the notion of “race” with “subspecies” and declaring that since there are no human subspecies, so “race” does not exist.
We know that all dogs, from the chihuahua to the Great Dane, are all just a type of wolf with “minor” genetic differences between breeds (and that all of this variation arose in just the last 40,000 years), and yet we see that these minor genetic differences are enough to create vast differences in appearance, size, behavior, intelligence, etc. As long as we are willing to accept that a Yorkshire Terrier and a St. Bernard are exactly the same thing, then race in humans doesn’t exist either. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?
So it’s all a clever semantic game – you define “race” to mean exactly what you want it to mean and then you can define it into non-existence.
* Interestingly, the author of this story is Emma Maier (she uses a pseudonym for her first name in the article), identifies as being on the autistic spectrum, and is not backing down (yet):
“I absolutely do not agree with the decision to remove and/or apologize for the articles, for they were not racist or eugenicist in any way,” she said. “The only violation they executed was to be a dissenting opinion away from Brown’s radical and politically left-wing student groups.”
…
“I do not think I need to apologize, either for myself or the Herald, nor will I,” she said. “I committed no transgression, as an opinion writer, and the Herald committed no transgression in deciding my articles were appropriate to print.”
* If biological race doesn’t exist, that’s news to doctors. We even have different units of measurement for kidney health/filtration rate based on whether the patient is Black or not.
The following is the IDMS-traceable MDRD Study equation (for creatinine methods calibrated to an IDMS reference method):
GFR (mL/min/1.73 m2) = 175 × (Scr)-1.154 × (Age)-0.203 × (0.742 if female) × (1.212 if African American)
Lest anyone accuse me of cherry picking, this is one of many, many such points in medicine where race/ethnicity enters into medical diagnostics.
* What does the Brown Biology Department think of this?
In particular, this guy, “David M. Rand Stephen T. Olney Professor of Natural History, Chair of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology”
https://vivo.brown.edu/display/drand
Most of his work has been with animals, but here is a paper he coauthored which shows he knows about human genomics:
Also, this guy “Thomas Roberts Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Vice Chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology”
https://vivo.brown.edu/display/troberts
studies the biomechanics of human running and might have an opinion on the demographics of Olympic medalists….
And this guy “Daniel M. Weinreich Associate Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Co-Director of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Graduate Program”
https://vivo.brown.edu/display/dweinrei
wrote this paper which looks like an important theoretical buttress for Cochran and Harpending’s work:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16050095
However the rising star in that department, who specializes in human population genetics, is this lady: “Sohini Ramachandran Assistant Professor of Biology”
https://vivo.brown.edu/display/sr33
This year she published this paper, “A comparison of worldwide phonemic and genetic variation in human populations”
http://www.pnas.org/content/112/5/1265.full.pdf_1
which is a densely detailed and very solid article (as is typical for PNAS papers) that she was the principal investigator for (her vitae entry for the paper says “SR is the PI of this project, conceived of the study with MR and MWF, designed the research with NC and MWF, prepared and analyzed the linguistic data with NC, and wrote the paper with input from all authors.”).
I hope she has tenure already! Here is her vitae:
https://vivo.brown.edu/docs/s/sr33_cv.pdf?dt=074710073
any iSteve readers at Brown ought to look her up and ask her what she thinks of this controversy and the idea that race has no basis in biology. As an (Asian) Indian woman, she’s immunized against automatic dismissals of her as racist, so she ought to speak up.
(By the way, the cited paper says “phonemic” and it’s not a typo for “phenomic” which would have been even more interesting….)
* In addition to the Saudis behaving badly in Beverly Hills, five Arabs (perhaps all Saudi?) have been arrested in just the past week on sexual assault charges.
Four Johnson & Wales University students charged in sexual assault
Gypsy cab driver sexually assaults woman in Austin
But lets take in a million Syrians! If we get a North African/Middle Eastern demographic on the census form, crime statistic demographic categorization ought to follow suit.
* Here’s a link to a map that Razib Khan reposted a couple of weeks back. It shows the astonishing correspondence between the genetics of Europeans and the physical geography of Europe. Of course, similar patterns can be seen on a global scale, looking at the genomes of the major human races.
Meanwhile, “The Herald said ‘The white privilege of cows,’ published Oct. 5, relied on the incorrect notion that biological differences exist between races.”
Are our lyin’ eyes being misled by the faulty Principal Components Analysis? Perhaps the isolated DNA contains the corruption. Maybe the test tubes themselves are the source of this sinfulness.
Because the people from whom the blood was taken are identically the same. To each other, and to every other human that has ever lived, or ever will.
* As all the commenters attest, it really does seem absurd. But is that because we’re witnessing the collapse of an ideology? Steve had a post last week titled, “Gradually, then Suddenly,” about how consequential changes seem to hover in a steady state for a while, then become overwhelming. Today, that contemptible “editorial note” certainly appears as nothing less than the expression of a totalitarian instinct; but will it reveal itself down the road as the final grasping at straws of a once regnant, but now dying, ideology?
I wonder what the the lifespan is for ideas that have run aground on the hostile shore of reality. (Soviet Communism had a run of 70 years.) Certainly, a lot of bad ideas have persisted for long periods in history; if they’re mostly inconsequential to living (like theories of the afterlife or the origins of the universe), they can persist for a very long time. And of course in isolated environments faulty ideas can go on indefinitely. It’s ironic that the university has shown itself to be just such a cloister where outmoded orthodoxies are nourished and can thrive–like the Easter Island of our culture.
* The reality is that the “peoples of Europe” (however one wants to define them), expanded, enriched themselves, and expanded all over the globe. They brought various negatives with them, but they also brought all of the benefits of applied European technology, including the very medium we are communicating in, but also: printing, mechanical power via steam, combustion, and nuclear, electricity, public health, decisive conquest of the problems of disease, famine, and reproduction, a doubling or tripling of longevity, and many other benefits, not the least of which was a moral earnestness towards self-correction that would have seemed completely bizarre to the non-Europeans that were conquered.
That is the reality. So then the question is why. Various explanations were offered, but the one offered in the article(s), namely, environmental happenstance, is surely the mildest conceivable. The only possible alternative is to claim that the Colonial Project (let’s call it that) was a “Bad Thing”, which is absurd. One can say, and she does, and so does everyone else, that this particular rose had a thorn, or two, or more, but I don’t see how anyone could argue that the present status of the human beings in the Americas is not far better by any possible metric than what it was before the Europeans arrived.
