Francis Collins writes in Nature magazine in 2004:
“Well-intentioned statements over the past few years, some coming from geneticists, might lead one to believe there is no connection whatsoever between self-identified race or ethnicity and the frequency of particular genetic variants1, 2. Increasing scientific evidence, however, indicates that genetic variation can be used to make a reasonably accurate prediction of geographic origins of an individual, at least if that individual’s grandparents all came from the same part of the world3. As those ancestral origins in many cases have a correlation, albeit often imprecise, with self-identified race or ethnicity, it is not strictly true that race or ethnicity has no biological connection. It must be emphasized, however, that the connection is generally quite blurry because of multiple other nongenetic connotations of race, the lack of defined boundaries between populations and the fact that many individuals have ancestors from multiple regions of the world.”
* That’s why sites like 23andme are able to determine if you had a black African ancestor hundreds of years ago, on the basis of a few gobbets of spittle.
* The point needs to be conveyed succinctly that comparison of genomes is not just a numbers game, but a more complicated process where a small number of unevenly distributed differences can have outsize impact.
The following analogies are a great way to deal with this modern geocentrism regarding race:
There is no such thing as cystic fibrosis. If you examine the genomes of those socially construed to have cystic fibrosis, the differences between them and others are on the order of 3 nucleotides out of 3 billion, which is negligible compared to the difference within the socially constructed cystic fibrosis and normal communities.
Similarly Huntington’s disease is the variation of a few trinucleotide repeats which is nugatory in comparison with the variation in repeat length across other genomic loci.
There is no scientific basis for the existence of a group called the Neanderthals, as the so-called Neanderthal genome is 99.7% identical to humans, which is less variation than between so-called modern humans, who have a single nucleotide polymorphism rate of about 1 in 200.
* A more compelling case can be made that humans ARE subject to evolution based on environmental factors, supported by a long and growing list of local genetic adaptations such as different vulnerabilities to diseases, different ways of processing proteins, different capacities for surviving environmental stresses such as altitude and heat/cold. Then there are the legendary differences in IQ. If there are only small variances in DNA among human populations, those small differences must carry a lot of weight … and YES, express themselves as different races with different, genetically tuned dispositions that express themselves as differences in social organization and culture. Dog and pigeon breeders know how to do this via selective breeding that also drives evolution. Why would humans be exempt?
* Near the article’s conclusion, reporter Natalie Angier notes, “Scientists say that while it may be easy to tell at a glance whether a person is Asian, African or Caucasian, the differences dissolve when one looks beyond surface features and scans the human genome for DNA hallmarks of ”race.”’
For readers new to Steve’s writing on this topic, here (again) is a link to a map that Razib Khan reposted a couple of weeks back. It shows the fine grain of the correspondence between the genetics of Europeans and the physical geography of Europe. Similar patterns emerge from analyses at larger scales (major human races) and smaller scales (e.g. the inset panel showing German-, French,- and Italian- speaking Swiss).
Fifteen years later, most of the quoted scientists are still professionally active (even the ones who sound a bit like latter-day Lysenkoists). It would be interesting to ask each:
* Were you properly quoted (does the quote reflect your beliefs at that time)?
* Do you hold to those same views today?
* At the time, did you agree with the major assertions of the article?
* Given what you now know, do you agree with these claims?
* Natalie Angier is also the reporter who got it completely wrong in the NYT about the predictable consequences of Nafta and Gatt. I remember interviewing her for an article I was working on, “Gatt Justice: Who Gets the Gains of Trade.” She thought she “knew” everyone would benefit from these new trade agreements, including ordinary American working people, because that’s what she learned in college and because all the big names in the field of international trade — Paul Samuelson and Paul Krugman most notably — were telling her so.
I answered that modern free trade theory did not support that conclusion and that anyway trade theory was irrelevant because it assumes no capital mobility between rich and poor countries, whereas both Nafta and Gatt allow free capital mobility around the world. All you needed to know, I explained, was plain old neoclassical economics in Econ 101: capital/population ratios would fall globally and therefore workers in advanced industrial economies with a high capital/population ratio would see their wages decline.
But, alas, the notion that free trade will automatically make everyone better off was the only “politically correct” position in the economics profession at that time — as it remains to this day — never mind that it is not supported in the literature. So here again as with the “consensus” that climate change threatens all human civilization or that race is not real, we see a truly dumb idea which truly does threaten future of civilization being endorsed by intelligent people because they care more about the good opinion of their friends and colleagues than the future welfare of the societies they live in.
Intellectual conformity, it turns out, is the most powerful force in the world. Given the history of religious orthodoxy I guess it should be no surprise.
* I’ve been seeing the “There is no scientific basis for the concept of race” mantra increasingly, with museums leading the way. The problem, though, is that this statement does not have its roots in science, but in politics. In the 19th through early 20th century, scientists were studying the differences between races and accumulated the results now derided as “scientific” racism. Then anthropologists Franz Boas and Ashley Montagu began to attack the idea of classification by race on the basis of “phenotypic plasticity” and other factors. But were they primarily motivated by scientific evidence or a desire to delegitimize racism by denying the reality of race itself? At any rate, the result was the liberal dogma that “there is no such thing as race” as well as the stigmatization of any further scientific study of racial differences.
This is from the Wikipedia entry “Historical race concepts”:
Several social and political developments that occurred at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century led to the transformation in the discourse of race. Three movements that historians have considered are: the coming of mass democracy, the age of imperialist expansion, and the impact of Nazism. More than any other, the violence of Nazi rule, the Holocaust, and World War II transformed the whole discussion of race. Nazism made an argument for racial superiority based on a biological basis. This led to the idea that people could be divided into discrete groups and based on the divisions, there would be severe, tortuous, and often fatal consequence. The exposition of racial theory beginning in the Third Reich, up to the Final Solution, created a popular moral revolution against racism. In 1950, and as a response to the genocide of Nazism, UNESCO was formed and released a statement saying that there was no biological determinant or basis for race.
* Right, so a chihuahua and a Great Dane are exactly the same thing, as are a pygmy and a Dane – these are merely “social” concepts. Who are you going to believe – me or your lying eyes? Now you can see where this is going – race/ breed is social in the sense that if we FOR SOCIAL (IST) reasons, choose to ignore all the visual and genetic markers that differentiate different breeds/races and proclaim that all dogs/humans are the same, then they ARE the same, socially speaking.
There is no bright line between “races” or “breeds” as there are between species but that doesn’t mean that they are purely socially defined concepts either. This is just like colors – in some languages there is no separate word for yellow and orange. Scientifically, there is no exact point in the frequency scale where “yellow” ends and “orange” begins. But this doesn’t mean that we can say that “color” is a completely social concept and that there is no such thing as color, only “visible light”.
* UNESCO proclaimed the non-existence of race as early as 1950 – this was a backlash against Nazi racial theories. “Race” is a socially defined concept to the extent that we attach any social importance to it. The Nazis believed that Germans and Poles were of different “races”. Now in fact there are genetic markers that can identify pretty well whether you are a Slav or a German (and maybe these markers even translate to measurable differences in appearance, temperament, etc.) but it is purely a social matter if we even consider the differences to rise to the the level of being “races” or some lesser subcategory (ethnicity) or no category at all (e.g. there are probably markers that differentiate S. Germans from N. Germans if you looked hard enough, but nobody bothers) and as to what the consequences are of belonging to one category or another.
Extremism of one kind tends to lead to an equal and opposite extremism. The Nazis attached extreme, irrational importance to race and so the backlash was to attache extreme, irrational UNimportance to race, to the point of even denying its existence. Neither is a sensible position. Likewise, the US in the pre-Civil Rights era, also attached high importance to race, and so we had our own denialist backlash.
In modern American life, we take this one step further and jump thru the looking glass – liberals say that race does not exist, except WHEN WE WANT IT TO – e.g. for purposes of affirmative action benefits. But at other times, they deny its existence even when it may lead to people dying – there have been drugs that were found to work better on blacks, but because it would be racist to even admit that “black” exists, these drugs caused an outcry.
A Martian looking the this clusterfark would just laugh and shake his head in puzzlement, but once you understand the history and the fact that race denial can’t be view in isolation but rather as a political backlash to race over-emphasis , then it makes sense in its own crazy way even though it has nothing to do with “science”. Liberals have a touching faith in the ability of “science” to settle political questions, as long as the answer that “science” gives favors their position.
* Do newspapers differ? Not really, mass spectrometers show. Different newspapers do not exist because because more than 99% of every newspaper’s molecules are wood pulp, not ink. While it may seem easy to tell at a glance whether a newspaper is leftist, very leftist, or communist, the ease dissolves when one probes beneath surface characteristics…
