To do you the favor, as ashkenazi jew (at higher risk for a number of different genetic illnesses) nothing about my understanding of this is predicated upon the concept of a race. That there is a genetically distinct haplotype group that corresponds to many folk that share these traits with me, is sufficient. By the way, I don't think "African descent" is a race by any means of my understanding of the word...
I grant you that "Ashkenazi Jew" is not a race by any conventional definition. But no, there's no "genetically distinct haplotype" that defines it. It's "Jews from central and eastern Europe", vs. those from Africa, the Middle East and Spain. [1]
It's a broad, vague category, that is nonetheless sometimes still useful. Just like race. We don't pretend that Ashkenazi Jews don't exist, or are verboten from polite discussion because they are a "social construct."
> By the way, I don't think "African descent" is a race by any means of my understanding of the word...
Well, yeah. I pulled my punches there. I should have just said "black people", but even I felt squeamish about it. A great example of how this stuff confuses language and makes science harder.
That is not what these "guidelines" do. I quoted the part where they deny that race is biological at all. There is simply no other way to read the words. Once again:
> 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.
This is simply false. It's fiction. A substitution of political ideology for fact. People are attempting to turn "we don't have a precise test for race" into "race does not exist". Even ignoring the fact that today anyone can go to 23andMe and get a genetic test that will assign them a percentage composition by race / ethnic group, it's obvious that race is a useful, if imprecise, real-world categorization. We can acknowledge this without being discriminatory.
This entire conversation is the equivalent of someone claiming that water was a "sociopolitical construct" before scientists knew what atoms and elements were, because we couldn't define it chemically. If HN existed in the pre-times, you'd have people chiming in that "other clear liquids exist and can be confused with water! the classification is incomplete!" as proof of claim.
Is that false? It seems to me to be the current scientific consensus.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737365/ - "Genetic data sets are used to see if biological races exist in humans and in our closest evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee. Using the two most commonly used biological concepts of race, chimpanzees are indeed subdivided into races but humans are not."
> it's obvious that race is a useful, if imprecise, real-world categorization. We can acknowledge this without being discriminatory.
The approach of genetic scientists seems to be to use the words "ancestry" or "population", which do not risk as much ambiguity or overlap with the meaning of "race" as applied to other species.
>This entire conversation is the equivalent of someone claiming that water was a "sociopolitical construct" before scientists knew what atoms and elements were
A more accurate comparison is that of scientists deciding that Pluto isn't actually a planet, because it no longer meets the criteria. There was a bit of a stir about this but eventually it's been accepted, and rightly so as linguistic precision is a good thing!
Read the links. Because those aren't providing evidence for the claim. They're just repeatedly asserting what I've already told you is faulty reasoning: we don't have a precise genetic definition of "race" today, therefore it doesn't exist.
That's wrong. Regarding the specific papers:
The first explicitly admits that race exists in the opening sentence (oops), then proceeds to say "the two most commonly used biological concepts of race" don't work in humans, therefore race doesn't exist ("There are no objective criteria for choosing one adaptive trait over another to define race. As a consequence, adaptive traits do not define races in humans.")
This is exactly the fallacious thinking I'm calling out. Great example.
The second is not a paper at all, but still admits that there's at least some biological basis for race, even though it's not precise. That's fine -- I'm not claiming it is precise:
> Research indicates that the concept of “five races” does, to an extent, describe the way human populations are distributed among the continents—but the lines between races are much more blurred than ancestry testing companies would have us believe
The third is saying that a single, specific measurement of genetic diversity fails to define race. Again, that's fine. Saying "test X doesn't define race" != "race does not exist":
> These limitations on FST are demonstrated algebraically and in the context of analyzing dinucleotide repeat allele frequencies for a set of eight loci genotyped in eight human groups and in chimpanzees. In our analyses, estimates of FST fail to identify important variation.
Overall, these illustrate exactly what I've said: race is clearly real and we know it when we see it, but it's not precise, and we don't have a biological test that defines it. Those who extend this to "race is a sociopolitical construct" are engaged in a through-the-looking-glass form of motivated reasoning. And it's a very convenient form of reasoning, because if you make it "wrong" to say that race exists, you prevent anyone from doing the research that might produce such a test.
The guidelines include the qualifier "at least based on modern biological criteria". This is true: if you use the modern biological criteria for race, then there is only one human race.
Nobody just says that "observable differences in humans are rarely genetically related to actual genetic differences", they say "race has absolutely no meaning in humans - but here in animals it means exactly what lay-people mean when they say it".
The elites are panicking about the perceived mental limits of the commoners. Normals know the limits of the words they use and actual bigots won't be deterred.
No one is saying it has absolutely no meaning. They're saying that its meaning has its basis in culture rather than in biology.
If you were to collect the DNA of every living human today and send the information to an alien species, would they say "aha, this clearly falls into five (or however many) pretty distinct categories"? Would anyone be able to tell them how to delineate those categories? Based on what I've read, I don't think so, which implies that what is meant by "race" is more cultural than biological.
> No one is saying it has absolutely no meaning. They're saying that its meaning has its basis in culture rather than in biology.
And that is 100% false. It's obviously biological in basis. It has useful meaning outside of "culture". We just don't have a reductive definition that satisfies the people who aspire to police our thoughts and language...and science.
I'm not naïve about this. There's obviously this bad history where bigots tried to come up with "biological" arguments that some races were superior to others. It's ugly and wrong. But it's just as wrong to go to the opposite pole of the debate, and try to pretend that race is not a thing at all. Both positions are soft-minded extremism.
We can accept that race is a real, biological thing (however fuzzy), and still say that race isn't a value judgment.
The overwhelming impression that I'm getting every time I look into this is that the concept of "race" is outliving biological meaning or usefulness when applied to humans. Fine if you think that's "obviously" false, but science has a very long list of things that initially appear obvious but are dropped as understanding grows and/or terminology becomes more precise. Invoking obviousness isn't very convincing at this point.
It feels like this need to over-moderate use of this word is projection from people who grew up with a specific light/dark skin divide that also mapped nearly perfectly onto actual prejudice and inequality. The USA is like that episode of star trek where people were white on one side and black on the other.
People use the word like "are the dutch racially tall or is it their diet?" and nobody means or takes offense.
I doubt this has much to do with US culture or any specific country. Nature is a German/British enterprise. The trend away from using "race" in genetics research appears to be a global thing.
> they say "race has absolutely no meaning in humans - but here in animals it means exactly what lay-people mean when they say it"
Weird hill to stand on in a thread that started with me saying that race is a cultural concept that has little to no utility in science outside of its cultural context, lawtalkingguy.
"Humans do not have biological race" is correct if and only if you change the definition of "race" to whatever definition these academics have made up expressly to make the statement true.
If you use any definition that wasn't specifically concocted to make the statement true (i.e. any definition used by normal people or by actual scientists doing real work, say prior to 1990), it remains false.
Yeah, I agree that's what's probably going on here. Being nincompoops, they've likely redefined "biological race" to mean something tautological, like this:
> biological race is a collection of N genes that clearly separate all races; no such set of genes exists, therefore biological race doesn't exist.
Academics love this kind of stuff. The danger is that this up-is-down wordplay works its way into things that actually matter. Then it's (quite literally) Orwellian. I guarantee that the panel of clerics at Nature won't be so precise in their application of the funhouse rules when it's in their ideological interest to ignore them.
What is the implication here, that geneticists decided in 1990 to pack in "real work" in order to work up a grand conspiracy to wipe out an entire concept?
I think if you were doing scientific work in this area, you would want political cover.
"I'm just studying why people whose ancestors grew up in one area are more likely to have a certain gene than people whose ancestors grew up in a different area. It has absolutely nothing to do with race".
No, I'm just guessing that the inflection point of productive scientists being financially displaced by useless academia career optimizers was some time in the last few decades.
"Black people" isn't a genetic category either. So maybe you should follow these oh-so Orwellian ethics guidelines and define what you mean by that and note whether it was a class that was self assigned by the group or by yourself or third parties and how that assignment was made.
If that's the case I'm sure you can provide a link to a dictionary stating as much. In reality, such haplotype groups, when they even exist, do not correlate with what people call "race".
You mean one of the politically activist dictionaries like Webster, which have lately frequently changed the definition of words like "racism"? I'm sure if it becomes an issue they'll change their definition of "race" too, if they haven't already.
And sure, not all races correspond directly to a specific HG, but all races have clear genetic differences which can be identified and classified purely mechanically. Multi-locus fixation clustering is an example of one such mechanical procedure. Unsupervised, something like k-means will generate racial groups equivalent to the ones humans come up with intuitively.
In your case, the HG in question obviously corresponds to one such cluster.
Well I don't think you'd find a dictionary that ever used that definition, because it's not the definition. And it has nothing to do with your allegation that dictionaries are woke and changing.
