User:Ina301/Race

Race

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The Ancestors' Tale - Richard Dawkins

The African, who was the only black person there – and he really was black, unlike many "African-Americans" – happened to be wearing a red tie. He finished his self-introduction by laughingly saying, "You can easily remember me. I am the one with the red tie." He was genially mocking the way people bend over backwards to pretend not to notice racial differences. I think there was a Monty Python sketch along the same lines. Nevertheless, we can’t write off the genetic evidence which suggests, all appearances to the contrary, we are an usually uniform species. What is the resolution to the apparent conflict between appearance and measured reality?

It is genuinely true that, if you measure the total variation in the human species and then partition it into a between-race component and a within-race component, the between-race component is a very small fraction of the total. Most of the variation among humans can be found within races as well as between them. Only a small admixture of extra variation distinguishes races from each other. That is all correct. What is not correct is the inference that race is therefore a meaningless concept. This point has been clearly made by the distinguished Cambridge geneticist A.W.F. Edwards in a recent paper “Human genetic diversity: Lewontin’s fallacy.” R.C. Lewontin is an equally distinguished Cambridge (Mass.) geneticist, known for the strength of his political convictions and his weakness for dragging them into science at every possibile opportunity. Lewontin’s view of race has become near-universal orthodoxy in scientific circles. He wrote, in a famous paper of 1972:

It is clear that our perception of relatively large differences between human races and subgroups, as compared to the variation within these groups, is indeed a biased perception and that, based on randomly chosen genetic differences, human races and populations are remarkably similar to each other, with the largest part by far of human variation being accounted for by the differences between individuals.

This is, of course, exactly the point I accepted above, not surprisingly since what I wrote was largely based on Lewontin. But see how Lewontin goes on:

Human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations. Since such racial classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxnomic significance either, no justification can be offered for its continuance.

We can all happily agree that human racial classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations. That is one reason why I object to ticking boxes on forms and why I object to positive discrimination in job selection. But that doesn’t mean that race is of “virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance.” This is Edwards’s point, and he reasons as follows. However small the racial partition of total variation may be, if such racial characteristics as there are highly correlated with other racial characteristics, they are by definition informative, and therefore of taxonomic significance."

A. W. F. Edwards - Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy

In popular articles that play down the genetical differences among human populations, it is often stated that about 85% of the total genetical variation is due to individual differences within populations and only 15% to differences between populations or ethnic groups. It has therefore been proposed that the division of Homo sapiens into these groups is not justified by the genetic data. This conclusion, due to R.C. Lewontin in 1972, is unwarranted because the argument ignores the fact that most of the information that distinguishes populations is hidden in the correlation structure of the data and not simply in the variation of the individual factors.

It is not true that "racial classification is . . . of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance". It is not true, as Nature claimed, that "two random individuals from any one group are almost as different as any two random individuals from the entire world", and it is not true, as the New Scientist claimed, that "two individuals are different because they are individuals, not because they belong to different races" and that "you can’t predict someone’s race by their genes". Such statements might only be true if all the characters studied were independent, which they are not.

it is a dangerous mistake to premise the moral equality of human beings on biological similarity because dissimilarity, once revealed, then becomes an argument for moral inequality.

Ernst Mayr, 2002. The biology of race and the concept of equality

Let me begin with race. There is a widespread feeling that the word “race” indicates something undesirable and that it should be left out of all discussions. This leads to such statements as “there are no human races.” Those who subscribe to this opinion are obviously ignorant of modern biology. Races are not something specifically human; races occur in a large percentage of species of animals. You can read in every textbook on evolution that geographic races of animals, when isolated from other races of their species, may in due time become new species. The terms "subspecies" and "geographic race" are used interchangably in this taxonomic literature.

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Geographical groups of humans, what biologists call races, tend to differ from each other in mean differences and sometimes even in specific single genes.

James F. Crow:

Biologists think of races of animals as groups that started as one, but later split and became separated, usually by a geographical barrier. As the two groups evolve independently, they gradually diverge genetically. The divergences will occur more quickly if the separate environments differ, but they will occur in any case since different mutations will inevitably occur in the two populations, and some of them will persist. This is most apparent in island populations, where each island is separate and there is no migration between them. Each one has its own characteristic types. In much of the animal world, however, and also in the human species, complete isolation is very rare. The genetic uniformity of geographical groups is constantly being destroyed by migration between them. In particular, the major geographical groups–African, European, and Asian–are mixed, and this is especially true in the United States, which is some- thing of a melting pot.

Because of this mixing, many anthropologists argue, quite reasonably, that there is no scientific justification for applying the word “race” to populations of human beings. But the concept itself is unambiguous, and I believe that the word has a clear meaning to most people. The difficulty is not with the concept, but with the realization that major human races are not pure races. Unlike those anthropologists who deny the usefulness of the term, I believe that the word “race” can be meaningfully applied to groups that are partially mixed.

Jerry Coyne, 2012. Are there human races?

What are races?

In my own field of evolutionary biology, races of animals (also called “subspecies” or “ecotypes”) are morphologically distinguishable populations that live in allopatry (i.e. are geographically separated). There is no firm criterion on how much morphological difference it takes to delimit a race. Races of mice, for example, are described solely on the basis of difference in coat color, which could involve only one or two genes.

Under that criterion, are there human races?

Yes. As we all know, there are morphologically different groups of people who live in different areas, though those differences are blurring due to recent innovations in transportation that have led to more admixture between human groups.

Neil Risch and colleagues

In our view, much of this discussion does not derive from an objective scientific perspective. This is understandable, given both historic and current inequities based on perceived racial or ethnic identities, both in the US and around the world, and the resulting sensitivities in such debates. Nonetheless, we demonstrate here that from both an objective and scientific (genetic and epidemiologic) perspective there is great validity in racial/ethnic self-categorizations, both from the research and public policy points of view.

A racial difference in the frequency of some phenotype of interest ... or quantitative trait is but a first clue in the search for etiologic causal factors. As we have illustrated, without such racial/ethnic labels, these underlying factors cannot be adequately investigated.

Finally, we believe that identifying genetic differences between races and ethnic groups... is scientifically appropriate. What is not scientific is a value system attached to any such findings. Great abuse has occurred in the past with notions of 'genetic superiority' of one particular group over another. The notion of superiority is not scientific, only political, and can only be used for political purposes.

H. Allen Orr and Nicholas Wade

H. Allen Orr reviewing Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors by Nicholas Wade:

We all know that much evil has been committed in the name of various crackpot theories of race. But it does not follow that racial differences do not exist or that science can say nothing sensible about them.

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conclusions that are broadly accepted by human geneticists ... human races are real and they correspond reasonably well to our folk distinctions between peoples from different continents.

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it would be miraculous if these [racial] differences did not exist

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[the existence of race differences] should come as no surprise

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In the book, Wade wrote:

It is often assumed that evolution works too slowly for any significant change in human nature to have occurred with the last 10,000 or even 50,000 years. But this assumption is incorrect...

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Because the human population was dispersed across different continents, between which distance and hostility allowed little gene flow, the people on each continent followed independent evolutionary paths. It was these independent trajectories that led over the generations to the emergence of a variety of human races.

Armand Leroi

Yet there is nothing very fundamental about the concept of the major continental races; they're just the easiest way to divide things up. Study enough genes in enough people and one could sort the world's population into 10, 100, perhaps 1,000 groups, each located somewhere on the map.

Some critics believe that these ambiguities render the very notion of race worthless. I disagree.

The billion or so of the world's people of largely European descent have a set of genetic variants in common that are collectively rare in everyone else; they are a race. At a smaller scale, three million Basques do as well; so they are a race as well. Race is merely a shorthand that enables us to speak sensibly, though with no great precision, about genetic rather than cultural or political differences.

But it is a shorthand that seems to be needed. One of the more painful spectacles of modern science is that of human geneticists piously disavowing the existence of races even as they investigate the genetic relationships between "ethnic groups." Given the problematic, even vicious, history of the word "race," the use of euphemisms is understandable. But it hardly aids understanding, for the term "ethnic group" conflates all the possible ways in which people differ from each other.

Papers

Rosenberg, N. A., J. K. Pritchard, et al. (2002). "Genetic Structure of Human Populations." Science 298(5602): 2381-2385.

PDF: http://pritch.bsd.uchicago.edu/publications/RosenbergEtAl02.pdf

Tang H, Quertermous T, Rodriguez B, et al. (2005). "Genetic Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in Case-Control Association Studies". American Journal of Human Genetics 76 (2): 268–75. doi:10.1086/427888.

PDF: http://med.stanford.edu/tanglab/publications/PDFs/GeneticStructureSelfIdentifiedRaceEthnicityAndConfoundingInCase-ControlAssociationStudies.pdf

Li, J. Z., D. M. Absher, et al. (2008). "Worldwide Human Relationships Inferred from Genome-Wide Patterns of Variation." Science 319(5866): 1100-1104.

PDF: http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~lliao/archive/worldwide_human_relationships_inferred_from_genome_wide_patterns_of_variation.pdf

Tishkoff et al. (2009). "The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans" (Science 22:1035–1044)

PDF: http://eebweb.arizona.edu/Courses/Ecol426_526/Tishkoff_et_al_2009.pdf

Other stuff

http://therightstuff.biz/2014/04/29/correcting-the-anti-racialist-qa/ http://ctwiki.us.to/index.php/Common_Arguments_%26_Rebuttals