[HN Gopher] Self-reported race, ethnicity don't match genetic an...
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Self-reported race, ethnicity don't match genetic ancestry in the
U.S.: study
Author : pseudolus
Score : 73 points
Date : 2025-06-06 15:15 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| pseudolus wrote:
| https://archive.ph/jfmTn
| Metacelsus wrote:
| 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.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| > 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.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| 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.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| 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.
| reissbaker wrote:
| 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.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| 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.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| 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.
| jhanschoo wrote:
| 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.
| antognini wrote:
| 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.
| throw310822 wrote:
| > 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.?
| antognini wrote:
| 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.
| throw310822 wrote:
| 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.
| MyOutfitIsVague wrote:
| 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.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| More importantly, humans have lived in Africa far longer than
| anywhere else in the world, so have had much more time to
| genetically diversify.
| ty6853 wrote:
| 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.
| desktopninja wrote:
| "One drop rule" makes everyone black in America
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| 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.)
| Shorel wrote:
| 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.
| anon291 wrote:
| Also population bottlenecks. Only a handful of populations
| left Africa, whereas many remained back.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| African is a useless label -- Africa alone has as much genetic
| diversity as the rest of the world combined.
| DougMerritt wrote:
| What lead to this?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Founder effect
| skywhopper wrote:
| Africa is where humans originally come from. There's much
| more human history in Africa than the rest of the world.
| djohnston wrote:
| Existence, not history. History requires writing.
| 9283409232 wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Not just _as much_ , but it literally _includes_ most of the
| genetic diversity in the rest of the world.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| 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.
| sarchertech wrote:
| 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.
| earnestinger wrote:
| If data would include both, one could check which of them
| is a signal signal and which is noise
| scoofy wrote:
| The point is that race is a bad proxy for ethnicity. We
| should expect the environmental factors to also mirror ethnic
| clustering.
| nabla9 wrote:
| '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.
| yupitsme123 wrote:
| How is this possible?
| anon291 wrote:
| 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.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| >almost guaranteed to have at least some African ancestry
|
| everyone from everywhere has african ancestry
| DougMerritt wrote:
| Very true, but of course you're talking about a different era
| much further up the tree.
| shrubble wrote:
| I don't; unless you are referring to the discredited "out of
| Africa" theory
| earnestinger wrote:
| Could you elaborate?
|
| I assume you imply that humans evolved not in Africa.
| Where?
| gitremote wrote:
| Neanderthals evolved in Europe and Europeans have more
| Neanderthal ancestry, so he might identify more with his
| Neanderthal ancestors.
| shrubble wrote:
| I've used Perl a lot.
| shrubble wrote:
| 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...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| gitremote wrote:
| 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_a
| rchai...
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| 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.
| sjducb wrote:
| 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.
| achierius wrote:
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| > 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.
| malcolmgreaves wrote:
| There are zero genetic markers for race. This is because race
| is purely a social construct.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| _> 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
| anon291 wrote:
| 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.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| 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.
| pkkkzip wrote:
| Prior to industrial revolution, mass immigration was
| difficult, not only because of logistics but tribalism.
| ruszki wrote:
| 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.
| david38 wrote:
| Yea, and like you just proved, it was very difficult.
| Hence the choice to do it in large groups.
| anon291 wrote:
| Not really no. Any student of linguistics is quickly
| dispelled of this notion
| travisjungroth wrote:
| 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.
| rayiner wrote:
| 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.
| anon291 wrote:
| 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
| sashank_1509 wrote:
| 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.
| ninininino wrote:
| 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.
| naasking wrote:
| > 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.
| nradov wrote:
| 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
| peanutcrisis wrote:
| 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...
| tptacek wrote:
| 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.
| peanutcrisis wrote:
| 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...
| tptacek wrote:
| 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.
| peanutcrisis wrote:
| 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.
| alphazard wrote:
| The technical term that we use for genetic subgroups beneath
| the species level is "subspecies".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subspecies
| malcolmgreaves wrote:
| 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.
| alphazard wrote:
| 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.
| meindnoch wrote:
| 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?
| foldr wrote:
| 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.
| meindnoch wrote:
| >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
| foldr wrote:
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| 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/
| foldr wrote:
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| > 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.
| foldr wrote:
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| > 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...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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...
| nomel wrote:
| 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.
| foldr wrote:
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| Which is completely unrelated to speaking with a someone
| outside of academia, _today_.
| rwyinuse wrote:
| 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...
| meindnoch wrote:
| 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)
| alphazard wrote:
| 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.
| meindnoch wrote:
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| There are no human subspecies.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| 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.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| 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.
| paganel wrote:
| 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.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| You live under a rock if you think "race discourse"
| originated (presumably recently) from US media or the US at
| all.
| gjm11 wrote:
| 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.)
| gitremote wrote:
| 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.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| Yes that is how it reads now that they've edited to say
| "the _US_ race discourse."
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| 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.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Actually, ironically I don't think that someone from Spain is
| intended to be considered Hispanic. Which also doesn't make
| sense, I know.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Technically, they're included.
|
| In practical usage, they'd far more likely be called Spanish
| or European in the US context.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| Technically according to what? These labels were based on
| implicit understanding that shifted over time and place.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Technically according to Wikipedia, at the very least.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic
| tokai wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| "The term commonly applies to Spaniards AND..."
|
| This is not a complex sentence.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| skylurk wrote:
| 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
| pram wrote:
| FWIW "hispanic" isn't a race on those forms, it's an ethnicity.
| You can choose any race with it.
| octopoc wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| The really weird thing is why a bunch of other things aren't
| also ethnicities.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| 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?
| lazide wrote:
| 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?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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.
| fumeux_fume wrote:
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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...
| mistrial9 wrote:
| actual detail about this evolving topic here
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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/...
| lazide wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| 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).
| lazide wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| You really might want to re-read what I wrote, and what
| you wrote again. Because you're agreeing with me.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| 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.
| naasking wrote:
| > 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
| anthk wrote:
| 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.
| yupitsme123 wrote:
| This sounds like the same split that has happened with sex and
| gender in recent years.
| ilaksh wrote:
| There is urgent need for education on these types of topics in
| the United States.
| ebiester wrote:
| It's there in every university. It's in every sociology and
| anthropology field at least.
|
| But in general, it gets dismissed as "Woke."
| contagiousflow wrote:
| This is literally Critical Race Theory
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| 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.
| energy123 wrote:
| > 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.
| n4r9 wrote:
| > 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
| mc32 wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| 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...
| nradov wrote:
| Who has more athleticism, Aaron Rodgers or Ruth
| Chepngetich?
| mc32 wrote:
| 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 .
| n4r9 wrote:
| 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.
| mc32 wrote:
| 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.
| rayiner wrote:
| > 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.
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| 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.
| rayiner wrote:
| Ethnicity is what I mean.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| 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.)
| slibhb wrote:
| 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.
| earnestinger wrote:
| 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.
| throw310822 wrote:
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| GolfPopper wrote:
| 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
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I was assigned Italian at birth. There is no changing that,
| legally, illegally, by 23andMe, or anyone else.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| 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.
| VOIPThrowaway2 wrote:
| We've only recently stopped thinking of "Italian" as being
| separate. For good and bad.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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".
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| It hasn't been very long since "Irish" was considered by many
| to be a separate race.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Who is the epistemic authority on someone's culture or
| ethnicity?
| ebiester wrote:
| 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.
| kelnos wrote:
| 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.)
| duxup wrote:
| 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.
| tokai wrote:
| Your comment made me remember this short reportage:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9mtCLL8rI0
|
| Culture is definitely the major part of 'race'.
| pkkkzip wrote:
| Its the result of managed breeding by slave owners not uncommon
| with the black demographic in Americas and shouldnt be used to
| argue "race is a construct its not real"
| DoctorOW wrote:
| 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._
| ilamont wrote:
| 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.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| > 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?
| bawolff wrote:
| 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.
| reverendsteveii wrote:
| I mean, the real problem was that race was always a social
| construct but racists wanted to to be a biological one instead
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| 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.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| 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.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| 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.
| kome wrote:
| race science is bogus, news at 11
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| 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.
| like_any_other wrote:
| > 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
| like_any_other wrote:
| Correction: Line 3 was supposed to read "110/45,761 for Blacks"
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| 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.
| msgodel wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| I know some people who would spend hours at the tavern
| explaining why "British/Irish (largely Welsh apparently)" is an
| almost incomprehensible statement :D
| MrDrDr wrote:
| 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.
| systemstops wrote:
| 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
| pkkkzip wrote:
| race is NOT a social construct for the same reason Japanese and
| Finnish and Africans are totally distinguishable. The American
| liberal progressive definitions simply are constructs to dilute
| culture into a bland, boring, politically correct minefield to
| keep the masses controllable.
| systemstops wrote:
| 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.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| 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.
| carabiner wrote:
| 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/
| rayiner wrote:
| > 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.
| kelnos wrote:
| 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.
| rayiner wrote:
| 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.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| "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."
|
| Good news! That means that all those studies that were just for
| white people are good enough and we don't need to worry about
| race when selecting trial participants.
|
| Right!?
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| 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.
| Peacefulz wrote:
| 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.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| 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.
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