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Genes for Skin Color Rebut Dated Notions of Race, Researchers Say

nytimes.com

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Re: Genes for Skin Color Rebut Dated Notions of Race, Researchers Say

#11

Post by darawk »

tptacek wrote: post #7
HillaryBriss wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think the article is claiming that the skin-color-centric definition of race doesn't make sense any more: “If you ask somebody on the street, ‘What are the main differences between races?,’ they’re going to say skin color,” said Sarah A. Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania. i suppose that Tishkoff is right, but to be a bit more rigorous about it, i would be curious to see the sociological resea…

I think you're answering a question the article doesn't pose. Tishkoff didn't claim to have refuted the concept of races, but rather just the notion that they were directly tied to skin color.

> The research “dispels a biological concept of race,” Dr. Tishkoff said.

Re: Genes for Skin Color Rebut Dated Notions of Race, Researchers Say

#13

Post by VeejayRampay »

kemerover wrote: post #8
astrodust wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, voice? That seems dubious. Apart from vernacular or speaking styles that are generally racial in nature, there's really nothing there. > But every human can easily identify black/white/Asian... It's not the obvious cases that matter, but the borderline ones. Is that person Japanese or maybe Inuit? > If racists believed that race is just a skin color, why would they be racists? Yes. If we were all precisely the sa…

>Uh, voice? That seems dubious. Apart from vernacular or speaking styles that are generally racial in nature, there's really nothing there. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/17342877 >It's not the obvious cases that matter, but the borderline ones. Is that person Japanese or maybe Inuit? First of all, I don't think it is appropriate to classify "Japanese" or "Inuit" as races. Race is a more general concept. Anywa…

Really depends on the European though... Europe is an extremely diverse continent despite its relatively small size.

Re: Genes for Skin Color Rebut Dated Notions of Race, Researchers Say

#14

Post by kemerover »

astrodust wrote: post #5
darawk wrote: post #2

This article is somehow trying to say that race doesn't exist because we found the genes for skin color? What?

They're saying that skin color is what people think is a reliable indicator of race, but in fact, genetically speaking, it's a total mess and nothing is clear at all.

But it is a reliable indicator of race.

Article even says it:

>The dark-skinned people of southern India, Australia and New Guinea, for example, did not independently evolve their color simply because evolution favored it.

>They inherited the ancestral dark variants Dr. Tishkoff’s team found in Africans. “They had to be introduced from an African population,” said Dr. Tishkoff.

Re: Genes for Skin Color Rebut Dated Notions of Race, Researchers Say

#15

Post by pizza »

darawk wrote: post #11
tptacek wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're answering a question the article doesn't pose. Tishkoff didn't claim to have refuted the concept of races, but rather just the notion that they were directly tied to skin color.

> The research “dispels a biological concept of race,” Dr. Tishkoff said.

I think there's two ways to read this:

"dispels a biological concept of race" - as in, it dispels one concept

or

"dispels a biological concept of [human] race [because the genetics variants determining pigment predate humanity, therefore either human delineation of race predates humans, or is incoherent]"

Re: Genes for Skin Color Rebut Dated Notions of Race, Researchers Say

#16

Post by [deleted] »

pizza wrote: post #15
darawk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The research “dispels a biological concept of race,” Dr. Tishkoff said.

I think there's two ways to read this: "dispels a biological concept of race" - as in, it dispels one concept or "dispels a biological concept of [human] race [because the genetics variants determining pigment predate humanity, therefore either human delineation of race predates humans, or is incoherent]"

[deleted]

Re: Genes for Skin Color Rebut Dated Notions of Race, Researchers Say

#17

Post by tptacek »

Mz wrote: post #10
astrodust wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, voice? That seems dubious. Apart from vernacular or speaking styles that are generally racial in nature, there's really nothing there. > But every human can easily identify black/white/Asian... It's not the obvious cases that matter, but the borderline ones. Is that person Japanese or maybe Inuit? > If racists believed that race is just a skin color, why would they be racists? Yes. If we were all precisely the sa…

Uh, voice? That seems dubious. No, that's not dubious. Rick Astley, most famous for the internet meme of Rick Rolling, had trouble getting taken seriously at first because everyone thought his (first?) song "Never gonna give you up" was sung by a black guy. They could not believe it was really the voice of some skinny, pasty white guy. It sounds black to most people. I participated in a poorly designed pysch study in…

Can you provide a link to any? I'm drawing a blank; the (high level pop science writing) consensus appears to be that while there are obviously powerful ethnolinguistic features, what limited evidence there is for inter-racial physiological voice features is swamped by the evidence for intra-racial vocal differences.

It might be tricky to de-confound the ethnolinguistic stuff from the physiological stuff, because some of the ethnolinguistic markers are subtle.

Re: Genes for Skin Color Rebut Dated Notions of Race, Researchers Say

#18

Post by Mz »

tptacek wrote: post #17
Mz wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, voice? That seems dubious. No, that's not dubious. Rick Astley, most famous for the internet meme of Rick Rolling, had trouble getting taken seriously at first because everyone thought his (first?) song "Never gonna give you up" was sung by a black guy. They could not believe it was really the voice of some skinny, pasty white guy. It sounds black to most people. I participated in a poorly designed pysch study in…

Can you provide a link to any? I'm drawing a blank; the (high level pop science writing) consensus appears to be that while there are obviously powerful ethnolinguistic features, what limited evidence there is for inter-racial physiological voice features is swamped by the evidence for intra-racial vocal differences. It might be tricky to de-confound the ethnolinguistic stuff from the physiological stuff, because som…

https://www.quora.com/Why-does-an-African-American-persons-v...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_profiling

https://io9.gizmodo.com/5928125/do-people-of-different-races...

Of course, it is a bit like differences in height for the genders: while men are, on average, taller than women, there is overlap in height as well as statistical outliers (so, no, you cannot definitively say "They are x height, so I can confidently assert their gender"). But there is some evidence that a) average or typical physiological differences between ethnicities influence voice sound and b) people who have zero training can pick up on these differences.

Granted that race, itself, is a somewhat nebulous human construct or mental model that often groups people together somewhat arbitrarily for sociocultural reasons having little or nothing to do with DNA.

Re: Genes for Skin Color Rebut Dated Notions of Race, Researchers Say

#19

Post by astrodust »

kemerover wrote: post #14
astrodust wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're saying that skin color is what people think is a reliable indicator of race, but in fact, genetically speaking, it's a total mess and nothing is clear at all.

But it is a reliable indicator of race. Article even says it: >The dark-skinned people of southern India, Australia and New Guinea, for example, did not independently evolve their color simply because evolution favored it. >They inherited the ancestral dark variants Dr. Tishkoff’s team found in Africans. “They had to be introduced from an African population,” said Dr. Tishkoff.

There's multiple genetic factors that dictate skin tone, and the overlap between these is pretty chaotic.

They even admit there's some aspects to skin tone that are still completely a mystery, there's no genetic marker(s) they can point to as the cause.

Re: Genes for Skin Color Rebut Dated Notions of Race, Researchers Say

#20

Post by astrodust »

kemerover wrote: post #8
astrodust wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, voice? That seems dubious. Apart from vernacular or speaking styles that are generally racial in nature, there's really nothing there. > But every human can easily identify black/white/Asian... It's not the obvious cases that matter, but the borderline ones. Is that person Japanese or maybe Inuit? > If racists believed that race is just a skin color, why would they be racists? Yes. If we were all precisely the sa…

>Uh, voice? That seems dubious. Apart from vernacular or speaking styles that are generally racial in nature, there's really nothing there. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/17342877 >It's not the obvious cases that matter, but the borderline ones. Is that person Japanese or maybe Inuit? First of all, I don't think it is appropriate to classify "Japanese" or "Inuit" as races. Race is a more general concept. Anywa…

That link about vocal characteristics is only relevant when talking about huge populations. On an individual basis it's meaningless, there's just too much variation. You need samples of a thousand or more to develop a picture. Where biological differences do exist that might affect intonation in a particular dialect, but not when soemeone was raised with a different dialect or intonation.

Now if "Japanese" isn't a race then nothing is. The vast majority of Japanese are identifiable on a genetic level due to the relative isolation of the country. Same goes for Inuit who were geographically and culturally isolated.

> Middle Eastern and European are better examples.

If you're talking some stereotypically Polish person compared to some stereotypically Arabic person from Egypt, obviously, but there's cases where ordinary Turkish people look more "European" than some groups of Europeans do.

The bell curve on these things is just too wide, there's nothing but overlap in all but the most extreme fringes.

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