Human geneticists curb use of the term ‘race’ in their papers
31–40 of 92 posts
Re: Human geneticists curb use of the term ‘race’ in their papers
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
What science in particular is not getting done now, due to the replacement of the term race in scientific papers? Be specific. You seem deeply passionate about this issue, so I'm sure you have plenty of examples.
Any sort of science which may suggest differences among ethnic groups, regardless of how useful it may be to study those differences.
Which difference are you alleging that isn't being talked about?
Re: Human geneticists curb use of the term ‘race’ in their papers
#33Quoted post unavailable.
It has nothing to do with political correctness or wokitude, science bra. There's simply no genetic basis for "race." All humans today have 99.9% identical DNA, with an extraordinary lack of genetic variation compared to that in other species. There is no person on the planet that is a further relation to you than about 37th cousin. Ever seen race used for differentiation in other animal? Race is a recent invention, essentially nothing more than folklore, to be generous, and not a product of scientific research or discovery. The concept of race has it origins in the context of African slavery. So from it's inception, the concept of race was always racist invention.
Re: Human geneticists curb use of the term ‘race’ in their papers
#34I don't understand how the criticisms in the comment section here are at all related to the actual journal article. From the abstract of the paper: Throughout The Journal’s 70-year history, “ancestry” and “ethnicity” have increased in use, appearing in 33% and 26% of articles in 2009–2018, while the use of “race” has decreased, occurring in 4% of articles in 2009–2018. Although its overall use has declined, the odds…
You're not missing anything here. The article is about race, so there's all these comments who already know what the article says without reading it, what their pre-established attitudes are, and why they are superior. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.
Yeah not surprising for BoomerNews
Re: Human geneticists curb use of the term ‘race’ in their papers
#35The sad thing is that once they find a substitute term it will eventually be considered problematic too. This is the "euphemism treadmill." [1] [1] - https://stevenpinker.com/files/pinker/files/1994_04_03_newyo...
It’s called progress.
Re: Human geneticists curb use of the term ‘race’ in their papers
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
The latter. The problem with this line of thinking is that race is a genetic term. Crime investigators can determine race from a blood droplet. NHS has a monthly begging campaign for "black blood" donations. And the biggest thing is that race corresponds to generic ancestry with 99.86% accuracy: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/
That's what confuses me. Some people say race is a construct, but then why do ads for sickle cell medicine only have black actors in them? I don't see how cloaking or censoring ideas of race benefits humanity. I know there's specific problems that are more common in my race. I WANT doctors and scientists to acknowledge that and use that information to improve treatments. I don't feel outraged, just sort of confused a…
The problem is in the variation of what people mean by "race". In popular culture, people generally use it as a synonym for ethnicity. In genetics, it means the same as "breed" does when referring to animals. The first is a social construct. The second is a grouping of heritable traits.
Re: Human geneticists curb use of the term ‘race’ in their papers
#37I'm cool with that. Now if governments can not ask what my race is on forms...
Exactly. Don’t ask about it or collect it. Yes race existed but it should but be the detriment of anything else.
Re: Human geneticists curb use of the term ‘race’ in their papers
#38Quoted post unavailable.
What science in particular is not getting done now, due to the replacement of the term race in scientific papers? Be specific. You seem deeply passionate about this issue, so I'm sure you have plenty of examples.
It’s a nonsense standard to demand “examples” of science not being done, which would be impossible to know precisely, and OP didn’t even claim specifically. The point is that our prominent scientific institutions are occupying themselves with nonsense woke red herrings. That constitutes a corruption of their telos (rigorous pursuit of the rational truth) in principle and the consequences are predictable, “examples” are beside the point.
Re: Human geneticists curb use of the term ‘race’ in their papers
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
The latter. The problem with this line of thinking is that race is a genetic term. Crime investigators can determine race from a blood droplet. NHS has a monthly begging campaign for "black blood" donations. And the biggest thing is that race corresponds to generic ancestry with 99.86% accuracy: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/
That's what confuses me. Some people say race is a construct, but then why do ads for sickle cell medicine only have black actors in them? I don't see how cloaking or censoring ideas of race benefits humanity. I know there's specific problems that are more common in my race. I WANT doctors and scientists to acknowledge that and use that information to improve treatments. I don't feel outraged, just sort of confused a…
It is both a social construct as well as a physically real thing. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive, and more people need to understand that. Most of the debate in this area is language games.
Consider running a PCA on a matrix of everyone's alleles . Hypothesis: A bunch of the top few components will correspond to commonly understood racial groups that people have created based on observable phenotypic clusters. In this sense, it's a real physical thing. Duh.
However, at the same time, the components are an abstraction, and the common conceptualization of what these components mean and how they relate to reality is somewhat of a mental construction. There will be other high variance components that don't relate to racial categories. We probably don't even notice them. And our racial categories probably don't map that cleanly to the actual underlying components.
Re: Human geneticists curb use of the term ‘race’ in their papers
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
The latter. The problem with this line of thinking is that race is a genetic term. Crime investigators can determine race from a blood droplet. NHS has a monthly begging campaign for "black blood" donations. And the biggest thing is that race corresponds to generic ancestry with 99.86% accuracy: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1196372/
They can also distinguish at a much finer level than the typical black, white, asian races. It's a social construct because the cutoff for being one or the other is determined by whatever matters to people in a society, not because science can distinguish them.
That the precise cutoffs are socially constructed does not imply the categorization itself is not biological. It's simply a coarse clustering based on kinship, that can be reproduced without reference to any society.
Edit: To the replies claiming the categorization is arbitrary and mostly cultural - that does not appear to be the case. In fact, it almost perfectly corresponds to genotype principal component plot clusters, as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29669918 noted:
I.e. the categorization corresponds to what you get when you consider all/many genes, and not a few arbitrarily chosen ones, like those that determine eye or hair color.