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National Academies: We can’t define “race,” so stop using it in science

arstechnica.com

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Re: National Academies: We can’t define “race,” so stop using it in science

#71

Post by BenSahar »

sjducb wrote: post #59
fenomas wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a bit ridiculous. It's well known in medicine that members of different ethnic groups.. Emphasis added. Race != ethnicity; TFA argues against using the former and suggests using the latter (with other things). > Some of the key recommendations focus on getting rid of the use of race and instead focusing on what the report terms "population descriptors." These can be things like ethnicity, region of residenc…

Image you've got a black patient in front of you and you're choosing between two drugs. One of the drugs has a greater risk of nasty side affects for the black patient. Which drug do you give the patient? Should the research that tells you which drug to give be banned?

Imagine your patient is Obama.

Which drug do you give him?

Re: National Academies: We can’t define “race,” so stop using it in science

#72

Post by fenomas »

sjducb wrote: post #59
fenomas wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a bit ridiculous. It's well known in medicine that members of different ethnic groups.. Emphasis added. Race != ethnicity; TFA argues against using the former and suggests using the latter (with other things). > Some of the key recommendations focus on getting rid of the use of race and instead focusing on what the report terms "population descriptors." These can be things like ethnicity, region of residenc…

Image you've got a black patient in front of you and you're choosing between two drugs. One of the drugs has a greater risk of nasty side affects for the black patient. Which drug do you give the patient? Should the research that tells you which drug to give be banned?

> Should the research that tells you which drug to give be banned?

No, and nobody suggested anything like that, so if you're trolling please don't.

The point of TFA is that a study reporting "drug X has greater risks for black people" is weak science, because any given doctor has little way of determining whether their patient is genetically similar to whoever participated in the study. If the study had instead reported risk levels for, say, people of North African ancestry, then the doctor could ask about the patient's background and make an informed decision, instead of just looking at skin color and hoping for the best.

Re: National Academies: We can’t define “race,” so stop using it in science

#73

Post by naniwaduni »

klodolph wrote: post #60
hirundo wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there’s not actually a significant amount of genetic divergence between racial groups. Does skin color not diverge between racial groups, or is it not a significant genetic divergence? If skin color seems too trivial to be genetically "significant", then what about racial differences that confer an advantage or disadvantage to malarial resistance? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3704235/

It’s not a significant part of genetic divergence. Humans also have a striking lack of genetic diversity in the first place, due to factors like a severe population bottleneck 2 Mya. One of the races is “black”, but since most Africans are black, and all humans have African ancestry, the idea of coming up with a genetic basis for “blackness” is completely useless. It would be difficult to come up with some kind of ge…

> One of the races is “black”, but since most Africans are black, and all humans have African ancestry, the idea of coming up with a genetic basis for “blackness” is completely useless.

Proves too much: the idea of coming up with a genetic basis for "fishness" is also now completely useless.

Re: National Academies: We can’t define “race,” so stop using it in science

#74

Post by dpkirchner »

dekhn wrote: post #64
dpkirchner wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably not all that easy to sequence the DNA of study participants when they number in the thousands. Although I guess you only have to do it once per person.

It's trivially easy and cheap to determine genetic history by dna sequenceing; it doesn't require sequencing the whole genome, just a tiny bit of it. 23&Me does it with their tiny little exome test.

At $100 each, adding $1M to a small study of only 10000. And biasing the results by only including people willing to hand over their DNA. I'm not sure the net result will be improved science.

Re: National Academies: We can’t define “race,” so stop using it in science

#75

Post by wdbbdw »

FabrosoFernan wrote: post #57
klodolph wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s factually incorrect—there’s not actually a significant amount of genetic divergence between racial groups. There’s a saying—if you pick two chimpanzees in the same forest, you are likely to find more genetic differences than if you pick two humans on opposite sides of the world. Genetic diversity within a given racial group is much larger than the genetic differences between different racial groups, which make…

That sounds like contrived rubbish me. Yes we can pluck a dozen Germans off the street and you might find 5 different eye colours, 6 hair colours, a range of 30 IQ points, a priest and a thug, and over a foot between the tallest and shortest. Yet show me a picture of any of them and I am confident I could roughly point to the region in Europe where their ancestors have toiled for the last thousand generations. Put th…

I dunno, go look at Barack Obama, then look at pictures of his parents, and tell me which group he belongs to.

Re: National Academies: We can’t define “race,” so stop using it in science

#76

Post by NotYourLawyer »

drewcon wrote: post #10
NotYourLawyer wrote: post #9

Lots of categories have fuzzy edges. It doesn’t mean they’re not useful or that they don’t exist.

I defy you to describe race in certain terms.

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.

Re: National Academies: We can’t define “race,” so stop using it in science

#77

Post by klodolph »

naniwaduni wrote: post #73
klodolph wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a significant part of genetic divergence. Humans also have a striking lack of genetic diversity in the first place, due to factors like a severe population bottleneck 2 Mya. One of the races is “black”, but since most Africans are black, and all humans have African ancestry, the idea of coming up with a genetic basis for “blackness” is completely useless. It would be difficult to come up with some kind of ge…

> One of the races is “black”, but since most Africans are black, and all humans have African ancestry, the idea of coming up with a genetic basis for “blackness” is completely useless. Proves too much: the idea of coming up with a genetic basis for "fishness" is also now completely useless.

> Proves too much: the idea of coming up with a genetic basis for "fishness" is also now completely useless.

I mean, that’s a good analogy, the term “fish” is even worse than “race”. Fish is paraphyletic, just like “tree”. There’s also the colloquial sense of “fish”, which is even less clear.

Re: National Academies: We can’t define “race,” so stop using it in science

#78

Post by klodolph »

naasking wrote: post #56
klodolph wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Species is a lot fuzzier than you think. As someone who, as a child, read books on the history of taxonomy and how taxonomy has changed over the centuries, I would love to hear you list what mistaken beliefs about species you claim that I have. Seriously, though. I am not interested in being the topic of conversation, so please do not make me the subject of your comments.

Just a thought, maybe you could not take informal statements on general knowledge so personally.

Or, you know, you could not use personal language, and instead talk about the subject matter itself.

Re: National Academies: We can’t define “race,” so stop using it in science

#79

Post by dekhn »

dpkirchner wrote: post #74
dekhn wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's trivially easy and cheap to determine genetic history by dna sequenceing; it doesn't require sequencing the whole genome, just a tiny bit of it. 23&Me does it with their tiny little exome test.

At $100 each, adding $1M to a small study of only 10000. And biasing the results by only including people willing to hand over their DNA. I'm not sure the net result will be improved science.

You're not adding anything to this debate- studies already do this (and budget for it). Lightweight genetic testing like this is far cheaper in bulk and the scientists and doctors running the study are likely going ot want that data, so I don't see any problem there.

As for bias and people not consenting to hand over their DNA: this is not a scientific problem, it's a social one.

Re: National Academies: We can’t define “race,” so stop using it in science

#80

Post by danaris »

naniwaduni wrote: post #73
klodolph wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a significant part of genetic divergence. Humans also have a striking lack of genetic diversity in the first place, due to factors like a severe population bottleneck 2 Mya. One of the races is “black”, but since most Africans are black, and all humans have African ancestry, the idea of coming up with a genetic basis for “blackness” is completely useless. It would be difficult to come up with some kind of ge…

> One of the races is “black”, but since most Africans are black, and all humans have African ancestry, the idea of coming up with a genetic basis for “blackness” is completely useless. Proves too much: the idea of coming up with a genetic basis for "fishness" is also now completely useless.

"Fish" are one of the classic examples of a commonly-understood descriptor that has little to no scientific rigor. Another good one is "tree".

In casual speech, you can certainly look at an animal and say "this is a fish", or look at a plant and say "that is a tree", but if you actually start to look closer, you find that there's no clear way to define either of those terms that includes everything we think should belong in them, and also excludes everything we think shouldn't.

"Races" among humans are similarly hard to pin down by any kind of genetic taxonomy.

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