'All of Us' genetics chart stirs unease over controversial depiction of race
1–10 of 17 posts
Re: 'All of Us' genetics chart stirs unease over controversial depiction of race
#2“Our analysis reaffirms that race and ethnicity are social constructs that do not have a basis in genetics”
In what sense is race not genetic?
Re: 'All of Us' genetics chart stirs unease over controversial depiction of race
#3Seems like the concern is a purposeful attempt to bias how genetics research is presented to fit an ideological agenda.
Re: 'All of Us' genetics chart stirs unease over controversial depiction of race
#4“Our analysis reaffirms that race and ethnicity are social constructs that do not have a basis in genetics” In what sense is race not genetic?
Adam Rutherford's book "How to Argue with a Racist" is all about this.
Re: 'All of Us' genetics chart stirs unease over controversial depiction of race
#5“Our analysis reaffirms that race and ethnicity are social constructs that do not have a basis in genetics” In what sense is race not genetic?
I'm going to assume that what they're trying to imply is that some sizable share of genetic information is shared across all humans and the information that is typically used to separate us into racial and ethnic categories is a very small subset (imagine some genetic 'knobs' for hair color, skin color, stature, morphology, etc). Their argument seems really fucking stupid when you consider that we share an estimated 98.8% of our DNA with chimpanzees.
Re: 'All of Us' genetics chart stirs unease over controversial depiction of race
#6Re: 'All of Us' genetics chart stirs unease over controversial depiction of race
#7“Our analysis reaffirms that race and ethnicity are social constructs that do not have a basis in genetics” In what sense is race not genetic?
Race is genetic in the same way ROYGBIV is about wavelengths: wavelengths cause the different colours, but there's no real reason to say "this is red, but this is orange" - the wavelengths don't care how we categorise these things! In the same way, genetics certainly determines a lot about our appearances, but definitions of "black", "white", "Asian", "hispanic", etc are just categories that we humans have defined on top of a much more complex underlying structure.
Re: 'All of Us' genetics chart stirs unease over controversial depiction of race
#8“Our analysis reaffirms that race and ethnicity are social constructs that do not have a basis in genetics” In what sense is race not genetic?
Person of race A and race B have two children. People tend to think child 1 is race A, people tend to think child 2 is mixed race AB. In the social sense, it could be said that child 1's race is race A, even though genetically it's probably more like AB.
Another common situation: People of race A think child 2 is race B, people of race B think child 2 is race A. And you can imagine more complex examples with more races and more generations. In this manner the categorization of race is primarily social.
Re: 'All of Us' genetics chart stirs unease over controversial depiction of race
#9“Our analysis reaffirms that race and ethnicity are social constructs that do not have a basis in genetics” In what sense is race not genetic?
Many black people are probably way more white than black (and look it) but still choose to identity as black.
Irish and Italian immigrants in America used to not be considered white.
Only in America are Middle Eastern people considered white.
In Europe, there are more groups inside of white, where there is like northern white and central/southern/eastern white.
So genetics plays a role but race is still a social construct.
Re: 'All of Us' genetics chart stirs unease over controversial depiction of race
#10“Our analysis reaffirms that race and ethnicity are social constructs that do not have a basis in genetics” In what sense is race not genetic?
Person of race A and race B have two children. People tend to think child 1 is race A, people tend to think child 2 is mixed race AB. In the social sense, it could be said that child 1's race is race A, even though genetically it's probably more like AB. Another common situation: People of race A think child 2 is race B, people of race B think child 2 is race A. And you can imagine more complex examples with more rac…
And this (and more) happened multiple times in effectively everyones ancestry.