“Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans”

Hiding this knowledge from the world doesn’t make it not exist. It just makes people less prepared for when malicious actors use it against them. You promote ignorance as a solution to technical problems. I don’t.

> 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.

This is simply false. It's fiction. A substitution of political ideology for fact. People are attempting to turn "we don't have a precise test for race" into "race does not exist". Even ignoring the fact that today anyone can go to 23andMe and get a genetic test that will assign them a percentage composition by race / ethnic group, it's obvious that race is a useful, if imprecise, real-world categorization. We can acknowledge this without being discriminatory.

This entire conversation is the equivalent of someone claiming that water was a "sociopolitical construct" before scientists knew what atoms and elements were, because we couldn't define it chemically. If HN existed in the pre-times, you'd have people chiming in that "other clear liquids exist and can be confused with water! the classification is incomplete!" as proof of claim.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737365/ - "Genetic data sets are used to see if biological races exist in humans and in our closest evolutionary relative, the chimpanzee. Using the two most commonly used biological concepts of race, chimpanzees are indeed subdivided into races but humans are not."

https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-res... - "In the biological and social sciences, the consensus is clear: race is a social construct, not a biological attribute."

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/48157/pdf - "none of the race concepts is compatible with the patterns of variation revealed by our analyses."

> it's obvious that race is a useful, if imprecise, real-world categorization. We can acknowledge this without being discriminatory.

The approach of genetic scientists seems to be to use the words "ancestry" or "population", which do not risk as much ambiguity or overlap with the meaning of "race" as applied to other species.

>This entire conversation is the equivalent of someone claiming that water was a "sociopolitical construct" before scientists knew what atoms and elements were

A more accurate comparison is that of scientists deciding that Pluto isn't actually a planet, because it no longer meets the criteria. There was a bit of a stir about this but eventually it's been accepted, and rightly so as linguistic precision is a good thing!

Some people take these measured differences as sufficient cause to declare the entire concept of IQ as worthless racist pseudoscience, despite all the evidence to the contrary [1]. But it's also been shown that, for example, the black-white IQ gap is closing in America [2], a process we also observed the Irish go through [3].

If only racists like Richard Lynn did research on race and intelligence, we wouldn't know this. Lynn claims to have investigated this topic and shown that the gap is NOT closing. Discovering the opposite required less biased researchers to engage tenaciously and scientifically with technical issues, questions of measurement, etc., along with the understanding that IQ is a meaningful measurement worth engaging with.

Would we prefer that anti-racists be scared off this research, and have only racists doing it? Wouldn't that feed a narrative that the racists have the truth the Establishment wants to hide?

I don't think this is a simple and straightforward issue. Moralizing a topic like race and IQ and pre-emptively closing it off to inquiry could really be shooting ourselves in the foot. Instead of preventing science from harming marginalized groups, we could be preventing science from protecting marginalized groups.

And I'm not saying the authors of this article are doing that. But I think we all need to grapple with this backfire risk when we go about applying the principles in this article. Which, as I've said elsewhere, are good as far as general principles go.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-That-Matters-Stuart-Ritc...

[2] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/2006061...

[3] https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/06/heres-why-the...

That's wrong. Regarding the specific papers:

The first explicitly admits that race exists in the opening sentence (oops), then proceeds to say "the two most commonly used biological concepts of race" don't work in humans, therefore race doesn't exist ("There are no objective criteria for choosing one adaptive trait over another to define race. As a consequence, adaptive traits do not define races in humans.")

This is exactly the fallacious thinking I'm calling out. Great example.

The second is not a paper at all, but still admits that there's at least some biological basis for race, even though it's not precise. That's fine -- I'm not claiming it is precise:

> Research indicates that the concept of “five races” does, to an extent, describe the way human populations are distributed among the continents—but the lines between races are much more blurred than ancestry testing companies would have us believe

The third is saying that a single, specific measurement of genetic diversity fails to define race. Again, that's fine. Saying "test X doesn't define race" != "race does not exist":

> These limitations on FST are demonstrated algebraically and in the context of analyzing dinucleotide repeat allele frequencies for a set of eight loci genotyped in eight human groups and in chimpanzees. In our analyses, estimates of FST fail to identify important variation.

Overall, these illustrate exactly what I've said: race is clearly real and we know it when we see it, but it's not precise, and we don't have a biological test that defines it. Those who extend this to "race is a sociopolitical construct" are engaged in a through-the-looking-glass form of motivated reasoning. And it's a very convenient form of reasoning, because if you make it "wrong" to say that race exists, you prevent anyone from doing the research that might produce such a test.