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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

#91

Post by joak »

wdbbdw wrote: post #75
FabrosoFernan wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The common answer is Obama is African American (or black or negro). The reason is the implicit "one drop rule", if a white is contaminated with a little amount of black blood from their ancestors, they are not white anymore but black.

The race classification of humans is racist. As the term implies.

Many people arriving to the US are shocked to be asked their 'race', as if we were dogs. I never know what to answer, are arabs white? Are spaniards latin? Are ouzbeks from Caucase asian? Etc... This is non sense racist shit.

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

#92

Post by joak »

BenSahar wrote: post #71
sjducb wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Barack Obama has around 50% of his ancestors from Africa, most 'black' americans have a lot less than that. Example: if one of grand parents is black, one of your parents is, so you're black.

This is know as the one drop rule, if one of your ancestors is black you are black. So maybe 95% of your ancestors are from Europe and you are still considered as black.

Latin has even a fuzzier definition. Latin american countries have been build -as the US- with immigration. Immigrants from latin american countries are white, black, asian, etc... Or whatever classification the USA might invent. There is no less diversity in the rest of the Americas than in the USA.

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

#93

Post by naasking »

klodolph wrote: post #78
naasking wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you

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

#94

Post by landoftheice »

dekhn wrote: post #67
sjducb wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not a great argument. Drug response is based mostly in genetic history, partly in life experience (IE, if you live near a highly polluting plant and develop an allergy while growing up there). While many papers on drug response use race as a variable, that variable is highly confounded and is often not sufficient to make an accurate determination for medication prescription purposes. Such research is not being banned…

[dead]

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

#95

Post by 4dayworkweek4u »

krapp wrote: post #90
matt-attack wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I’m being gas lighted by these explanations that race doesn’t exist. A five year old can plainly see race but grownups must pretend it doesn’t exist? It’s a bit Orwellian (a bit like 2+2=5)

You're not being gaslighted, rather you're being made aware that a five year old's naive and immature view of reality is insufficiently grounded in knowledge or nuance to be useful as a basis for adult discussions, much less science. I'm guessing you're older than five, so you probably should adjust to the shock and make an attempt to advance your understanding of the world beyond the level of a child who can't even…

[flagged]

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

#96

Post by 4dayworkweek4u »

naasking wrote: post #93
klodolph wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you

[flagged]

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

#98

Post by sjducb »

dekhn wrote: post #67
sjducb wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not a great argument. Drug response is based mostly in genetic history, partly in life experience (IE, if you live near a highly polluting plant and develop an allergy while growing up there). While many papers on drug response use race as a variable, that variable is highly confounded and is often not sufficient to make an accurate determination for medication prescription purposes. Such research is not being banned…

You're right that race often has a small (but statistically significant) affect, because of all of the confounding variables.

Imagine that you're a hospital who takes predominantly black patients, if you could modify the standard treatment to reduce Adverse Drug Experiences by 5-10% would you do it? Or would you say that it's unacceptable to use race as a variable at all, and continue to give the black people the same treatment as white people, resulting in more Adverse Drug Experiences in your black patients?

You can say that Ancestry is better, but often neither you or the patient actually know their ancestry.

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

#99

Post by fenomas »

sjducb wrote: post #98
dekhn wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a great argument. Drug response is based mostly in genetic history, partly in life experience (IE, if you live near a highly polluting plant and develop an allergy while growing up there). While many papers on drug response use race as a variable, that variable is highly confounded and is often not sufficient to make an accurate determination for medication prescription purposes. Such research is not being banned…

You're right that race often has a small (but statistically significant) affect, because of all of the confounding variables. Imagine that you're a hospital who takes predominantly black patients, if you could modify the standard treatment to reduce Adverse Drug Experiences by 5-10% would you do it? Or would you say that it's unacceptable to use race as a variable at all, and continue to give the black people the sam…

> Or would you say that it's unacceptable to use race as a variable at all,

You're arguing against a claim that neither TFA nor anyone here made. TFA doesn't suggest doctors should ignore past research that examined race - it argues that future research should examine specific identifiers instead of made-up ones.

> often neither you or the patient actually know their ancestry

Sure - which is why using race as a proxy for ancestry is a bad idea. If a drug has known risks to people of West African ancestry, and you have a patient with unknown ancestry, then you don't know whether that drug presents risks to the patient. Whereas, if the research on that drug had only reported "risks to black people" without examining ancestry, then you would believe you could tell by looking at a patient whether the drug presented a risk - and you'd be wrong.

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

#100

Post by fsckboy »

danaris wrote: post #80
naniwaduni wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 be…

fish exist. trees exist. races exist. we have laws about overfishing, laws about cutting trees down, and laws protecting against racial discrimination and these laws largely work. the legal system has developed techniques for dealing with gray areas too.

science is for describing what is, and in detail, but science's failure to do that just means we need more science, not that we should quit and claim the above words have no meaning.

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