How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’
mobile.nytimes.com
How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’
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Re: How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’
#2No matter how much the society at large wants to tiptoe the subject, the concept of race has never fell into disuse wherever facts really matters, such as in healthcare or the legal system.
Re: How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’
#3It's interesting to think that an article so reasonable, and so grounded in knowledge, would also get you called names if you posted it on Twitter. Empirically, this field would appear to be the one most likely to yield Galileos in our time. (As in Galileo's case, without any deliberate attempt on their part to be heretics, just by following the truth where their era's zealots don't want it to lead.)
Re: How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’
#4No matter how much the society at large wants to tiptoe the subject, the concept of race has never fell into disuse wherever facts really matters, such as in healthcare or the legal system.
I don’t understand your examples. How does race affect medical treatment of an individual? Should people be treated differently in the eyes of the law depending on skin color?
Re: How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’
#5No matter how much the society at large wants to tiptoe the subject, the concept of race has never fell into disuse wherever facts really matters, such as in healthcare or the legal system.
Because race is a very good predictor of class in the US.
Are you poor? Probably black.
Are you in trouble with the legal system? Probably poor -> black.
Can you afford good health care and preventive medicine? Probably not poor -> probably not black.
Funnily enough this also explains why redneck whites are looked down on by everyone else.
Re: How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’
#6It's interesting to think that an article so reasonable, and so grounded in knowledge, would also get you called names if you posted it on Twitter. Empirically, this field would appear to be the one most likely to yield Galileos in our time. (As in Galileo's case, without any deliberate attempt on their part to be heretics, just by following the truth where their era's zealots don't want it to lead.)
Interesting take on the Galileo angle. I always thought of him as anti-authoritarian, but I'm sure he was a bit of a pariah in many cultural circles as well.
Re: How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’
#7This is an interesting argument but I think it fails to coherently restate what it means for race to be socially constructed. Nobody is denying that genetic differences between people exist and are important for health. They’re saying that reusing racial categorization schemes in genetics is scientifically ungrounded because these racial categories have no inherent biological content— they’re more like receptacles for political and social debate.
It’s not clear what value it adds to use (e.g.) US Census racial categories in genetics research. The salience of racial identification changes over time and is deeply politicized (as the author notes). More sophisticated and granular categories that are actually based on genetics would be much more appropriate than trying to recuperate categories that weren’t developed for science.
Re: How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’
#8It's interesting to think that an article so reasonable, and so grounded in knowledge, would also get you called names if you posted it on Twitter. Empirically, this field would appear to be the one most likely to yield Galileos in our time. (As in Galileo's case, without any deliberate attempt on their part to be heretics, just by following the truth where their era's zealots don't want it to lead.)
It's reasonable but also kind of.. straw-manny. Outside of a few crazy fringes, nobody is suggesting that its not "Politically Correct" to point out that certain races are carriers for various genetic disorders or disease risk factors.
I've never heard of anybody calling someone racist if they said "People with African heritage can be carriers for sickle cell anemia." Likewise, I've never seen anyone called an anti-semite for pointing out that Jewish people can suffer from or be carriers for "founder effect" genetic disorders.
If anything, there's a distinct social justice angle to recognizing minority population health concerns in medicine, so I'm actually kind of surprised things aren't tilting the other way: where the "anti-PC" crowd is angry that researchers aren't focused more on traits that apply to the broader human population, as opposed to the genetics of distinct minorities.
Re: How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’
#9No matter how much the society at large wants to tiptoe the subject, the concept of race has never fell into disuse wherever facts really matters, such as in healthcare or the legal system.
I don’t understand your examples. How does race affect medical treatment of an individual? Should people be treated differently in the eyes of the law depending on skin color?
Different disease prevalence. Different response to drugs.
Jews for example more likely to have Tay Sachs disease.
Sickle cell disease affects blacks disproportionately.
Re: How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’
#10No matter how much the society at large wants to tiptoe the subject, the concept of race has never fell into disuse wherever facts really matters, such as in healthcare or the legal system.
I don’t understand your examples. How does race affect medical treatment of an individual? Should people be treated differently in the eyes of the law depending on skin color?
There are some situations where both illnesses and treatments behave differently depending on race-linked genetics; sickle-cell aenemia vs malaria is the famous one, but there's a long tail of medicines that are slightly less effective in nonwhite people because of who happened to be in the clinical trials.