That being said, there are important differences within the traditional "races", such as the finding in this study that people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities for obesity.
Overall I would love it if medical research papers moved away from "race" and started getting more into the fine-grained genetic details. Regardless of the politics involved, this will lead to better medical treatments for everyone.
"Traditional races" as you call them have changed over time and space, and we are only in this predicament because we lump different ethnicities together today. 150 years ago people could tell the difference between someone of West African or East African descent. And Southern Italians, Irish vs Western Europeans vs Germans... etc.
It's harder now because a) there has been a lot more mixing since then; and b) socioculturally we consolidated many of those ethnicities
Back in those respective countries, they can tell everyone apart. When my wife (Irish/English by ancestry) visited Hungary, they were immediately able to peg her as a foreigner, and frankly, so was I. They look nothing alike aside from skin color. This is true of basically any country in Europe, Africa, Asia, where people have tended to remain in the same location for thousands of years.
I think even most Americans would be able to tell apart African and European races if they really tried.
Take a course in European history, learn about all the wars, genocides, forced and unenforced migrations, plagues, etc. and even more mundane thinggs like intermarriage outside of immediate community ( very common amongst nobility ) and tell me again with a straight face you believe people have remained in the same place for thousands of years
They may have recognized your wife as “foreign” based on a number of things. The most obvious being language, But it could have also been dress, makeup, demeanor etc.
It’s rare (but not impossible) for a people to have been in the same place on Earth for thousands of years. It’s more like hundreds.
Is it really rare? That seems to be the norm except for America and Africa that got replaced or displaced by colonization. But in Europe and Asia most areas has been populated by steady groups. Rulers come and go, but the people living there stays the same.
I think its rare for everyone to have been there for a thousand years, but its not rare for a majority of the genes to have stayed in one place for a thosand years.
But it’s not like we’re being super precise here. It’s fuzzy enough that lots of takes are correct, depending how you frame it. That’s kind of my point in my other reply. They weren’t wrong but they were being rude about it.
This contrasts to earlier "literary" arguments in magazines such as Quadrant that native Australians moved about and fought for territories with invaders supplanting original dwellers long before Europeans arrived.
- https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2016-09-22/world-first-s...
is a national press article on some of that, my original references to the hosted papers on this seems to be offline / unavailable ATM (damn bitrot).
It was more difficult, but it happened many-many times.
The names of the systems related to this registry are slightly different in Chinese, Japanese and Korean but you can see links to Wikipedia entries for each of them from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%88%B6%E7%B1%8D
It’s usually, as it is in this case, genetically meaningless. Culturally, it means someone picked an arbitrary point in the past, counted up the cohort of people within some group (and a metric for testing in-ness), and then deemed descendents of only that group to be pure, descendents of that group in part to be impure, and people who have no ancestors in that group to be outsiders.
In practice, recordkeeping past a handful of generations gets annoying, so most cultures set this line somewhere within 200 years ago. (The concept correlates with nativeness to varying degrees.)
For example, a study indicating that "black people in the US are X% more likely to have {some condition}" is useful, even if "black person in the US" doesn't tell much about an individual's ancestry. That's because health conditions are heavily influenced by environmental factors, and someone's race impacts the environmental factors they're exposed to.
This does get complicated, and requires digging deep into the data. Top-level statistics don't indicate root cause, which still needs to be researched. But top-level statistics can indicate that there's a problem that needs to be worked on, which is why medical studies tracking race are still useful.
similarly, when working on genomes a few years back, it used to be said that the two most genetically distinct humans alive right then would both be from Africa, which was memorable because one might guess Inuit vs Africa or something like that naively.
The you could say that a distinctive trait of Khoi-San ethnicity is its genetic variance. Not to mention the fact that this variance, coming from before two population bottlenecks, must contain a large number of traits not seen in other human populations.
Although this makes you wonder- if they're the most genetically diverse, do they also look diverse? Are there light and dark skinned individuals, blonde and red and black hair, green/ blue/ brown eyes, short and tall, etc.?
Last of course there's the idea that this variance must be restricted to the visible phenotype. Which sounds a bit like saying that the objects in a dark room must be all in the spot illuminated by the torch, and everywhere else the room is empty.
>> Although this makes you wonder- if they're the most genetically diverse, do they also look diverse? Are there light and dark skinned individuals, blonde and red and black hair, green/ blue/ brown eyes, short and tall, etc.?
Yes, they do look diverse.
The visual differences will be more readily apparent to people who are familiar with the high genetic variance population since this would allow more (maybe fine-grained) diverse looks. If the person looking does not have much experience distinguishing looks in a "high genetic variance" population then they probably end up generalizing as a default. Not being able to pick up on how diverse these looks are does not make them not there. Only that, the observer is familiar with the visual differences in their non-african population of less genetically diverse humans with some grouped environmental adaptions/mutations. Such as lighter pigment to better absorb vitamin D, and this type of thing being carried as the standard for "diverse looking" (blue/brown/light/dark).
After all, "SLC24A5 encodes a cation exchanger in melanosomes ... A derived, nonsynonymous mutation (rs1426654 ...) in SLC24A5 associated with light skin color has swept to near fixation in Europeans due to positive selection [...] rs1426654 is common in East African populations with high levels of Afroasiatic ancestry [...] Further, SLC24A5 likely experienced positive selection in East Africa after this admixture event. ... rs1426654 is at moderate frequency (5–12%) in the KhoeSan from Botswana, who have substantially lighter skin than equatorial Africans". and also "studies show that the ancestral alleles of many predicted functional pigmentation variants in Africa are associated with lighter skin, suggesting our human ancestors may have had light or moderately pigmented skin" and that dark skin may be a derived trait that also continued to evolve.[0]
But when you only have a hammer...
It's like being introduced to this workshop full of tools with a stacks of wood for any type of joinery desired. Yet, your experience is much more simplistic: hammer, nail (or bolt/screw, whatever), boards; repeat. Without much thought, the human brain has already created the groups: the trusty hammer with some metal fasteners to drive, and that foreign group of absolutely nothing like the trusty hammer and fasteners. But upon closer look there are hammers and nails and screws and all these other metal fasteners in the workshop -- except, instead of them being chosen to put the boards together, a variation of tools are creating a variation of joints in order to put the boards together. The finished product ends up being ~99.9% identical to your nailed product, but it's probably only those familiar with the experience of joinery that are most likely to appreciate an notice the visual diversity between joints, instead of simply noticing that one of the products has a couple spots of metal and the other doesn't.
To give an example, take 3 people named A, B, and C. A and B are both from Africa, while C is from elsewhere.
A and B have 9 genetic differences. B and C have 1 genetic difference. A and C have 10 genetic differences.
We can make the claim that the genetic difference between someone from Africa and from elsewhere (B to C, thus 1) is much smaller than the difference between two people in Africa (A to B, thus 9). 1 is smaller than 9, so this statement is true, but could easily be misunderstood to saying that the two most genetically distinct individuals are from Africa, which isn't the case because A to C is the most genetically distinct and C is from elsewhere.
The two statements seem nearly equivalent and the wrong one could accidentally be spread by someone who is really just trying to focus on expressing how much genetic diversity is within Africa.
They are talking with respect to internal diversity I believe.
As an Anglophone you may notice a similar thing in language, and in English you can notice the large diversity in accent in native UK speakers.
Non-Africans split from Africa relatively late in human genetic history. So A and B's divergence point(s) can readily be quite a bit earlier than C's. So, as you pointed out, C is likely more closely related one of A or B. Let's say B.
The big difference between B & C is that B is much more likely to incorporate genes from other early branches than C is. Therefore B is likely further away genetically from A than C is.
To put it another way, if we start with groups A and B, and then branch off B' from B, while B and B' are likely similar, that doesn't tell us anything about the relationship between A and B', and it doesn't imply that A and B' are closer than A and B.
There’s no logical argument needed to prove the genetic diversity in Africa, it is an observed fact.
Bottlenecks, small population inbreeding, genetic drift, founder effect, etc
Basically what happened was, an alt-group of African humans decided earth was not safe anymore and its collapse was imminent -- they need to get to Mars. But since they don't have a way to get a spaceship in Africa, they will need to leave Africa and do whatever is necessary to build one, including throwing the people who helped them under the mammoth if need be.
At this point they have a pretty diverse gene pool and represent the humans well. They walk for a bit but came upon some steam vents and decided take a break and steam some food and enjoy the ocean view in the distance. The leader is not happy they stopped for food or rest. Later they are shooketh awake just before fire rains down on them. 3/4th of them make it safely to the ocean, and what luck the water is receding it'll be easier to cross, for the first 2/3rds at least. The tsunami gods demanded a toll and claimed the back 1/3. Not happy with the direction of leadership, half the group decided they could establish a better foundation away from these clowns and forked themselves.
Meanwhile, back in Africa and finally having got rid of that crazy mars dude and his cult followers, they decide to invite all the neighbors to an epoch swinging dance party to celebrate -- complete with the best plant-based party favours they could dig up/gather. Thus, ensuring the larger African population and their descendant would end up with an abundant supply of pokemon variants to swap between'em.
Though, you may want to take a look at the linked paper above for a more precise explanation. I may have paraphrased a bit.
(* who mattered. There were earlier migrations of hominids, but the mark they left on our genetics is much smaller than the influence from later migrations.)
Humans originated in Africa, so populations there have had more time to evolve and become more diverse.
200,000 years of genetic drift versus 20,000 years makes a big difference.
A genetic test takes several days and costs a few hundred dollars.
The patient wants the best treatment right now. If race carries useful information that helps the doctor treat the patient, then the doctor should have access to it.
This might sound like nitpicking, but most black people in the US have significant European ancestry and the admixture can vary wildly even for people with similar skin tones. Our naive view of "race" is not always backed by genetic reality.
Yes, you give them the list and say "What is your race/ethnicity, you may select at least one and as many as you wish." They answer. You are done.
> What race is someone who's Arab?
Whatever they answer (Middle East or Northern African [MENA], under the 2024 revision to the categories, intuitively seems most likely.)
> What about someone who could look black with one haircut but white with another?
Again, whatever they answer.
> What about half-Arab, half-Euro?
Again, whatever they answer. Though the most obvious guess of what they might answer, given the premise, would be one of White, MENA, or both.
The part to question is not, "is it quick and free to determine race" but "does race carry useful information that helps the doctor treat the patient", which is a much thornier question.
While I broadly agree with you, there have been notable controversies around people who self-identified as having a particular ancestry [0] that didn't match how other people classified them.
It's pretty low quality information. If you're taking a genetic test you want something that returns susceptibility to sickle cell amenia, cystic fibrosis, tay-sachs, et cetera. Race is a very low quality signal that is used when you lack something better, like a genetic test.
everyone from everywhere has african ancestry
I assume you imply that humans evolved not in Africa. Where?
Since the OOA theory doesn’t have any explanation for this evidence…
OOA does have an explanation for Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA that isn't found in African populations, and that is that the cross-breeding between anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals and Denisovans occurred after modern humans left Africa.
> as well, something like up to 20% of West African genome has an as yet unknown source which is usually referred to as “archaic” or ghost DNA which is not found elsewhere in other populations.
"Archaic" DNA refers to DNA that appears to have originated with some human group other than modern humans and not be shared among modern human populations (the Denisovan and Neanderthal-origin genomes of Eurasian humans would be included here), but specific to some subpopulation. It is not the case that "20% of West African genome" is archaic, though there is a study in which some specific isolated West African subpopulations had archaic fractions that high, which is not something that OOA has no explanation for (the explanation is that those subgroups were isolated from the ones that participated in the various outbound migrations, and so their particular archaic genome is not shared with the groups that migrated out.)
There may be valid challenges to OOA, but those aren't it.
* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archai...
"In biological taxonomy, race is an informal rank in the taxonomic hierarchy for which various definitions exist. Sometimes it is used to denote a level below that of subspecies, while at other times it is used as a synonym for subspecies."
Categorization is a fundamental part of our intelligence, but not necessarily a reflection of reality.
Race isn’t a subspecies. It’s an artificial social construct created by European elites in the beginning of the last millennium. Its purpose is to sow division. And to other groups of people to make it more palatable to commit crimes against the objectified folk.
For instance, in late 1800's Swedish scientists stole bunch of skulls from Finnish cemeteries, trying to prove that Finnish people are of different/lesser race than their Scandinavian neighbours. It took until 2024 for those skulls to be returned to Finland for reburial.
https://ki.se/en/about-ki/history-and-cultural-heritage/medi...
Then why do biologists distinguish subspecies of other animals? E.g. look at the subspecies of Panthera tigris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger#Subspecies
They do, when there are things that seem to be subspecies, they don't do it just because there is an arbitrary requirement for every species to have subspecies. There's been dispute about whether various archaic human groups were separate species or subspecies, and if what we now call modern humans weren't the only ones still around, that might be a more acute debate and might be resolved in favor of subspecies, but the others aren't still around, so...
But regardless, the more important point is that whatever biologically-motivated categories humans might be grouped by would not correspond to 'races' as normally understood.
What's left? Seems like something left over from the old science perspective that "humans are not animals", more than anything.
I have to say, this is a super weird paper to suddenly pull out of nowhere in order to make an argument against the modern biological consensus that there are no subspecies of humans. It says nothing about species or subspecies, or even different populations of humans. Did you just Google some keywords and go with the first result? I'm genuinely puzzled.
I'm haphazardly suggesting that the above is the same as:
> "There are some (small) genetic populations whose genetics diverged so much, from geographic separation, that they have fertility problems [1].
We have genetic populations that are the result of geographic separation, and we even have genetic divergence that makes reproduction difficult/impossible.
Again, what's left? Why can't we categorize human genetic populations to the same level? Please be specific in what's missing?
> It says nothing about species or subspecies
Why would it? If the categorization of humans included subspecies, I couldn't have responded.
If it's an established biological fact that there are different subspecies of humans, then it should be possible to find a reference for that.
Precise equality isn't required for a conceptual discussion, especially one that's so ill defined/subjective as the concept of subspecies [1].
It's an established political fact that classifying humans, at any level, could never be presented. That's not a bad thing, but it's also a mostly arbitrary thing.
[1] https://bioone.org/journals/the-auk/volume-132/issue-2/AUK-1...
Tribes from the Horn of Africa have more common with Swedes than they have with East African tribes.
What I mean is that, you can have two closely related populations with their own distinct phenotypes that are actually closely related.
An interesting example are the Negritos of SE Asia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrito
Here is what they look like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrito#/media/File:Taman_Nega...
Any person simply going off of looks, would obviously assume these people are African.
However, they are indeed most closely related to their sister population, the fair-skinned small-eyed (please no offense, we all know what I'm talking about) East Asians.
Their look is due to convergent selection that favors darker skin, wider noses, etc.
They are actually vastly genetically different than the Africans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrito#/media/File:PCA_of_Ora...
This is what I mean by phenotype and genotype are not perfectly correlated.
More precision is better, but we don't have rapid genetic tests that can distinguish West vs. East African ancestry on the spot, so race is the only proxy available when you're, say, treating a patient in the ER.
[0] https://skepticalinquirer.org/2023/06/the-ideological-subver...
Did you even bother to read the piece? He explicitly opens his fifth point with an example of The Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) weaponizing its reputation to do precisely just that. He documented another instance of this in Nature recently as well [0]. If you look at the top subthread here too, Nature Human Behaviour is doing this as well.
Given all that, it seems he's right that the problem with ideologues exists. The success or lack thereof of these ideologues is a separate matter. Your claim that such research still exists doesn't negate the problem he identified. If anything, I don't think we should be comfortable with any kind of intentional distortions to the biology of race and ethnicity. The bad (false) PR could come back and bite, affecting the research and how it might be received. Otherwise, I don't really see any real disagreement here.
[0] https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/05/11/nature-tackles-rac...
The real issue for people concerned about the politicization of this issue is that the science isn't going their way right now.
As for your mind reading about the author’s intent, he is, to the best of my understanding, a standard-issue liberal. As such, I don't really get where you're coming from with this.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there are no differences between ethnicities, just that those differences are based on ancestry not race. People of a specific "race" don't share the same ancestry all the time, some times they have more in common with a different "race" than their own. Race as we know it today is a means of classifying humans that came about at a time when colonial expansion was booming. Classifying people based on their outward appearance was all too convenient. It's like someone learning how to code who found out there are thousands of programming languages and categorized them using terms like "curly brace language","lots of parenthesis language","indentation oriented language". It's lazy and childish. But once you learn more about the languages you should abandon the old ways of classifying things.
The journal Nature Human Behaviour published ethics guidelines in Aug 2022 which touch on this:
> 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.
> Studies that use the constructs of race and/or ethnicity should explicitly motivate their use. Race/ethnicity should not be used as proxies for other variables — for example, socioeconomic status or income.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2
There was a furore here in the discussion of it on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32595083
Cats are interesting, tabby cats are most like humans, because they are very "mixed" but not with a purpose, just at random and by convenience. Orange cats have specific behavioral traits, but they weren't bred on purpose either.
The "on purpose" part is important because in those cases, we keep breeding them until specific traits are exaggerated to the max. With human reproduction, if having a blonde hair is considered ideal in a specific part of a country over several hundred years, then yeah, you'll see blondes mate more than non-blondes and you'll have lots of blondes, but you'll still see blondes marry non-blondes so their great-grandchildren could have red or black hair just the same. Now instead of hair consider behavioral traits. Those are even more complicated because us humans don't operate on a purely instinctual directive like animals. if a person has a genetic propensity for violence for example, that doesn't mean much because they can still decide to act against their "genetics" (otherwise, it doesn't make sense to punish them). Even dogs bred for their violent nature can be trained out of it to a large extent.
But the whole arena is fraught with the risk of disaster. It's apparently OK to admit that a group of people are likely to be better at X because they're on average taller, but going further gets very dangerous.
> Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations. Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters.
That’s not true. AI can determine race from even from x-rays: https://www.nibib.nih.gov/news-events/newsroom/study-finds-a...
> In a recent study, published in Lancet Digital Health, NIH-funded researchers found that AI models could accurately predict self-reported race in several different types of radiographic images—a task not possible for human experts.
AI confirming human bias because it was trained on it doesn't mean much.
One quote from that:
> We are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.
My summary would be that race is a heuristic. It's not perfect but it's a broadly accurate and often useful category. For example, whether someone has dark skin says quite a bit about their propensity for skin cancer. Whether someone is Jewish says a lot about their propensity for certain rare genetic diseases.
That's it. It's a classification system, a taxonomy, a social construction, a coarse categorization (all these things). But it's a bad one that only loosely correlates with a small handful of phenotypes. There isn't zero correlation which is why I disagree, as a matter of precision, with people who say race doesn't exist. The quality of a given taxonomy exists on a spectrum and race is a pretty damn bad one when you consider how inaccurately it separates the phenotypes it claims to care about, and how many genotypes/phenotypes (the vast majority) it fails to separate at all beyond a coin flip.
There are bunch of unrelated people that do research with vastly different opinions and methods. (Thing in common: scientific method and review,publications)
When it comes down to layperson, research results are averaged out and de-nuanced by jounalists.
This concept of race is designed so that one race can claim better evolution than the other, as a whole that is. People with specific ancestry might be better at specific things (provided they pursue those things to their potential), but associating that with an entire race was only useful at the time of this social constructs' creation because Europe needed to conquer the world and what do Europeans have in common the rest of the world doesn't have? Skin color. Which due to the latitude of Europe as a continent, people whose ancestors are from there have less melanin in their skin to account for lesser sunlight (You can see the same effect with north-east Asians). If you think about it, the western classification of "race" has more to do with geography than genealogy.
The US government scheme has more than four top-level racial categories, and "Hispanic or Latino", in that system, is an ethnicity, not one of the races.
I think that is an understandable feeling and I think that says a lot about the concept of race. Her statement doesn't make race any less real, but it does indicate what race IS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9mtCLL8rI0
Culture is definitely the major part of 'race'.
There are hispanic creoles, native american creoles, german creoles, italian creoles, so forth and so on. Because to be a Louisiana creole isn't to rely on any racial marker at all. It just signifies that your ancestors lived here at a particular time.
So if someone says that they're Cajun, not creole, they're lying to you. ALL cajuns, without exception, are creole.
And most people who claim to be Cajun are either not Cajun at all or they've mistaken their surname for being Cajun. Like a guy who told me I was wrong about a food item and he knew better because he's a Cajun, being a Champagne from Golden Meadow.
Only problem is that Champagne isn't a cajun surname. The Champagne family came over directly from France.
You might have seen Isaac Toups on TV hawking a cookbook. The Toups surname is actually German (originally spelled Dubs but the French authorities did their thing), and they landed in the US in 1718-19 in Biloxi, MS.
And so on, and so on...
I think that some "cajuns" would be more willing to call themselves creole if they knew that in addition to the native americans, the other group that saved their asses when they came to the territory were the German creoles. Those people had it far, far harsher than the Acadian disapora ever did. When they got to the territory, they were not allowed to use beasts of burden for a full decade. This means that when they were dropped off and told to go farm rice (which none of them had ever done before), they had to till their fields and deliver their product to New Orleans from the River Parishes, up to 60 miles away without horses. By the time the Cajuns got here, there were plenty of horses for working the land and other livestock that you were legally allowed to eat.
Anyway, that's just one little speck of a much larger ethnic pie.
And i got to share that "creole" has many meanings, including the stuff that forms on the inside of a BBQ itself.
The registrar of births in Orleans Parish used to essentially blackmail several prominent families about how far back the black was in their birth certificates and lineage.
I assume this refers to figure 7 of the study [1]. Figure 7C shows 63/124,341 self-identified Whites had predicted African ancestry from their genome, 45,206/45,761 Blacks, and 19/7,419 Asians.
Figure 7D shows predicted European ancestry, which was 120,127/124,341 for Whites, 110/45,761, and 39/7,419 for Asians. This seems like remarkably good correspondence to me?
> Race, ethnicity don’t match genetic ancestry
The title is missing "self-reported" at the start. Without that, the article isn't even self-consistent - "race is meaningless, it does not perfectly match genetic ancestry from historical geographical groups"? You haven't done away with race, you just renamed it to "African ancestry", "European ancestry", "Asian ancestry", etc.., and found that they have somewhat intermixed in the US. But it has been known since literally ancient Greece that races can intermix, and that their variation is geographically gradual, so the study hasn't discovered or disproven anything new.
It's amusing to contrast this with science's findings on non-human animals: there are 16 subspecies of brown bear, 38 subspecies of wolf, 46 subspecies of red fox, 9 subspecies of tiger, and 12 subspecies of house sparrow.
[1] https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(25)00173-9
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with...
I’m Asian and I grew up in the U.S. and for years I didn’t realize the stomach problems I was having were from drinking milk when most asians cannot drink milk, while most European Americans can: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/16jcecc/map_of_lac.... Is race a rough proxy? Sure. But it’s an easy proxy to administer which in the medical context gives it a certain value for making people aware of differences that may be salient.
Our kids are half white so we were unsure if they’d be lactose intolerant. At the first sign of stomach problems in the youngest, we switched him to lactose free milk and the problem went away immediately. If we took him to a doctor we might’ve gone down a whole rabbit hole of dead ends. And if we weren’t aware of the issue and looking out for it, we may have not done anything and just let him deal with the discomfort. After all, kids get tummy aches for a million reasons.
The idea what we are a homogenous species with no biologically important distinctions between groups - which became popular in the postwar period - is coming to end. But, we are also not returning to racial essentialism of the past. The new narrative of human differences will be far more complicated.
> Tony Clayton, a black man and a prosecutor who tried one of the Baton Rouge murder cases, concedes the benefits of the test: "Had it not been for Frudakis, we would still be looking for the white guy in the white pickup." Nevertheless, Clayton says he dislikes anything that implies we don't all "bleed the same blood." He adds, "If I could push a button and make this technology disappear, I would."
I'm sure they'll use it whenever possible, regardless of his quote.
Our understanding of race have been historically contingent. Both the racial essentialism of the colonial period and the "we are all the same under the skin" anti-racism of post-WW2 were based more on political ideologies than reality.
They are neighbors, so there is of course some overlap if you take some French village close to Germany and a German village close to France. But French native and Polish native, you can, which is why we can track genetic ancestry like this.
There is an average genetic difference across the populations, but nothing that will function at the level of individuals.
I myself, being from the Balkans, don't even pretend to have a clue of what my genetic ancestry might be, and don't feel like finding out through some Find Your DNA ancestry (parasitic data harvesting) startup.
1) I'm mostly British/Irish (largely Welsh apparently)
2) I have no African or Asian heritage
idk I had always just called myself "American" and assumed I'd be a mix of a lot of things.
All of a sudden, people have the ability to determine if distant ancestors came from a different continent. Even if it's just 1 or 2% or even a trace amount, they're checking off boxes identifying themselves as multiracial.
For the 2020 census, it resulted in a 276% increase in the number of people self-identifying with more than one racial group. This is far more than could be explained by immigration or children born to parents from different backgrounds since 2010.
This NPR article (https://www.npr.org/2021/08/28/1030139666/2020-census-result...) explains the dynamic:
Its findings suggest adults 50 and up are most likely to self-identify as multiracial on surveys after receiving a report about the potential roots of their family tree based on a DNA analysis of their saliva. The study of more than 100,000 adults registered as potential bone marrow donors in the U.S. also found that DNA test takers were especially likely to identify with three or more racial groups. ...
"Native American was the one identity people really wanted to have and really wanted to prove," Roth says, adding that she has also found that some people stopped claiming Native American identity after the results of a test did not show any genetic ancestry.
You can imagine the problem when self-reported racial identities could really cloud the waters for determining a suitable bone marrow donor or other health application.
This is not necessarily wrong though. In many cases I've seen where children of grandparents from a particular region showing up on those products as having low percentage heritage from those areas.
If your grandmother was born in China and is - for all intents and purposes - clearly Chinese, yet you show up with 3% Chinese DNA on these products, does that mean you can't identify as having Chinese in your family background? Who determines where this line is drawn?
Re: the bone marrow thing, no one is using self identification as a way of doing blood or organ transplants ("you say you are black so your marrow will probably work for him"). There are real medical tests to check for all this.
My understanding from the sidelines was that the reported ethnicity of "oh you have a little french in you" had no meaningful basis, and was absurdly inaccurate. People treating it as anything more than fiction were making a mistake.
One could imagine (climate change not withstanding) that different geographic human populations would always tend to evolve to the same phenotype over time.
But in general, it gets dismissed as "Woke."
They say its nonsense but then go and make admittance decisions based on it.
You couldn't accurately fill out your ancestry on the form, even if you wanted to.
Race was a crude approximation and better techniques are available today. There is a push to use a wider variety of reference genomes which makes sense especially now that that computers are more powerful. There seems to be an assumption by others here that going from an unsophisticated crude approximation to a sophisticated one will somehow validate their other assumption that 'race is only skin deep'. I am not as optimistic.
No, for most purposes they never did (in fact, for many purposes where this is used, it is immediately separated from anything that would associate it with the submitter, so it would be hard for them to come back and ask you for anything), and the 2024 revisions to the definitions of the minimum categories removes the language about maintaining an ongoing affiliation ("who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment") from the definition of that category. [0]
[0] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/03/29/2024-06...
In practical usage, they'd far more likely be called Spanish or European in the US context.
"The term commonly applies to Spaniards and Spanish-speaking populations and countries in Hispanic America and Hispanic Africa" I.e. not mainland Spain.
This is not a complex sentence.
So it makes sense that you could be a Caucasian Hispanic.
These all have just as much claim from a cultural-diaspora perspective eh? With a wide variety of phenotypes, if we go back a bit. Though Indian should probably be more finely divided if we’re being honest.
If you really wanted to piss people off, we could of course lump Indian, Singaporean, Australian, American, etc. under English Ethnicity.
The only reason Hispanic is one is because the conquistadors were really, really persistent, murderous, and shameless eh?
That said, there is probably a good argument for breaking out at least South Asian from Asian as a distinct top-level racial category, in the same way that MENA recently was. (But note that all of the top-level categories also have more detailed breakdowns available, and recent revisions have also moved to require the more detailed options to collected in a wider range of circumstances.)
> The only reason Hispanic is one is because the conquistadors were really, really persistent, murderous, and shameless eh?
Mostly, the opposite: that the successors to the conquistadors were less genocidal and more assimilationist than their British and British-descended North American counterparts.
The only reason these groups are included this way is because of lobbying power (for and against) and $$ and privileges related to being in or out of various categories.
From an ontological perspective, your argument is BS looking at the actual distributions and ground truth of these groups.
What racial groups in the minimum reporting scheme does this ethnic group cut across, and in what rough proportions?
Hispanics are Caucasian in the original classification:
Just compare a Mexican Mariachi with an Asturian folk guy playing Celtic songs with bagpipes. Or the differences on ideology, state support, progressiveness... as much as a Brit and the average North American if not more.
The modern concept of "race" in general is a BS construct that was invented to support and justify European imperialism, and which has long been recognized as having only the loosest relation to biological reality despite in its own terms being conceptualized as a biological reality of some importance.
OTOH, its also produced very real communities of differentiated experience, identity, and treatment, and it is largely that which the US government system of race (plus one ethnicity, in the minimum scheme) is designed to gather data related to.
> If I understand them correctly,
You do not.
> officially someone from Portugal or France is supposed to be Caucasian
"Caucasian" is not part of the official race/ethnicity scheme used in US federal government reporting. Someone who has prehistoric ancestors who were from the region which is now Portugal or France, and who identifies with the racial group into which people with that ancestry are categorized, would be White, possibly with another racial and/or ethnic category depending on what other ancestry they identified with.
> whereas someone from Spain is supposed to be Hispanic
With the same description as above, replacing "Portugal or France" with "Spain", the person would still be White.
A person who also identifies with Spanish or South, Central, or North American (south of the US border) national/cultural origin would be Hispanic or Latino by ethnicity (the only ethnic category in the scheme) as well as any racial category or categories they identify with.
Here's a news release on 2024 updates to the scheme, which involve combine the race/ethnicity questions into a single multiple answer allowed question (the race question was already multiple answers allowed, but the presence or absence of the one ethnic category was a separate question) as well as other updates to the scheme: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2024/...
Is ‘caste’, race? Because it sure is used that way (or worse) in places that have it. And that’s been going on for longer than what we currently call European civilization.
Regional customs vary, but southern indian cousin marriage traditions in particular are heavily caste oriented.
The only thing not ‘race’ about it, is the word.
Spain and it’s colonies also had a ‘casta’ system with simpler and more explicit rules.
French colonists to the new world freely intermarried (and had kids) with Native Americans and people brought over from Africa, and eventually those same groups were prevented from marrying under racist american laws.
So there's lots of french blood in black people in the southern united states, but they were eventually prevented from marrying white french people, even when they were literally part of the same large family tree! There are long lines and families of black people who literally descend from my ancestors that I wouldn't have been allowed to marry!
Which should clearly demonstrate that it was never about your genetic or biologic ancestry, as modern science knows.
Wikipedia claims America's "blacks can't marry whites" laws have no precedent.
Similarly, there was lots of inter-racial relations before some colonies banned it, and other colonies never banned it.
It's almost like our perceived identity is just a user interface, and the genetic code is the raw assembly language underneath. It makes me wonder, how much of our cultural narrative is shaped by these historical "coding errors" or, perhaps, deliberate obfuscations? And what happens when more and more people start running these genetic "debuggers" on their own personal history? Are we headed for a significant "reboot" of how we understand race and identity in society? Just food for thought.
People talk about the irony of Black people adopting the faith of their oppressors when really that is the case for most monotheists today when you start to consider the historical contexts of why their lineage adopted the monotheistic faith at the time.
Africans in the USA is certainly a special sociological case due to the largest importation of agricultural slaves in Western history. As almost everyone knows, not all people shipped in chains to the US South were illiterate. Literacy is a central feature of Christian practice. All else aside, literate people in chains adopting the literate religion does not sound too far fetched to me.
And what does that mean, anyway? That some people in your family were born inside some arbitrary lines drawn on the ground? Who cares?
This sort of classification is meaningless.
(I, too, have Italian ancestry, but that's a small part of the overall picture, and has little to do with anything "real" about me, like my health or looks.)
What did the Elves say? “To sheep other sheep no doubt appear different. Or to shepherds. But Mortals have not been our study.”
People can get really prickly about it, for example lumping all people south of the US border as "Hispanic" or calling everyone in the UK "English".
You joke, but "assigned at birth" is probably apt. You may have discomfort or comfort in identifying with it. It may subtly change your perceptions and perceptions of you.
Also critical race theory is compatible with these results. Critical race theory holds that race is as social construct, and can only be found in culture, not in genetics.
I don't think the problem is the science, it's the non-scientific conclusions.
This is also nazi garbage. IQ isn't a real thing.
The theory of general intelligence is now 100 years old and has produced nothing of value. It holds no predictive power which is not better explained with better metrics (such as SES). The only thing which population IQ has done is attempting to push (or otherwise popularize) racist pseudo-science into the field of psychology. We have no deeper understanding, no new models, no new predictions, as a result of describing intelligence as a set of covarying factors which are measurable and distributes normally among the population.
Now, assessing an individual IQ is a different matter, but even then it holds no scientific value. Developmental psychologists may use IQ tests to detect disabilities, but there are other and better tests which do the same thing. IQ tests have the benefit of being extremely well standardized and available so many developmental psychologists use them, but that doesn’t tell you anything about the underlying theory, especially since you can detect the same disability with other tools which do not claim to measure a general intelligence.
What is more popular though (at least in the literature the last I checked) is to use only the most relevant subtests and never actually assess the full IQ. But even if IQ is useful to diagnose disabilities among individuals, that tells us nothing about how to describe intelligence, just like how breathalyzers might tell whether a driver is dangerous on the road, but cannot tell you anything about how alcohol impairs driving abilities in the population.
IQ is actually rather easy to debunk on its own merit, and it doesn’t even pass the sniff test. We can tell from experience that intelligence is not evenly distributed, even if you assume that intelligence can be measured as a set of covarying factors (of which there is no proof), our own experience shows that an IQ of 70 is much more mentally impaired than an IQ of 130 is mentally superior. The difference between a 70 and a 100 is much much much greater than the difference between 100 and a 130. This suggests that IQ (if such a thing exits) is negatively skewed, which contradicts one of the fundamental assumptions of psychometricians.
To summarize. The theory of general intelligence (i.e. IQ) is at best an old theory which never amounted to anything (a scientific dead end if you will; I have my suspicion string theory might be on the same track) and at worst it is a racist pseudo-science, used to push racist believes in the field of Psychology.
Note that your argument is a whole another argument from what your grandparent made (and what your parent was arguing against), which is why I went ahead and explained the pseudo-scientific nature of population IQ (which your grandparent is arguing against my in a nibling thread).
One should never dismiss the link between IQ and the eugenics movement. IQ is not a good theory, nor is it good science, we can (and should) do without it.
I get why you want to write all these paragraphs; I feel the same way whenever IQ comes up on HN. But you picked the wrong person to write them to. I recommend you check the search bar to see why.
You seem to have a similar view as Eric Turkheimer. Believe in IQ without all the racist stuff (and obviously don‘t believe it is inherited). I want to go even further. I think I remember Kareem Carr had a nice debate with Turkheimer on Twitter, where Carr said:
> In my opinion, I think we would all be better off if we thought of IQ not as "intelligence" but as a measure of "standardized test taking ability".
https://en.rattibha.com/thread/1653076849717825536
In my opinion we need to sunset the term IQ. It has a troubled history and is just bad science. I also think the whole field of psychometrics has a lot to answer for. I’m not sure that field has a future (at least not as a science).
(btw: if you're not up with Sasha Gusev yet, run don't walk --- midwit race scientists are constantly bouncing off him and it drives people crazy. curtis yarvin threatened to have imprisoned. i love him so much.)
"Black expressing genotypes" is the kind of phrase you'd expect someone to come up with if they wanted to mean "phenotype" but had a political motive for wanting something that sounded like "gene" to be in it.
> reliably score lower on them on average.
No, they don't. In the US there has been a significant—but inconsistent over time, racial IQ gap—but both the variability over time in that gap and all the studies that explore more details besides just broad racial contours show that that gap is at least largely and likely entirely due to socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental factors correlated with race, and not genetic.
>> nor does it mean the gene itself causes that
So re:
>No, they don't.
Yes, they do, but you just jumped the gun straight to your strawman because you thought you were saying 'no' to something I didn't even say, maybe because of some political motive.
Just because you throw a bunch of statistics behind a nonsence theory, that doesn’t make your nonsence theory any better.
Science is working with a theory and gathering evidence for that theory. The theory behind IQ is called general intelligence and it has been completely exposed as nothing but racist pseudo-science. Removing the theory from the metrics just gives you a bunch of data, which may or may not describe a useful model of nature (but most likely it won’t).
What you're attempting to do here is debase your argument to semantics, by excluding what you don't like out of science, which is quite typical on HN when you have nada for an argument. I simply unequivocally reject this sort of 'heads I win, tails you lose' redefinition of science.
Science is more then mere observations. You can observe all the white swans you like, and if your only prediction is “all the swans I have seen are white” that isn’t science, it is just bird watching.
If you want to measure IQ and you observe differences in population, and you don’t give a theory as to why that is, and you don’t make any further predictins based on your observations, you are just surveying.
Now, somebody might create a model based on these observations, and make predictions based on that model, then-and-only then are you doing science. If Tycho Brave had only been observing the stars, never developing the Tychonic system, he would have just been an excellent astrologer, and as you know astrology is not a science. When Kepler later used that data to prove Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, then—and only then—would we consider his observation to be scientific.
In IQ testing, the only people making predictions with the data are psychometricians. They are using it to try to prove the existence of the g-factor. This effort is in vein, as this theory has long been debunked. It is modern day alchemy (or phrenology if you will). Nobody else is making any other predictions with IQ data. The only people who are using IQ data are using it to make predictions in a futile effort to prove their race pseudo-science. And they keep failing at it.
I am only bothered by instances of racism where you violate the individual liberties of others. ex Nazis I don't really care the Germans hated Jews, I do care they put them in camps and executed them. Pre-emptively slapping them would violate their individual liberties, walking across the street infringes on no one, and indeed if I tried to control the right to people to freely travel based on thought-police it would be far more dystopic than any potential racism.
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