i was using that as an example. There are about 2-5 million so known or suspected SNPs out of 3 billion basepairs, which runs about 1-2%. It is suspected there are many more, but we are just beginning.
we are pretty much 99% the same. African Americans differ from their European contemperaries far less than Africans themselves, there is crossbreeding of SNPs that should be exclusive to European populations (around 18% of “European only” show up in AA, because we all have sex with each other, cite is in a paper we submitted to Nature this week, which may or may not get published, dunno yet). We have around 55,000 SNPs characterized by our lab, from our article on which ones are race specific
For what it is worth, we haven’t had any fears of political junk, except the stupid California Affirmative action complaining we have too many Asians, so we responded by hiring more. (actually, we hired the best people for he job, who just happened to be Chinese like most our lab)
The wet dream was despite the article’s downplay, it still bothered to point out specific races that were being sequenced, but not in a population way, and came off raw to me. or from what i remember, i’m not going to read it again now, i should be working
Yes, but i can make all humans match into the Mice genomes if i define it loosely enough
And sorry to everyone for screwing up the scroll bar in this thread.
But to what extent are those 1% “race” specific? In general, would you agree that a random European guy is likely to be more genetically similar to another random European guy than to a random African guy? (I seem to recall Collounsbury vigorously denying this in a previous thread).
Yeah, but probably so loosely as to not be useful - Risch’s point is that this is not the case with “race”
I again reiterate my call for you or someone else to sign up for a trial membership at the online journal in which Risch’s paper was published, and summarize it for the rest of us. (I would do it myself, but am afraid that it would be too technical for me to understand)
Great post there, Sparc, I can see you’ve put a lot of effort into it. Keep it up.
One further question for tomndebb, Tars et al: When people say that we are 99% similar, what is the scale that is being used? IOW, by comparison, how similar are we to chimpanzees, frogs, etc. ?
But what does a more nuanced position buy you in science? A position in which you can identify a “race” and look for a susceptibility to disease is fine. When you then have to go back and say, “Well, we really have to make this separate genetic test in order to know whether the susceptibility is real” it would seem that using the genetic test ought to be the first order of business and the “race” test ignored.
The heart medication study in which it was found that “blacks” were helped less than “whites” turned out to give even better predicitions of utility when “race” was ignored and general health and diet were considered, instead. It was not biological determinism but the lifestyles of different American social classes that wound up putting a larger number of blacks into the “less helped” category.
Looking at sickle-cell anemia we find that it is simply not a “black” disease. It appears “more black” in the U.S. because of the disparity in locations from which slaves were imported as opposed to either the rest of the African continent or the traditional locations from which Southern Europeans immigrated to the U.S.
In Dseid’s initial post to this thread he pointed out an apparent “black/white” correlation for drug action that is better describe by a genetic test that ignores “race.”
So where is the utility of race? What makes it real if it is useless in predicting longevity, susceptibility to disease, or response to drugs or other treatments? And how does providing more nuance change the biological reality? In a cultural or sociological scenario, I can see lots of ways to use race (and many ways in which it may be more nuanced). I simply have seen no indication that it has utility in science or that it can be used to predict anything other than one’s likelihood of being treated in particular ways in various social settings.
Tom, I’m not arguing that it buys anything in science - as I’ve mentioned previously, I think that is a technical issue that is best left to researchers and medical people. As Dr. Goldstein said:
(As an aside, the medical utility of race was one in which you contradicted Edwino, in a previous race thread - I tried to get you guys to confront this issue, with no success).
My point that you are responding to was not about the utility of “race” as a category, but rather your point about whose position science supports. As you may recall, my position in previous debates has been that regardless of the utility and meaningfulness of race to science, there may be certain true facts that correlate along racial lines. This got us into a pointless discussion of Truth vs. truth - no need to revisit this.
The point I am making here is, again, that not everyone who takes a pro-race position in a given race debate is basing it on the notion that there exists a clear genetic delineation between the classic races (or any other groupings of similar size). Yet some on the anti-race side have consistently attempted to structure all debates over these issues.
Isn’t it then just a tad bit ironic that while I being anti-race agrees that if there is a useful genetic division along race lines it is fine, while you obviously being pro-race claims that I wouldn’t be ready to swallow that?
Sparc, I have no idea what you would or wouldn’t be ready to swallow, and frankly it’s not something I concern myself with much. For which reasons I’ve made no claims in this regard. In one of your earlier posts you exhibited a distaste for the practice of putting words in people’s mouths - I suggest you follow this principle.
I find it absurd that Tomndebb finds it absurd that he and Coll are thought to be PC. Maybe if you would identify what race you are we could make a more informed decision about your motivations.
But that is the only point on which we declare that race is not relevant. We do not object to race in a cultural situation, a sociological situation, a political situation. Since our only opposition is to the claim that there is a physical, biological, and medical underlying racial reality, we are unlikely to oppose its use in cultural, sociological, or political domains. And, aside from sjgouldrocks, I have not seen anyone declare that race does not exist in those non-medical, non-biological domains.
I have never seen anyone leap into a dispute over affirmative action or a discussion of Hip-Hop and declare “This discussion is moot because there are no races.” The “no race” position is only held in biological discussions, so it is unlikely that we would declare that it did not exist in other such discussions.
(Regarding the apparent disagreement that edwino and I expressed, that was adressed in a related thread at about the same time, although I do not now recall the threads involved. I’m not sure that we came to an identical position (we don’t vet our answers before we post), but the separation was not as broad as it first seemed.)
Actually, the topic most frequently comes up in the context of whether there is a possiblity that there might be differences, on average, in the physical and/or mental abilities of the various (sociologically defined) “races”. Many anti-race people would have you believe that this follows logically from the “races aren’t meaningful scientifically” position. I have disputed this.
I’m sure you don’t (vet your positions). Nonetheless, when two people arguing in favor of a common position claim to agree with each other while actually contradicting each other, one might think they would address it. It gets confusing for the guy trying to keep up the other end of the debate, not to mention those keeping score at home. FWIW, here’s my final post about the issue.
Well, physical and mental abilities are going to have biological origins, so if we cannot categorize the groups, biologically, we have an immediate problem. If the differences are identified by sociological methods, I am going to first look at sociological explanations for those differences.
And I would note that I have never seen anyone post that the people of the Fleem Valley between the first and third cataracts have demonstrated a remarkable proficiency in higher calculus. With one exception, nearly all those threads start off expounding on the qualities of one of the Five Races or one of the Three Races. It may be true that white boys can’t jump–but neither can pygmies, so how does a “racial” characterization work for a claim that “black guys can jump.” In addition, those posts generally make broad assertions that assume a coherence that has already been demonstrated to be false.
The single exception has been the issue of a supposed superiority of Tropical West Africans in the sprint. While that issue has been tangled up with a lot of personal acrimony, the general position of the “non-race” posters has been a call to see actual evidence that both the numbers are real and that the numbers cannot be explained in sociological terms. Without claiming that either “side” has proven their point, I would say that I have not seen a clear refutation of the sociological aspects.
I am posting a brief hit and run post, which I will try to follow up. My week again has been horribly busy. I will add a few points here, and try not to kill this thread like I did the last one.
IIRC my disagreement with tomndebb was resolved. My point has been that physicians need to do things cheap and fast. They use appearance to racially profile. The utility of doing that, as DSeid has pointed out, lies both in a genetic and a sociologic realm, but not in a particularly accurate way. Profiling does sometimes lead to useful information – you start with a higher degree of suspicion for certain diseases, etc. etc. Physicians use it as a cheap, inaccurate way of bluntly tuning their diagnoses. Geneticists have no use for blunt, cheap tools when we have laser scalpels at our disposal.
Medical histories start out: This pt, a 50 y/o AAM c h/o CAD, NIDDM,… (This patient, a 50 year old African American Male with history of coronary artery disease, non-insulin dependent diabetes mellitus…) While I agree with Collounsbury that genetic populations will never map onto classic races, there is certainly sloppy overlap. And looking at the skin color, nose shape, and hair type is free. But I wouldn’t say that it is scientific to state that black people get sickle cell anemia more than white people.
I get PNAS at work. Yes, it can have ground-breaking research, yes it maintains a relatively high impact factor. But there is an important consideration here: many of the articles in PNAS are not peer reviewed. A member of the National Academy of Sciences can review and accept a paper by herself for publication without review by anonymous peers. Some articles are peer reviewed, however. I won’t know until at the earliest tomorrow, when I can access the paper online and provide a short synopsis. This is only to say that when reading an article in PNAS, I tend to be very careful, because we find flat-out wrong publications more there than in other places.
From the OP article, I agree with others who have said that Risch seems to have confused his terms, and that the article was written in a very bait-and-switch kind of way.
I can assure you that the HGP is proceeding with their next step efforts in haplotyping without regard to race but with a lot of regard to general genetic ethnic background. I talked to Francis Collins about it at the beginning of July. (It was cool). The HGP is using general ethnic background to prove that the only race is human, and we all come from Africa.
Any fool knows that race is sloppy. Especially the old “big 5” scheme. Irish/Arab/Basque/Russian race? Khoisan/African American/Ethiopian/Nigerian race? Navajo/Mongolian/Sri Lankan race? General Pacific Islander/Aboriginal race? Where will we stick the majority of people in Central and South America? Where will we stick all of those who don’t fit into any category? Any fool can see that however we draw the lines, and however many lines we draw, there is a tremendous around of flux at the edges and we can never even cover all of humanity. Even die-hard racist bastards sidestep this issue for the most part – try pinning a white supremacist down on how much “black blood” they will tolerate. Then try and find people who meet those criteria. Any fool can see that there must be a ton of mixture. So why must we persist in searching for a scientific justification for this ill-defined, nebulous entity?
Using haplotype analysis of the genome, we can tease apart individual (relatively) uncleavable “chunks” of the genome – these are called haplotypes. Haplotypes are labeled by single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) – see Tars Tarkas above. There may be any number of haplotypes at a particular locus, but usually they fall into a handful of general classes. We can analyze the frequency of specific haplotype classes in particular populations, and we can thus imply a lineage for the individual classes. We conclude two things. First of all that no haplotype maps directly onto any unique race. Second, that all major classes of haplotypes were present in a human founder group in Africa.
There is no large scale population change found in humanity that was not present in a founder group of 10,000 humans in Africa. While subgroups went on to form successive waves out of Africa, the founder haplotype classes remained in Africa (not all of the subgroup left). Add this to what we know about population movements in humanity – two waves of population of Europe, with the second also populating much of Asia and the Americas, etc. etc. The lines that we draw around races mean nothing to the anthropologic and genetic history of humanity, and therefore the concept of race has no scientific utility.
The problems of posting while dealing with family lives–posts may have widely varying begining and ending times.
Still, while my response probably reinforces your perspective on the issue, if there is a nuanced way to identify races sociologically while examining biological traits that have no biological origins, I confess that I do not see a way for that to happen.
It’s a little odd that you should say “bad assumption.” Stripped of its drama, your statement basically concedes what I had said earlier: You were unwilling to take edwino’s reasoning and apply it generally.
Instead, you sought to limit the application of edwino’s reasoning:
Why won’t you concede this obvious point?
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Well, edwino’s original statement referred to “scientific concepts” not “biological reality.” So you are still trying to qualify his reasoning.
Further, your original response was limited to “subdivision of humanity.” Now you’ve broadened your position, apparently, to all biologicial groupings.
In any event, I think I can show that your latest position too has some “issues.” But let’s make sure I have things straight, ok?
Is it your position that for each and every grouping that exists as a “biological reality,” there is a characteristic that is universal and exclusive to each group?
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I’m not sure that “dislike” is the right word. You and others have taken many different positions on the race issue. Some of them, I agree with wholeheartedly. Some I reject. Many are too vague and ambiguous to agree or disagree with.
I’m not sure what you mean by “exist.” I do agree that race is a somewhat rough means of categorizing people.
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I’m not sure what you mean by “clearly,” but I agree that it is entirely possible that there is no simple genetic feature that corellates perfectly with race, as classically defined.
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For what it’s worth, my biggest issue in the race debate has been expressed in this thread already. Frequently, somebody will observe a relationship between a physical ability and race and ask if that relationship might have a genetic component to it. The “no race” people seem to take the position that since “race is invalid,” such a component cannot exist.
It seems to me that such logic is pretty clearly flawed.
Thus, to defend their position, the “no race” folks must dance around in terms of what they actually mean when they say that “race is invalid” and why they reject the concept of race.
At times, it can get pretty silly, like a few threads ago when you tried to draw a distinction between “Truth” and “truth”
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Nope. I don’t have an anti-PC agenda. And certainly I pay close attention to the facts. If you can cite facts that disprove anything I’ve said, I will gladly concede that I’m in the wrong.
If I can point out a generally accepted biological grouping, for which there is no characteristic that is universal and exclusive to each group, will you concede that you are in the wrong?
In a previous thread, edwino made the following statements:
In response, I asked the following question:
So far, there has been no response at all.
Perhaps edwino has given up on bringing light to the dim. Or perhaps he prefers not to have his position nailed down for the reasons I expressed earlier.
Distributions of what? Is there any objective way to determine if a “map” is “coherent”?
I’m not sure what “statistically coherent” means, but are you saying that if someone pointed out 10 alleles that significantly covaried with race, as classically defined, you would accept the concept?
Since you say “might also prefer,” I gather that “fixed differences” (whatever that means) is not a rigid requirement.
By the way, does “fixed differences” mean the same thing as “universal and exclusive traits”?
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If it’s so clear, then why are people so reluctant to have their position nailed down?
