Nope. What is meant by free will? If you consider it a purely physical concept, define it precisely in terms of physical phenomena only.
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So if humans are governed by physics it would seem that the genetic code that contributes to the structure of the body would actually be meaningful as well it is in every other non PC organism.
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Yes. Everybody except your ridiculous “PC” strawman is already well aware that human genetic code is meaningful in human organisms, and has no objection to that fundamental fact of physiology.
Let’s say that you’re a doctor, and 80% of your patients are white.
You’ve noticed a certain set of symptoms tend to crop up more commonly in your white patients than in your black and Asian patients. (Let’s make white people the messed-up group for a change.)
What’s your next step?
My next step would be to look at the commonalities shared by the patients with the special symptoms and compare their prevalence against the outgroup’s. Do they all live in the same area? Do they have similar occupations, habits ,and hobbies? Are they all taking similar medication? Do they share any other diseases and conditions? Have they been in contact with each other?
Genes would be the last thing on my mind. It could be that all the patients with the symptom cluster are from the same extended family. But those other variables are probably much more predictive for the vast majority of mystery conditions. They’d need to be eliminated before jumpiing to any gene hypothesis anyway, so that’s why I’d start off with those.
Your example is a bit deceptive because if 80% of your patients are white, you’re going to need a way larger sample size before there will start to be a significant statistical evidence that the disorder is more common among white patients.
But suppose that you happen to live in a particularly diverse neighborhood, and your patients are generally 25% white, 25% black, 25% asian, 25% hispanic, and then 10 of them have this rare thing, and they’re all white, I certainly think that that’s a data point you should include in your report when you’re sending it up to the CDC or whatever.
But you’re certainly right that the doctor should certainly not jump straight to anything involving genes. Nor did I say he should. I’m just saying that it would be foolish to NOT notice a pattern, and at least keep it in mind as a possibility. If the doctor finds another doctor in another city who has also seen a flare up of this condition, he should at least say “hey, have an unusual number of the patients been black?”.
I don’t think it’s deceptive at all. It’s just another way to frame the conversation–which all too often is focused on the deviance of the minority population. If it is possible for a condition to be disproportionately represented among a minority group, it can also be disproportionately represented in the majority group.
I don’t know why you feel the need to make the percentages so unrealistic. Either something is disproportionately represented or not. If 50% of my patients are white and 50% are non-white, and 80% of patients with Disease X are white and 20% are non-white, this is a significant finding…assuming I have a decent number of patients. And it would be a significant finding if 100% of my patients with condition X are white, even though they comprise 80% of my practice. The disparity would likely be overlooked (because white people are usually considered the norm, by default). But it would still be a significant finding, especially if corroborated by other clinics.
No, I don’t think he should at least say that, not unless he knows that this is a significant risk factor. He could say it, of course, but I don’t think he needs to say it. Because he might introduce confirmation bias. At the very least, he could say, “Most of the patients I’ve seen with this condition are black, but I haven’t looked at other risk factors that may better discriminate cases from non-cases.”
Agreed. Societally, a doctor in the USA is more likely to overlook that something strikes white people disproportionately than that it strikes people of a particular nonwhite ethnicity disproportionately . But I don’t think that’s particularly relevant to the point I’m trying to make (which, to step back a second, is that people on “my side” of this conversation have a tendency to overstate the point that race is a poorly defined construct, scientifically/biologically, to an extreme which strikes me as unsupportable).
That seems totally wrong. First of all, the fastest way that he can completely eliminate any connection to race as a hypothesis is to say “hey, I’ve noticed this seems to be overrepresented with black patients, is that true over there as well?” and the other guy says “nope, not at all”, in which case the likelihood of any genetic connection goes WAY down. Alternatively, if he says he’s noticed it, and the other doctor says “hey, that’s funny, I have too”, then that makes it more likely that there could be a connection there.
I think that you’re worried about something where, for instance, two different doctors notice an apparent connection to race, and spend a bunch of time pursuing that lead, but it turns out that that was just a coincidence, and all that time was wasted. But that’s backwards logic… you could apply that to any correlation. “Well, I did notice that this mainly happened in people who shared characterstic X… but I didn’t want to say anything, because what if I was wrong, and then we would have wasted a bunch of time”. That’s no way to go about pursuing answers.
I think you err in assuming a connection or correlation to race implies a genetic basis rather than a host of other reasons including the fact that it may just be some statistical anomaly or misattribution. Genes, in the vast majority of cases beyond known correlations (eg. Ashkenazi Jews and Tay Sachs, etc.), is one of the less likely explanations for something the average doctor will see.
I’ve made it very very clear in my posts that they should not say “oh, hey, look, a correlation to ‘black’ people, hey, it must be genetic”. I’m saying that they should keep it in mind as a possibility, and they should not refuse to even mention it because everyone knows that “race” is just a fiction.
But it could very well be a genetic factor. Just one that doesn’t align with race. You might be noticing the manifestation of a gene showing up in the same extended family–one that just so happens to be black. Your colleague’s patients may have that same gene, but may not look anything like them.
I’m not worried about anything. I just don’t understand why finding a racial pattern is all that important when there’s so many other variables that are much more informative. If a colleague came to me and said, “I’ve found a pattern! I’ve got a set of symptoms that appear disproportionately in my black patients. That’s pretty interesting, isn’t it?” my initial reaction would be “Uh, not really. Not without knowing what else these black people have in common.” Only after the colleague had mined his data some more would I want him saying that his findings are “interesting”.
Just like how I wish my own doctor had explored his “data”–me–before jumping to a race-based hypothesis.
Just like how it’s not interesting to know that Tay Sachs disease is found disproportionately in white people. But it is interesting to know that it has the highest prevalence in Ashkenazi Jews.
In summary, if my colleague’s patients all come from the same extended family but he didn’t bother teasing this out before expressing his concerns about the new “black” disease he thinks he’s uncovered, I’d seriously question his scientific training.
Yes. Clearly if this hypothetical doctor is incompetent then he’s incompetent. And if all of these people, who happen to be black, all live near each other, then environmental factors should be investigated. And if they all have similar careers, then that should be investigated.
All I’m saying is that a correlation with race shouldn’t be ignored and discounted as automatically meaningless the same way that a correlation with last-digit-of-social-security-number should be.
Of course, the moment there’s any real reason to suspect that there is a hereditary genetic component, then it makes a lot of sense to start drilling down and learn as much as possible about the actual ancestry of the people involved… and then once more detailed information is available, “they are all black” becomes fairly irrelevant. But pretending it was never a clue in the first place, and never COULD be a clue, is just silly.
Yes I agree with you and slightly disagree with monstro on that point.
It can make sense for medical professionals to say, for example, “Sickle cell anaemia is strongly associated with X population, I should consider this early for someone who appears to be from this region, and late (but not rule it out) for others”.
However, diseases where it is a binary you-either-have-it-or-you-don’t, are wholly different than characteristics like running speed, where there is a bell curve and a lot of overlap between different groups (as they say: much more variance within a group than between groups).
It’s just not very useful to know how different groups measure up in such comparisons, and seems to only be of interest to individuals with an agenda.
The only reason I entered into this thread is that it bothers me when people overstate sentiments I generally agree with. Maybe I’m overreacting or nitpicking, but there’s a huge difference to me between:
-race, as commonly understood, is poorly defined, and is thus rarely scientifically or medically relevant
and
-race has NO SCIENTIFIC MEANING AT ALL
I think the second statement is overbroad and ends up weakening whatever case whoever says it is trying to make. But I see it, or the equivalent, made a LOT on the SDMB, by people with whom, on the whole, I agree.
“Race”, meaning the socially constructed ones like “black”, “white”, “asian”, has no scientific meaning as a way of grouping people. This is not an overbroad statement, and it is the stance of the major scientific groupings that deal with human biology and anthropology.
I’m currently reading a book which addresses this exact topic, called Taboo by John Entine.
In said book, he discusses some of the historical problems associated with correlating “race” with athletic ability. To my memory, there are two main issues:
High athletic ability is often considered to be inversely correlated with intelligence. That is, if a group are great athletes, they are probably less intelligent. (For example, the stereotype of the “dumb jock.”) This is based on the misguided idea that certain “races” are naturally better at some things and worse at others. So, to some people, saying “black people are superior athletes” is just a proxy for saying “they’re dumber than white people.”
Broad assumptions about races have been used to justify all kinds of horribly racist policies, actions, and attitudes. For a long time, it was assumed that blacks were inferior at athletics because they would fold under pressure. Early in the 20th century, once it was borne out that they performed better at certain sports, the attitude shifted to “they perform better because they are beast-men straight from the jungle.” Then there’s the disgraced “science” of phrenology, which was used to “prove” all manner of racist ideas based solely on measurements of the human skull. (It was also used to “prove” the superiority of the Tutsis over the Hutus in Rwanda, and I think we all saw how that turned out.)
So unfortunately, it’s hard to have a reasonable discussion about the performance of certain populations in athletics without getting burdened by a lot of historical baggage.
The thing is, nobody, but nobody, is opposed to scientific studies like “Is there a biological reason people from a certain subset in East African highlands disproportionately win marathons?” or “Is there a physical component to why Jamaicans excel at sprinting even over other Caribbean countries never mind West Africans?”. Those are great topics of study, and nobody, but nobody, would consider them bad science or pseudoscience … or inherently racist or bigoted.
It’s when it’s phrased as “Blacks are good at sports” or “Asians are more intelligent” that it becomes unscientific and, quite frankly, racist. Because it’s been shown, time and time again, that races are just social constructs that don’t represent accurate human biological groupings. And there are cases where mistaking phenomena as racial when they’re not could be negative e.g. thinking sickle cell is a “Black” disease, or Tay Sachs is a “Jewish” one.
And there’s also value in doing scientific study on socially-constructed race - just don’t confuse race for a biological classification category.
It depends what you mean by “scientific meaning”. There is no rigorous scientific definition that precisely defines what the difference is between “black” and “white”. So there would be no reason for a scientist to, say, attempt to study whether “black people” were better or worse at X than “white people”.
But that doesn’t mean that race is totally orthogonal, totally irrelevant, to genetics. It’s useless when any more precise information is available… but more precise information isn’t always available.
Going back to the example I keep using about a doctor noticing a pattern, maybe the doctor first notices that the new syndrome seems to be mainly hitting Asian people. Then he goes back and double checks with them and finds that almost all of them actually have ancestors from a particular region in Vietnam. Well, great, at that point he knows more and can present a more precise hypothesis than he could earlier. But should he never have been allowed to make that preliminary step, because “race has NO scientific meaning”? And, going forward, he might occasionally encounter people who, due to being orphaned at a young age or something, do not know their precise ancestry. One of those people has pale skin and blonde hair and blue eyes. One of them has dark hair and epicanthic folds. Is it ridiculous or anti-scientific of him to think that the second person is more likely to be in a risk group for this condition than the first?
So what? He didn’t say “I know that you have this gene”, or even “I know that you are descended from a region where there’s a prevalence of that gene”. He said “since you are an orphan and don’t actually know where your biological ancestors came from, I can see from superficial racial features that there’s a reasonable chance that you are descended from a region where there’s a prevalence of that gene”. At which point the guy can investigate further, send in his dna to 23andme.com, get a test, whatever, and find out if it’s actually true.
And if the doctor alerts him to that possibility and nothing comes of it, hey, all the better. But what the doctor should NOT do is say “hey, do you know what your genetic heritage is”, and the guy doesn’t know, and the doctor just throws up his hand and says “well, I’m a scientist, and I know race is meaningless, so I can learn NOTHING from looking at your face, NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING”, and thus not give any potentially useful information at all.
But in medicine, more precise information is almost always available.
Let’s say I’m a doctor in St. Paul Minnesota. Over the past year, I’ve had patients coming in presenting with a very strange, distinct rash that I’ve never seen before. I look at the records of these patients and notice that all of them are Asian. It’s amazing.
I have a doctor friend located in a different state. I ask him if he has noticed any Asian patients showing up with the mystery rash. He says nope.
Then my friend asks, “But what kind of Asians are you talking about?”
When I say, “Hmong”, he says “Oh, well, there you go. We don’t have many of those folks in this area.”
Can you see how asking about “Asians” is pretty pointless?
Of course, it’s not a bad thing to notice that all the ugly rash patients are “Asian”. Being a doctor does not make you immune to social programming and there’s nothing objectively wrong with placing people into arbitrary groupings. But that doesn’t mean that “Asian” is a useful shorthand. If I wanted to alert clinics and hospitals about the emerging disease I’ve found, I’d emphasize that it is found disproportionately in people of Hmong heritage. I’d leave the “Asian” thing completely out of it.
In this example, it’s not the race of the patients that make the condition stand out. It’s the condition itself. I suppose it would be a different situation if we were talking about, say, hypertension or diabetes. But is it really that interesting if a disproportionate number of Asians, blacks, or whatever show up with these conditions, given our awareness of all the other risk factors out there and how they intersect with culture and socioeconomic class?
Yes, and when it is, it should certainly be used. The moment that the doctor is able to narrow it down from asians to “hmong”, he should proceed with that new, far more precise and meaningful, information.
But think about it this way. For the vast majority of actual meaningful “real” scientific genetic groupings, members of that group will appear to be the same “race”. So if there’s a disease that affects mostly Hmong, it will initially appear to affect mostly Asians. For a disease that affects mostly bushmen, it will appear to affect mostly black people. If it affects mostly people from a particular caste in a particular region of India, it will appear to affect mostly Indians.
Race is a crude and immediate and rough approximation which can help suggest genetic patterns with greater-than-chance possibility.
If someone says “hey, I noticed that that those 10 patients were all Asian”, then that might be the first step to learning that the disease actually only affects Hmong. (And note my use of MIGHT and FIRST. Just as likely it will turn out that it’s just a coincidence, or it’s something in the water in a neighborhood where lots of Asians live, or bad food at a restaurant with a mostly Asian clientele, or what have you.)
But that initial observation has a non-zero chance or leading to an actual finding of an actual root genetic cause. Which, frankly, strikes me as a totally non-controversial observation. I’m not trying to get you to admit that yes, race does mean something, and thus we should teach every in first grade how to identify the different races of the world.
