Meaningfull Biological Definition of Race

Great Debates
241

Hey, you’re the one who

  • apparently thinks physical features aren’t biological (?)!

  • has conceded the points about gene flow leading to clusters;

  • genetic differentiation in terms of geographic separation;

  • that this has medical significance

Yet is still arguing that is all just hopelessly arbitrary. What you don’t seem to grasp is that these criticisms about arbitrariness can be applied to species or subspecies, not to mention most other classification systems. Go back and read the NEJM article and stop wasting peoples time.

242

You claimed that genetic structure could be determined through VISIBLE physical features. When applied to humans, that is classic skin color racism. For any other use it is another generalization based on a lack of specific genetic information.

There is nothing to concede. Gene flow and genetic clusters explain the smallest to the largest groupings of humans and does nothing to give more meaning to any grouping than another.

Yes, animals tend to mate with other animals in their species which are physically close to them. How long did it take you to figure this part out?

Medical significance is not meaningful biological significance. Insurance rates have medical significance. And all I concede is that there is a medical utility to using arbitrary definitions of race when more specific genetic information is not available. And it is not accurate, something that would be part of anything ‘meaningful’. The definitions of race used in this context have no biological basis. Your self or other identified race has no bearing on your actual genetic structure.

I have problems with the definition of species when they are not genetically based, or differentiate animals which produce fruitful offspring, if those haven’t been cleared up. Otherwise you are wrong. Species can be differentiated in a non-ambiguous manner.

I think sub-species is utter nonsense as generally defined. It is an another arbitraty classification. This should be obvious by the varying definitions per species that have no genetic basis. I don’t consider the plethora of sub-species due to the vanity of biologists who name them to be biologically meaningful. Maybe it’s biologist meaningful, and you can hang your hat on that.

Why don’t you stop searching for papers that use the word ‘race’ and try giving us an explanation of how your definition of race defines a human’s genetic structure instead of looking for an explanation to suit a pre-conceived notion.

243

I see some posts referring to haplogrouping of sex-linked DNA (esp. Y-chromosome) that imply that to be the be-all and end-all of genetic clustering. I think that’s a false view.

For example, 20% or more of Japanese males are in the Y-chromosome specific to Ainu, yet the actual portion of “Ainu people” today is much smaller; the non-Ainu with that Ainu Y-chromosome probably have otherwise typical Japanese DNA. The reason for the high incidence of Ainu Y-chromosome in Japan is due, I’ll guess, to a patrilocal phenomenon I think of as “King of the Mountain.” As non-Ainu immigrated to Japan, the natives retained political and military power (due to knowledge of terrain, etc.). While the native elite males may have been happy to procreate with immigrant women, immigrant males had less opportunity to leave successful descendants.

Similar effects are seen elsewhere. The Bushmen retain a specific Y-chromosome though their autosomal DNA is less distinctive; similarly Amerindians, and so on. Y-chromosome is inherited from only a single one of one’s 4 trillion (non-distinct!) 40-great grandparents. It cannot be considered useful for general genetic clustering.

Having said this, Y-chromosome does provide a crisp interesting picture of something, even though that “something” may not be general genetic clustering. An interesting puzzle to emerge only recently is that a huge majority of Western European males apparently inherit their Y-chromosome from a very recent (late Copper Age?) immigration.

244

It’s also a strawman. I referred to Y-haplogroups as used to indicate latest possible time of branching, not clustering. For instance, I’m well aware that going by Haplogroup A, you can cluster Khoisan with some Yorkshiremen or somesuch. That wasn’t my point.

245

This is the kind of SDMB post I find very frustrating. I thought my post raised very interesting issues. :smiley:

What I see is an overly-defensive criticism, referring to my correct and interesting post as a “strawman” and incorporating a non-sequitur mention of some Yorkshireman.

hth.

246

WAY too close to personal insult.

Back off.

[ /Moderating ]

247

I have a question for the “race-is-a-biological-reality” people.

I had to go to specialist a few weeks ago (some Dopers may have a vague recollection of this). He’s not absolutely sure, but he thinks I have a genetic neurogenerative disorder. I tested negative on the test for the most common of these diseases, but turns out there are other genetics diseases that present with symptoms similar to the most common, better-known one (Huntington’s). There are about four variants of this condition (Huntington’s like diseases). They are all very rare.

He immediately identified me as an African American, which does not always happen, so props to him. When coming up with a list of an additional tests to take, at the top was for a variant of the neurodenerative disease that, according to him, is “highly common among African Americans” (his exact words). When I read those words, my opinion dropped of him a million points. There is no disease that is “highly common among African Americans.” However, there are diseases, such as sickle cell, that are disproportionately represented among African Americans. I’m not generally a nit-picker, but I do like precise language in scientific and medical contexts. So that was the first annoyance.

I did research on the disorder he wants me tested for, because if I’m going to have pay out-of-pocket for something, then I want to know my chances of actually turning up something. I don’t like blindly fishing when it comes to my health, sorry. Well, what do you know? Turns out the disease is not even disproportionately represented in African Americans! Indeed, in all my searchings I couldn’t find a single case of this rare condition being found in African American families. However, the disease has been found in a tiny subset of South Africans. They represent over half of all the cases of this disorder ever found. The others have been in various populations scattered throughout the world (French, Mexicans, etc.) that have had little contact with South Africans. For the uninitiated, South Africans represented a very tiny fraction of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Almost all African Americans are descended from West and Central Africans. Very very few of us have recent ancestry going back to either East or South Africa, and even in those that do, the ancestry would represent a small contribution to their overall make-up.

So let’s see…here I am, a genetic mutt with some visible recent (West) African ancestry, being told I should get tested for a single variant of a disorder–the only one that can be linked to (South) Africans. And the reason I have explicitly been given for this is based strictly on my race. Not on my symptoms or family history, but on the doctor’s incorrect assumptions about my race. The doctor never asked about my pedigree. For all he knows, being tested for another variant would make more sense. I have Scots-Irish ancestry–perhaps there is a variant that is traceble to this group? I have been mistaken for everything from Samoan to Middle Eastern–but he did not ask if I have anything beyond “African” in my bloodline. He didn’t ask, “Besides African ancestry, what other recent ancestry do you have?” Apparently that one drop of black blood obliterates everything else. (utter frustration!)

So…racial biologists? Am I a jerk for refusing to take this expensive test? Or am I simply applying the common sense my Mama gave me?

248

I didn’t say you could determine genetic structure from physical features, although that is an element of the possible definitions. Hardimon’s definition includes groups being somewhat distinguishable by physical features. The biology online definition refers to various sets of heritable characteristics (such as color of skin, eyes, and hair).

That’s not what you were asking about though. You were asking for evidence of restricted gene flow. I provided it and attempted to explain it’s relevance in terms of the clusters.

Well, you seemed to be under the impression that these groupings are arbitrary. I wasn’t sure if by that you thought they had no biological meaning. But they come back to ancestry, as indicated in the definitions above.

Again, how do you define accurate? Race is an imperfect surrogate for ancestral geographic origin, which in turn is a surrogate for genetic variation across an individual’s genome. It’s not perfect, but it is statistically useful information for a treating physician as the articles above discuss.

Don’t you find it somewhat arbitrary dividing up animals by whether they can produce fruitful offspring? :stuck_out_tongue:

Race doesn’t define a persons genetic structure any more than knowing a persons age or gender defines their genetic structure. It provides a shorthand for information about their ancestry.

249

No, it did, I agree - I didn’t mean to come across as overly-defensive. But it was a strawman, too - no-one has argued that haplogroups are the ne plus ultra of genetic groups. But they are a sine qua non. Any purported clustering schema that ignores or contradicts them is obviously suspect.

It wasn’t a non sequitur, although I should have been more informative and mentioned the West African connectionat the subclade level and not just the larger Y-A clade. I should also have been more precise in mentioning I was talking about Y-chromosomal Haplogroup A and not MtDNA-A

250

Why do you keep citing Risch? Wasn’t this author disputed earlier in the thread as having a dissenting view? I don’t think it’s appropriate to bring in disputed work to make your case unless you state that it’s disputed and why you think it’s still relevant.

Your own cites state that human genetic diversity is low relative to other species.

251

It tells us something about our “Deep Ancestry”, as the geneticist Spencer Wells likes to call it. The other things you mention are a sign that this “Deep Ancestry” does no manifest itself as genetically isolated populations.

Y-chromosome and mtDNA analysis is useful because they don’t experience chromosomal crossover during meosis.

252

Chen, I want to apologize for the ‘clown car’ post. I had intended to comment on your circular argument, but** tomndebb **called it right, it could easily be interpreted as something else. Again, my apologies.

You are using criteria which are essentially outdated in classification. We can determine inherited features through genetic analysis now, which is a method far more accurate than observation of physical features. The process of re-classification is ongoing because of the ways that physical features are misleading indicators of genetic makeup. And as noted several times now, the biology online definition explicitly states the invalidity of it’s own definition. Why do you keep using these inaccurate and invalid definitions?

I don’t want to verge to far from the original discussion about isolation and restricted gene flow. We both agree that there are genetic clusters. We disagree on the significance of them.

I consider the groupings to be arbitrary because they aren’t based on a principle of biology, but by looking for patterns within what are arbitrarily drawn lines. For every significant genetic combination you can find a unique grouping of people that will not have a consistent geographic basis. Pick a gene that has medical significance and the set of people within a geographical classification who share that gene will show a different distribution than for some other gene. The same will happen with gene combinations. Each case will show different distributions of people within the geographic classification who do and do not have the gene, and the same will apply to those outside. There are too many possible means of using geographical classification to subgroup humans to qualify any of them as a race.

That is pretty much the issue right there. There is an accurate means of determining a person’s genetic structure, which conforms to the current understanding of the inheritance mechanism. Other means of classification that are not based on biology lack meaning (IMHO) because they are indistinquishable from coincidence, or the maximum level randomness that would be found in genetic inheritance. That does not mean they lack in utility, but certainly in accuracy. In other contexts I’ve made a simpler statement, ‘all rules of thumb are wrong’, that’s why they aren’t called ‘rules’.

In some senses yes. But it is an unambiguous means of classification based on biology.

Getting back to some of my points early in this thread, do you have any way to take the accurate means of classification based on biological measurement of genetic structure and derive a system of racial classification, or even see a rational reason why there would be one?

253

Sure, I agree entirely, but what my post was responding to was a very specific exchange between John Mace and Rand Rover which went something like this (paraphrasing):

John Mace: Biologists have a very specific definition of race
Rand Rover: I don’t care, I want to discuss (something similar but not identical)
John Mace: But how can you be fighting ignorance in a thread whose entire existence concerns the biological definition of race if you ignore the actual biological definition of race?

I think the title of this thread is somewhat ambiguous. It could be interpreted as “definition of ‘race’ used by biologists in actual biology”. It could also be interpreted as “definition of race as commonly understood, is it meaningful biologically”? A lot of people seem to be basically saying that answering the first question, and discussing whether that definition applies to commonly-understood-races, renders the second question meaningless, which I disagree with. Biologists can give answers other than “yes, that grouping is identical to the most pure biologically defined grouping one could construct” or “no, that grouping is not identical to the most pure biologically defined grouping one could construct and is therefore totally meaningless and worthless”.

254

This is an excellent question. So, first of all, the doctor in question was clearly uninformed. If some fairly quick research on the internet turned up that this disease was found not in Africans in general but specifically in South Africans, he should have already known that.

So assume for a second that he does in fact know that, and he has a patient like you show up who is visibly “black” and showing the symptoms you’re showing. What should he do with that information?

I think ideally he would say “here’s a condition that it’s possible that you might have, but it’s found almost exclusively in South Africa, do you happen to know whether any of your ancestry comes from Southern Africa”. Then based on your response (“yes”, or “no”, or “not sure”, or “I don’t think so but am not certain”) you and he could decide how to proceed. But, and here’s the absolutely key point for me, it would not at all have been unreasonable for him to treat you (slightly) differently based on your race. That is, if you’d been visibly Chinese, he wouldn’t have brought that up at all, or would have mentioned it as a much more passing possibility. He’s not saying “oh, he’s black, I know he must have X so will definitely do Y”, but he’s using his intelligence and his knowledge of your race to change probabilities to feed into the decision making process.

In other words, the fact that he immediately categorizes you as “black” changes some probabilities and possibilities and likelihoods of what the best, most efficient way to treat you might be, but doesn’t prove anything, and further detail about your ancestry, if available, can change things further. That pretty much sums up the point I’ve been trying to make here… you being black meant SOMETHING, even if not very much and not very definitively.

255

Well, the OP was quite specific about what he was looking for. It was a fill-in-the blank. AFAICT, only **Chen **has offered up a list of races. It’s like a whole lot of people want to say that yes, races have biological significance, but they won’t tell us what those alleged races are. And if they are ever fluid anywhere from 5 to 500 in number, then that’s where we get to the point of saying we need a new term because “race” doesn’t mean that (not scientifically and not usually in the vernacular either). That is why biologists prefer the term “populations” or “ethnic groups”. Those are easily understood to mean whatever parameters the researcher has defined them to be. They are ever fluid and can mean almost anything.

256

Max, please don’t take this the wrong way because I do not mean any insult. And I’m not sure how to adequately explain my thought process. That said, I’ll try:

Your comment above, and some other comments you have made upthread, lead me to see a basic misunderstanding in your viewpoint. You seem to be treating vernacular or popular usage as if it was some sort of fuzzy, diluted version of science. As if drawing inexact parallels and partially supported conclusions is acceptable as long as we make clear that we aren’t talking about “pure” science. So when we say that “Science” ™ defines race as a subset of a species having distinct morphology and reproductive isolation, and is equivalent to the term subspecies, you think that it’s OK in vernacular to use the same terms as long as one pays lip service to morphology and/or isolation. And to also toss in words like grouping or population to modify or to support the primary words. Somehow this would not be “totally meaningless and worthless”.

That’s a problem. Science is all about precision, and likes its terms to be clearly defined. Vernacular usage on the other hand allows for tremendous ambiguity and fluidity of meaning. So a casual discussion amongst non-experts may borrow words from science, and apply them in whatever haphazard manner their presenters give to them. But science and scientists will never accept that ambiguity.

So if you or others want to talk about groups of people in a vernacular manner, certainly that is fine. There is probably some small validity to certain groupings, especially if the area of concern is already restricted by pre-selection, like the United States. I suppose we could say that they are therefore not totally meaningless and worthless.

But as has been demonstrated over and over and over again, these vernacular groupings simply do not map well across the full range of heritable characteristics; these groupings are not genetically distinct. Nor are they reproductively isolated. They therefore do not meet the criteria for use of defined terms like race or subspecies. So when anyone using those terms can impart their own vernacular definition to them, and that definition may or may not be understood or agreed to by other parties in the conversation, and the resulting discussion is therefore an exercise in translation of gibberish, then despite any random and fleeting approach to scientific understanding, the usage is unarguably totally meaningless and worthless.

257

It’s like a whole lot of people want to say that someone must say what the races are or the term “race” doesn’t have “biological significance” (whatever that means really).

Again, I think Maxthevool has it exactly right.

258

I feel like the OP of this thread was written in a deliberately gotcha-y fashion. It’s like “OK, anyone who thinks Dan Marino is a great football player, please fill in the blanks. He won the super bowl in the following years: ____ _____ _____ ____”. (Assuming I’ve got it right and Dan Marino in fact has never won a Super Bowl.) If you’re a big fan of Dan Marino and you see that OP, how do you respond?

I think post #254 in this thread, for instance, is an interesting one, part of an interesting discussion, and one which we never would have gotten to if we simply did or did not fill in the blanks. The position I take in it may well be wrong for a variety of reasons, but it’s a discussion that I’d like to see continue.

259

If you can’t define it, it doesn’t have significance of any sort.

260

If I may speak for the OP, it was written that way because of dozens of threads like this. Several posters have argued that race has an imprecise but useful meaning to biology. They claim it can be useful in certain situations and supply examples of those situations. So far so good.

Then other posters say “Please supply some examples of races so we can test your hypothesis.” This is where we keep running into a stone wall. We never get examples. When we get something that we can critique and point out how the races as chosen don’t make much sense the response we seem to get is something in order of “Well, those particular definitions don’t matter much, the important thing is that there are definitions of race that are useful.”

Without concrete examples that claim is useless. Many folks have posted why all previously proposed examples of “race” don’t meet any reasonable criteria but the supporters still insist that the definitions are out there. It’s an impossible conversation; like nailing jello to the wall. The whole argument relies on having some examples to discuss or else it’s just handwaving.

If that seems to be a “gotcha” scenario it is unfortunate. But it’s at the heart of the problem.