Really, I don’t think we disagree too much here… I’m not in any way endorsing actually using societal definitions of race for anything meaningful in any context, I’m just saying that claiming they are totally and completely 100% without meaning is going too far. So your first paragraph I agree with just fine, but I think your second paragraph goes too far.
Look at my post #254 in this thread. If there’s a situation where a doctor can look at the patient, see something based on that patient’s “race”, and then make any even remotely useful decision, even if it’s just a very preliminary decision that just changes probabilities slightly, or does some crude narrowing down of the patient’s possible genetic heritage, then I think qualifies as NOT being “unarguably totally meaningless and worthless”, which is all that I’m trying to say.
Well, in post #254 I propose a only-barely-hypothetical (ie, it almost actually happened, had monstro’s doctor been a bit better informed) situation in which the doctor identifying monstro as African American (black) could have had a minor but possibly relevant impact on at least the beginning of the decision-making process. So, there you go, I’m saying “black” is a (common parlance) race, and I’m saying it’s not 100 million billion percent utterly and completely and totally and in all possible imaginable situations without meaning. I’m not (for the millionth time) saying anything more than that.
But see, the upshot of **Monstro’s **story is that the doctor, using a sociological definition or a vernacular definition of **Monstro’s **race, made a great big fucking mistake!
Yes, there may be some other instance where some doctor looked at some other patient, made a vernacular assumption about race, and was (since coincidences do occur) actually right.
Since neither we as potential patients nor the doctors involved in making the predictions or inferences can possibly predict which one of these scenarios will actually play out, because the baseline chosen was vernacular and not scientific, then using such vernacular groupings is indeed pathetically, inarguably, and totally meaningless and worthless.
Random chance (“Mr. Vool, I’m so pleased you’ve come to me with your problem. I’ve put a whole bunch of diseases up on my dart board, and I’m going to close my eyes, throw a dart, and come up with my diagnosis. Not saying anything about most of my thousands of patients, but just last year I diagnosed a guy with an intestinal impaction this way. So obviously my system is not *totally *meaningless and worthless, you know.”) would work as well.
It has been pointed out in this thread that this example only works because the Blacks in the US come from a relatively small group of ethnicities in Western Africa. If you apply it worldwide it stops working. It’s not without meaning, but it doesn’t mean “race”. It’s a property of the founder effect and ethnicities.
You can show a similar case with Jews and Tays-Sachs since the majority of Jews in the US are Ashkenazi. But it doesn’t mean that Jews are a race anymore than Blacks are one. It just means that populations are meaningful even if you aren’t aware of them.
Again, no one is claiming that the labels are completely useless. But if you go beyond the labels you can find the real biological underpinnings that support those labels and use them instead. They are more precise, avoid incorrect assumptions, represent the real biology going on, and don’t carry the baggage that the term race brings to the table.
Actually, many people are claiming precisely that. Or at least, I think they are, and that’s what I’m trying to argue against.
I agree entirely. Which is why I think the ideal thing for Monstro’s doctor to do would have been to (first) know that this condition was particularly common in South Africa, and (second) inquire as to Monstro’s specific heritage, IF KNOWN. But if it was not known (ie, Monstro was adopted at an early age or something), then Monstro being black would still potentially have a small amount of weight when discussing the risks and possibilities available.
I can’t guarantee that you wouldn’t offend anyone, but in the US, using Black as a rough first approximation for getting certain types of medical testing (such as blood pressure) can be useful to identify people at risk. There are better ways to identify the target audience but they aren’t as simple or quick. It works in this case because it’s an easy test, lots of people are affected, and the problem probably has a social component as well as a biological one, and because of the founder effect the population of Blacks in the US is heavily biased towards a smaller population group.
But it doesn’t define a biological race, it’s just an expedient way of identifying people who have a higher statistical probability of being at risk. This is useful from a public health standpoint; it’s strength is expediency.
If most Jews didn’t know whether they were Ashkenazi or Sephardic, then telling all Jews to get testing to Tays-Sachs would also make sense. However, most Jews know their ancestry well enough to know if they are at risk so you can refine the message to just Ashkenazi. I assume the Ethiopian Jews will be getting tested for high blood pressure with the rest of the Blacks.
See, I feel like you have a legitimate point, and one that I don’t disagree with, but you’re taking too far to an absolute that is not supportable.
So this condition that Monstro is discussing is most common among South Africans. “Race” and “being South African” are not identical concepts when using the vernacular definition of “race”. But they are strongly correlated, albeit with a mostly one-way correlation. So if you have information as to actual genetic heritage, that’s (somewhat) useful. If you have information only as to race, that’s clearly LESS useful, so much so that it would be totally obsoleted by more precise heritage data. But you seem to be claiming that purely race data would be 100% useless, even if used intelligently and correctly (which in Monstro’s original example was clearly not the case).
So with the Tay-Sachs example, we know that it’s most common among Ashkenazik Jews. So ideally, we’ll find out if someone has Ashkenazik Jewish heritage and factor that into our decision whether to test for Tay-Sachs. But if for some contrived reason all we knew was that the person was Jewish, should we take that information and use it as a weaker indication that Tay-Sachs might be present (remember, even knowing Ashkenazik heritage is present doesn’t prove Tay-Sachs is present, nor does knowing it’s absent prove that it’s absent, it’s just a data point that changes the probabilities), or should we say “well, you’re Jewish, so you might be Ashkenazik Jewish, or might be Sephardic, or heck might be a convert, and since we don’t know which, we won’t even take that into consideration at all”? Should a known-to-be-Jewish-but-not-known-whether-Ashkenazi person and a known-not-to-be-Jewish person get precisely the same treatment with exactly the same weighting of all decisions with respect to Tay-Sachs?
Well, this may be the semantic crux. I think of “biological” in this type of discussion as being opposed to social/cultural… nature as opposed nurture. The discussion of whether Monstro might or might not be more susceptible to this disease was, on that scale, purely a biological one, in that no one was saying “black people here tend to live near an area where they get exposed to a lot of X in their drinking water…” or “black culture near here frequently involves eating a lot of Y…”. Whatever likelihood Monstro did or did not have based on heritage was based purely on genetic heritage, not cultural heritage.
I think there is a bit of talking past people in this thread. My take is that people are rejecting the idea that the term race is useful for a biological classification system. This is true; there is a biological definition of race/subspecies that does not apply to humans. To a biologist, to use the term race to apply to humans is meaningless because it doesn’t meet the basic definition.
This isn’t to say that using the grouping “black” in some select situations can’t be expedient or useful, but that it only works because of geographic, social, or historical circumstances that aren’t universal. Since the concept of race necessarily implies universality IMO, this would mean we can use these terms with lots of caveats.
However, if he was in South Africa it wouldn’t make sense for his doctor the make the same decision, would it? There, the vast majority of people with black skin don’t have ancestors from West Africa and so wouldn’t be at risk. Sure, there’s a small possibility but the statistics would argue for not performing the test. How can the biology be supporting both doctors equally if they would come to valid but opposite conclusions depending on the history of the region?
His being black is only a risk factor in the context of living in the United States. That doesn’t argue to race being a biological classification.
So should we call Jews a race? That’s what we’re discussing here, not whether you test for Tays-Sachs in the absence of full information. From a statical argument, of course you test. But would you also test the Ethiopian Jews since you can make a statical case for that as well?
But monstro has no South African heritage. That’s the point isn’t it? So the doctor is quite simply wrong; she doesn’t have an increased risk because she’s “black” but only if she were to be from South Africa. The two are not even close to being synonymous. I’m pretty sure that monstro is of mixed descent just classifying her visually as “black” doesn’t make any biological sense. Phenotypes are not always reliable at determining ancestry. Obama is viewed as “black” but he’s half-white. Why don’t we define him as “white”? That definition is sociological.
The doctor could have easily looked up that a particular disease had a higher incidence in South Africa and then simply *asked *monstro if she knew of any South African ancestry. *As he should have done for any other patient.*My doctors shouldn’t be looking at what they think is my race (or they shouldn’t be!) but look at my family history and ask about ancestry if they’re concerned. There’s a far greater chance that I have diabetes or heart disease if my parents/grandparents have it than because I’m a member of X race.
But even allowing your nonbiological, sociologically derived definition, Monstro’s “race” is not South African. The only reason the doctor made the false assumption about race was because of an incorrect belief about skin color and it’s correlation to ancestry or “genetic heritage”. And that is exactly the problem with this kind of misapplication of both the word and the idea of race in a modern human context. I honestly cannot see it as being anything other than useless (except for instances where it is in fact dangerous or hurtful).
This is a debate - obviously these topics are disputed! As I’ve tried to explain, you can have these debates about all kinds of continuous variables and the lumper/splitter problem occurs when discussing classifications.
Why don’t you read Risch’s arguments and address those? You’re talking about a man described as *“the statistical geneticist of our time.” * PLOS Genetics
Again, do you have a citation regarding the low human genetic diversity relative to other species?
Err, yes they are. Social race tends to map to genetic clusters - that’s why it is useful in a medical context - for instance if you are treating a glaucoma.
Well I would call it medical utility, but you seem to feel it has biological meaning, so we are now down to definitional stuff within the scientific realm. Either way, Monstro’s doctor just didn’t follow proper diagnostic procedures.
I could say from now on that I find no meaningful biological definition of race except where it has medical utility when more specific genetic information is unknown. You might say that differently, but we have narrowed it all down a great deal.
MaxTheVool, why don’t you start a thread on the topic of sociological or cultural race definitions? This seems to be your area of interest, and there is some legitimate science in that area.
These are the reasons why the doctor is a dunderhead:
He picks out the African ancestry in my phenotype, disregarding the obvious “other” that is also there. Socially, this would not matter. I would be considered “black” in social interactions, and I accept this as my racial identity with no problem. But in this instance, he’s using race as a risk factor and thus marking it as an important biological variable. But why? In any biological sense, I have just as many European features as well as “black” ones. I have never had genealogical genetic testing performed, but I’m fairly confident–based on what I do know about my geneology–that I probably have a fair number of Western European genetic markers as well as West African ones. Supposedly I have Native American ancestry as well. For all he knows, I could have been a quarter Native American, a quarter West African, a quarter Western European, and a quarter Australian Aborigine. But the good doctor never asked me to identify my ancestral background at all. He saw a person who physically fits a certain “look” and went from there with all the bogus assumptions.
He incorrectly extrapolated a disease found in a small number of South Africans to an entire “race” of people (a race called “African American” :rolleyes:) It wouldn’t have mattered if I had been Ethiopian, Nigerian, Cape Verdian, or Afro-Brazilian. All that mattered to the doctor was that I am black, just like South Africans are black, so OMG, monstro has the black people brain cooties! The idea of different ethnicities existing within the social construct “black” did not even occur to him. Now, imagine him doing that to a white person. If there was a genetic disorder found only in a handful of Finnish families, don’t ya’ll think the doctor would have questioned a white patient about his background before sending off his samples to get tested for this disease? I think he would have. I think the doctor would have realized that “white” is a loose term we use to groups various populations recently descended from Europeans. Maybe he assumed that an African American wouldn’t know who their African ancestors were, so it’s better to err on the side of caution. But one can be clueless about what specific tribe or villages they come from while being very confident about what part of the big-ass continent they did NOT come from. Dumbass doctor.
The chances of a South African having the disease in the absence of it presenting in their family history is very very slim. The chances of an African American having inherited the disease from South African ancestors and ALSO not showing any family history of it is damn near close to zero. If he wanted to rule out a variant of the disease (apparently ruling out all four variants at the same time is out of the question? I’m still too befuddled by the whole ordeal to even bother to ask him), then he would have been better off picking the most commonly found variant (type 1) than the South African variant (type 2). The test is expensive, not covered by insurance because of the disorder’s rarity. And there are other, much more likely diagnostic possibilities out there that actually fit in with my family history and better yet, my actual symptomology! But the doctor is stuck on this far-fetched hypothesis. A hypothesis that, if true, would mean I would have less than a decade to live in any meaningful way. He’s data-mining with someone’s life, goddammit.
This is a dangerous approach to medicine, and that is why I refuse to see this doctor ever again.
. . . as long as your “social race” is identified in a location where founder effect has limited the variety of individuals who might be so classified socially, (e.g., the U.S.). Otherwise, not so much.
Beats me. It’s certainly been done. But, key question, if we DO call them a race, is that classification biologically meaningless? I argue that even though that classification is clearly biologically imprecise, as long as we agree that it’s not prima facie ridiculous to do things like recommend Tays-Sachs tests based on knowing that someone is Jewish but not knowing whether they’re Ashkenazik or not, then it’s not 100% without meaning.
