The individual groups that Rosenberg identified are biological populations. The Yoruba, San, Sindhi, Pathan, Basque, Han, Miao and all the other individual groups are recognized as populations by everyone in biology. None of them are identified as “races.” Where do you find any legitimate scientific paper that identifies any of them as “races”?
Mixing terms and arbitrarily putting the label “race” on any of those groups can satisfy some archaic definition, but it simply confuses any discussion of “race” in society or biology because the vast majority of people who hear or read the word “race” in such a discussion will look for a(n essentially) non-existent larger group. To what larger “races” would the Yoruba, Pathans, or Han belong that actually share any biological commonality, (genetic structure, predisposition to disease, dietary restrictions, etc.)?
If you wish to assert that there are hundreds of races among humanity, that is your prerogative, but then you need to recognize that when you use that term, you will mislead the overwhelming majority of any audience you might have. When the word “race” gets bandied about, it pretty much nearly always refers to the four of Linnaeus, the five of Blumenbach, or the three of mid-twentieth century social studies texts without actually identifying any genetically coherent group.
I’m using the biological definitions I cited above. If people find that too confusing it’s their problem.
In terms of the HapMap codes these relate to the following broader racial categories: white = CEU + TSI, black = ASW + LWK + MKK + YRI, Hispanic = MEX, East Asian = CHB + CHD + JPT, and South Asian (Indian) = GIH.]. Remember that the term “human populations” is basically a euphemism for “racial groups”.
Population descriptors:
ASW (A): African ancestry in Southwest USA
CEU (C): Utah residents with Northern and Western European ancestry from the CEPH collection
CHB (H): Han Chinese in Beijing, China
CHD (D): Chinese in Metropolitan Denver, Colorado
GIH (G): Gujarati Indians in Houston, Texas
JPT (J): Japanese in Tokyo, Japan
LWK (L): Luhya in Webuye, Kenya
MEX (M): Mexican ancestry in Los Angeles, California
MKK (K): Maasai in Kinyawa, Kenya
TSI (T): Toscans in Italy
YRI (Y): Yoruba in Ibadan, Nigeria
Actually, it is not so much “confusing” as misleading. To employ the word “race” when it sends a completely different meaning to the audience than you claim to be intending, hardly promotes knowledge or understanding.
Not really. “Human populations” has the meaning “genetically related populations.” “Racial groups” means “groups of people, often unrelated, associated by geography or vague phenotype or any other sysem of classification that looks good to a particular observer at a particular time,” (i.e., some social construct).
Where do you get that definition from? The definition I used from biology online mirrors your definition for genetically related populations, particularly:
The point about geography of course is that it influences mating patterns, something the Rosenberg paper on clines discussed. Here is Neil Risch also:
However, the three to six “races” that are generally included in those discussions do not meet that definition of population. Pick any of the “races.” They are not “a tribe or family of people sharing a common breed or lineage” while a population probably is and they do not share more of a “common heritage, ancestor, breed or stock” other than all being human.
Really? Wilson’s abstract actually notes:
In other words, Wilson and company developed methods to test genetics for specific markers to identify drug effectiveness rather than relying on the unreliable and inaccurate assumption of relatedness based on “ethnic labels” (such as “race”).
Risch appears to believe in racial structure, but tends to ignore all the information that argues against it, (such as citing Wilson’s work that does not say what he wants it to or ignoring the clinal nature of humanity and avoiding discussions of “racial” mixing). You appear to believe Risch, but I find him unpersuasive.
Risch doesn’t ignore racial mixing. See his comments on hispanics in that 2002 paper. Nonetheless, in a study in 2005 Risch then showed self reported ethnicity corresponds to these clusters about 99% of the time. When Risch says that two two Caucasians are more similar to each other genetically than a Caucasian and an Asian, that’s what subsequent studies also show.
(Witherspoon et al 2007 - Genetic Similarities Within and Between Human Populations)
And no matter what genetic markers you choose: SNPs, STRs, no matter how you choose them: randomly or based on their “informativeness”, it is relatively easy to classify DNA into the correct continental origin (ie. major geographic origins of their ancestors).
As long as you stick to North America with its particular filters of immigration, you can make that work. It starts to come apart when we move into the rest of the world, otherwise, Wilson would not have had to create the separate methodology to use gene testing for drug compatibility–he could have simply relied on self-reported ethnicity, the specific action he noted was too flawed for validity.
I’m surprised to even see Risch employ the word “Caucasian.” I’d be curious to know who he includes in that group and whether he really believes that a Swede is closer, genetically, to a Sri Lankan than to an Ethiopian or whether the Ethiopian is more distant from a Yemeni than a Swede or a Sri Lankan. Does he include Tahitians with the Mongoloids or with an Oceanic people?
Regardless, with all the extra gene matching that that is required for genuine medicine to match individuals, there does not seem to be any legitimate reason to hang on to the outdated concept of “race,” since it fails to actually provide useful information.
And note, again, that Rosenberg failed to find actual relatedness among the groups, only statistical pairing by junk DNA as a legacy of migrations. Within the various groups, enough change has occurred that the geographical groups tend to be composed of actually dissimilar smaller groups.
Well, doesn’t genetic distance measure the time since two populations have shared common ancestors - i.e., since they were the same population?
So genetic distance is a summary measure of general relatedness between populations. And what these results show is that people from a given continental population are more closely related to one another than they are to the populations of other continents (see Goodrum’s faq http://www.goodrumj.com/RFaqHTML.html.
As you say, you can also identify the genetic distance between smaller groups within these major groupings:
No. It merely shows the distance from common ancestor, not what has happened to the populations since that time.
By “relatedness” I would expect to see common susceptibility to disease or diet or pharmacology, yet disease is all over the place, based on environmental factors, acceptable diets are diverse, (probably environmentally selected, as well), and, as Wilson and others have noted, good pharmacology still requires tests at the level of individuals, not groups. At the local, (biological population), level, we can find relatedness, but no such commonality can be found at the level of the socially identified “races.”
Ok, but you have to accept that people from these continental races or populations are more closely related to each other than they are to people from other continental races. For instance, europeans are more closely related to each other than they are to someone from sub-saharan africa or an australian aborigine.
In terms of disease, here are some examples of statistical differences along these lines: