Race is a Social Construct
Back to back on my to read list were two articles that made an odd juxtaposition. First up was Race Is a Social Construct, Scientists Argue in the once great Scientific American. Here’s a representative blurb:
More than 100 years ago, American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois was concerned that race was being used as a biological explanation for what he understood to be social and cultural differences between different populations of people. He spoke out against the idea of “white” and “black” as discrete groups, claiming that these distinctions ignored the scope of human diversity.
Science would favor Du Bois. Today, the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct without biological meaning. And yet, you might still open a study on genetics in a major scientific journal and find categories like “white” and “black” being used as biological variables.
The article goes on as a confused mish-mash, and includes a comment that one researcher feels that
modern genetics research is operating in a paradox, which is that race is understood to be a useful tool to elucidate human genetic diversity, but on the other hand, race is also understood to be a poorly defined marker of that diversity and an imprecise proxy for the relationship between ancestry and genetics.
Of course, when people think “race” they think ancestry. Ask a random person to classify people whose ancestors lived in what is now Japan, Sweden, and Uganda 2,500 years ago and he/she will, with little difficulty in most cases, classify those people as “Asian,” “European” and “Black,” respectively. Other objections to discussing race include the fact that people travel, and sometimes procreate after they’ve moved. Additionally, the fact that not all White people are exactly alike, and not all Black people are exactly alike, etc., is also viewed as problematic.
Next up on my reading list was Impact of common genetic determinants of Hemoglobin A1c on type 2 diabetes risk and diagnosis in ancestrally diverse populations: A transethnic genome-wide meta-analysis in PLOS Medicine. Here are a few quotes:
Blood glucose binds in an irreversible manner to circulating hemoglobin in red blood cells (RBCs), generating “glycated hemoglobin,” called HbA1c. HbA1c is used to diagnose and monitor diabetes…. About 11% of people of African American ancestry carry at least one copy of this G6PDvariant, while almost no one of any other ancestry does. We estimated that if we tested all Americans for diabetes using HbA1c, about 650,000 African Americans would be missed because of these genetically lowered HbA1c levels… This work supports a role for a precision medicine application to reduce race-ethnic health disparities using HbA1c genetics to improve T2D diagnosis and prediction and to inform screening strategies for T2D across the African continent where the prevalence of the G6PD variant can reach 20%.
From what I can tell reading medical and genetic literature, there is a collage industry in which scholars tell us that “race is a social construct without biological meaning.” But there is a second cottage industry in which a different group of scholars looks for genetic manifestations that strongly correlate with that particular biologically meaningless social construct.
The first cottage industry also warns us (to quote the Scientific American article again) that:
Assumptions about genetic differences between people of different races have had obvious social and historical repercussions, and they still threaten to fuel racist beliefs.
Meanwhile, members of the second cottage industry seems hell bent on trying to save lives. It is all very odd.
Update, 10/18/2017, 5:48 AM PST – minor grammatical error corrected by removing the word “with” following the word “mish-mash.”
From what I remember from my undergrad genetics courses there isn’t any contradiction between the two views. While there are sub populations with clinically meaningful genetic differences these differences are generally confined to minor genetic anomalies that are clinically but not socially meaningful, like a tendency towards high blood presdure. There hasn’t been enough time for genetic drift to result in variance beyond things like genetic disorders from mostly recessive traits that haven’t spread far from their point of origin.
Because Africans have considerably more genetic diversity there are more of these sub groups in populations of African descent than with other groups. Since we don’t have a way to sort people into clinically meaningful groups we rely on the social construct of race to identify populations to screen for medical disorders. It is a poor proxy but we lack a better one.
And just to reinforce the point this is meaningful primarily for recessive medical disorders because these can often occur in a single gene, more complex traits generally don’t trace to a single gene so outside the medical field what genetic differences there are are meaningless. Hence race as a social construct, as far as socially meaningful traits are concerned there is no reason to believe that there has been enough drift to result in variation on socially meaningful traits since the necessary mutations would be more complex than those that result in clinically meaningful differences.
Race in humans is a social construct. When the rules used to define race in other species is applied to humans, there is no justification for claiming races in different populations.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737365/
Gray squirrels sometimes have black fur. Pintos, Sorrels, Palominos, Chestnuts, etc. are horses.
Just checking Sickle cell traits are one gene issues in recessive genes, that appear to improve survivability till reproduction in folks living in areas with Malaria. Of course for Sickle cell if not treated in non Malarial areas it does hinder survival till reproduction.
As noted since Africa is in current anthropology theory the source of the human race it is not surprising that there is more variation there.
The selective advantage for the sickle cell allele in regions where malaria is endemic is for the heterozygotes (sickle cell trait). Except at very high altitudes with low oxygen tension, heterozygotes are asymptomatic and have no survival disadvantage in non-malarial environments. Sickle cell disease is the consequence of homozygosity for the sickle cell allele.
To put it another way, the malarial resistance associated with the sickle cell allele is dominant.
Joel,
A lot of divisions are social constructs. In animals, if there are sufficient differences between two groups, we call the two groups a subspecies or a breed. But what constitutes sufficient differences? Of course, we wouldn’t apply the term “breed” to humans. Heck, dogs can mate with wolves, and wolves can mate with coyotes, and we call them all separate species.
Are there such differences in humans? For instance, can we tell people apart by ancestry? It does appear that DNA tests can tell us the ancestry of a person with some reasonable degree of precision.
Tzimiskes,
There is a reason we have statistics. When my wife was pregnant, the fetus was tested for Tay Sachs and not Sickle Cell. The reason is that my wife and I fall into one group rather than a different group, and those groups are clinically different. Sure, not every member of one group gets Tay Sachs, and not every member of the other gets Sickle Cell, but until we get to the point where we can tailor medicine down to the individual level that will be true.
I am not a geneticist. Nor do I play one on TV. But I do know you have left out founder effects and bottlenecks. While well outside my knowledge base, I suspect the bit about genetic disorders is also not true. We see differences in height, weight, eye sight, ability to breathe at altitude, etc., among population groups. Is this really all due to differences in recessive traits?
What is the point of this post? What’s the underlying message the author is trying to hint at?
The word “race” has different meanings in different fields.
It makes perfect sense to discuss something like race when tracking genetics and ancestry. If you want to track historical migrations, tracking related genetic groups adds an entire dimension of data. If you want to make medical decisions based on genetic correlations, again that makes perfect sense. Since humans haven’t been perfectly hybridized, there are clinically valid uses for recognizing ancestral race in medicine. It’s even more important now that we have useful genetic tests, but broad genetic testing is not so inexpensive as to be done as a matter of course.
Race also has a political meaning, and that gets us into some ugly stuff. Political race is a social construct, usually one for defining in-groups and out-groups. Look at the Dia Del Raz, recently celebrated, which celebrates the hybrid Old World and New World “race” that followed from Columbus’s voyages. Look at how various races in the US slowly became “white”. Italians and other southern Europeans, for example, were not always considered to be of the same race as northerners.
There is some overlap in the meaning of the words in that the political meaning usually determines race based on ancestry, but the scientific community deals with biological issues while the political community deals with political issues.
urban legend
I think you’re probably smart enough — a10 years level of smart — to figure that out.
Seems to me that I vaguely recall from my early child-hood indoctrination by the Lutheran church bible class (which occurred during adult Sunday services my mother attended — she being a full blood blond haired blue-eyed daughter of my immigrant grand-parents from Sweden an all) that the early legends passed down by the Israelites — who came from what is now southern or central Iraq via Abraham’s migration — separated people into 12 tribes based on racial origins (e.g. appearances)..
Now for absolute certainty the ancients of yore hadn’t even an iota of a clue that genes were involved but probably knew pretty well by then that procreating from two of these racial types produced hybrids dominated by racial appearances of one or the other partners in the procreation effort
And then for some reason’s left to the imaginations of those ancients of yore, they decided that these differences in appearances were of some social significance — maintaining tribal cohesion, traditions, and thus a special identity perhaps — and thus they passed down stories related to reasons why maintenance of one’s tribal identity by appearances was important to them, and this is what we now live with as our Achilles heal of racist belief systems. Or maybe their “god” told them to remain pure and separate as “he” had intended.
And I’m also pretty sure that as the Assyrians moved through the regions and occupied various territories and as they Egyptians did like wise, not to mention the early trading routes and caravans between these various regions of what we now refer to as the “cradle of civilization” and the “Middle East” that there were thousands upon thousands of short one-night stands between the males of one group and females of another, not to mention rapes, and thus these different races mixed to produced hybrid offspring with mixed racial appearances that then made for difficulties in identifying which tribe they actually belonged to based on appearances and so things changed …. and religious identity took its place .. which god of the many gods (polytheism) they put at the top of their priorities in sacrificial traditions and worship.
It’s all so confusing though, isn’t it Mr. Kimel? I mean which is it? Race or Religion? or is it cultural traditions? or are these all just different terms meaning the same thing..
Mr Kimil,,
What is the reason for your wanting to distinguish humans by their ancestry? You said in your response to Joel [ October 18, 2017 10:09 pm]:
” Heck, dogs can mate with wolves, and wolves can mate with coyotes, and we call them all separate species.
Are there such differences in humans? For instance, can we tell people apart by ancestry? It does appear that DNA tests can tell us the ancestry of a person with some reasonable degree of precision”
Also I’m curious what “reasonable degree of precision” means in your measures since a few hundred or thousand of years of migrations, travels, with mingled interbreeding is genetically a huge mixture of traits so unless there’s been a dominance of a tribal intra-breeding the “precision” you refer to leaves a huge question of what “reasonable” means. So hence my question to you.
Then if you’re referring to a dominance produced by generations of intra-breeding you’re assuming or implying that you assume this is what’s important to differentiate people., which seems to mean (my interpretation) that some level of “purity” of racial traits is significant. But then you have to have some criteria to decide between level of significance and from that a criteria of significance to judge being important in some regard..
Mike Kimel bleats “But what constitutes sufficient differences?”
That’s precisely the point of the link I posted. Try reading it.
Urban Legend,
Lives count for something?
Or, to go upthread, when my wife was pregnant, the fetus was tested for Tay Sachs rather than Sickle Cell. Was that racism? I view it as a more efficient use of resources than testing our child for Sickle Cell given neither of us have the right ancestry for that disease.
There is a lot of efficiency that is lost when people go with the “social construct” dismiss.
Joel,
I read it a long time ago and did a quick skim after your comment. And from what I can tell, JackD’s comment was a pretty good albeit succinct response. If you did a ctrl-H and replaced the word “human” with the word “squirrel” in the paper (having lived in Northeast Ohio, “Operation Black Squirrel” comes to mind), would it read differently?
Besides, does it even matter? Would it have changed, for instance, the conclusion of the paper to which I linked? Would it have changed the fact that our son was tested for Tay Sachs and not Sickle Cell? Sure, there are no hard and fast boundaries with population groups when mobility and interbreeding of groups exists given the way biology works. But in the absence of the ability to look at each individual as a separate biological entity, which we don’t have yet, are you willing to lose the lives needed to stop using a classification that does provide useful guidance?
“If you did a ctrl-H and replaced the word “human” with the word “squirrel” in the paper (having lived in Northeast Ohio, “Operation Black Squirrel” comes to mind), would it read differently? ”
I don’t know. What I know is that if you replace the word “human” with “chimpanzee” you get a different result. And chimps are far closer to humans than squirrels.
“Would it have changed the fact that our son was tested for Tay Sachs and not Sickle Cell?”
More misdirection, Mike. Clumsy and obvious misdirection at that. The title of your post is “Race is a social construct.” Tay Sacks and Sickle Cell are single gene disorders. Per the Templeton paper, allele frequencies at one or another locus in subpopulations don’t define races in humans or any other species.
“you willing to lose the lives needed to stop using a classification that does provide useful guidance?”
Rubbish. It is simple and obvious to say that if you trace your ancestry to certain populations where a given allele frequency is higher than that that of others, it is reasonable to test for that allele. That’s not race.
You obviously either didn’t read the Templeton paper or didn’t understand it.
No, but an awful lot of those alleles vary in frequency by this social construct we call race. Allele variation will never follow any predetermined boundaries. There’s too much breeding across groups, and too many mutations.
We might as well say there’s no difference between Brazilians and Germans that isn’t socially constructed. Like the author of your paper did, one can create definitions that, when used, make that statement true. But they don’t make those definitions relevant for a lot of purposes that matter.
“No, but an awful lot of those alleles vary in frequency by this social construct we call race.”
Actually, no. If you read the Templeton paper I linked to, as well as the literature in the field, you will discover that the data point to more allelic variation *within* so-called races than between so-called races.
“Allele variation will never follow any predetermined boundaries. There’s too much breeding across groups, and too many mutations.”
In humans, yes. In chimps, no. In other animal and plant species, not necessarily. The word “race” does have meaning in population genetics, but when the metrics used to define this term quantitatively are applied to human “races,” these “races” fail to meet the minimum threshold. Which is Templeton’s central argument in the paper you say you read.
” Like the author of your paper did, one can create definitions that, when used, make that statement true.”
Uh, no. Templeton didn’t “create definitions,” he used a definition accepted in the field of population genetics to define “race” in non-human species. He then applied the same criteria to humans and to a closely related primate species. For chimps, he found evidence that fulfilled the definition of races. Using the same approach, he found no evidence in human populations for races.
“We might as well say there’s no difference between Brazilians and Germans that isn’t socially constructed.”
Uh, no. It is likely that there are alleles that differ significantly between these two human subpopulations. The topic of this thread, based on the title, is “race.” It is possible to say that race in humans is a social construct while at the same time acknowledging that there are allelic frequency differences between Brazilian populations and German populations that aren’t socially constructed.
Mike,
I think the paper linked to by Joel really says everything that is necessary on the subject. All I can add are some specific examples.
A while back my wife was telling me about how she had seen several people with a disease that was associated with Swedish descent. I don’t believe this particular disease was specifically identified as having a genetic origin but it likely is given its link to heredity; genetic analysis has not been done on a large number of diseases linked to heredity because there is not enough geneticists or funding to do the work. As an aside, this was interesting to her because she was diagnosing it in people not of Swedish decent, she left the clinic so was never able to follow up and determine if there was a distinct cause or if the people simply had a distant ancestor that was a Swede, perhaps a missionary, soldier, or merchant that visited their part of the world a few centuries back.
Back on point, this disease was associated with Swedish descent, not European ethnicity. If history had gone differently the association would be different, if the Kalmar Union had lasted no doubt it would be associated with a Scandanavian background, or if Gustav Vasa had been more successful perhaps a Greater Swedish background. The point being, any social construct associated with geography is also going to be associated with variance in disease burden, no matter how arbitrary the categorization. With rare exceptions, such as sickle cell, disease burden is not something that is being selected for and therefore it will spread from its point of origin randomly.
From a clinical standpoint it would probably be clinically useful if you could divide the human population up into groups that had the most interaction with each other, you could have a Mediterranean group, a silk road group, another grouped by the Indian Ocean trade, etc (examples only, the key element is population transfers and I don’t know enough population genetics to know what the most useful groupings would be but these aren’t going to be racial categories, there was a lot more transfer between East Africa and west India than there was between East Africa and West Africa or between North Africa and West Africa through the Sahara route than there was between West Africa and South Africa). But we don’t have this as a social construct, my wife can’t ask her patient if his ancestors were from a country that was part of the silk road or Indian Ocean trade. If they are a more recent immigrant she can get modern nationality but even this isn’t going to necessarily correspond well with actual genetic transfers. And in the case of African Americans they don’t even know the country of origin of their ancestors the best they can do is African.
But something I recall from when I accompanied my wife on a medical mission to Zambia and did some reading on the subject is that even this distinction is not helpful when the patient is African. African Americans are not from a representative sample of Africa, disease risks among African Americans are not indicative of disease risks in a country like Zambia. This is because African Americans are primarily from West Africa and Zambia is sufficiently distant that the disease risks for central Africans differ from those of West Africans. This is where race as a social construct comes in. African-American does not work as a category for Africa as a whole, it is a distinct sub-population. What we see is closer to continuous variation, regions that had more trade and population transfer show more similarity than those that show less. But any categorization that reflects geography will be clinically useful because this helps the doctor to focus on risks that can be linked to geography. Since race is a social construct researchers also test for disease risk based on race, they aren’t testing for disease risks based on proximity to ancient trade routes so we don’t have data on which would better characterize disease risk.
A further point arises from this. Because medical research has been disproportionately North American and European we can more narrowly categorize diseases in these populations. A disease present in Europe can be associated with Swedish or Irish descent, however, a disease that truly originated in Mali or Nigeria and is confined to people descended from these areas will be characterized as associated with African American descent since we are testing for African American descent, not Malinese or Nigerian descent. This provides a false impression of African-Americans as a genetically unitary group rather than as a far more diverse one where people of Malinese descent might have more in common with people of North African descent rather than East African descent (again, I don’t know enough population genetics to know of the closeness of these specific groups, I do know that within group variation is greater than between group variation, it stands to reason that if you group people differently you will find some groups that are different races which have more in common with each other genetically than they do with others from more geographically distant members of their own race).
Regarding recessive traits, on further reflection I believe I am influenced by the use of recessive traits in text book examples which tend to focus on childhood diseases with simple genetic models. Particularly to disease I think recessive traits are probably more common, with rare exceptions like sickle cell, disease is almost by definition maladaptive, since a silent mutation would be more likely to be passed on than a maladaptive trait. I admit, this is logical inference more than anything I am sure that I remember, late onset diseases like Huntingtons can be dominant and more complex genetic interactions or other late onset or lifestyle dependent traits like high blood pressure or type 2 diabetes may just as easily not be recessive since they wouldn’t have the same impact on reproduction that an early onset childhood disease would.
Regarding adaptive traits such as altitude tolerance, no one claims these are associated with race, they emerged independently in areas like Tibetan Plateau or Andean region. I have seen some claims that height varies by race but there is substantial within group variations, should the Pygmy and Dinka be classified as different races based on their height? No one is arguing against variation within the human species, the argument is whether race accurately captures this variation, or what I think people are often really getting at, whether race is correlated with adaptive traits. On both counts I think the evidence is strongly against that hypothesis. There is no good model that could argue that traits that are adaptive to the peculiar circumstances of modern life could have faced selective pressure in any group that could be classified as a race or that classification by the concept of race is a good proxy for genetic variation across human populations. This doesn’t mean it isn’t clinically useful but that is because it is information that is available to both doctor and patient, the causation is backwards race is useful because it is a social construct that reflects geography not because it reflects underlying genetic differences. Other categories would undoubtedly be more useful but since these categories have neither been the source of genetic study nor do they represent information that would be available to either the patient or doctor in a clinical setting they can’t be used.
Ethnicity is a crude, but clinically useful, proxy for genetic differences that exist as a continua based on distance but that can’t be used to imply socially meaningful genetic differences between the groups since these differences exist on a continuum rather than as a sharp divide between population.
Tzimiskes,
Here’s the issue, as best I can figure. Because of the way genes propagate, for a given condition (say, a disease) the right population to look at might be an extended family. X years later it might be most if the residents of a town, and X years after that maybe a national population. Even then, not everyone has “it.”
Race is an imperfect differentiator but it is what is out there, and for many nasty enough issues that affect enough people that resources can be fruitfully applied to combatting them, it can correlate well with the affected population.
I did some googling and found that a big chunk of what I am trying to say was more eloquently put by nephrologist who happens to be editor of Ethnicity and Disease, a journal looking at, well, ethnicity and disease:
Throwing out a classifier that can save lives because it isn’t perfect, or because some people are unhappy with it makes no sense.
Joel,
“When it comes to matters regarding physical differences, look to genetics. What people call racial groups is a short hand that correlates well with a lot of the differences that exist in the genes given issues of data collection, granularity, interbreeding, porous borders, etc. ”
When you actually look to genetics, what you find is that there is more genetic variation between members of the same “race” than there is genetic variation between races. What people call racial groups is a short hand that correlates well with lots of differences that exist in culture, diet, climate, etc. When it comes to matters regarding physical differences, look to environment, gene-environment interaction and genetics. This is what human genetics teaches us.
What people call racial groups is not meaningful as a genetically based classification system. In the Templeton paper, he places this argument on a quantitative footing. If you are actually interested in human genetics, read the Templeton paper. If you still cling to the use of the word race–as many people do–then fine. The point is that such usage is a social construct not buttressed by a meaningful genetic foundation. That is the point Templeton makes. Nothing you have said here falsifies the points made in the article.
“Throwing out a classifier that can save lives because it isn’t perfect, or because some people are unhappy with it makes no sense.”
Using a meaningless classifier because of historical preservation or because discarding it will make some people unhappy makes no sense. There are perfectly reasonable classifiers to justify genetic testing for risk that don’t require appeals to “race.” Indeed, with the advent of cheap DNA sequencing, simply sequencing a patient’s entire exome regardless of ancestry is an option. Already, 23andMe has FDA authorization to advise on 10 single-gene traits, and all you have to do is spit in a tube–no physician intermediation. The list of genes will only grow, and quickly.
I look at humanity over time and play this little game with myself to try to understand when our version of hominids really did diverge from a completely different ancestor to the point where a mating between that distant ancestor and myself would be impossible. That is the line I draw in this little game. I think all of us would agree that we could successfully mate with a Roman living 2000 years ago. I believe I could mate with a Native American 15,000 years ago. As you go further in time, the chances of a successful pairing diminish. It may be that speciation occurs over so many generations that adjacent ancestors or offspring seem the same to each other but this scale must be a sliding one. What is the real number of human generations that prevents successful pairings? It could be in the tens of thousands.
Joel, I’m not sure if you were responding to my comment and questions to Mr. Kimel, but if so, I had read the summary of the link you posted which is new new information.
My interest is obtaining Mr. Kimel’s answers to my questions to him and his support for his statements. I seriously doubt he has any rational logic to support his statements, but am willing hear him try to provide it. Of course to date in his present post and others he can’t / won’t even make a semblance of doing so.
For example he’s often referred to his wife’s being tested passing on a disease that is more frequent in a religious culture where-in the religion has / had rules related to marriage … a male could marry a non-Jewish female IF the female converted to Judism. This has the effect of keeping marriages among the religious group’s members (males and females_ which then has the effect of increasing the frequency of any disease becoming more-so with the group. .
How race enters into this is a constriction where-by the religious group is deemed or deems itself a “race”. Yet the origins of this religious group are from the multiple peoples and their heritages in the ME, including North Africa, Persians, Assyrians, etc. It is only after the religion established itself that the marriage rules became significant and enforced which then led to more in-breeding and thus perpetuated the then genetic makeup of the religious members.
Does Mr. Kimel believe Jews are a race? If so why? If not, then why does he consider Blacks a race or Indian’s, or Chinese, or Northern Europeans, or Scandinavians, etc. All he’s doing is using external appearances to classify people into something he calls “race” which has its origins in biblical lore with the “twelve tribes”. … and subsequently added to over the millennia by people, predominantly Northern European “scholars” who deemed the appearances of people from the Caucus’s to be the superior form and appearance of humans as a race. White supremacy then and now all based on appearances.
The more significant question to me is why “tribalism” prevails? Why do people have to have a self-identity that uses appearances at the top level to define one’s “tribe” to which they claim membership and their identity?.
What value is this “separatism”” Is it perhaps simply a tradition handed down over time for political purposes —- maintenance of power within a group and rejection of “outsiders” as threats to that power unless subjugated as slaves.
Since people like familiar things and institution, and traditions, because it gives them more comfort and peace of mind, predictability, etc. then it seems to me that this desire may manifest in defining one’s tribe and identity by appearances at the top level to maintain that which is likely to be maintained as familiar and predictable. .. which is to say cultural cohesion… which is perpetuated for self-security, comfort and peace of mind… tranquility promoting..
And since of course people like to feel important and significant, then they would have a tendency to denigrate those outside their own tribe to maintain the own feelings of importance and superiority… hence racism.
@Longttooth,
I’ve been responding to Mike. I agree with your comments.
Mike is clinging to the notion of races in humans in the face of sound, detailed genetic arguments. As the title of this thread states, race is a social construct. Mike attempts to draft sciency sounding language to make it appear that the categorization of humans by “race” matters to health. It doesn’t. I provided a link that falsifies his arguments. He claims he read it. I don’t see any evidence that he has, but if so, he clearly doesn’t understand it. I’ve rebutted his arguments using reasoning.
I accepted years ago that no matter how well you teach, you cannot make someone learn.
Joel,
BTW, I see (belatedly) I had a typo in my statement to you
“I had read the summary of the link you posted which is new new information.”
Replace the 1st occurrence of “new” with “not”
Regards teaching & learning.
In my experience there are two types of problems with learning.
1. A failure to recognize a concept or foundation condition (basis) as being critical to further understanding … e.g. learning. This can sometimes be the teacher’s failure in not emphasizing it in that context or the students’ due to the student’s lack of relevant background preparatory to the current subject matter to be learned.
2.A failure to accept what one doesn’t want to accept, therefore rationalizing and rejecting on any basis that seems satisfactory enough for the student’s desire to reject. This type of problem with learning is often related to a rejection of an authority in the subject matter when it differs from a prior authority whom the student accepted. Reconciling this requires more introspection than many are willing go to the effort to do. This is also known as having a prejudice.
I had two experiences in which I viewed the latter type of learning problem. They convinced me that people are often very prone to rejecting reality and known information to the point of walking out of the class…. e.g. rejecting the teaching authority.
One was a high-school semester elective course on “history”. The teacher was a doctorate in history from Harvard (on a 2 year leave to teach military brats in Europe for he experience of living and traveling in Europe on the gov’ts dime so to speak). Her subject was teaching us all the fallacies we’d always been taught and the full / complete picture of which only one part had been taught to us in our history books and standard fare. Over half the class vehemently objected to the content and the facts we were being taught…. and quit the class within the two week “drop” limit. High school students calling the teacher a liar to her face in public!
The other occurred in college, my sophomore year in Intro to Macroeconomics (an elective course for me). The prof explained that the U.S. was moving rapidly to a majority service economy and that production of goods capital was disappearing to foreign manufacturing because “capital always moves to the best risk related ROI”.. U.S capital a major mover. Half the class objected and shouted their “reasons” why the prof was FOS. The US was the globes largest most profitable enterprise the world had ever known leading in every technology and every mfg’ing enterprise. When the prof showed evidence that this was a completely erroneous claim … e.g both Europe and Japan’s steel industry were then far more productive and at far lower costs than the U.S. (for just one example among many). they rejected the data out of hand. This was in 1966 or fall of ’65.
1/3rd of the class petitioned to a) have the prof replaced forthwith or b) allow students to drop without academic records 1/3rd of the way through the course. The head of the business school under which the econ dept existed gave them the latter option The class was much more informative and less disrupted after that.
I learned by those two experiences that learning requires a lot more than what a teacher can offer toward student’s learning. For a teacher to identify and modify prejudices of students which were formed in the past by who knows what authorities is nearly impossible or if possible requires something of an “art” in persuasion, demeanor, infinite patience, and a willingness to sacrifice the actual course content for the non-prejudiced segment in the course..
In Mr. Kimel’s case teaching him anything requires first and foremost identifying the foundations of the source(s) of his original prejudice and working from that point. Mr. Kimel is not willing to start at that point and has done no or far from sufficient introspection to even understand the sources himself. I would guess that there’s an internal conflict he doesn’t want to confront.
Joel, the synopsis of my prior comment is the well known
“You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make’em drink”.
Woolley,
Bear in mind that lions and tigers can still mate. Apparently so can sheep and goats. Here are pictures of guinea hen & chicken hybrids. If this is correct, they are from two distinct families that split 64 million years ago, and of course, their generations are much shorter than people’s.
Note also that non-Sub Saharan African populations contain DNA from archaic humans (Neanderthals and Denisovans) and recent literature suggests that Sub Saharan African may have DNA from a different (to my knowledge, currently unknown) archaic population. So early Homo sapiens clearly were able to mate with individuals who we would not classify as Homo sapiens.
To be a bit more provocative – I have skimmed through some of Greg Cochran’s recent writing. His writing style sometimes makes it hard for a layman to quite grasp the nuance of what he has in mind, so it is possible I am not quite getting it, but if I am, he seems to feel that the date for which Homo sapiens came around keeps getting pushed backward because the date at which the San split off from everyone else keeps getting pushed backward, and that would otherwise lead to several very awkward conclusions. It does, however, speak to the arbitrariness of borders.
Joel,
I am not clinging to anything. I quoted the journal editor of Ethnicity and Disease upthread who stated what I said, however more succinctly:
The point is, if a classification is useful, it should continue to be used until something better comes along.
Besides, none of this is settled as much as you or Templeton want to insist it is. For example, Dawkins has a view that is different from both Templeton’s and the quote I provided – he thinks race is real:
If I recall correctly from the Ancestor’s Tale, I am guessing that that what he means by “irrelevant to anything that matters” is not that it does not affects outcomes like diseases, but rather that they shouldn’t affect how we consider each other to be human. I could be wrong though – I wouldn’t want to speak for Dawkins.
And, of course, there are the comments of James Watson that got him pilloried. They may be offensive, but it is clear that the co-discoverer of DNA believes to this day that race is a real thing.
My uneducated opinion, which is based more on statistics than on biology or genetics or medicine, is that it is sufficiently fuzzy around the edges that sooner or later more granular classifications will prove to be sufficiently more useful, but in the meantime, it is a classification that is proving useful.
Joel,
For grins and giggles, here’s Pinker:
His tweet links to this article.
Yes, I giggled and grinned. Because Pinker is a psychologist and utterly unqualified to comment on the definition of race, and because Templeton is an internationally recognized population geneticist who is eminently authoritative on the subject.
I was giggling and grinning at you.
“Race is real.” What does “real” mean. If you accept race as a social construct, then it is “real.” As defined genetically, it is real for many species of plants and animals, but not for humans.
Not to put too fine a point on it, the Nazis certainly found race to be “real.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism_and_race
Apartheid South Africa found race to be “real.”
http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/race-and-ethnicity-south-africa
Champions of the “one drop rule” in the post-reconstruction South found race to be “real.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-drop_rule
Personally, I find all of the above to be dubious empirical claims. YMMV.
Joel,
The Nazi card was inevitable. After all, we have Templeton’s arbitrary formulas on one side, and a bunch of people doing research that works on the other side.
Let’s discuss some of that research. You probably know that on average, treatments for some diseases and conditions have different levels of efficacy depending on the race of the person being treated. For instance, for some types of heart problems, pharmaceuticals that work reasonably well on White people don’t work as well on Black people. For example, from the NEJM:
Because people in the medical field noticed poorer outcomes in Black and White patients, the search was on to find something that improved outcomes for Black patients. (And yes, I am aware of the controversies over whether they should have tested BiDil on non-Black people.)
We both know any competent doctor can produce a large number of examples just like this one, all based on race.
Now, because the Nazis and the Apartheid regime believed in races, should we assume that the difference in outcomes that was noted wasn’t real? Or is it just that these differences in outcomes shouldn’t be noticed? How many patients are you willing to let die because the Nazis believed in races? Will we chalk those deaths up to the greater good?
“treatments for some diseases and conditions have different levels of efficacy depending on the race of the person being treated.”
Actually, treatments for some diseases and conditions have different levels of efficacy depending on the genetic background of the person being treated. Sometimes it tracks with “race” as it is socially constructed, sometimes it doesn’t.
“How many patients are you willing to let die because the Nazis believed in races? ”
LOL! Who said anything about letting people die because the Nazis believed in races? Can you please stop being so silly in your desperate attempts to cling to “race” as something other than a social construct?
Mike, it is perfectly feasible to identify risk factors that track with ancestry. This is often done with pedigrees. But knowing somebody’s ancestry may certainly be useful in assessing risk. Notice that I made no reference to “race.” That’s because outdated social constructs like “race” are unnecessary and superfluous in the practice of medicine. The fact that some doctors refer to it doesn’t make it necessary, only intellectually lazy.
“Templeton’s arbitrary formulas”
LOL! You appear to believe that “arbitrary” is a synonym for “inconvenient.” His arguments are based on population genetics formulas used to classify races in other species. What is arbitrary is to pretend that human population genetics should be exempt.
Mike,
Good point on cross species abilities to produce offspring, a mule for instance. So can this lead us to the conclusion that our classifications of species is a bit bizarre and arbitrary? The various forms of hominids are called hominids for some specific reason resulting in various species yet a collie and a beagle are both dogs. Linneaus dreamed this stuff up from what I remember, maybe we should just chuck the whole system and start over. As it relates to race, it has always intrigued me how we came to have so many different types of human beings. Isolation is one answer but is that the only answer? Assuming all of us were black at some ancient time before we left Africa, how exactly did a white person emerge? Was it an albino? Almost an albino? Australian aborigines have been isolated from all others for around 50,000 years. They sure didn’t create a land with different races. This leads me to my opinion about us. I think we are much older than any archeologist says, I think we go way back. Its a fascinating subject.
Joel,
I didn’t state that arbitrary = inconvenient. I did state (and this post wasn’t the first time, by a long shot) that arbitrary makes for fuzziness at the borders, but also that in real life, many (most?) things have fuzzy borders.
Templeton’s problem is similar to one you see among creationists. They know, instinctively, that borders are fuzzy, so they make their arguments on the basis that if something were true, the borders would be precise. In a world where a wolf can breed with a coyote, though, arguing that you can’t tell the difference between “White” and “Asian” and “Black” “because Berbers” is silly. Given that in studies of everything from diabetes to cranial circumference of 20 week fetuses, “White” and “Asian” and “Black” distributions are distinguishable from each other, and these differences have real world effects, the silliness actually causes damage.
Sure, one day the resources will be there to differentiate people at a more granular level. And when that time comes, folks like Templeton are going to find it even more problematic than they find the concept of race. (Spend a bit of time thinking through the implications of some Gattaca-style capabilities.)
Woolley,
I am not an expert in the field. However, from what I can tell reading some anthropology literature, the fuzziness of borders is compounded by the fact that the fossil record isn’t great, there is variability in population in groups, and fossils are imperfectly preserved. If, in a million years, someone digs up some random bones from an assortment of people Dutch six footers plus, and also digs up some random of bones from an assortment of Congolese pygmies, they could easily conclude that these are two separate species.
We, of course, do not consider the Dutch and the Congolese to be separate species, but then we have access to walking, talking examples of both. A million years from now, the fossil evidence will suck… and the fossils of the two groups will be preserved and degrade in different ways.
Divergence happens because mutations happen in every generation. Also, a child inherits some traits from each parent. And selection happens literally at each generation. So do random events, like catastrophes. There are a lot of reasons for any two populations that have any separation at all to gradually diverge.
As to how “whiteness” emerged… apparently lighter skin is good for absorbing vitamin D. Thus, lighter skin confers no advantage in Sub Saharan Africa which doesn’t have the sort of winters that keep people indoors. But in a place with winters, until the population became sufficiently light skinned, in every generation there was a tiny added increased likelihood of survival until age of procreation to those children that were born with lighter skin.
Again… this is simply my understanding from reading the literature for which I have received no training whatsoever.
Mr. Kimel,
In reference to your statement:
” I didn’t state that arbitrary = inconvenient. I did state (and this post wasn’t the first time, by a long shot) that arbitrary makes for fuzziness at the borders, but also that in real life, many (most?) things have fuzzy borders. ”
Actually arbitrary means that the borders you speak of don’t exist since any border is arbitrarily defined and thus can have any extent. “Fuzzy” in your sense then means only what you want it to mean.
As long as you stick with terms that have no meaning in any objective sense, but only in your or anybody’s subjective opinions, you can conclude whatever is convenient to you interests. Joel was simply equating arbitrary = to convenient without teaching you the logic that makes it true. You clearly have a deficiency in rational reasoning and logic.. Hereditary perhaps?
I realize everyone has moved on from the thread, but here is a interesting read on how ornithologists determine which birds are part of the different species: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/whats-in-a-name-how-genome-mapping-can-make-it-harder-to-tell-species-apart/?platform=hootsuite
Even with genetic analysis it seems the borders are very fuzzy.