This is just a preview for my half-hour talk at the CSICon meeting in Las Vegas this October, where I’ll talk about some of the distortions of biology created by ideology, distortions summarized in my Skeptical Inquirer paper coauthored with Luana Maroja.
Below is one slide I’m using to address the misguided claim (one made by the top editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association), that “Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.”
Now the definition of “race”, as we discuss in our paper, is slippery, so we prefer to use “ethnicity” or “geographic populations,” but the implication is the same (read the paper before you kvetch): the claim is that there are no meaningful genetic differences between geographically separated populations.
But if that were the case, then you couldn’t identify people’s ancestry from their genes. But we can: with good accuracy! If your genetic endowment said nothing about your ancestry, then companies like 23andMe would go out of business. And the fact that this works shows that ethnicity, or ancestry, or geographic population, or “race,” if you want to use the term, are not simply made-up social constructs, but indeed have important and often near-diagnostic genetic differences.
One example is me. Here’s a slide I’m going to show at CSICon. It’s the 23andMe readout of my ancestry, with 97.2% of my genes coming roughly from the dark green area on the map. I’m 100% Jewish, and mostly Ashkenazi.
That matches with what I know of my ancestry, and so my genetic endowment is surely of biological significance. The data from my genome, as analyzed by 23andMe, tells me something about the history of the genes I carry. Apparently, I have not a single nucleotide that isn’t Jewish!
At any rate, come to the meeting. It features much bigger fish like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Cox, and for sure it will be a good time, as it’s going to be similar in spirit and content to James Randi’s Amazing Meetings, which were great.
“social construct” is a dialectical manipulation of language for turning over any power over any thing – like population genetics – to “society”, namely Marxists.
There is, as reader Barbara explained, a reasonable use of “social construct” in the context of anthropology.
This sheds more light the dialectic – obliteration of context.
Oh god they’re SOOOO going to cancel you, boss.
Prepare for what’s coming. There’s a world of hurt waiting for people who, y’know, know stuff ’bout science n’ that.
Is Luana going with you? I hope so – she’s pretty formidable. You’ll need allies.
D.A.
NYC
Thanks, but I’ve already written pretty much what I’m going to say, and I haven’t been canceled. I don’t expect I’ll get canceled for speaking what I’ve already written.
But thanks for trying to frighten me.
I’m guessing PCC won’t get cancelled at CSICon, which is mostly attended by science aficionados.
I agree, though- if you can, absolutely attend CSICon. I went last year and had a rare chance to talk with Richard Dawkins at length at the VIP luncheon. So glad I went!
Yes, go to the website and check out the program.
https://csiconference.org/#top
I hadn’t realised they could pinpoint the region/local population within Eastern Ashkenazi Jewry. That’s impressive.
Check out what they can do with Europe: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35696575/
Sounds like the type of meaningful science/skepticism conference we had 15-20 years ago.
And in contrast to failed organisations such as “Skepticon”, this one actually attracts attendees.
I’m giving a talk to a general audience of computer programmers next month on basic population genomic analysis and have been thinking about ways to intuitively frame the amount of variation and structure in the human genome between individuals and populations. One idea I just had is to figure how much information could be stored at the variable sites in the human genome. Say there’s a million sites in the genome that vary regularly among people – I wonder how much information could be stored in binary with that many digits?
Perhaps tangential, but you may be interested in this (I’m sure there has been other work since 2013): https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11875
The idea is great but I see a problem: over time, more and more mutations would accumulate in this DNA which, from the host cell’s viewpoint, is non-coding.
The interesting idea here is that the DNA is not in a host cell, and not replicating, which gives little (but not zero) opportunity for mutation. It’s just sitting in a vat somewhere. DNA is remarkably stable over long periods of time. I am not an expert on this, but apparently information stored on compact disks and hard drives decays in decades, while DNA can last for millennia if it is in a reasonably stable environment.
The fact that there are statistically recognizable assemblages of genes or phenotypic characters that correlate with geographical origin and that persist today shouldn’t be all that controversial, and one would hope that a review of the data would be a welcome contribution—at least for the scientists in attendance.
If there is controversy, I might expect it to arise *after* the talk when and if the press decides to cover the proceedings of the symposium. The word “Race” comes with lot of cultural associations, and the press might try to use that word to create controversy where it really needn’t exist. It’s true that you’ve already published on this topic—and might think that any criticism will have already been expressed—but some of the audience will be new, so the talk does bring about new risk.
To me it’s weirdly ironic that so much of the social justice movement centers on race, and that the social justice warriors don’t hesitate to distinguish communities by race or to call out racism when they see it. Their own actions seem to assume that race is real, or is at least something recognizable they can use in furthering their causes. Is it OK for activists to recognize race but not OK for you?
I hope that you can post the talk after you give it this October.
“Is it OK for activists to recognize race but not OK for you?”
The activists are gnostics with critical consciousness, with the knowledge of how History began, unfolded, is unfolding now, and how it ends – as they are on the right side of History —
Which isn’t a side at all, it is the tip of a Christmas tree spiral form the dialectic takes in their alchemy.
That is why activists make no sense to anyone but the activists – and the targets are spun in circles. They use Hegel’s dialectic.
Bryan, I had a penchant for philosophical hermeneutics some years back, mostly Gadamer and Ricoeur, flirted with critical theorists like Adorno and Horkheimer, sniffed a bit of Habermas, developed a grudging respect for aspects of Foucault, dismissed Derrida as a fraud (surely, I didn’t understand him), remain entranced by the existentialist leanings of Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard, find Lev Shestov a bewildering and guilty pleasure, and am now revisiting Camus after some decades. I have read in and around a fair share of the authors who you cite, but my undisciplined dabbling would never rise to expertise in these domains.
All that to say: The various subjects that you address naturally entice me. But, somehow, I take you more seriously now that you have dropped that ridiculous moniker! I know, I know, it shouldn’t be so. But it is. I slap myself.
Appreciate your contributions.
Appreciate that.
I only started paying attention and thinking about this literature last year – largely because I could not believe it was serious or really taken seriously. Perhaps that’s why it’s so successful. When I learned what to look for, the pattern could be discerned.
I added those names to my notes – thanks, Doug.
The few times I’ve had this conversation on whether race / ethnicity is a useful category / taxonomy, I get the Richard Lewontin retort – “but within is greater than between” – that’s the answer to a different question. Race/ethnicity provides solid information on what happens with geographic separation over spans of time. The allure of “everything is a construct” is that it can then be imagined as something that can be more easily changed.
One area where race, or ethnicity, is used every day is in transfusion medicine. The frequency of red cell antigens is a clear phenotypic expression of our genotype. One example: African Americans with sickle cell disease often need transfusion, and they often make antibodies to red cell antigens they lack. Sometimes it can become difficult to locate compatible blood. There are programs at blood centers in various cities to recruit blood donors from the black population to increase the odds of finding compatible units.
Malaria was/is a huge driver of human evolution. Red cell antigens are part of the structure of the red cell and certain ones can make the red cell more resistant to malaria parasites.
I wonder how is it possible to be a 100% Jew and to be mostly Ashkenazi (mix of Jews, French, German, Polish, Lithuanian) at the same time?
The cliché that ancestry is “without scientific or biological meaning” in effect abolishes the very concept of Genetics. In our present world of DNA sequence analysis, this makes even less sense—a lot less, in fact— than did Lysenkoism 80 years ago. It belongs in a new edition of Sokal and Bricmont’s “Fashionable Nonsense”. The way such clichés became fashionable reflects the sociology of academe, where baloney can spread from the wet-markets of Grievance Studies departments to the editors of JAMA. For decades, we have been witnessing the zoonosis of baloney.
Genuine question: To the best of your understanding, did race as we currently use the term exist before 1800?
Does anyone know if the talks at CSICon will be recorded for later broadcast or streamed live? I would hate to miss Jerry’s talk due to the unfortunate circumstance of being located 10 time zones away.
What a boring DNA you have. All the same. There was no monkey-business 🙂