Category: race

Glenn Loury and John McWhorter video: an interesting show

June 1, 2025 • 11:00 am

As I say repeatedly, I find it very difficult to listen to long videos (and long podcasts without visuals are even worse). But I happened to click on the one below, part of the biweekly Glenn Show dialogue between Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, and found it quite worthwhile, even though it’s a bit more than an hour long (Loury gives an advertisement between 11:12 and 13:14). It’s interesting because of the topics: wokeness, race, and their intersection, and McWhorter (with whom I’m on a panel in three weeks) is particularly interesting.

The first thing we learn is that Loury has left (actually been fired from) the rightish-wing Manhattan Institute. He explains why in his website post “I was fired by the Manhattan Institute. Here’s why.”:

 In short, I think they disapproved of my opposition to the Gaza War, my criticisms of Israel’s prosecution of that war, and my praise of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s meditations on the West Bank settlements.

Well, I knew that Loury was a stringent critic of Israel, but praising Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “meditations” on the West Bank, meditations that followed just 10 days visit in the Middle East and did not even mention Palestinian terrorism, isn’t something to praise.  At any rate, since Loury retired from Brown, he’s contemplating his next move, and hints that the University of Austin (UATX) has been courting him.

That leads to a brief discussion of whether schools like UATX are the wave of the future: schools that can teach humanities courses without them being polluted by extreme “social justice” mentality. Both men ponder whether universities like that are the wave of the future, and whether regular universities will devolve into “STEM academies”.  That, in turn, leads to a discussion, mostly by McWhorter, about music theory and how that, one of his areas of expertise, has been polluted by wokeness.

The biggest segment of the discussion involves McWhorter’s recent visit to Washington’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and his thoughts about it (read his long NYT op-ed piece, which is very good, here). McWhorter characterizes it as not a dolorous place but a “happy place,” and one that gives a balanced view of black history—a view in which black people are more than simple oppressed people who serve to remind the rest of us of their guilt. It portrays as well, he avers, the dignity and positive accomplishment of African Americans. (McWhorter compares the dolorous view of black history with the narrative pushed by Nikole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Project.)  His description makes me want to visit that museum more than ever (I haven’t yet been but will, and I must also visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum).

Finally, they discuss the question of whether they were wrong to be so hard on DEI, given that some aspects of it (e.g., a call for equality) are positive. Here McWhorter is at his most eloquent, saying that, given the overreach of DEI, it was imperative for both of them to have criticized it. As McWhorter notes, the extreme construal of DEI did not “fight for the dignity of black people” and, he says, in the face of that extremist ideology, their silence would not have been appropriate. Loury agrees.  At this point McWhorter brings up Claudine Gay, ex-President of Harvard, claiming that she was hired simply because she was a black woman, which was “wrong and objectifying.” (Only McWhorter could get away from saying something like that.) The elevation of Gay, says McWhorter, was the sort of thing they were pushing back against when they opposed DEI.

This is worth a listen, and I’ve put the video below.

Once again, if both sex and race are social constructs, why is it okay to declare you’re of your non-natal sex, but not your non-natal race?

May 12, 2025 • 9:30 am
I was just reading Richard Dawkins’s engrossing essay on sex, gender, and wokeness, and something struck me—a notion that’s not original since it occurred to Rebecca Tuvel when she wrote her infamous essay for Hypatia, a feminist philosophy journal, on “transracialism” Tuvel’s essay pointed out the philosophical and moral parallels between declaring you’re a member of your non-natal “race” (again, I prefer “ancestry”) and declaring that you’re of  your non-natal sex.  Yet Tuvel’s philosophical analysis of this issue, an analysis which I applauded, got her in hot water. As Wikipedia notes:

 

The feminist philosophy journal Hypatia became involved in a dispute in April 2017 that led to the online shaming of one of its authors, Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis.  The journal had published a peer-reviewed article by Tuvel in which she compared the situation of Caitlyn Jenner, a trans woman, to that of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who identifies as black. When the article was criticized on social media, scholars associated with Hypatia joined in the criticism and urged the journal to retract it.  The controversy exposed a rift within the journal’s editorial team and more broadly within feminism and academic philosophy.

In the article—”In Defense of Transracialism”, published in Hypatia‘s spring 2017 issue on 25 April—Tuvel argued that “since we should accept transgender individuals’ decisions to change sexes, we should also accept transracial individuals’ decisions to change races”.  After a small group on Facebook and Twitter criticized the article and attacked Tuvel, an open letter began circulating, naming one of Hypatia‘s editorial board as its point of contact and urging the journal to retract the article. The article’s publication had sent a message, the letter said, that “white cis scholars may engage in speculative discussion of these themes” without engaging “theorists whose lives are most directly affected by transphobia and racism”.

On 1 May the journal posted an apology on its Facebook page on behalf of “a majority” of Hypatia‘s associate editors. By the following day the open letter had 830 signatories, including scholars associated with Hypatia and two members of Tuvel’s dissertation committee. Hypatia‘s editor-in-chief, Sally Scholz, and its board of directors stood by the article.  When Scholz resigned in July 2017, the board suspended the associate editors’ authority to appoint the next editor, in response to which eight associate editors resigned.  The directors set up a task force to restructure the journal’s governance.  In February 2018 the directors themselves were replaced.

And of course Rachel Dolezal was also demonized when she was outed as having been born white although claiming she was black. She was fired as president of the local NAACP, and, as Wikipedia notes, “dismissed from her position as an instructor in Africana studies at Eastern Washington University and was removed from her post as chair of the Police Ombudsman Commission in Spokane over ‘a pattern of misconduct'”. All for saying she was black when she was born white. I do believe Dolezal assumed her black identity honestly. It didn’t seem to be a ruse, and, indeed, why would she fake being a member of an oppressed minority unless she really believed it. It surely wasn’t a trick or a ruse.

Richard has been writing about this disparity/hypocrisy for years, most notably in his website post, “Race is a spectrum. Sex is pretty damn binary.”  The title is of course correct, but pointing it out on Twitter cost Richard the 1996 Humanist of the Year Award from the American Humanist Association. And that was for simply raising the question of any relevant difference between being “transracial” or “transsexual”. The AHA acted shamefully in that case, and I’ve washed my hands of it.

Indeed, since race is more spectrum-ish than is sex, it would seem to be MORE JUSTIFIABLE to say you’re a member of a non-natal race than of a non-natal sex.  After all, people like Barack Obama are of mixed ancestry, and can claim whatever they want with biological justification (in his case, white or black).  But if he felt more Asian, why couldn’t he claim he was Asian? After all, race, like sex, is supposed to be a social construct.

This came back to me when I considered the case of Kat Grant and her essay for the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), which I documented here. That fracas resulted in my published response being taken down, with the consequence that I resigned from the FFRF along with Richard and Steve Pinker.  And the FFRF declared that it dissolved the honorary board of which we were all members (though, curiously, it’s still on the web). Grant’s essay, “What is a woman?” implicitly accepted sex as a social construct and ended this way (bolding is mine):

All of this is to say that there is an answer to the question “what is a woman,” that luckily does not involve plucking a chicken from its feathers. A woman is whoever she says she is.

Yes, a woman is whoever she says she is. Clearly, sex is a social construct here, and you can be whatever sex you want, regardless of your natal gamete-producing system.  Grant was widely applauded by many on the gender-extremist side, while my response was taken down by the FFRF for being hurtful and offensive (you can still read it here, here or here).

 

This fracas, which I call “The KerFFRFle,” has reminded me of the seeming hypocrisy of regarding both sex and race as social constructs, but allowing you to declare whatever sex you feel you are, but not allowing you to declare whatever race you feel you are. Transracialism would seem especially laudatory because one would think it would be a bold move to declare you’re of an oppressed minority group. (Again, I prefer “ancestry” or “population” to “race” for reasons I’ve explained many times.)

I am not taking a stand on these issues here, but merely trying, as did Richard, to understand the difference.  And so I ask readers?

Why is it okay (indeed, applauded) to be transsexual but not transracial?

 

Nature tackles race and eugenics in a torturous and tortuous article

May 11, 2025 • 11:30 am

Yes, folks, the science journals are still flaunting their virtue in articles that are similar to a gazillion articles published before. This time (and not the first time), the article is torturous because the assertions are mostly misleading.  And it’s tortuous because it weaves back and forth between two themes: eugenics and the assumed beneficial effect of diversity on scientific productivity. And the material in the article contradicts some of its own claims. The author, Genevieve L. Woicik, is identified as “an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,Baltimore, Maryland, USA.”

You can read the article by clicking on the title below, or find the pdf here.  If you were to read it without knowing better, you would get two false impressions:

  1. The world, and especially America, is gearing up for a big bout of eugenics.
  2. Race is a social construct that has nothing to do with biology

I see no evidence for #1 unless one is oblivious to reality, while #2, as Luana and I showed in our paper on The Ideological Subversion of Biology, is misleading. I recommend you read section 5, which is headed by one of the statements about genetics and evolutionary biology that we consider misleading: ““Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.”

Moreover, the discussion tacitly admits that, yes, populations do have biological differences. As Luana and I wrote in our paper, we don’t like using the word “race” because in its classical form, it is misleading. Instead we say this:

Before we handle this hot potato, we emphasize that we prefer the words ethnicity or even geographic populations to race, because the last term, due to its historical association with racism, has simply become too polarizing. Further, old racial designations such as white, black, and Asian came with the erroneous view that races are easily distinguished by a few traits, are geographically delimited, and have substantial genetic differences. In fact, the human species today comprises geographically continuous groups that have only small to modest differences in the frequencies of genetic variants, and there are groups within groups: potentially an unlimited number of “races.” Still, human populations do show genetic differences from place to place, and those small differences, summed over thousands of genes, add up to substantial and often diagnostic differences between populations.

I prefer “populations” which are still not social constructs and do have biological meaning. But our paper shows how and why, so read section 5, which is not long.

Finally, Woicik’s article calls on all scientists to push back against racism and eugenics, and of course all people of good will should do so when they can. But her article is of a Chicken Little bent, as the first claim is wrong and the second distorted (as the progressives say, “it lacks nuance”).

Click below to read, or find the pdf here. It’s only two pages long

Here are the main topics:

Eugenics.

Let’s first take up the author’s overheated claim that “eugenics is on the rise again,”  I suppose if you trawled the white-supremacist or tinfoil-hat literature, you could find a few people who espoused eugenics (the sterilization, prevention of breeding, or even murder of members of minority groups), but really, that idea is dead as a doornail in science and in the public (when was the last time you found a call for eugenics in the MSM or in a biology textbook?)  Even Trump, despite his brief remark below, has not espoused eugenics.

In fact, Woicik cites only three bits of evidence for her claim that eugenics is on the rise:

In 1924, motivated by the rising eugenics movement, the United States passed the Johnson–Reed Act, which limited immigration to stem “a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions”. A century later, at a campaign event last October, now US President Donald Trump used similar eugenic language to justify his proposed immigration policies, stating that “we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now”.

. . . . At a hearing in February, the now-confirmed head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, reiterated his past comments that Black children should receive different vaccine schedules from white children because of variations in their immune systems.

Kennedy’s motives in this regard are unclear. But after making numerous demonstrably false statements about vaccination, he is providing another layer of reasoning that the scientist whose work Kennedy cites described as “twisting the data far beyond what they actually demonstrate” while promoting racial essentialism: the false belief that people of different ‘races’ have inherently distinct biology2,3.

and this:

In the United States, a reactionary political movement has ridden a populist wave into power, using dog-whistle rhetoric about race. This has happened just when scientists have the knowledge — and tools — to make strides towards a more equitable world.

Geneticists and others must stand against a global rise of white nationalism, which seeks to leverage scientific racism for eugenicist goals, and stop its talking points from entering the mainstream political discourse.

She does mention one case of race-motivated shooting, but that is murderous bigotry, not eugenics, which is the initiative of a government or professional body.  One cannot argue that each race-related shooting (including shooting of whites by minorities) is an instance of “eugenics.”

The only evidence for a rise of eugenics here is a throwaway remark by Trump.  The RFK Jr. statement may be misguided, but there are some “racial” differences in responses to treatment.  The last statement says that white nationalism has “eugenicist goals”.  Perhaps some extremists do, but I simply do not hear calls for the public, the government, or the scientific community to reinstitute eugenics in America.  Of course it would be bad to call for that and do that, but the threat of eugenics is simply not a problem.

The falsity of denying genetic differences between populations. The first thing to remember is what Luana and I wrote:

Of what use are such ethnicity clusters? Let’s begin with something many people are familiar with: the ability to deduce one’s personal ancestry from their genes. If there were no differences between populations, this task would be impossible, and “ancestry companies” such as 23andMe wouldn’t exist. But you don’t even need DNA sequences to predict ethnicities quite accurately. Physical traits can sometimes do the job: AI programs can, for instance, predict self-reported race quite accurately from just X-ray scans of the chest.

This along shows that there are biological differences between populations, and even those populations that are “self-reported races”, like white, black, Hispanic, or Asian.  But Wojcik, even disses the ancestry-testing companies. Wojcik:

One public-facing area is direct-to-consumer ancestry-testing services. These use computational algorithms to model the genetic similarity between individuals and reference populations to draw conclusions about people’s geographical origins. Many have pointed out that these services — which rely on geopolitical and ethnic categories — might be exacerbating racial essentialism.

Again we have a hyperbolic statement here; Luana’s finding out that she has ancestry that’s Hispanic, black, native American, and from other groups does not “exacerbate racial essentialism.” Ask yourself: have you ever seen anybody turn into a racist when they get their 23andMe results?

Here are a few more instances of biological differences between either populations or self-reported races cited by Luana and me. Have a look at the first study, involving “self reported race”:

Even the old and outmoded view of race is not devoid of biological meaning. A group of researchers compared a broad sample of genes in over 3,600 individuals who self-identified as either African American, white, East Asian, or Hispanic. DNA analysis showed that these groups fell into genetic clusters, and there was a 99.84 percent match between which cluster someone fell into and their self-designated racial classification. This surely shows that even the old concept of race is not “without biological meaning.” But that’s not surprising because, given restricted movement in the past, human populations evolved largely in geographic isolation from one another—apart from “Hispanic,” a recently admixed population never considered a race. As any evolutionary biologist knows, geographically isolated populations become genetically differentiated over time, and this is why we can use genes to make good guesses about where populations come from.

. . . More recent work, taking advantage of our ability to easily sequence whole genomes, confirms a high concordance between self-identified race and genetic groupings. One study of twenty-three ethnic groups found that they fell into seven broad “race/ethnicity” clusters, each associated with a different area of the world. On a finer scale, genetic analysis of Europeans show that, remarkably, a map of their genetic constitutions coincides almost perfectly with the map of Europe itself. In fact, the DNA of most Europeans can narrow down their birthplace to within roughly 500 miles.

We give other evidence, taking care to show that differences do not equate to a hierarchy. Populations have differentiated over time genetically, both through natural selection and genetic drift. Differences due to selection, like lactose tolerance or low-oxygen tolerance, cannot be equated to an overall superiority, only to a better ability to leave your genes in the environment wher eyou evolved.  Differences between populations will create racism only if people are motivated to be bigots.  Luana and I quote Ernst Mayr on this, who apparently was a far clearer thinker about genetics than both the author of this paper (who seems desperately afraid of differences even of the 23andMe type) and many others:

The great evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr stated it well:

Equality in spite of evident non-identity is a somewhat sophisticated concept and requires a moral stature of which many individuals seem to be incapable. They rather deny human variability and equate equality with identity. Or they claim that the human species is exceptional in the organic world in that only morphological characters are controlled by genes and all other traits of the mind or character are due to “conditioning” or other non-genetic factors. … An ideology based on such obviously wrong premises can only lead to disaster. Its championship of human equality is based on a claim of identity. As soon as it is proved that the latter does not exist, the support of equality is likewise lost. (Mayr 1963)

Thus, although the classical races are to some extent social constructs, they also jibe with biological differences. Wojcik:

. . . . there is broad consensus among researchers that social constructs of descent-based identity, such as race and ethnicity, do not align with genetic groupings. On the other, there is growing awareness that diversity matters for sound science and effective policy, including in health care. Embraced together, these two concepts have strengthened science and increased benefits to health.

This is misleading, as you can see by comparing the multivariate and principal-component genetic analyses that match very nicely with geographic locations.  As we said, there are “groups within groups within groups,” and thus we prefer to use the word “populations”. Here’s a genetic cluster analysis of Europeans by country of birth, which, as we note above, coincides remarkably well with geography. Are there “races” here? Well, no, but there are populations, and those populations are different in a consistent way that tells us something about geography and biology (people mate with those geographically close to them. Note as well that genetics has also helped us reconstruct the history of human migration out of Africa and across the globe.

 

Wojcik admits several times that there are genetic differences between populations.  This seems to be at odds with her thesis. Bolding is mine:

For example, the likelihood of people having haemoglobinopathies (inherited disorders that affect red blood cells) varies substantially depending on where in the world a person lives. In some regions of India, carrier rates for the blood disorder β-thalassaemia are estimated to be higher than 8%, whereas in areas of China, they can be as low as 2.7%. This heterogeneity would be missed if researchers simply grouped study participants as ‘Asian’, a term that refers to nearly 60% of the global population. Similarly, using the category ‘Hispanic’ without considering other factors would fail to reveal that the genetic variant associated with Steel syndrome, a rare genetic bone disorder, is more common in people from Puerto Rico than in those from the Dominican Republic or Mexico5.

But of course! We know this because researchers did NOT group populations as “Asian”.  Here’s another admission that geographic location is relevant to biology:

The availability of large-scale multimodal data and advanced statistical and computational tools is making it easier than ever for researchers to stop relying on race or ethnicity as proxies for biology or structural and social determinants of health. Instead, they can interrogate the effects of many well-defined variables, from people’s genetics and geographical location to their diet and income.

Again, genetics and geographical location (which of course differ among populations) are said to be relevant to biology and health.

The author seems to believe that physicians practice “race-based medicine”, but any doctor that doesn’t look beyond one’s self-identified or other-identified race or ancestry when diagnosing problems is a dreadful doctor. I’ve never met one—not even one asking me if I was an Ashkenazi Jew, which is what my genes tell me I am.  And yes, self-described race is associated with clinical risk, though some of that could be due to cultural differences among people of different ancestries.

Diversity.

Although Wojcik claims that race is a social construct, she also tells us that “diversity”–clearly of “self-defined race”—is something we need because higher (social-construct) diversity within groups leads to higher productivity and more valuable outcomes. While I agree that we need to increase diversity throughout society by affording all people equal opportunities from birth, that doesn’t mean that the sources cited bo Wojcik are dispositive:

Reports from the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, for instance, emphasize the need for more-diverse groups of participants to be included in genetics and genomics research2, as well as in biomedical research more broadly3. They also stress the importance of a diverse workforce — which has consistently been shown to result in higher productivity, as well as in work that has a greater impact on people’s lives.

But there are many other studies showing no effect or negative effects, and these have been summarized by Lee Jussim in his report “The downsides of DEI“, which has compiled all available studies on aspects of this topic. Go to the section called “diversity does not produce its promised benefits.” As Lee said:

I curated this list to make it easy in situations like this to track down relevant resources.  And any article touting the joys of diversity for science/performance that simply ignores
these articles is more propaganda than science.  This is true even if it is unintentional, failing to know about the existence of evidence contrary to the claims one is touting is, at best, the scientific equivalent of negligent malpractice.

Wojcik apparently hasn’t looked at these papers, many of which are recent.

According to Jussim’s data, the trope that more diverse groups always produce better outcomes is not strongly substantiated, although some studies show a weak effect. We should strive for diversity of groups simply because it will increase as an indicator of more equal opportunities from birth.

My point is simply that in calling for a reformation of science and society, Wojcik is making hyperbolic claims that are, more often than not, unjustified.  Races (or populations) don’t differ in meaningful biological ways, society is on the verge of adopting eugenics, and diverse groups don’t always do better than homogeneous ones. Of course I am not touting racism here, but I do maintain that we’re not on the verge of eugenics, and that differences between populations are biologically meaningful and will become more so as we learn more.

Near the end there is more hyperbolic rhetoric that verges on a call for censorship (my bolding):

Geneticists and others must stand against a global rise of white nationalism, which seeks to leverage scientific racism for eugenicist goals, and stop its talking points from entering the mainstream political discourse.

Of course I abhor white nationalism, even though I don’t think its goals are eugenics, but, regardless, I’m not calling for censorship in debates about race. Sunlight, they say, is the best disinfectant, and scientists need to engage with civility on all topics, including the hot potato of race.  Unfortunately, this article fails to do that. It is not a piece of science, or even of scientific analysis, but a tendentious ideological screed.

h/t: Roy

 

Now it’s Trump vs. the Smithsonian, and a NYT piece about human races

April 2, 2025 • 10:20 am

On March 17 Trump issued a new executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” And its goal is largely to prevent the dissemination of divisive or negative views of American history, instantiated, for Trump, in the Smithsonian Institution’s new exhibit on sculpture and identity. Here’s the “purpose” of the EO:

 Purpose and Policy.  Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.  This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.  Under this historical revision, our Nation’s unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness is reconstructed as inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.  Rather than fostering unity and a deeper understanding of our shared past, the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.

The EO then concentrates on a new exhibit at the Smithsonian that deals with race and power:

Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.  This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.  For example, the Smithsonian American Art Museum today features “The Shape of Power:  Stories of Race and American Sculpture,” an exhibit representing that “[s]ocieties including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement.”  The exhibit further claims that “sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism” and promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating “Race is a human invention.”

Other institutes also get this kind of treatment, including The National Museum of African American History and Culture and Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  The Order then decrees that the Department of the Interior must prevent such “divisive” exhibits. Part of Trump’s Diktat to the Department of the Interior telling it what it must do:

(i)    determine whether, since January 1, 2020, public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology;

(ii)   take action to reinstate the pre-existing monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties, as appropriate and consistent with 43 U.S.C. 1451 et seq., 54 U.S.C. 100101 et seq.,and other applicable law; and

(iii)  take action, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.\

It’s clear that Trump is aiming for a somewhat sanitized version of American history, closer to that of the old sanitized history textbooks we had in junior high and far, far distant from the claims of the 1619 Project.  Of course the truth is somewhere in between: America and its founders had high and admirable ideals, but fell down when it came to the “all men are created equal” with the same “unalienable rights” part.  All people (not just “men,” which to them presumably meant “people”) were not treated as if they were created equal, and the institution of slavery led to the worst war in American history (the Civil War killed 1.5 times the number of Americans who died in WWII and more than ten times the number of American deaths in the Vietnam War).

And bigotry did not end after the Civil War, of course. Immigrants were largely denied opportunities, blacks still faced Jim Crow treatment, and we incarcerated American citizens of Japanese descent during WWII.  Our history, while progressing now towards equality of opportunity, has been checkered, and it’s wrong to hide that from people.

On the other hand, it’s misleading to pretend, as woke culture does courtesy of Ibram Kendi et al., that racism is still built heavily into American laws and that all white Americans are bigots determined to hold down minorities. Yes, identity politics is distorting America, but the remnants of the past nevertheless can be seen in the lower well-being and achievement of some minorities, and we need to remedy that as best we can.

In contrast, Trump seems to want to hide America’s past under a basket.  I haven’t seen the Smithsonian’s exhibit so I can’t pass judgement on it, but the NYT, highlighting Trump’s order, takes another tack: it addresses, and pretty much denies, the existence of human race. Read the article by clicking the headline below or find it archived here.

The tenor of this article, which is poorly researched but laden with quotes, is that human races do not exist and are merely a social construct.  A few excerpts to that end:

The president’s order noted, among other things, that the show “promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating ‘Race is a human invention.’”

In interviews, several scholars questioned why the executive order appeared to take issue with that view, which is now broadly held. Samuel J. Redman, a history professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst who has written about scientific racism, said that “the executive order is troubling and out of step with the current consensus.” He added that pseudoscientific attempts to create a hierarchy of races with white people at the top were seen “in places like Nazi Germany or within the eugenics movement.”

and   

“Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation,” the statement reads. “Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters. Instead, the Western concept of race must be understood as a classification system that emerged from, and in support of, European colonialism, oppression, and discrimination.”

“It thus does not have its roots in biological reality, but in policies of discrimination,” the statement says. “Because of that, over the last five centuries, race has become a social reality that structures societies and how we experience the world. In this regard, race is real, as is racism, and both have real biological consequences.”

This is the view throughout the article, and it’s both right and wrong, which means it’s misleading.  The “classical” view, which is that there are a finite number of distinct groups, distinguishable by morphology and with few or no intermediates between groups, is wrong.  Thousands of years ago, when human populations began differentiating in geographical isolation from one another, and were was on the road to formation of distinct biological “races” and then species, this definition may have be closer to accuracy. But human mobility and interbreeding had long since effaced the distinctness of populations. We have groups within groups within groups.

But populations that are genetically distinct continue to exist, and that is what the article neglects. You can call them “races” or “populations” (my preference) or “ethnic groups”, but there’s no doubt that the human species is geographically heterogeneous, with geographic barriers like the Sahara or the Himalayas demarcating the more distinct populations. Further, you can often identify people’s ancestry from their genes. Otherwise, companies like 23andMe wouldn’t work at all.

But I am getting ahead of myself.  Writing about “race” these days is a hot potato because even discussing it implies that you are ranking populations, which no rational person does any more.  But ignoring the genetic distinctness of populations, based on frequency differences in many genes among populations from different areas, affords a fascinating and informative look into the history of human migration, selection, and so on.

There are few sensible pieces written on the topic of race. Most of them argue that race is a social construct without any biological basis.  But I want to be a bit self-aggrandizing and recommend one section of the paper “The ideological subversion of biology” that Luana Maroja and I wrote for the Skeptical Inquirer. It’s free at the title link. The paper takes up six ways that evolutionary biology has been distorted by ideologues. The part you should read is section 5, which starts like this (it is not long but I urge it upon you):

5. “Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.” This is the elephant in the room: the claim that there is no empirical value in studying differences between races, ethnic groups, or populations. Such work is the biggest taboo in biology, claimed to be inherently racist and harmful. But the assertion heading this paragraph, a direct quote from the editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association, is wrong.

and a few excerpts from that section (there are references to all statements):

. . .old racial designations such as white, black, and Asian came with the erroneous view that races are easily distinguished by a few traits, are geographically delimited, and have substantial genetic differences. In fact, the human species today comprises geographically continuous groups that have only small to modest differences in the frequencies of genetic variants, and there are groups within groups: potentially an unlimited number of “races.” Still, human populations do show genetic differences from place to place, and those small differences, summed over thousands of genes, add up to substantial and often diagnostic differences between populations.

Even the old and outmoded view of race is not devoid of biological meaning. A group of researchers compared a broad sample of genes in over 3,600 individuals who self-identified as either African American, white, East Asian, or Hispanic. DNA analysis showed that these groups fell into genetic clusters, and there was a 99.84 percent match between which cluster someone fell into and their self-designated racial classification. This surely shows that even the old concept of race is not “without biological meaning.” But that’s not surprising because, given restricted movement in the past, human populations evolved largely in geographic isolation from one another—apart from “Hispanic,” a recently admixed population never considered a race. As any evolutionary biologist knows, geographically isolated populations become genetically differentiated over time, and this is why we can use genes to make good guesses about where populations come from.

More recent work, taking advantage of our ability to easily sequence whole genomes, confirms a high concordance between self-identified race and genetic groupings. One study of twenty-three ethnic groups found that they fell into seven broad “race/ethnicity” clusters, each associated with a different area of the world. On a finer scale, genetic analysis of Europeans show that, remarkably, a map of their genetic constitutions coincides almost perfectly with the map of Europe itself. In fact, the DNA of most Europeans can narrow down their birthplace to within roughly 500 miles.

One more:

On a broader scale, genetic analysis of worldwide populations has allowed us to not only trace the history of human expansions out of Africa (there were several), but to assign dates to when H. sapiens colonized different areas of the world. This has been made easier with recent techniques for sequencing human “fossil DNA.” On top of that, we have fossil DNA from groups such as Denisovans and Neanderthals, which, in conjunction with modern data, tells us these now-extinct groups bred in the past with the ancestors of “modern” Homo sapiens, producing at least some fertile offspring (most of us have some Neanderthal DNA in our genomes). Although archaeology and carbon dating have helped reconstruct the history of our species, these have largely been supplanted by sequencing the DNA of living and ancient humans.

We go on to discuss the taboos of race (the most taboo-sh being studying differences in mentation and IQ among groups) as well as some of the advantages of knowing the genetic differences among human populations.

The point I want to make is that, when you’re talking about “race,” you don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Yes, the classical idea of “races” is largely wrong, but we should not pretend that all human populations are genetically identical, or that the existing genetic differences aren’t diagnostic or of interest.  The NYT article above, however, says nothing like that. Instead, it emphasizes the viewpoint expressed above:

“Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation,” the statement reads. “Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters. Instead, the Western concept of race must be understood as a classification system that emerged from, and in support of, European colonialism, oppression, and discrimination.”

“It thus does not have its roots in biological reality, but in policies of discrimination,”

You can see how this is misleading.  Populations are not absolutely distinct, but are distinguishable genetically if you use many genes. And populations do tend to statistically cluster by geography, because geographic isolation promotes genetic differentiation. (Again, this is how ancestry companies figure out where your genes came from.) And yes, of course, “race” was used to prop up colonialism, oppression, and discrimination”. That’s the bathwater we should throw out. But we should keep the baby, which is recognizing that human populations are not genetically identical, and that the genetic differences among them give useful information about several topics. Just read section 5!

Ibram Kendi moves from Boston University to Howard University

February 2, 2025 • 9:40 am

When Ibram X. Kendi (born Ibram Henry Rogers) was all the rage, and Boston University (BU) gave him his own Antiracist Research Center, I decided I’d better read his famous book, How To Be an Antiracist.  I found the book’s popularity puzzling, as it was a not-too-coherent mélange of autobiography and questionable but authoritative Diktats about racism, which was that it was ubiquitous, a feature of all white people, and that any law or rule that wasn’t explicitly antiracist was racist.  Further, if you are not actively involved in antiracist work, you are a racist.  As the NYT wrote, quoting a sentence from the first edition of Kendi’s book:

“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination,” Kendi wrote, in words that would be softened in a future edition after they became the subject of criticism. “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” In other words, two wrongs do make a right.

Well, that was arguable, but in general I found that the book didn’t cohere, though of course its message resonated at the time, what with Black Lives Matter and all, and sold a gazillion copies. Kendi became the doyen of antiracism (his female counterpart was Robin DiAngelo), and Boston University set up a center run by Kendi, funded by $10 million from a donor, and, over the next three years, it got a further $43 million in grants and donations.

Given all this, I wasn’t too surprised to learn that, given the incoherence of his book—and I’ll admit that I haven’t read Stamped from the Beginning, which some of my friends like, and which won a National Book Award—BU’s Antiracist Research Center was not a success.  It was dogged by accusations of mismanagement, and really never did anything. Nineteen employees of the Center (nearly half of its staff) were laid off and BU launched an investigation, which, although it found no issues of misuse of money, decided to hire a management consultant firm, whose recommendations led to a revamping of the center about a year ago. On this site I reported on a discussion of Kendi’s efficacy by John McWhorter and Glenn Loury, and said this (Loury was responding to McWhorter’s statement that he didn’t understand the joy that Kendi’s downfall was provoking):

Loury responds that yes, Schadenfreude is not a great emotion, but he feels that Kendi is an “empty suit”—a “little man behind the curtain”—who “doesn’t know anything.”  Loury asserts it’s not really about Kendi, but the failure of the extreme antiracist extremists, like Black Lives Matter or the 1619 Project to make any progress.

I agree with Loury about the problems of an unequipped Kendi being made the symbol of a movement, and if you read his book How to be an Antiracist, you’ll see the intellectual vacuity of his ideas. McWhorter agrees that Kendi was chosen to be the symbol of that movement, and wasn’t equipped to lead it, but that’s no reason to be angry at him.  In response, Loury asserts that the man is a fraud, and so he does show a bit of Schadenfreude, for Loury adds that Kendi is an “embarrassment and an absurdity.”  Isn’t that Schadenfreude?

In response, McWhorter says that Kendi was thrust into a position for which he was not equipped, and it was not his fault that his Institute fell apart. (McWhorter says that what Boston University did in founding Kendi’s antiracist center  “was an insult to black achievement.”)  In other words, Loury blames Kendi for taking money and doing what he was unequipped to do, while McWhorter blames society and Boston University for thrusting Kendi into a job that was irresistible in order to do performative antiracism.

Now I learn from this tweet, followed by reporting (see below) that Kendi has left BU for Howard University, a historically black institution in Washington, D.C.

You can read about Kendi’s move in many places, including BU Today, the Boston Globe, Axios, The National Review, and The Washington Post (I haven’t found a mention in the New York Times).  The Center will close on June 30 when its charter expires, and Howard University has also given Kendi his own institute:

Kendi will start at Howard this summer as a history professor and director of the tentatively named Howard University Institute for Advanced Research, according to the university. He will also bring with him the Emancipator, a digital magazine focused on racial inequity that was founded with the Boston Globe but has since gone independent.

The new institute will research the African diaspora through the lens of racism, technology, climate change and a host of other subjects, said Howard Provost Anthony K. Wutoh, and bring on fellows for each academic year with projects they propose. The effort will be funded largely through donors, though Wutoh said the specifics are not yet finalized.

As to why Kendi is leaving BU, the only guesses are from the National Review, which indicts a lack of productivity of the Center and speculates that Trump’s new DEI initiative may have been responsible:

Despite the generous funds, only two new research papers [from the BU institute] had been produced by the time of the employee layoffs. The exact count of total research papers is unclear.

“Despite all the headwinds we faced as a new organization founded during the pandemic and the intense backlash over critical race theory, I am very proud of all we envisioned, all we created, all we learned, all we achieved—the community we built, the people we helped and inspired,” Kendi said in a statement Thursday.

“To all the faculty, staff, administrators, students, supporters, and Boston community members, I feel honored to have been able to do this work with you over the last five years,” he added. “I am departing for an opportunity I could not pass up, but what connected us at CAR remains, especially during this precarious time. Our commitment to building an equitable and just society.”

The center’s closure and Kendi’s departure come as President Donald Trump roots out diversity, equity, and inclusion practices within the federal government and threatens to do the same in the private sector if corporations and universities fail to abandon the leftist ideology.

Taking the hint from the Republican administration, universities are halting research projects and shuttering offices related to DEI, according to the Wall Street Journal. Public higher-education institutions are reversing course because they could lose federal funding if they continue maintaining their diversity and inclusion efforts.

I’m not sure about the involvement of Trump’s DEI plans here, but I do have a few remarks. First, I don’t feel any joy that Kendi is leaving BU, even if he was sort of deep-sixed for non-productivity.  If McWhorter and Loury are correct, Kendi was simply unequipped to run a big institute. (As a side note, he also had stage 4 colon cancer, but appears to have survived it; and he did a lot of his work while waiting to see if he would be cured. That diagnosis is a huge burden to carry.) Kendi may, as they said, be good at helping with the “racial reckoning,” but appears to lack managerial skills (he’s only 42).

Second, I think that, in view of what happened at BU, Howard is making a mistake giving Kendi his own institute. As nearly everyone who’s studied the BU debacle admits, Kendi is unequipped to run a big institute. On the other hand, he’s published many books and shows no lack of scholarship, and his presence at Howard will undoubtedly be a magnet for students.  In my view, they should have just made him a professor, but one without an institute to run.  At any rate, we’ll see how the new Howard University Institute for Advanced Research will fare.

In the meantime, here’s Howard University’s welcome:

Andrew Sullivan on the ideological erosion of science and the genetics of “race” differences

September 23, 2024 • 10:15 am

Andrew Sullivan’s latest column (click first headline to read, but I couldn’t find an archived version) is a strange one.  His main point—that “progressives’ think that some scientific research should be ignored because it flouts their ideological conventions—is a good one, and one that Luana Maroja and I made before.

In this piece, Sullivan attacks three of these issues: assumption that there are no evolved differences among races, especially in intelligence; that gender reassignment may not always be a good thing; and, an issue I’ve mentioned before, the falsity of recent claims that black newborns have a higher mortality when taken care of by white rather than black physicians (this fact, falsely imputed to racism, actually reflects that underweight black newborns are preferentially given to the care of white doctors).  Sullivan’s conclusion is that science should proceed untrammeled by ideology:

Let science go forward; may it test controversial ideas; may it keep an open mind; may it be allowed to flourish and tell us the empirical truth, which we can then use as a common basis for legitimate disagreements. I think that’s what most Americans want. It’s time we stood up to the bullies and ideologues and politicians who don’t.

He’s right, but he also commits what I see as a serious error.  He describes recent studies by a crack geneticist (David Reich at Harvard) and his colleagues, studies showing that there has been natural selection on several traits within Eurasian “populations” in the last 8000 years. But then Sullivan extrapolates from those results to conclude there must then have been natural selection causing differences among populations.  Now we know that the latter conclusion is true for some traits like skin pigmentation and lactose intolerance, but we can’t willy-nilly conclude from seeing natural selection within a population to averring that known differences among populations in the same trait have diverged genetically via natural selection rather by culture culture (or a combination of culture and selection).

The hot potato here, of course, is IQ or “cognitive performance.”  This does differ among races in the U.S., but the cause of those differences isn’t known (research in this area is pretty much taboo).So even if there’s been natural selection on cognitive performance within Eurasians, as Reich et al. found, one isn’t entitled to conclude that differences among populations (or “races”, a word I avoid because of its historical misuse) must therefore also reflect genetic results of natural selection.

Here’s what Sully says, and basis it on the bioRχiv paper by Akbari et al. (Reich is the senior author) which you can access by clicking below.

Sullivan (bolding is mine):

But how have human sub-populations changed in the last, say, 10,000 years? A new paper, using new techniques, co-authored by David Reich, among many others, shows major genetic evolution in a single human population — West Eurasians — in the last 14,000 years alone. The changes include: “increases in celiac disease, blood type B, and a decline in body fat percentage, as farming made it less necessary for people to store fat for periods without any food.” Among other traits affected: “lighter skin color, lower risk for schizophrenia and bipolar disease, slower health decline, and increased measures related to cognitive performance.” Guess which trait is the controversial one.

The study was able, for the first time, to show

a consistent trend in allele frequency change over time. By applying this to 8,433 West Eurasians who lived over the past 14,000 years and 6,510 contemporary people, we find an order of magnitude more genome-wide significant signals than previous studies: 347 independent loci with >99% probability of selection.

Not just evolutionary change in the last 14,000 years — but “an order of magnitude” more than any previous studies had been able to show. Gould was not only wrong that human natural selection ended 50,000 years ago — but grotesquely so. Humans have never stopped evolving since we left Africa and clustered in several discrete, continental, genetic sub-populations. That means that some of the differences in these sub-populations can be attributed to genetics. And among the traits affected is intelligence.

The new study is just of “West Eurasians” — just one of those sub-populations, which means it has no relevance to the debate about differences between groups. But it is dramatic proof of principle that human sub-populations — roughly in line with what humans have called “races” — can experience genetic shifts in a remarkably short amount of time. And that West Eurasians got suddenly smarter between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago and then more gradually smarter since.

If the results have no relevance to differences between groups, then why in the next sentence does he extrapolate the results to differences between sub-populations or “races”?

Well, yes, Sullivan does indeed admit that the West Eurasian study (below), showing selection within tjat group, can’t be extrapolated to differences between groups.  But he does so anyway, saying that “it is the dramatic proof of a principle that human sub-populations — roughly in line with what humans have called “races” — can experience genetic shifts in a remarkably short amount of time.

Well, no, it doesn’t really “prove” that.  It’s surely true that 1) if two or more populations show genetic variation in a trait and 2) natural selection ACTS DIFFERENTIALLY in those different populations (or “races” or “subpopulations”), then yes, selection can in principle cause genetic differences among populations.  But this is not an empirical observation, but a hypothetical scenario. It’s almost as if Sullivan wants to use within-population data to show that differences among populations (especially in “cognitive performance”) must, by some kind of logic rather than empirical analysis, also be genetically based, and instilled by natural selection. But he is talking about what is possible, not what is known.

The relevant article below, which is somewhat above my pay grade, shows that Reich’s group used a combination of ancient and modern DNA to look for coordinated changes in the sequences of genes  involved in the same trait. Using GWAS analysis (genome-wide association studies), investigators can find out which segments of the genome are associated with variation in various traits within a population.  This way, for example, you can find out which areas of the genome (I believe there are about 1200) vary in a coordinated fashion with variation in an individual’s smarts (they use “educational attainment” as a surrogate for intelligence.

Click title to read:

Knowing this association, you can then compare the bits of the genome in ancient DNA associated with various traits like those listed above, and then estimate a) whether the bits of the genome that are jointly associated with variation in a trait measured today have changed in a coordinated way (i.e., have the genes affecting body fat in a population today changed over the last 8000 years in a coordinated way, with a decrease in those gene variants associated with higher body fat?); and b) the likelihood that natural selection has changed those bits over time.

Although we don’t, for example, know the “educational attainment” of ancient people, we can see that gene variants associated with higher attainment have increased by positive selection in the past few thousand years, implying that the Eurasian population has gotten smarter.  It’s thus fair to conclude that, within the study population,  there was selection for higher cognitive ability, known to be associated with educational attainment.  Here, for example, are two findings of selection from the paper:

CCR5-Δ32: Positive selection at an allele conferring immunity to HIV-1 infection (panel 7)

The CCR5-Δ32 allele confers complete resistance to HIV-1 infection in people who carry two copies43–45. An initial study dated the rise of this allele to medieval times and hypothesized it may have been selected for resistance to Black Death46, but improved genetic maps revised its date to >5000 years ago and the signal became non-significant47,48. We find that the allele was probably positively selected ∼6000 to ∼2000 years ago, increasing from ∼2% to ∼8% (s =1.1%, π=93%). This is too early to be explained by the medieval pandemic, but ancient pathogen studies show Yersinia was endemic in West Eurasia for the last ∼5000 years49–51, resurrecting the possibility that it was the cause, although other pathogens are possible.

Selection for light skin at 10 loci (panels 8-17).

We find nine loci with genome-wide signals of selection for light skin, one probable signal, and no loci showing selection for dark skin.

Depending on which level of stringency you want to use to identify natural selection on bits of the DNA, Reich’s group found between 300-5,000 “genes” (DNA bits) that have undergone positive or negative natural selection in our ancestors. But remember this: when you are talking about selection on traits, we didn’t KNOW the traits of our ancestors (like “intelligence” or “propensity to smoke” in our ancestors. Instead, what we see is that gene variants affecting those traits in modern populations have changed over time from ancient populations, with gene variants affecting a given trait changing in a coordinated way (i.e., different bits of DNA associated today with “higher intelligence” have generally increased over time).

Below is a figure from the paper showing 12 traits that have coordinated changes in the genes affecting them. Click to enlarge, and note that the traits vary from darker skin color (DNA bits associated with darker skin color declined in frequency, implying selection for lighter skin), waist to hip ratio (genes affecting this ratio declined in frequency), and both “intelligence” and “years of schooling” (both showing strong increases in “smart” DNA over the last 8,000 years).  It’s a clever analysis.

From paper: Figure 4: Coordinated selection on alleles affecting same traits (polygenic adaptation). The polygenic score of Western Eurasians over 14000 years in black, with 95% confidence interval in gray. Red represents the linear mixed model regression, adjusted for population structure, with slope γ. Three tests of polygenic selection—γ, γsign, and rs—are all significant for each of these twelve traits, with the relevant statistics at the top of each panel.

This is a lovely study (it needs vetting, of course, as this is a preprint), but doesn’t buttress Sullivan’s conclusion that changes within a group wrought by natural selection, such as the changes above, mean that differences between populations must also have been caused by natural selection. That’s simply a mistake, or a fallacy resting on confirmation bias. Sullivan insists, though, that he’s just interested in what the facts are, and those facts must play into any societal changes we want to make. (He’s sort of right here, but not completely, but I’ve discussed this issue in a WaPo book review.)

Sullivan:

Why do I care about this? It’s not because I’m some white supremacist, or Ashkenazi supremacist, or East Asian supremacist. It’s because I deeply believe that recognizing empirical reality as revealed by rigorous scientific methods is essential to liberal democracy. We need common facts to have different opinions about. Deliberately stigmatizing and demonizing scientific research because its results may not conform to your priors is profoundly illiberal. And, in this case, it runs the risk of empowering racists. As Reich wrote in his 2018 op-ed:

I am worried that well-meaning people who deny the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations are digging themselves into an indefensible position, one that will not survive the onslaught of science. I am also worried that whatever discoveries are made — and we truly have no idea yet what they will be — will be cited as “scientific proof” that racist prejudices and agendas have been correct all along, and that those well-meaning people will not understand the science well enough to push back against these claims.

Scientific illiberalism is on both sides. The denial of natural selection by creationists and the denial of carbon-created climate change by some libertarians is damaging to any sane public discourse, but so too is the denial of any human evolution for 50,000 years by critical race theorists and their Neo-Marxist and liberal champions.

Okay, but I wish he’d been a bit more explicit about the limitations of Reich’s study for concluding things about selection among populations or “races”.  Note, though, that he chastises both Left and Right for committing scientific “illiberalism.”

One area in which his conclusions seem more sound, however, involves gender and trans issues:

You see this [scientific illiberalism] also in the left’s defense of “no questions asked” gender reassignment for autistic, trans, and mainly gay children on the verge of puberty. The best scientific systematic studies find no measurable health or psychological benefit for the children — and a huge cost for the thousands of gay or autistic or depressed kids who later regret destroying their natural, functioning, sexed bodies. And a new German-American study has just “found that the majority of gender dysphoria-related diagnoses, including so-called gender incongruence, recorded in a minor or young adult’s medical chart were gone within within five or six years.” Yet the entire US medical establishment refuses to budge.

I should say that my own priors might also need checking. Maybe some, well-screened kids would be better off with pre-pubertal transition. Right now, we just don’t know. That’s why I favor broad clinical trials to test these experiments, before they are applied universally, and why I believe kids should have comprehensive mental health evaluations before being assigned as trans. And yet, as I write, such evaluations are being made illegal in some states, and gay kids are being mutilated for life before puberty, based on debunked science — and Tim Walz and the entire transqueer movement is adamant that no more rigorous research is needed.

Agreed!  I think that Sullivan should have added that studies do show that adults accrue overall benefits from changing gender (at least that’s what I remember). If that’s the case, then he’s made another omission that. if admitted would strengthen his credibility (always admit the caveats with your conclusions!) But I think he’s dead-on right about affirmative therapy for minors.

(h/t: Christopher)

Populations are genetically different, and meaningfully so

June 21, 2024 • 1:00 pm

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.