Good question

[supergee]

Why do so many researchers still treat race as a scientific concept? [Slate]

Comments

[arlie]

This is another area where I just don't understand humans, and would really rather go live with Vulcans or something.

It's useful to know that those of us with Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry are likely enough to be carriers of Tay Sachs disease that it would be worth getting tested, particularly if planning to have children with someone with similar ancestry. OTOH, those without that ancestry, and IIRC one or 2 other groups, really don't need to bother.

The idea that some drug reactions might be both genetically-based and strongly correlated with ancestry doesn't seem absurd to me. I can't imagine it being as simple as black vs white - IIRC, Africa has more genetic diversity among its humans than all the rest of the world combined. But the average "black" American is even more thoroughly mixed than the average "white" American - and less likely to know specific details of their ancestry - so I'm not sure that anything clinically useful would arise from trying to use race as a category - at least, not with American subjects. (OTOH, recruit members of several distinct African populations, etc., and you might get somewhere useful.)

But I find I don't even have the language to write about it. Every possible term to refer to categories like "Welsh" or "Ashkenazi" has been co-opted as a euphemism for race (in the modern American sense; older writers used race in much broader ways, including to mean descendants-of-so-and-so.)

These researchers probably had the same language problem, and it would have either muddled their thinking - or left them with no way to explain what they really meant, that non-specialists could understand.

But on the other hand - I've seen a lot of people who are bound and determined to divide humans up into categories, and then treat people as if each of them had the average - or stereotypical - attributes of everyone in their category - without looking at individuals at all. And race is *almost* as popular a category for this as gender. :-(

And some of those people are busily producing "scientific" arguments on the model of "Creation Science" and similar pseudo-scientific rubbish.

Meanwhile, others, unfortunately, oppose the first group by peddling their own brand of unconvincing drivel. If I see one more statement of the amount of genes all humans have in common, as apparantly "proving" a lack of any genetic correlations among fairly broadly conceived groups (like "Ashekanazi Jews" or even like "Asians"), I might just scream. There are a number of well known correlations of this kind. And the argument from % of common genes can also pretty reasonably be used to "prove" that we're all chimpanzees - or that chimpanzees are all human.

Normal humans apparantly can't think "Norwegians are more likely to have type A blood than Malays", without it turning into "Norweigians have type A blood, and Malays do not" - and like as not going from there to some concept involving one group being "better" than the other.

Talking of blood types - there are % difference in blood type distribution, by race, among people living in the US - however the American Red Cross chooses to define "race". I think that's pretty much impossible according to the article cited, because of "race" not being real etc. etc.. It's the same sloppy thinking all over again, except reversed. (If A and B are NOT distinct groups, with everyone unambiguously A or B, then they can't have statistically significant differences - rather than "if there's a statistical difference between A and B, then it applies to all members of the group. :-(