The headline is a bit overstated (i.e., someone of African-American race is almost guaranteed to have at least some African ancestry, admixed with a varying amount of European).
That being said, there are important differences within the traditional "races", such as the finding in this study that people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities for obesity.
Overall I would love it if medical research papers moved away from "race" and started getting more into the fine-grained genetic details. Regardless of the politics involved, this will lead to better medical treatments for everyone.
CGMthrowaway · 21h ago
>That being said, there are important differences within the traditional "races", such as the finding in this study that people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities for obesity.
"Traditional races" as you call them have changed over time and space, and we are only in this predicament because we lump different ethnicities together today. 150 years ago people could tell the difference between someone of West African or East African descent. And Southern Italians, Irish vs Western Europeans vs Germans... etc.
It's harder now because a) there has been a lot more mixing since then; and b) socioculturally we consolidated many of those ethnicities
anon291 · 19h ago
It's harder now because now you live in America and are used to seeing all these people as Americans, and then as members of whatever racial consciousness we have in America.
Back in those respective countries, they can tell everyone apart. When my wife (Irish/English by ancestry) visited Hungary, they were immediately able to peg her as a foreigner, and frankly, so was I. They look nothing alike aside from skin color. This is true of basically any country in Europe, Africa, Asia, where people have tended to remain in the same location for thousands of years.
I think even most Americans would be able to tell apart African and European races if they really tried.
rayiner · 18h ago
In my experience, south asians and middle easterners can easily tell I’m Bengali/Bangladeshi rather than (non-Bengali) Indian or Pakistani. Growing up in America I always assumed I looked Indian, but that’s because my reference point was european americans so I didn’t have sufficient data points in my mental model to work out aggregate tendencies.
sashank_1509 · 17h ago
There are plenty of Indians who in a literal sense could be classified as white (as in extremely fair pale skin), not just from Kashmir but even from South India. But if you’re Indian you can instantly pick them out as Indian, their entire facial structure etc is different from Europeans. In a sense, it is true, categories like “white”, “black” are social constructs that are meaningless at a genetic standpoint. But categories like, European, Nordic, Indian etc are not, if you put in some effort you can very easily distinguish between because of thousands of years of separate genetic evolution.
anon291 · 18h ago
Yup! And many Americans would guess some north Indians are white because of convergent selection and shared ancestry. It's just that most prominent Indians tend to be south indian or Bengali in America. For example, most of the big name Indian ceos
inglor_cz · 2h ago
I am just travelling around northern Italy (typing this from a Milano-Torino train), and there is a visible difference between people in the Po valley and people from Como, merely 50 km apart.
People from the Po valley, such as the Milanese, are mostly "lighter Mediterranean" types. People around Como Lake are visibly more blond and pale. The ethnic substrate is different, the ancient populations in southern Alps were more Celtic and Germanic, and even though the contemporary folk no longer speaks anything but Italian, the difference to much more mixed places such as Milano is still visible.
Same in northern Spain. Galicia and Asturias have a lot of pale, blue-eyed people who would stand out in an Andalusian crowd. Galicia has Celtic ancestry (they even preserved bagpipes as a folk instrument), and Asturias was the last refuge of the Visigoths when they were crushed by the Arabs in the 8th century.
You can also easily distinguish some other European subpopulations. For example, I met a lot of Lithuanians built as a, uh, brick shithouse. Neighbouring Poles tend to be somewhat less bulky. Many Russians have a visible Tatar admixture, with broad and flat faces. Ukrainians much less so.
And you can usually tell a Greek before they open their mouths. Some of them, especially in their older age, still resemble the old beardy statues from way-before-1-AD.
nmstoker · 13h ago
Yes, it's not that hard to distinguish if it's something you're alert to and have enough input to start recognising the patterns.
ninininino · 17h ago
I could definitely tell population-level differences between phenotypes in places like UK vs Poland when I visited (and yes I know Polish immigration to the UK is popular), and I can tell differences between the average population-level look in German-dominated descendant areas in the US vs Italian and Jewish and Irish areas like NYC. I think maybe people are expecting it to be easy to do individual-level predictions which is a lot more of a coin toss, but just telling the broad differences isn't super hard.
SJC_Hacker · 19h ago
I’m calling BS on the “remained in the same place for thousands of years”
Take a course in European history, learn about all the wars, genocides, forced and unenforced migrations, plagues, etc. and even more mundane thinggs like intermarriage outside of immediate community ( very common amongst nobility ) and tell me again with a straight face you believe people have remained in the same place for thousands of years
They may have recognized your wife as “foreign” based on a number of things. The most obvious being language, But it could have also been dress, makeup, demeanor etc.
travisjungroth · 17h ago
You’re right, but you’re being really rude about it.
It’s rare (but not impossible) for a people to have been in the same place on Earth for thousands of years. It’s more like hundreds.
Jensson · 12h ago
> It’s rare (but not impossible) for a people to have been in the same place on Earth for thousands of years. It’s more like hundreds.
Is it really rare? That seems to be the norm except for America and Africa that got replaced or displaced by colonization. But in Europe and Asia most areas has been populated by steady groups. Rulers come and go, but the people living there stays the same.
I think its rare for everyone to have been there for a thousand years, but its not rare for a majority of the genes to have stayed in one place for a thosand years.
travisjungroth · 10h ago
Thousands as in 2,000+ years? From my understanding that’s rare, at least by geography. I could be wrong.
But it’s not like we’re being super precise here. It’s fuzzy enough that lots of takes are correct, depending how you frame it. That’s kind of my point in my other reply. They weren’t wrong but they were being rude about it.
watwut · 3h ago
You did not read much about European history, did you?
defrost · 12h ago
Genetics strongly suggest Australia was settled by a single broad wave of humans that spread across the continent, finfing their niche, and staying in place whether that be east, west, north south, across desert, coast, rivers, forrest, etc.
This contrasts to earlier "literary" arguments in magazines such as Quadrant that native Australians moved about and fought for territories with invaders supplanting original dwellers long before Europeans arrived.
is a national press article on some of that, my original references to the hosted papers on this seems to be offline / unavailable ATM (damn bitrot).
watwut · 3h ago
Yeah, I do not know why this is downvoted. This is exactly true about Europe.
pkkkzip · 18h ago
Prior to industrial revolution, mass immigration was difficult, not only because of logistics but tribalism.
ruszki · 18h ago
Hungarians mass migrated about a thousand years ago from the Ural Mountains, several thousands of kms from present Hungary. Germans mass migrated to Hungary hundreds of years ago, especially after Mongols and Turks killed most of the population there. Italians lost their appetite to coriander because the mass migration of Germanic people around and after the fall of Rome.
It was more difficult, but it happened many-many times.
david38 · 17h ago
Yea, and like you just proved, it was very difficult. Hence the choice to do it in large groups.
No comments yet
SJC_Hacker · 11h ago
Tell it the Vandals, the Goths, the Huns, the Angles (I.e English), the Normans, the Danes, the Mongols, the Turks, etc.
anthk · 14h ago
If I sort out 20 Spaniards from different provinces and regions, you wouldn't guess if they were Spaniards, French, South Germans, North/South Italians or even Irish.
david-gpu · 12h ago
Yeah, and some also look Moorish, middle eastern, Sephardic, etc. too. Not a big surprise when you learn about the migrations that happened in Spain during the past 2000 years or so. We are a mixed bunch.
anon291 · 17h ago
Not really no. Any student of linguistics is quickly dispelled of this notion
No comments yet
ARandumGuy · 22h ago
It's used because, despite the fact that race doesn't really match with genetic ancestry, it still has impacts on people's lives and health.
For example, a study indicating that "black people in the US are X% more likely to have {some condition}" is useful, even if "black person in the US" doesn't tell much about an individual's ancestry. That's because health conditions are heavily influenced by environmental factors, and someone's race impacts the environmental factors they're exposed to.
This does get complicated, and requires digging deep into the data. Top-level statistics don't indicate root cause, which still needs to be researched. But top-level statistics can indicate that there's a problem that needs to be worked on, which is why medical studies tracking race are still useful.
sarchertech · 21h ago
It’s still correlated enough with ancestry that it can be a useful proxy for health issues related to ancestry—in addition to the environmental factors you pointed out.
earnestinger · 18h ago
If data would include both, one could check which of them is a signal signal and which is noise
scoofy · 19h ago
The point is that race is a bad proxy for ethnicity. We should expect the environmental factors to also mirror ethnic clustering.
jjtheblunt · 22h ago
> people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities
similarly, when working on genomes a few years back, it used to be said that the two most genetically distinct humans alive right then would both be from Africa, which was memorable because one might guess Inuit vs Africa or something like that naively.
antognini · 19h ago
Specifically they would both be of Khoi-San ethnicity. The vast majority of humans have been through two population bottlenecks which drastically reduced the genetic diversity of the populations. Most African populations have been through at least one of these bottlenecks, and every population group outside of Africa has been through two. The Khoi-San, however, seem to have broken off prior to either of the bottlenecks and so they retained much higher genetic diversity.
throw310822 · 18h ago
> Specifically they would both be of Khoi-San ethnicity
The you could say that a distinctive trait of Khoi-San ethnicity is its genetic variance. Not to mention the fact that this variance, coming from before two population bottlenecks, must contain a large number of traits not seen in other human populations.
Although this makes you wonder- if they're the most genetically diverse, do they also look diverse? Are there light and dark skinned individuals, blonde and red and black hair, green/ blue/ brown eyes, short and tall, etc.?
antognini · 17h ago
The genetic diversity doesn't really translate to diversity in appearance. Much of the genome doesn't code for anything in particular (so called "junk DNA"), so you can have high genetic diversity due to variance in these parts of the genome, but relatively low diversity in the small subset of genes that code for more visible features.
throw310822 · 17h ago
Yes, so in other words "high genetic variance" doesn't really mean much. So all this talk about "variance been higher within ethnic group than between" is not very relevant. The phenotype that we can actually see has differences between ethnic groups that are bigger than the variance within them.
Last of course there's the idea that this variance must be restricted to the visible phenotype. Which sounds a bit like saying that the objects in a dark room must be all in the spot illuminated by the torch, and everywhere else the room is empty.
1659447091 · 10h ago
> so in other words "high genetic variance" doesn't really mean much
>> Although this makes you wonder- if they're the most genetically diverse, do they also look diverse? Are there light and dark skinned individuals, blonde and red and black hair, green/ blue/ brown eyes, short and tall, etc.?
Yes, they do look diverse.
The visual differences will be more readily apparent to people who are familiar with the high genetic variance population since this would allow more (maybe fine-grained) diverse looks. If the person looking does not have much experience distinguishing looks in a "high genetic variance" population then they probably end up generalizing as a default. Not being able to pick up on how diverse these looks are does not make them not there. Only that, the observer is familiar with the visual differences in their non-african population of less genetically diverse humans with some grouped environmental adaptions/mutations. Such as lighter pigment to better absorb vitamin D, and this type of thing being carried as the standard for "diverse looking" (blue/brown/light/dark).
After all, "SLC24A5 encodes a cation exchanger in melanosomes ... A derived, nonsynonymous mutation (rs1426654 ...) in SLC24A5 associated with light skin color has swept to near fixation in Europeans due to positive selection [...] rs1426654 is common in East African populations with high levels of Afroasiatic ancestry [...] Further, SLC24A5 likely experienced positive selection in East Africa after this admixture event. ... rs1426654 is at moderate frequency (5–12%) in the KhoeSan from Botswana, who have substantially lighter skin than equatorial Africans". and also "studies show that the ancestral alleles of many predicted functional pigmentation variants in Africa are associated with lighter skin, suggesting our human ancestors may have had light or moderately pigmented skin" and that dark skin may be a derived trait that also continued to evolve.[0]
But when you only have a hammer...
It's like being introduced to this workshop full of tools with a stacks of wood for any type of joinery desired. Yet, your experience is much more simplistic: hammer, nail (or bolt/screw, whatever), boards; repeat. Without much thought, the human brain has already created the groups: the trusty hammer with some metal fasteners to drive, and that foreign group of absolutely nothing like the trusty hammer and fasteners. But upon closer look there are hammers and nails and screws and all these other metal fasteners in the workshop -- except, instead of them being chosen to put the boards together, a variation of tools are creating a variation of joints in order to put the boards together. The finished product ends up being ~99.9% identical to your nailed product, but it's probably only those familiar with the experience of joinery that are most likely to appreciate an notice the visual diversity between joints, instead of simply noticing that one of the products has a couple spots of metal and the other doesn't.
Is that specifically the case? This feels like an area where our language can fail to capture the nuance of what someone is trying to say and it gets misstated as something really similar but different.
To give an example, take 3 people named A, B, and C. A and B are both from Africa, while C is from elsewhere.
A and B have 9 genetic differences. B and C have 1 genetic difference. A and C have 10 genetic differences.
We can make the claim that the genetic difference between someone from Africa and from elsewhere (B to C, thus 1) is much smaller than the difference between two people in Africa (A to B, thus 9). 1 is smaller than 9, so this statement is true, but could easily be misunderstood to saying that the two most genetically distinct individuals are from Africa, which isn't the case because A to C is the most genetically distinct and C is from elsewhere.
The two statements seem nearly equivalent and the wrong one could accidentally be spread by someone who is really just trying to focus on expressing how much genetic diversity is within Africa.
jhanschoo · 18h ago
Africa is the continent on which humanity originated from, and peoples in other continents migrated in waves. So the most insular communities in Africa have had more time to diverge than the most insular communities in other continents.
They are talking with respect to internal diversity I believe.
As an Anglophone you may notice a similar thing in language, and in English you can notice the large diversity in accent in native UK speakers.
bryanlarsen · 21h ago
Yes, this is specifically the case.
Non-Africans split from Africa relatively late in human genetic history. So A and B's divergence point(s) can readily be quite a bit earlier than C's. So, as you pointed out, C is likely more closely related one of A or B. Let's say B.
The big difference between B & C is that B is much more likely to incorporate genes from other early branches than C is. Therefore B is likely further away genetically from A than C is.
reissbaker · 18h ago
No, your split argument doesn't make the case you think it does. If groups A, B, and C were once groups A and B (and B split into B and C later), it's true that B and C are likely closely related, but it doesn't mean A and B are more different than A and C.
To put it another way, if we start with groups A and B, and then branch off B' from B, while B and B' are likely similar, that doesn't tell us anything about the relationship between A and B', and it doesn't imply that A and B' are closer than A and B.
snowwrestler · 18h ago
The comment above is not making an argument, they are illustrating with an analogy.
There’s no logical argument needed to prove the genetic diversity in Africa, it is an observed fact.
bryanlarsen · 17h ago
To expand the second part of my argument: If C' is only descended from C, but B' is descended from B and D and F and Z, then B' has increased its genetic diversity more than C' has.
bryanlarsen · 22h ago
African is a useless label -- Africa alone has as much genetic diversity as the rest of the world combined.
dragonwriter · 16h ago
Not just as much, but it literally includes most of the genetic diversity in the rest of the world.
Bottlenecks, small population inbreeding, genetic drift, founder effect, etc
Basically what happened was, an alt-group of African humans decided earth was not safe anymore and its collapse was imminent -- they need to get to Mars. But since they don't have a way to get a spaceship in Africa, they will need to leave Africa and do whatever is necessary to build one, including throwing the people who helped them under the mammoth if need be.
At this point they have a pretty diverse gene pool and represent the humans well. They walk for a bit but came upon some steam vents and decided take a break and steam some food and enjoy the ocean view in the distance. The leader is not happy they stopped for food or rest. Later they are shooketh awake just before fire rains down on them. 3/4th of them make it safely to the ocean, and what luck the water is receding it'll be easier to cross, for the first 2/3rds at least. The tsunami gods demanded a toll and claimed the back 1/3. Not happy with the direction of leadership, half the group decided they could establish a better foundation away from these clowns and forked themselves.
Meanwhile, back in Africa and finally having got rid of that crazy mars dude and his cult followers, they decide to invite all the neighbors to an epoch swinging dance party to celebrate -- complete with the best plant-based party favours they could dig up/gather. Thus, ensuring the larger African population and their descendant would end up with an abundant supply of pokemon variants to swap between'em.
Though, you may want to take a look at the linked paper above for a more precise explanation. I may have paraphrased a bit.
skywhopper · 18h ago
Africa is where humans originally come from. There’s much more human history in Africa than the rest of the world.
Because of slavery, most African Americans don't know where they originated from so African American is the the most descriptive label you can get.
SoftTalker · 18h ago
African-Americans with slave ancestry almost all come from West Africa I would think, as that was the shortest route for the European slave ships between Africa and the New World.
viraptor · 5h ago
Many didn't go directly. For example Bristol, UK had around half a million slaves traded there.
MyOutfitIsVague · 22h ago
Genetic differences across Africa shouldn't be surprising when you consider how huge Africa really is. Africa is about as big as the US, China, and Europe combined.
Tuna-Fish · 22h ago
The effect is much larger than that. For most of the evolutionary history of humans, everyone* lived in Africa. Then only quite small groups left, taking with them only a small fraction of the genetic diversity of humans. Even today, the great majority of genetic diversity among living humans is inside Africa.
(* who mattered. There were earlier migrations of hominids, but the mark they left on our genetics is much smaller than the influence from later migrations.)
ty6853 · 22h ago
I was under the impression humans migrated from Africa so the rest of the world is all african-X, where the african- part is some subset of the original african population.
desktopninja · 21h ago
"One drop rule" makes everyone black in America
bryanlarsen · 22h ago
More importantly, humans have lived in Africa far longer than anywhere else in the world, so have had much more time to genetically diversify.
Shorel · 21h ago
It's not just about size.
Humans originated in Africa, so populations there have had more time to evolve and become more diverse.
200,000 years of genetic drift versus 20,000 years makes a big difference.
anon291 · 19h ago
Also population bottlenecks. Only a handful of populations left Africa, whereas many remained back.
sjducb · 21h ago
It’s quick and free to identify someone’s race.
A genetic test takes several days and costs a few hundred dollars.
The patient wants the best treatment right now. If race carries useful information that helps the doctor treat the patient, then the doctor should have access to it.
achierius · 21h ago
Is it? What race is someone who's Arab? What about someone who could look black with one haircut but white with another? What about half-Arab, half-Euro?
This might sound like nitpicking, but most black people in the US have significant European ancestry and the admixture can vary wildly even for people with similar skin tones. Our naive view of "race" is not always backed by genetic reality.
dragonwriter · 17h ago
> Is it?
Yes, you give them the list and say "What is your race/ethnicity, you may select at least one and as many as you wish." They answer. You are done.
> What race is someone who's Arab?
Whatever they answer (Middle East or Northern African [MENA], under the 2024 revision to the categories, intuitively seems most likely.)
> What about someone who could look black with one haircut but white with another?
Again, whatever they answer.
> What about half-Arab, half-Euro?
Again, whatever they answer. Though the most obvious guess of what they might answer, given the premise, would be one of White, MENA, or both.
The part to question is not, "is it quick and free to determine race" but "does race carry useful information that helps the doctor treat the patient", which is a much thornier question.
david-gpu · 12h ago
> Yes, you give them the list and say "What is your race/ethnicity, you may select at least one and as many as you wish." They answer. You are done.
While I broadly agree with you, there have been notable controversies around people who self-identified as having a particular ancestry [0] that didn't match how other people classified them.
It's pretty low quality information. If you're taking a genetic test you want something that returns susceptibility to sickle cell amenia, cystic fibrosis, tay-sachs, et cetera. Race is a very low quality signal that is used when you lack something better, like a genetic test.
malcolmgreaves · 19h ago
There are zero genetic markers for race. This is because race is purely a social construct.
reverendsteveii · 21h ago
>almost guaranteed to have at least some African ancestry
everyone from everywhere has african ancestry
DougMerritt · 21h ago
Very true, but of course you're talking about a different era much further up the tree.
shrubble · 18h ago
I don’t; unless you are referring to the discredited “out of Africa” theory
pfannkuchen · 17h ago
I don’t think the parts of that theory that have fallen out of fashion include humanity originating in Africa in general. I think it’s more like - maybe more of modern human comes from a branch or branches that changed after Africa exit than we thought previously.
earnestinger · 18h ago
Could you elaborate?
I assume you imply that humans evolved not in Africa. Where?
shrubble · 17h ago
There’s plenty of evidence to the contrary, including Denisovan and Neanderthal that is not present in any African population; as well, something like up to 20% of West African genome has an as yet unknown source which is usually referred to as “archaic” or ghost DNA which is not found elsewhere in other populations.
Since the OOA theory doesn’t have any explanation for this evidence…
dragonwriter · 17h ago
> There’s plenty of evidence to the contrary, including Denisovan and Neanderthal that is not present in any African population
OOA does have an explanation for Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA that isn't found in African populations, and that is that the cross-breeding between anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals and Denisovans occurred after modern humans left Africa.
> as well, something like up to 20% of West African genome has an as yet unknown source which is usually referred to as “archaic” or ghost DNA which is not found elsewhere in other populations.
"Archaic" DNA refers to DNA that appears to have originated with some human group other than modern humans and not be shared among modern human populations (the Denisovan and Neanderthal-origin genomes of Eurasian humans would be included here), but specific to some subpopulation. It is not the case that "20% of West African genome" is archaic, though there is a study in which some specific isolated West African subpopulations had archaic fractions that high, which is not something that OOA has no explanation for (the explanation is that those subgroups were isolated from the ones that participated in the various outbound migrations, and so their particular archaic genome is not shared with the groups that migrated out.)
There may be valid challenges to OOA, but those aren't it.
gitremote · 17h ago
Homo sapiens didn't evolve from Denisovans and Neanderthals. All are branches of human and existed at the same time and interbred.* Homo sapiens survived while Neanderthals and Denisovans became extinct. The majority of the ancestry of living humans, Homo sapiens, was originally from Africa. Europeans have some Neanderthal ancestry (like 2%) due to interbreeding with Neanderthals, but the vast majority of European DNA is from Africa. Sub-Saharan Africans have less Neanderthal ancestry than Europeans and more Homo sapiens ancestry.
Neanderthals evolved in Europe and Europeans have more Neanderthal ancestry, so he might identify more with his Neanderthal ancestors.
shrubble · 16h ago
I’ve used Perl a lot.
peanutcrisis · 21h ago
The notion of race and ethnicity in biology has been politicised by ideology. Jerry Coyne and Luana Maroja clarifies this in point five of their piece [0] in the Skeptical Inquirer.
I don't know what Jerry Coyne is talking about because genetic vs. environmental causation of behavioral and physical traits, broken down "racially" and otherwise, is a very active field of study.
peanutcrisis · 18h ago
He isn't saying there isn't such research being done, he's criticizing the attempts made by ideologues to discredit and discourage research along such premises.
Did you even bother to read the piece? He explicitly opens his fifth point with an example of The Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) weaponizing its reputation to do precisely just that. He documented another instance of this in Nature recently as well [0]. If you look at the top subthread here too, Nature Human Behaviour is doing this as well.
Given all that, it seems he's right that the problem with ideologues exists. The success or lack thereof of these ideologues is a separate matter. Your claim that such research still exists doesn't negate the problem he identified. If anything, I don't think we should be comfortable with any kind of intentional distortions to the biology of race and ethnicity. The bad (false) PR could come back and bite, affecting the research and how it might be received. Otherwise, I don't really see any real disagreement here.
Yes, I read the piece, and I find it very difficult to reconcile with the volume and quality of research going on in this area. My feeling is that some people want there to be a kind of Heckler's Veto on "controversies" they're concerned about, so that they can rail against it. But there isn't.
The real issue for people concerned about the politicization of this issue is that the science isn't going their way right now.
peanutcrisis · 15h ago
Are you just going to outright dismiss the evidence I provided earlier for this politicization? As I explained before, your point is perfectly compatible with his. If you’re able to follow this kind of research, I’m frankly baffled by your inability to grasp the idea that acknowledging attempts to politicize this topic doesn’t imply that research in the area can’t proceed. The evidence for politicization is all over the editorials in your major research journals. If research in this area is booming as you’ve described (I don’t follow this research), all that means is that the politicization attempts have been unsuccessful.
As for your mind reading about the author’s intent, he is, to the best of my understanding, a standard-issue liberal. As such, I don't really get where you're coming from with this.
tptacek · 12h ago
Yep, I am dismissing it. I evaluated it and found it unpersuasive.
peanutcrisis · 4h ago
Great, I didn't know we can dismiss evidence without justifying why. The author claims that there is politicization by ideologues, and the evidence he provided flats out suggests that. If anything, the disagreement seems to be the extent or areas where it's actually happening, which is the point I'm trying to make, which you have not engaged with. I'm frankly puzzled by all my (past) interactions with you. It seems we agree a lot in some way or another yet somehow, you always come across as bad faith to me. That's why when you eventually conceded to one of our past discussions, I decided it was no longer worth engaging. I thought Hacker News is a place for reasoned discussion, I guess I'm wrong to come back to it.
tptacek · 54m ago
No, you can just disagree with someone without devolving into accusations of bad faith. Try it!
alphazard · 19h ago
The technical term that we use for genetic subgroups beneath the species level is "subspecies".
"In biological taxonomy, race is an informal rank in the taxonomic hierarchy for which various definitions exist. Sometimes it is used to denote a level below that of subspecies, while at other times it is used as a synonym for subspecies."
That doesn't seem like a useful definition. There is no case where subspecies could not also satisfy that definition. It's a distinction without a difference.
nomel · 17h ago
Much of it, at that level, is a mostly arbitrary construct, with blurry boundaries, left to subjective interpretation, made up long before the very new concept of genetic analysis was even a thing, where a more informed hierarchy could be made. Even then, the end bits of the hierarchy turn into a knotted mess a generation or two after you remove a river or mountain.
Categorization is a fundamental part of our intelligence, but not necessarily a reflection of reality.
meindnoch · 19h ago
Yeah. I think it's a synonym. I'd consider it a linguistic quirk, like how we use the term "carcass" for the body of a dead animal, but we use "corpse" for humans.
paxys · 18h ago
There are no human subspecies.
dragonwriter · 16h ago
Among the identified human subgroups, some would probably be subspecies of the same species as modern humans (Denisovans, neanderthals, and a few others) if there hadn't been a tendency to assign extinct human groups (or even individual specimens) as distinct species on scant evidence.
malcolmgreaves · 19h ago
Incorrect: somewhere Ali g the way in your life, someone deeply lied to you.
Race isn’t a subspecies. It’s an artificial social construct created by European elites in the beginning of the last millennium. Its purpose is to sow division. And to other groups of people to make it more palatable to commit crimes against the objectified folk.
rwyinuse · 17h ago
Yeah, it's quite wild what European elites and scientists believed around late 1800's / early 1900's, and it wasn't limited just to anti-semitism or racism towards Africans, even if those groups had it much worse than most others.
For instance, in late 1800's Swedish scientists stole bunch of skulls from Finnish cemeteries, trying to prove that Finnish people are of different/lesser race than their Scandinavian neighbours. It took until 2024 for those skulls to be returned to Finland for reburial.
Ok, but there are clear morphological, genetical, etc. differences between e.g. a Han Chinese person and a Yoruba person. So putting aside politics, sociology and whatnot, purely on a scientific basis, what term do you use for these differences? When you say that "these people belong to different $INSERT_TERM_HERE", what's the correct term to substitute?
foldr · 17h ago
There are also morphological and genetic differences between, say, an average 'white' Swedish person and an average 'white' Spanish person. But our systems of racial classification tend to put them in the same group just because they both happen to have light skin. Naturally, if you take two groups of people who've long inhabited different parts of the world (with little to no historical interaction between the groups), then you'll find genetic differences. The point is that there is no biological motivation for the specific set of racial categories that the US and other societies have developed. An objective Martian biologist studying humans would not group us into 'white humans', 'black humans', ... etc.
meindnoch · 17h ago
>there is no biological motivation for the specific set of racial categories that the US and other societies have developed. An objective Martian biologist studying humans would not group us into 'white humans', 'black humans', ... etc.
> Then why do biologists distinguish subspecies of other animals?
They do, when there are things that seem to be subspecies, they don't do it just because there is an arbitrary requirement for every species to have subspecies. There's been dispute about whether various archaic human groups were separate species or subspecies, and if what we now call modern humans weren't the only ones still around, that might be a more acute debate and might be resolved in favor of subspecies, but the others aren't still around, so...
foldr · 16h ago
Some animals have subspecies. Humans don't. This is something that's widely misunderstood popularly but which is indubitable biologically. For example, many people are not aware that there is vastly more genetic variation between different breeds of dog than there is between any two groups of humans.
But regardless, the more important point is that whatever biologically-motivated categories humans might be grouped by would not correspond to 'races' as normally understood.
nomel · 16h ago
There are some (small) genetic populations whose genetics diverged so much, from geographic separation, that they have fertility problems [1].
What's left? Seems like something left over from the old science perspective that "humans are not animals", more than anything.
That article doesn't say anything about small populations. The word 'subpopulation' appears in the abstract, but it's talking about subpopulations of sperm in ejaculate.
I have to say, this is a super weird paper to suddenly pull out of nowhere in order to make an argument against the modern biological consensus that there are no subspecies of humans. It says nothing about species or subspecies, or even different populations of humans. Did you just Google some keywords and go with the first result? I'm genuinely puzzled.
nomel · 16h ago
> However, in this article, I show that female-mediated sperm selection can also facilitate assortative fusion between genetically compatible gametes. Based on this evidence, I argue that reproductive failure does not necessarily exclusively represent a pathological condition, but can also result from sexual selection (‘mate choice’) at the level of the gametes.
I'm haphazardly suggesting that the above is the same as:
> "There are some (small) genetic populations whose genetics diverged so much, from geographic separation, that they have fertility problems [1].
We have genetic populations that are the result of geographic separation, and we even have genetic divergence that makes reproduction difficult/impossible.
Again, what's left? Why can't we categorize human genetic populations to the same level? Please be specific in what's missing?
> It says nothing about species or subspecies
Why would it? If the categorization of humans included subspecies, I couldn't have responded.
foldr · 15h ago
Those two things really aren't the same at all, so I don't see where you're going with this.
If it's an established biological fact that there are different subspecies of humans, then it should be possible to find a reference for that.
nomel · 15h ago
> Those two things really aren't the same at all
Precise equality isn't required for a conceptual discussion, especially one that's so ill defined/subjective as the concept of subspecies [1].
It's an established political fact that classifying humans, at any level, could never be presented. That's not a bad thing, but it's also a mostly arbitrary thing.
The original comment was talking about using a different term than race when doing real biology or medical science. You basically made their point by jumping in with an explanation of race.
nomel · 17h ago
What most people (non-academics) mean when they say "race" is "genetic population". If your goal is to have a conceptual exchange, rather than correcting terminology, you should go in with that perspective. Top level comment put "race" in quotes, understanding this.
foldr · 17h ago
Mendel didn't get much attention until 1900 or so. European racism was alive and well long before non-academics had any notion of a "genetic population", or indeed a genetic anything.
nomel · 16h ago
Which is completely unrelated to speaking with a someone outside of academia, today.
nabla9 · 21h ago
'African ancestry' is itself not a good concept.
Tribes from the Horn of Africa have more common with Swedes than they have with East African tribes.
yupitsme123 · 21h ago
How is this possible?
anon291 · 19h ago
I'm not sure about that particular claim, but in general, skin color and phenotype are not perfectly correlated with ancestry. The immediate objection is the obvious one... "What do you mean? Why do Chinese people look Chinese, or Africans African, or Europeans European?".
What I mean is that, you can have two closely related populations with their own distinct phenotypes that are actually closely related.
An interesting example are the Negritos of SE Asia.
Any person simply going off of looks, would obviously assume these people are African.
However, they are indeed most closely related to their sister population, the fair-skinned small-eyed (please no offense, we all know what I'm talking about) East Asians.
Their look is due to convergent selection that favors darker skin, wider noses, etc.
This is what I mean by phenotype and genotype are not perfectly correlated.
naasking · 21h ago
> Overall I would love it if medical research papers moved away from "race" and started getting more into the fine-grained genetic details. Regardless of the politics involved, this will lead to better medical treatments for everyone.
More precision is better, but we don't have rapid genetic tests that can distinguish West vs. East African ancestry on the spot, so race is the only proxy available when you're, say, treating a patient in the ER.
nradov · 16h ago
We have rapid genetic tests now. They are still expensive and not widely available but this is improving.
On one hand, science tells us race as defined in western countries is not backed by actual biological differences. On the other hand, scientists use "race" in their research as if it is a legitimate means of categorizing people.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there are no differences between ethnicities, just that those differences are based on ancestry not race. People of a specific "race" don't share the same ancestry all the time, some times they have more in common with a different "race" than their own. Race as we know it today is a means of classifying humans that came about at a time when colonial expansion was booming. Classifying people based on their outward appearance was all too convenient. It's like someone learning how to code who found out there are thousands of programming languages and categorized them using terms like "curly brace language","lots of parenthesis language","indentation oriented language". It's lazy and childish. But once you learn more about the languages you should abandon the old ways of classifying things.
n4r9 · 21h ago
> scientists use "race" in their research as if it is a legitimate means of categorizing people
The journal Nature Human Behaviour published ethics guidelines in Aug 2022 which touch on this:
> Race and ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs. Humans do not have biological races, at least based on modern biological criteria for the identification of geographical races or subspecies.
> Studies that use the constructs of race and/or ethnicity should explicitly motivate their use. Race/ethnicity should not be used as proxies for other variables — for example, socioeconomic status or income.
We use breeds for other species, like cats, dogs, horses, etc. Humans could probably be categorized by breeds —breeds of course would not parallel ‘races’ but could still subdivide our species in new ways like we do with other animal species.
notepad0x90 · 14h ago
That won't work because people breed dogs for a purpose, that's why we have breeds. We don't breed to have better hunting humans for example. We practice eugenics on dogs, but we don't practice it at scale on ourselves.
Cats are interesting, tabby cats are most like humans, because they are very "mixed" but not with a purpose, just at random and by convenience. Orange cats have specific behavioral traits, but they weren't bred on purpose either.
The "on purpose" part is important because in those cases, we keep breeding them until specific traits are exaggerated to the max. With human reproduction, if having a blonde hair is considered ideal in a specific part of a country over several hundred years, then yeah, you'll see blondes mate more than non-blondes and you'll have lots of blondes, but you'll still see blondes marry non-blondes so their great-grandchildren could have red or black hair just the same. Now instead of hair consider behavioral traits. Those are even more complicated because us humans don't operate on a purely instinctual directive like animals. if a person has a genetic propensity for violence for example, that doesn't mean much because they can still decide to act against their "genetics" (otherwise, it doesn't make sense to punish them). Even dogs bred for their violent nature can be trained out of it to a large extent.
bombcar · 18h ago
We probably could - but people don't like it, and some huge percentage of everyone would be various "mutts".
But the whole arena is fraught with the risk of disaster. It's apparently OK to admit that a group of people are likely to be better at X because they're on average taller, but going further gets very dangerous.
mc32 · 18h ago
On the other hand, it could help people look beyond race and instead look at other traits like athleticism, math proficiency, wordsmithing, artistry, endurance, high altitude adaptation, seamanship, gift of the gab, etc…
nradov · 15h ago
Who has more athleticism, Aaron Rodgers or Ruth Chepngetich?
mc32 · 15h ago
They’d be the same breed! Or at least American athletic vs Kenyan athletic breed, like we have different terriers or different shepherd dog breeds .
saagarjha · 2h ago
People typically don't like to be categorized on how they are "bred".
mc32 · 2h ago
There are lots of things people don’t like to be categorized by such as weight/mass, height, intelligence, income, medical history, criminality, etc. There’s no reason we can’t be categorized along the lines of breeds.
n4r9 · 18h ago
If you're suggesting categorising according to genetics, then I don't think the scientific consensus is with you. Pet breeds have clear biological divisions that humans do not. See e.g. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.23882
> Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations. Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters.
mc32 · 15h ago
I’m saying we sidestep race altogether or at least treat it like cat coats and categorize people along other lines, some cultural some genetic.
rayiner · 18h ago
> science tells us race as defined in western countries is not backed by actual biological differences.
> In a recent study, published in Lancet Digital Health, NIH-funded researchers found that AI models could accurately predict self-reported race in several different types of radiographic images—a task not possible for human experts.
notepad0x90 · 18h ago
ethnicity is what you mean. unless you are claiming, the AI's model didn't have the concept of "race" in it's training data but was able to come up with a novel classification scheme that aligns with society's concept of race.
AI confirming human bias because it was trained on it doesn't mean much.
rayiner · 17h ago
Ethnicity is what I mean.
anthk · 14h ago
In Spain and not to mention Latin America with even Japanese and German people in Brazil it would collapse.
selimthegrim · 14h ago
I absolutely promise you it would fail massively in my case.
rayiner · 12h ago
Why?
dragonwriter · 16h ago
x-rays don't measure purely innate, genetic factors, they reflect things that are influenced by nurture as well as nature (and might, in principle, even have detectable difference based on differences in how technicians treat and react to the patient.)
energy123 · 22h ago
> Race as we know it today is a means of classifying ...
That's it. It's a classification system, a taxonomy, a social construction, a coarse categorization (all these things). But it's a bad one that only loosely correlates with a small handful of phenotypes. There isn't zero correlation which is why I disagree, as a matter of precision, with people who say race doesn't exist. The quality of a given taxonomy exists on a spectrum and race is a pretty damn bad one when you consider how inaccurately it separates the phenotypes it claims to care about, and how many genotypes/phenotypes (the vast majority) it fails to separate at all beyond a coin flip.
> We are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.
My summary would be that race is a heuristic. It's not perfect but it's a broadly accurate and often useful category. For example, whether someone has dark skin says quite a bit about their propensity for skin cancer. Whether someone is Jewish says a lot about their propensity for certain rare genetic diseases.
earnestinger · 18h ago
There is no “the science”.
There are bunch of unrelated people that do research with vastly different opinions and methods. (Thing in common: scientific method and review,publications)
When it comes down to layperson, research results are averaged out and de-nuanced by jounalists.
throw310822 · 18h ago
I have the impression that a lot if these talks about race being an entirely unscientific idea are related to the US dividing the entire world in four "races" as such: white, black, asian, and latino. Which is comically imprecise and arbitrary, and yet Americans seem to be obsessed with it.
notepad0x90 · 14h ago
it's not the US alone, this concept originated from the UK. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was used by the ruling class (think, east India company directors and such) to divide humans into sub-species with different levels of evolution. This would allow them the moral justification they needed to continue their conquest. There is a reason "all people are created equal" is the phrase used to abolish things like slavery. people focus on the "created" part, but the equal part is just as relevant.
This concept of race is designed so that one race can claim better evolution than the other, as a whole that is. People with specific ancestry might be better at specific things (provided they pursue those things to their potential), but associating that with an entire race was only useful at the time of this social constructs' creation because Europe needed to conquer the world and what do Europeans have in common the rest of the world doesn't have? Skin color. Which due to the latitude of Europe as a continent, people whose ancestors are from there have less melanin in their skin to account for lesser sunlight (You can see the same effect with north-east Asians). If you think about it, the western classification of "race" has more to do with geography than genealogy.
dragonwriter · 16h ago
> the US dividing the entire world in four "races" as such: white, black, Asian, and latino.
The US government scheme has more than four top-level racial categories, and "Hispanic or Latino", in that system, is an ethnicity, not one of the races.
duxup · 22h ago
I recall a newspaper story about a Black writer who did not know his ancestry. He took a genetic test to find out he was more native American than black. He told his mother who responded "I'm too old to stop being a black woman."
I think that is an understandable feeling and I think that says a lot about the concept of race. Her statement doesn't make race any less real, but it does indicate what race IS.
tokai · 21h ago
Your comment made me remember this short reportage:
There are hispanic creoles, native american creoles, german creoles, italian creoles, so forth and so on. Because to be a Louisiana creole isn't to rely on any racial marker at all. It just signifies that your ancestors lived here at a particular time.
So if someone says that they're Cajun, not creole, they're lying to you. ALL cajuns, without exception, are creole.
And most people who claim to be Cajun are either not Cajun at all or they've mistaken their surname for being Cajun. Like a guy who told me I was wrong about a food item and he knew better because he's a Cajun, being a Champagne from Golden Meadow.
Only problem is that Champagne isn't a cajun surname. The Champagne family came over directly from France.
You might have seen Isaac Toups on TV hawking a cookbook. The Toups surname is actually German (originally spelled Dubs but the French authorities did their thing), and they landed in the US in 1718-19 in Biloxi, MS.
And so on, and so on...
I think that some "cajuns" would be more willing to call themselves creole if they knew that in addition to the native americans, the other group that saved their asses when they came to the territory were the German creoles. Those people had it far, far harsher than the Acadian disapora ever did. When they got to the territory, they were not allowed to use beasts of burden for a full decade. This means that when they were dropped off and told to go farm rice (which none of them had ever done before), they had to till their fields and deliver their product to New Orleans from the River Parishes, up to 60 miles away without horses. By the time the Cajuns got here, there were plenty of horses for working the land and other livestock that you were legally allowed to eat.
Anyway, that's just one little speck of a much larger ethnic pie.
genewitch · 12h ago
Where do coon-asses fit in this scheme?
MisterBastahrd · 10h ago
Coonass is a pejorative that Cajuns from Louisiana received during WWII when they were asked to be translators for the French resistance. The language in Louisiana diverged into cajun French and Kouri Vini (creole French) over the 200 years since Louisiana was first colonized, so modern French didn't line up and there was still a bit of a language barrier. The French called these people connasse, which basically means stupid because of this, but the cajuns took it as a kind-hearted nickname and brought it back home with them. Many cajuns were and still are upset that the term is ever still used to refer to them because it's a coarse word they feel belittles their culture, so if you're in the company of them and you don't know how they'll react, you might want to wait until they bring it up.
genewitch · 10h ago
I love this site, this is the second thing about louisiana culture i've learned in the past month by asking a question like this. The other one was that Cajun is derived from Acadian.
And i got to share that "creole" has many meanings, including the stuff that forms on the inside of a BBQ itself.
selimthegrim · 14h ago
You beat me to it. I definitely know Cajuns from Breaux Bridge with the last name Rees for example.
The registrar of births in Orleans Parish used to essentially blackmail several prominent families about how far back the black was in their birth certificates and lineage.
like_any_other · 21h ago
> Rather than fitting into clear-cut genetic clusters based on self-reported racial or ethnic labels, most participants’ genomes revealed different gradients of ancestry spanning continents, the team reports today.
I assume this refers to figure 7 of the study [1]. Figure 7C shows 63/124,341 self-identified Whites had predicted African ancestry from their genome, 45,206/45,761 Blacks, and 19/7,419 Asians.
Figure 7D shows predicted European ancestry, which was 120,127/124,341 for Whites, 110/45,761, and 39/7,419 for Asians. This seems like remarkably good correspondence to me?
> Race, ethnicity don’t match genetic ancestry
The title is missing "self-reported" at the start. Without that, the article isn't even self-consistent - "race is meaningless, it does not perfectly match genetic ancestry from historical geographical groups"? You haven't done away with race, you just renamed it to "African ancestry", "European ancestry", "Asian ancestry", etc.., and found that they have somewhat intermixed in the US. But it has been known since literally ancient Greece that races can intermix, and that their variation is geographically gradual, so the study hasn't discovered or disproven anything new.
It's amusing to contrast this with science's findings on non-human animals: there are 16 subspecies of brown bear, 38 subspecies of wolf, 46 subspecies of red fox, 9 subspecies of tiger, and 12 subspecies of house sparrow.
Correction: Line 3 was supposed to read "110/45,761 for Blacks"
GolfPopper · 22h ago
I seem to recall (but cannot find) a variant of the Weinreich witticism[1], which goes something like, "a nation is a language with an army and an origin story". (Meaning 'nation' in the sense of "a people" rather than "a state".[2])
> Geneticists have long established that race and ethnicity are sociocultural constructs and not good proxies to describe genetic differences in disease risks and traits among groups
I’m Asian and I grew up in the U.S. and for years I didn’t realize the stomach problems I was having were from drinking milk when most asians cannot drink milk, while most European Americans can: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/16jcecc/map_of_lac.... Is race a rough proxy? Sure. But it’s an easy proxy to administer which in the medical context gives it a certain value for making people aware of differences that may be salient.
kelnos · 17h ago
It's very rough, though. I know many (East, South, Southeast) Asians who can drink milk just fine. But I -- white with European ancestry -- am lactose intolerant. Not a really useful rubric from my perspective, and I think if a doctor (re: your "medical context") were to say something like, "you're Asian so your stomach distress is probably caused by dairy" or "you're white so we should look deeper for some unusual cause of your stomach distress", I would look for a new doctor immediately.
rayiner · 16h ago
Think about the probabilities. Lactose intolerance in the UK (as a proxy for British Americans) is under 10%, while in my home country it is over 85%. Meanwhile, drinking milk is universal among white American children (it’s served in schools). If a white kid has stomach problems, there’s a 90% chance it’s not lactose intolerance. But if an Asian kid presents with stomach problems, lactose intolerance is probably the single likeliest explanation. And it can be assessed by asking a couple of simple questions.
Our kids are half white so we were unsure if they’d be lactose intolerant. At the first sign of stomach problems in the youngest, we switched him to lactose free milk and the problem went away immediately. If we took him to a doctor we might’ve gone down a whole rabbit hole of dead ends. And if we weren’t aware of the issue and looking out for it, we may have not done anything and just let him deal with the discomfort. After all, kids get tummy aches for a million reasons.
selimthegrim · 14h ago
I had the same problem as a child.
Balgair · 33m ago
Scandinavians tend to have lactose intolerance as children that they later outgrow. It's not a universal thing, but is common enough.
southernplaces7 · 18h ago
Unsurprising. Many, many people claim their ethnicity is X third this or that based on some half-checked thing some older relative told them a while back, and then base their claims on that, despite having all kinds of different possible ancestry combos.
I myself, being from the Balkans, don't even pretend to have a clue of what my genetic ancestry might be, and don't feel like finding out through some Find Your DNA ancestry (parasitic data harvesting) startup.
systemstops · 18h ago
Race is a social construct, but one loosely based on biological reality. As we unravel the mystery of human origins using ancient DNA, we are starting to get a better understanding of the how different groups came to be.
The idea what we are a homogenous species with no biologically important distinctions between groups - which became popular in the postwar period - is coming to end. But, we are also not returning to racial essentialism of the past. The new narrative of human differences will be far more complicated.
Related: A New DNA Test Can ID a Suspect's Race, But Police Won't Touch It
> Tony Clayton, a black man and a prosecutor who tried one of the Baton Rouge murder cases, concedes the benefits of the test: "Had it not been for Frudakis, we would still be looking for the white guy in the white pickup." Nevertheless, Clayton says he dislikes anything that implies we don't all "bleed the same blood." He adds, "If I could push a button and make this technology disappear, I would."
idk I had always just called myself "American" and assumed I'd be a mix of a lot of things.
bombcar · 18h ago
I know some people who would spend hours at the tavern explaining why "British/Irish (largely Welsh apparently)" is an almost incomprehensible statement :D
ilamont · 22h ago
Part of the problem with self-reported ethnic or racial backgrounds is the explosion of cheap DNA tests from the likes of Ancestry and the now-bankrupt 23andme.
All of a sudden, people have the ability to determine if distant ancestors came from a different continent. Even if it's just 1 or 2% or even a trace amount, they're checking off boxes identifying themselves as multiracial.
For the 2020 census, it resulted in a 276% increase in the number of people self-identifying with more than one racial group. This is far more than could be explained by immigration or children born to parents from different backgrounds since 2010.
Its findings suggest adults 50 and up are most likely to self-identify as multiracial on surveys after receiving a report about the potential roots of their family tree based on a DNA analysis of their saliva. The study of more than 100,000 adults registered as potential bone marrow donors in the U.S. also found that DNA test takers were especially likely to identify with three or more racial groups. ...
"Native American was the one identity people really wanted to have and really wanted to prove," Roth says, adding that she has also found that some people stopped claiming Native American identity after the results of a test did not show any genetic ancestry.
You can imagine the problem when self-reported racial identities could really cloud the waters for determining a suitable bone marrow donor or other health application.
y-c-o-m-b · 21h ago
> Even if it's just 1 or 2% or even a trace amount, they're checking off boxes identifying themselves as multiracial.
This is not necessarily wrong though. In many cases I've seen where children of grandparents from a particular region showing up on those products as having low percentage heritage from those areas.
If your grandmother was born in China and is - for all intents and purposes - clearly Chinese, yet you show up with 3% Chinese DNA on these products, does that mean you can't identify as having Chinese in your family background? Who determines where this line is drawn?
bawolff · 18h ago
It does seem a little silly. My great-great grandfather on one side was from germany, but i don't identify as german. The link is too weak and i have no cultural connection.
paxys · 18h ago
Why is that a problem? Self identification is a good thing. The real problem is people using the box you check for real world decisions like college admissions, jobs and scholarships.
Re: the bone marrow thing, no one is using self identification as a way of doing blood or organ transplants ("you say you are black so your marrow will probably work for him"). There are real medical tests to check for all this.
mrguyorama · 15h ago
The problem comes when, well, did anyone ever verify Ancestry data?
My understanding from the sidelines was that the reported ethnicity of "oh you have a little french in you" had no meaningful basis, and was absurdly inaccurate. People treating it as anything more than fiction were making a mistake.
reverendsteveii · 21h ago
I mean, the real problem was that race was always a social construct but racists wanted to to be a biological one instead
MrDrDr · 19h ago
I found the following paper helpful in understanding the evolutionary pressures on a species (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abg5391). It's possible for two different genetic ancestries to arrive at the same phenotype independently where there environment is virtually identical. The example here, cichlid fish in lakes like Tanganyika and Victoria, evolved similar traits independently from different genetic lineages.
One could imagine (climate change not withstanding) that different geographic human populations would always tend to evolve to the same phenotype over time.
Peacefulz · 18h ago
I'm multiracial, but I only ever choose White on forms. I don't really have anything to do with the other side of my family, and I don't relate to their culture. I have also lived in predominantly rural areas, and I didn't feel it benefitted me to claim my other half on forms that held any importance to me.
No comments yet
ilaksh · 22h ago
There is urgent need for education on these types of topics in the United States.
ebiester · 22h ago
It's there in every university. It's in every sociology and anthropology field at least.
But in general, it gets dismissed as "Woke."
Jensson · 12h ago
Those are the ones pushing for this though, its the woke that wants to collect all these self reported data.
They say its nonsense but then go and make admittance decisions based on it.
contagiousflow · 18h ago
This is literally Critical Race Theory
yupitsme123 · 22h ago
This sounds like the same split that has happened with sex and gender in recent years.
No comments yet
nitwit005 · 17h ago
This is genuinely in the question. The US census doesn't ask about your ancestry, they ask about your race.
You couldn't accurately fill out your ancestry on the form, even if you wanted to.
cjbgkagh · 21h ago
One of the problems now is if you use SNP statistics for Germans you have to take into account the N% of Turks in that population which changes over time, with DNA they really should be separate groups. The assumption that the genes will blend doesn't really pan out quickly enough for it to be ignored in the near term.
Race was a crude approximation and better techniques are available today. There is a push to use a wider variety of reference genomes which makes sense especially now that that computers are more powerful. There seems to be an assumption by others here that going from an unsophisticated crude approximation to a sophisticated one will somehow validate their other assumption that 'race is only skin deep'. I am not as optimistic.
Al-Khwarizmi · 22h ago
Not very surprising that the official US races are BS. If I understand them correctly, officially someone from Portugal or France is supposed to be Caucasian, whereas someone from Spain is supposed to be Hispanic, which makes zero sense from any point of view.
fumeux_fume · 22h ago
To be fair, in the eyes of the US government, Hispanic is an ethnicity and not a race so you can be White and Hispanic. However, this distinction is lost among most and ethnicity and race are commonly used interchangeably.
dragonwriter · 21h ago
To be fair, in the eyes of the US government, races are non-exclusive and you can be White, Black or African American, American Indian or Native Alaskan, and all the other racial categories simultaneously, as well as either having or not having Hispanic or Latino ethnicity.
bombcar · 18h ago
The kicker is that if you select "American Indian or Native Alaskan" they start asking for tribal documentation. But you can check Black or White or Hispanic (Not White) or anything else all you want. Who will gainsay?
dragonwriter · 18h ago
> The kicker is that if you select "American Indian or Native Alaskan" they start asking for tribal documentation.
No, for most purposes they never did (in fact, for many purposes where this is used, it is immediately separated from anything that would associate it with the submitter, so it would be hard for them to come back and ask you for anything), and the 2024 revisions to the definitions of the minimum categories removes the language about maintaining an ongoing affiliation ("who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment") from the definition of that category. [0]
No Wikipedia explicitly states that people from Spain are not included;
"The term commonly applies to Spaniards and Spanish-speaking populations and countries in Hispanic America and Hispanic Africa" I.e. not mainland Spain.
ceejayoz · 20h ago
“The term commonly applies to Spaniards AND…”
This is not a complex sentence.
bombcar · 18h ago
A friend in college from Spain had way too much fun pretending to be stereotypically hispanic and would insist that he had more a claim to it, being from Hispaniola, after all.
skylurk · 17h ago
To be pedantic, if he was from Spain, he would be from Hispania[1] not Hispaniola[2].
FWIW "hispanic" isn't a race on those forms, it's an ethnicity. You can choose any race with it.
octopoc · 21h ago
Yeah and it actually kinda makes sense--in Mexico, there are white Hispanics who descended from Spanish Jews and have not interbred much with the natives. They are tall and white. Then there are people with little or no European blood in them, and they are short and brown, generally speaking.
So it makes sense that you could be a Caucasian Hispanic.
lazide · 21h ago
The really weird thing is why a bunch of other things aren’t also ethnicities.
dragonwriter · 21h ago
What other ethnicities do you think there is an equally strong case to include in the list of minimum reporting categories (which is what the official scheme defines) on par with the one current ethnic and six current (with the recent addition of Middle East and North African) racial categories?
lazide · 21h ago
Chinese. Indian. Northern European (Nordic countries). English.
These all have just as much claim from a cultural-diaspora perspective eh? With a wide variety of phenotypes, if we go back a bit. Though Indian should probably be more finely divided if we’re being honest.
If you really wanted to piss people off, we could of course lump Indian, Singaporean, Australian, American, etc. under English Ethnicity.
The only reason Hispanic is one is because the conquistadors were really, really persistent, murderous, and shameless eh?
dragonwriter · 21h ago
The case for including an ethnicity in the minimum reporting categories starts with, largely, that it is both a large community and that it significantly cuts across rather than existing largely within a category already defined as a racial category; "Ethnicities" which would fall almost entirely within the Asian, Asian, or White racial categories don't really have a strong case.
That said, there is probably a good argument for breaking out at least South Asian from Asian as a distinct top-level racial category, in the same way that MENA recently was. (But note that all of the top-level categories also have more detailed breakdowns available, and recent revisions have also moved to require the more detailed options to collected in a wider range of circumstances.)
> The only reason Hispanic is one is because the conquistadors were really, really persistent, murderous, and shameless eh?
Mostly, the opposite: that the successors to the conquistadors were less genocidal and more assimilationist than their British and British-descended North American counterparts.
lazide · 21h ago
American born Ethnic Chinese would like a word. As would a very large number of other groups.
The only reason these groups are included this way is because of lobbying power (for and against) and $$ and privileges related to being in or out of various categories.
From an ontological perspective, your argument is BS looking at the actual distributions and ground truth of these groups.
dragonwriter · 21h ago
> American born Ethnic Chinese would like a word.
What racial groups in the minimum reporting scheme does this ethnic group cut across, and in what rough proportions?
kjkjadksj · 20h ago
Realistically the US has different ethnicities just considering the differences between north and south, east, midwest and its spectrum, and then the west. For some the differences are so great the language spoken is no longer mutually intelligible.
paganel · 22h ago
The entire US "race" discourse is pretty stupid, to be fair, too bad it has infected much of the rest of the world because of the influence of the US media.
bluGill · 22h ago
Every place in the world I've looked into has stupid "race" issues that make no sense to anyone outside. There is a human tribal tendancy to want to find someone "different and lesser" than us that we can then look down on. Exactly what those things are vary a lot from place to place (and over history even in one place) depending on various factors. However there always is some group that is seen as lesser for no good reason.
dragonwriter · 21h ago
I think you need to replace the first "US" with "European imperialist" and "US media" at the end with "European imperialism", and adjust your timeline for the origin of the problem.
aap_ · 2h ago
Parent was not talking about the origin though. Present day obsession with so called "race" is absolutely a US phenomenon. Classifying people as "caucasian" for instance always trips me up because it's something that people would call you a nazi for elsewhere.
sorcerer-mar · 22h ago
You live under a rock if you think "race discourse" originated (presumably recently) from US media or the US at all.
gjm11 · 22h ago
I don't think paganel's claim is that all race discourse is derived from the US. Rather, that (1) the race discourse in the US is stupid and (2) that much race discourse elsewhere these days is derived from the US's and is therefore similarly stupid. (Other independent race discourse might also be stupid but in different ways.)
sorcerer-mar · 21h ago
Yes that is how it reads now that they’ve edited to say “the US race discourse.”
gitremote · 21h ago
Race discourse in the US is not stupid. Nazis from Germany mass murdered people because of white supremacy before US critical race theory. It's important to talk about Nazis and white supremacy instead of ignoring the problem and hoping it will go away by itself.
gjm11 · 2h ago
It is possible for something to be important to talk about, and for the way it's talked about to be stupid. In fact, I think it's quite common. I agree with paganel that a lot of US race discourse is stupid. I agree with you that sometimes it's important to talk about race. There's no contradiction between those.
(But I don't think "white supremacy" is a good way to think about the Nazis' hatred of Jewish people. They were white supremacists, but they hated the Jews for other reasons and if by some miracle they had abruptly stopped being white supremacists I think they would have gone right on persecuting Jewish people.)
Hispanic can be any race, from African Black to Nordic White.
Also, there can be huge differences between Hispanic themselves, an Argentinian, Mexican, Peruvian and Asturian might share common traits (Catholic Culture -not beliefs, culture, something affecting even Atheists, and I am not talking about superstitions- , food) but their customs and worldview can be totally alien between ourselves.
Just compare a Mexican Mariachi with an Asturian folk guy playing Celtic songs with bagpipes. Or the differences on ideology, state support, progressiveness... as much as a Brit and the average North American if not more.
dragonwriter · 21h ago
> Not very surprising that the official US races are BS.
The modern concept of "race" in general is a BS construct that was invented to support and justify European imperialism, and which has long been recognized as having only the loosest relation to biological reality despite in its own terms being conceptualized as a biological reality of some importance.
OTOH, its also produced very real communities of differentiated experience, identity, and treatment, and it is largely that which the US government system of race (plus one ethnicity, in the minimum scheme) is designed to gather data related to.
> If I understand them correctly,
You do not.
> officially someone from Portugal or France is supposed to be Caucasian
"Caucasian" is not part of the official race/ethnicity scheme used in US federal government reporting. Someone who has prehistoric ancestors who were from the region which is now Portugal or France, and who identifies with the racial group into which people with that ancestry are categorized, would be White, possibly with another racial and/or ethnic category depending on what other ancestry they identified with.
> whereas someone from Spain is supposed to be Hispanic
With the same description as above, replacing "Portugal or France" with "Spain", the person would still be White.
A person who also identifies with Spanish or South, Central, or North American (south of the US border) national/cultural origin would be Hispanic or Latino by ethnicity (the only ethnic category in the scheme) as well as any racial category or categories they identify with.
Here's a news release on 2024 updates to the scheme, which involve combine the race/ethnicity questions into a single multiple answer allowed question (the race question was already multiple answers allowed, but the presence or absence of the one ethnic category was a separate question) as well as other updates to the scheme: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2024/...
lazide · 21h ago
Regardless of what specific term is used, it is used (and abused!) equivalently pretty much everywhere humans exist.
Is ‘caste’, race? Because it sure is used that way (or worse) in places that have it. And that’s been going on for longer than what we currently call European civilization.
paxys · 18h ago
Caste is synonymous with social class. There is no genetic or racial component to it, and no one is claiming as such (including the people who are discriminating on the basis of caste).
Regional customs vary, but southern indian cousin marriage traditions in particular are heavily caste oriented.
The only thing not ‘race’ about it, is the word.
Spain and it’s colonies also had a ‘casta’ system with simpler and more explicit rules.
paxys · 17h ago
The study shows the reverse effect. Because of the emergence of the caste system and rigid classes people stopped intermixing across caste boundaries and now 2000 years later you can find certain genetic differentiators between them.
mrguyorama · 15h ago
The reality is the same for "Race" and "Ethnicity", and all sorts of other words that humans have used to categorize "not my family".
French colonists to the new world freely intermarried (and had kids) with Native Americans and people brought over from Africa, and eventually those same groups were prevented from marrying under racist american laws.
So there's lots of french blood in black people in the southern united states, but they were eventually prevented from marrying white french people, even when they were literally part of the same large family tree! There are long lines and families of black people who literally descend from my ancestors that I wouldn't have been allowed to marry!
Which should clearly demonstrate that it was never about your genetic or biologic ancestry, as modern science knows.
Wikipedia claims America's "blacks can't marry whites" laws have no precedent.
Similarly, there was lots of inter-racial relations before some colonies banned it, and other colonies never banned it.
lazide · 17h ago
You really might want to re-read what I wrote, and what you wrote again. Because you’re agreeing with me.
Freedom2 · 21h ago
I remember a few years back, I was at a tech conference – one of those big ones in San Francisco, you know, where everyone is talking about the latest in AI and blockchain. Anyway, during a coffee break, I overheard this intense discussion about ancestry DNA kits. One guy, who looked very much like he could have stepped out of a Swedish travel brochure, was absolutely flabbergasted because his DNA results showed a significant percentage of Sub-Saharan African ancestry. He kept repeating, "But my family has been in Nebraska for generations!"
It's almost like our perceived identity is just a user interface, and the genetic code is the raw assembly language underneath. It makes me wonder, how much of our cultural narrative is shaped by these historical "coding errors" or, perhaps, deliberate obfuscations? And what happens when more and more people start running these genetic "debuggers" on their own personal history? Are we headed for a significant "reboot" of how we understand race and identity in society? Just food for thought.
kjkjadksj · 20h ago
It has always been like that. “My family has always been christian” except before that critical generation where the village shrine to the pagan gods were burned, the women raped, the men and children put to the sword by christians with a directive from a christian king to put all pagans to the sword, and your surviving pagan ancestor fleeing to the woods and eventually hiding all indications of their former faith out of survival.
People talk about the irony of Black people adopting the faith of their oppressors when really that is the case for most monotheists today when you start to consider the historical contexts of why their lineage adopted the monotheistic faith at the time.
mistrial9 · 19h ago
the truth you speak there is a) not representative of all the conversion stories and b) is very representative of Christian conversion in the North East of Europe e.g. Saint Boniface and Donar's Oak.
Africans in the USA is certainly a special sociological case due to the largest importation of agricultural slaves in Western history. As almost everyone knows, not all people shipped in chains to the US South were illiterate. Literacy is a central feature of Christian practice. All else aside, literate people in chains adopting the literate religion does not sound too far fetched to me.
kelseyfrog · 22h ago
I was assigned Italian at birth. There is no changing that, legally, illegally, by 23andMe, or anyone else.
kelnos · 16h ago
Northern or Southern? What about your ancestry prior to the existence of Italy?
And what does that mean, anyway? That some people in your family were born inside some arbitrary lines drawn on the ground? Who cares?
This sort of classification is meaningless.
(I, too, have Italian ancestry, but that's a small part of the overall picture, and has little to do with anything "real" about me, like my health or looks.)
nonethewiser · 22h ago
Is Italian a race now? If you can be assigned Italian I'm not sure what's stopping you from being reassigned to something else.
amanaplanacanal · 21h ago
It hasn't been very long since "Irish" was considered by many to be a separate race.
VOIPThrowaway2 · 21h ago
We've only recently stopped thinking of "Italian" as being separate. For good and bad.
cjbgkagh · 21h ago
I have Northern Italian friends who consider themselves very separate to the Southern Italians. The Lega Nord party was originally about Padania (Northern Italy) separatism.
bombcar · 18h ago
Almost any group identified from the outside has internal divisions that they insist are incredibly important.
What did the Elves say? “To sheep other sheep no doubt appear different. Or to shepherds. But Mortals have not been our study.”
People can get really prickly about it, for example lumping all people south of the US border as "Hispanic" or calling everyone in the UK "English".
kelseyfrog · 19h ago
Who is the epistemic authority on someone's culture or ethnicity?
ebiester · 21h ago
And that's the intersection between race, genetic background, ethnicity, heritage, and culture.
You joke, but "assigned at birth" is probably apt. You may have discomfort or comfort in identifying with it. It may subtly change your perceptions and perceptions of you.
That being said, there are important differences within the traditional "races", such as the finding in this study that people with West African vs. East African ancestries have different genetic propensities for obesity.
Overall I would love it if medical research papers moved away from "race" and started getting more into the fine-grained genetic details. Regardless of the politics involved, this will lead to better medical treatments for everyone.
"Traditional races" as you call them have changed over time and space, and we are only in this predicament because we lump different ethnicities together today. 150 years ago people could tell the difference between someone of West African or East African descent. And Southern Italians, Irish vs Western Europeans vs Germans... etc.
It's harder now because a) there has been a lot more mixing since then; and b) socioculturally we consolidated many of those ethnicities
Back in those respective countries, they can tell everyone apart. When my wife (Irish/English by ancestry) visited Hungary, they were immediately able to peg her as a foreigner, and frankly, so was I. They look nothing alike aside from skin color. This is true of basically any country in Europe, Africa, Asia, where people have tended to remain in the same location for thousands of years.
I think even most Americans would be able to tell apart African and European races if they really tried.
People from the Po valley, such as the Milanese, are mostly "lighter Mediterranean" types. People around Como Lake are visibly more blond and pale. The ethnic substrate is different, the ancient populations in southern Alps were more Celtic and Germanic, and even though the contemporary folk no longer speaks anything but Italian, the difference to much more mixed places such as Milano is still visible.
Same in northern Spain. Galicia and Asturias have a lot of pale, blue-eyed people who would stand out in an Andalusian crowd. Galicia has Celtic ancestry (they even preserved bagpipes as a folk instrument), and Asturias was the last refuge of the Visigoths when they were crushed by the Arabs in the 8th century.
You can also easily distinguish some other European subpopulations. For example, I met a lot of Lithuanians built as a, uh, brick shithouse. Neighbouring Poles tend to be somewhat less bulky. Many Russians have a visible Tatar admixture, with broad and flat faces. Ukrainians much less so.
And you can usually tell a Greek before they open their mouths. Some of them, especially in their older age, still resemble the old beardy statues from way-before-1-AD.
Take a course in European history, learn about all the wars, genocides, forced and unenforced migrations, plagues, etc. and even more mundane thinggs like intermarriage outside of immediate community ( very common amongst nobility ) and tell me again with a straight face you believe people have remained in the same place for thousands of years
They may have recognized your wife as “foreign” based on a number of things. The most obvious being language, But it could have also been dress, makeup, demeanor etc.
It’s rare (but not impossible) for a people to have been in the same place on Earth for thousands of years. It’s more like hundreds.
Is it really rare? That seems to be the norm except for America and Africa that got replaced or displaced by colonization. But in Europe and Asia most areas has been populated by steady groups. Rulers come and go, but the people living there stays the same.
I think its rare for everyone to have been there for a thousand years, but its not rare for a majority of the genes to have stayed in one place for a thosand years.
But it’s not like we’re being super precise here. It’s fuzzy enough that lots of takes are correct, depending how you frame it. That’s kind of my point in my other reply. They weren’t wrong but they were being rude about it.
This contrasts to earlier "literary" arguments in magazines such as Quadrant that native Australians moved about and fought for territories with invaders supplanting original dwellers long before Europeans arrived.
- https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2016-09-22/world-first-s...
is a national press article on some of that, my original references to the hosted papers on this seems to be offline / unavailable ATM (damn bitrot).
It was more difficult, but it happened many-many times.
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For example, a study indicating that "black people in the US are X% more likely to have {some condition}" is useful, even if "black person in the US" doesn't tell much about an individual's ancestry. That's because health conditions are heavily influenced by environmental factors, and someone's race impacts the environmental factors they're exposed to.
This does get complicated, and requires digging deep into the data. Top-level statistics don't indicate root cause, which still needs to be researched. But top-level statistics can indicate that there's a problem that needs to be worked on, which is why medical studies tracking race are still useful.
similarly, when working on genomes a few years back, it used to be said that the two most genetically distinct humans alive right then would both be from Africa, which was memorable because one might guess Inuit vs Africa or something like that naively.
The you could say that a distinctive trait of Khoi-San ethnicity is its genetic variance. Not to mention the fact that this variance, coming from before two population bottlenecks, must contain a large number of traits not seen in other human populations.
Although this makes you wonder- if they're the most genetically diverse, do they also look diverse? Are there light and dark skinned individuals, blonde and red and black hair, green/ blue/ brown eyes, short and tall, etc.?
Last of course there's the idea that this variance must be restricted to the visible phenotype. Which sounds a bit like saying that the objects in a dark room must be all in the spot illuminated by the torch, and everywhere else the room is empty.
>> Although this makes you wonder- if they're the most genetically diverse, do they also look diverse? Are there light and dark skinned individuals, blonde and red and black hair, green/ blue/ brown eyes, short and tall, etc.?
Yes, they do look diverse.
The visual differences will be more readily apparent to people who are familiar with the high genetic variance population since this would allow more (maybe fine-grained) diverse looks. If the person looking does not have much experience distinguishing looks in a "high genetic variance" population then they probably end up generalizing as a default. Not being able to pick up on how diverse these looks are does not make them not there. Only that, the observer is familiar with the visual differences in their non-african population of less genetically diverse humans with some grouped environmental adaptions/mutations. Such as lighter pigment to better absorb vitamin D, and this type of thing being carried as the standard for "diverse looking" (blue/brown/light/dark).
After all, "SLC24A5 encodes a cation exchanger in melanosomes ... A derived, nonsynonymous mutation (rs1426654 ...) in SLC24A5 associated with light skin color has swept to near fixation in Europeans due to positive selection [...] rs1426654 is common in East African populations with high levels of Afroasiatic ancestry [...] Further, SLC24A5 likely experienced positive selection in East Africa after this admixture event. ... rs1426654 is at moderate frequency (5–12%) in the KhoeSan from Botswana, who have substantially lighter skin than equatorial Africans". and also "studies show that the ancestral alleles of many predicted functional pigmentation variants in Africa are associated with lighter skin, suggesting our human ancestors may have had light or moderately pigmented skin" and that dark skin may be a derived trait that also continued to evolve.[0]
But when you only have a hammer...
It's like being introduced to this workshop full of tools with a stacks of wood for any type of joinery desired. Yet, your experience is much more simplistic: hammer, nail (or bolt/screw, whatever), boards; repeat. Without much thought, the human brain has already created the groups: the trusty hammer with some metal fasteners to drive, and that foreign group of absolutely nothing like the trusty hammer and fasteners. But upon closer look there are hammers and nails and screws and all these other metal fasteners in the workshop -- except, instead of them being chosen to put the boards together, a variation of tools are creating a variation of joints in order to put the boards together. The finished product ends up being ~99.9% identical to your nailed product, but it's probably only those familiar with the experience of joinery that are most likely to appreciate an notice the visual diversity between joints, instead of simply noticing that one of the products has a couple spots of metal and the other doesn't.
[0] https://academic.oup.com/hmg/article/30/R1/R88/6089124
To give an example, take 3 people named A, B, and C. A and B are both from Africa, while C is from elsewhere.
A and B have 9 genetic differences. B and C have 1 genetic difference. A and C have 10 genetic differences.
We can make the claim that the genetic difference between someone from Africa and from elsewhere (B to C, thus 1) is much smaller than the difference between two people in Africa (A to B, thus 9). 1 is smaller than 9, so this statement is true, but could easily be misunderstood to saying that the two most genetically distinct individuals are from Africa, which isn't the case because A to C is the most genetically distinct and C is from elsewhere.
The two statements seem nearly equivalent and the wrong one could accidentally be spread by someone who is really just trying to focus on expressing how much genetic diversity is within Africa.
They are talking with respect to internal diversity I believe.
As an Anglophone you may notice a similar thing in language, and in English you can notice the large diversity in accent in native UK speakers.
Non-Africans split from Africa relatively late in human genetic history. So A and B's divergence point(s) can readily be quite a bit earlier than C's. So, as you pointed out, C is likely more closely related one of A or B. Let's say B.
The big difference between B & C is that B is much more likely to incorporate genes from other early branches than C is. Therefore B is likely further away genetically from A than C is.
To put it another way, if we start with groups A and B, and then branch off B' from B, while B and B' are likely similar, that doesn't tell us anything about the relationship between A and B', and it doesn't imply that A and B' are closer than A and B.
There’s no logical argument needed to prove the genetic diversity in Africa, it is an observed fact.
Bottlenecks, small population inbreeding, genetic drift, founder effect, etc
Basically what happened was, an alt-group of African humans decided earth was not safe anymore and its collapse was imminent -- they need to get to Mars. But since they don't have a way to get a spaceship in Africa, they will need to leave Africa and do whatever is necessary to build one, including throwing the people who helped them under the mammoth if need be.
At this point they have a pretty diverse gene pool and represent the humans well. They walk for a bit but came upon some steam vents and decided take a break and steam some food and enjoy the ocean view in the distance. The leader is not happy they stopped for food or rest. Later they are shooketh awake just before fire rains down on them. 3/4th of them make it safely to the ocean, and what luck the water is receding it'll be easier to cross, for the first 2/3rds at least. The tsunami gods demanded a toll and claimed the back 1/3. Not happy with the direction of leadership, half the group decided they could establish a better foundation away from these clowns and forked themselves.
Meanwhile, back in Africa and finally having got rid of that crazy mars dude and his cult followers, they decide to invite all the neighbors to an epoch swinging dance party to celebrate -- complete with the best plant-based party favours they could dig up/gather. Thus, ensuring the larger African population and their descendant would end up with an abundant supply of pokemon variants to swap between'em.
Though, you may want to take a look at the linked paper above for a more precise explanation. I may have paraphrased a bit.
(* who mattered. There were earlier migrations of hominids, but the mark they left on our genetics is much smaller than the influence from later migrations.)
Humans originated in Africa, so populations there have had more time to evolve and become more diverse.
200,000 years of genetic drift versus 20,000 years makes a big difference.
A genetic test takes several days and costs a few hundred dollars.
The patient wants the best treatment right now. If race carries useful information that helps the doctor treat the patient, then the doctor should have access to it.
This might sound like nitpicking, but most black people in the US have significant European ancestry and the admixture can vary wildly even for people with similar skin tones. Our naive view of "race" is not always backed by genetic reality.
Yes, you give them the list and say "What is your race/ethnicity, you may select at least one and as many as you wish." They answer. You are done.
> What race is someone who's Arab?
Whatever they answer (Middle East or Northern African [MENA], under the 2024 revision to the categories, intuitively seems most likely.)
> What about someone who could look black with one haircut but white with another?
Again, whatever they answer.
> What about half-Arab, half-Euro?
Again, whatever they answer. Though the most obvious guess of what they might answer, given the premise, would be one of White, MENA, or both.
The part to question is not, "is it quick and free to determine race" but "does race carry useful information that helps the doctor treat the patient", which is a much thornier question.
While I broadly agree with you, there have been notable controversies around people who self-identified as having a particular ancestry [0] that didn't match how other people classified them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal
It's pretty low quality information. If you're taking a genetic test you want something that returns susceptibility to sickle cell amenia, cystic fibrosis, tay-sachs, et cetera. Race is a very low quality signal that is used when you lack something better, like a genetic test.
everyone from everywhere has african ancestry
I assume you imply that humans evolved not in Africa. Where?
Since the OOA theory doesn’t have any explanation for this evidence…
OOA does have an explanation for Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA that isn't found in African populations, and that is that the cross-breeding between anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals and Denisovans occurred after modern humans left Africa.
> as well, something like up to 20% of West African genome has an as yet unknown source which is usually referred to as “archaic” or ghost DNA which is not found elsewhere in other populations.
"Archaic" DNA refers to DNA that appears to have originated with some human group other than modern humans and not be shared among modern human populations (the Denisovan and Neanderthal-origin genomes of Eurasian humans would be included here), but specific to some subpopulation. It is not the case that "20% of West African genome" is archaic, though there is a study in which some specific isolated West African subpopulations had archaic fractions that high, which is not something that OOA has no explanation for (the explanation is that those subgroups were isolated from the ones that participated in the various outbound migrations, and so their particular archaic genome is not shared with the groups that migrated out.)
There may be valid challenges to OOA, but those aren't it.
* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interbreeding_between_archai...
[0] https://skepticalinquirer.org/2023/06/the-ideological-subver...
Did you even bother to read the piece? He explicitly opens his fifth point with an example of The Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA) weaponizing its reputation to do precisely just that. He documented another instance of this in Nature recently as well [0]. If you look at the top subthread here too, Nature Human Behaviour is doing this as well.
Given all that, it seems he's right that the problem with ideologues exists. The success or lack thereof of these ideologues is a separate matter. Your claim that such research still exists doesn't negate the problem he identified. If anything, I don't think we should be comfortable with any kind of intentional distortions to the biology of race and ethnicity. The bad (false) PR could come back and bite, affecting the research and how it might be received. Otherwise, I don't really see any real disagreement here.
[0] https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/05/11/nature-tackles-rac...
The real issue for people concerned about the politicization of this issue is that the science isn't going their way right now.
As for your mind reading about the author’s intent, he is, to the best of my understanding, a standard-issue liberal. As such, I don't really get where you're coming from with this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subspecies
"In biological taxonomy, race is an informal rank in the taxonomic hierarchy for which various definitions exist. Sometimes it is used to denote a level below that of subspecies, while at other times it is used as a synonym for subspecies."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(biology)
Categorization is a fundamental part of our intelligence, but not necessarily a reflection of reality.
Race isn’t a subspecies. It’s an artificial social construct created by European elites in the beginning of the last millennium. Its purpose is to sow division. And to other groups of people to make it more palatable to commit crimes against the objectified folk.
For instance, in late 1800's Swedish scientists stole bunch of skulls from Finnish cemeteries, trying to prove that Finnish people are of different/lesser race than their Scandinavian neighbours. It took until 2024 for those skulls to be returned to Finland for reburial.
https://yle.fi/a/74-20110151
https://ki.se/en/about-ki/history-and-cultural-heritage/medi...
Then why do biologists distinguish subspecies of other animals? E.g. look at the subspecies of Panthera tigris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger#Subspecies
They do, when there are things that seem to be subspecies, they don't do it just because there is an arbitrary requirement for every species to have subspecies. There's been dispute about whether various archaic human groups were separate species or subspecies, and if what we now call modern humans weren't the only ones still around, that might be a more acute debate and might be resolved in favor of subspecies, but the others aren't still around, so...
But regardless, the more important point is that whatever biologically-motivated categories humans might be grouped by would not correspond to 'races' as normally understood.
What's left? Seems like something left over from the old science perspective that "humans are not animals", more than anything.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8600657/
I have to say, this is a super weird paper to suddenly pull out of nowhere in order to make an argument against the modern biological consensus that there are no subspecies of humans. It says nothing about species or subspecies, or even different populations of humans. Did you just Google some keywords and go with the first result? I'm genuinely puzzled.
I'm haphazardly suggesting that the above is the same as:
> "There are some (small) genetic populations whose genetics diverged so much, from geographic separation, that they have fertility problems [1].
We have genetic populations that are the result of geographic separation, and we even have genetic divergence that makes reproduction difficult/impossible.
Again, what's left? Why can't we categorize human genetic populations to the same level? Please be specific in what's missing?
> It says nothing about species or subspecies
Why would it? If the categorization of humans included subspecies, I couldn't have responded.
If it's an established biological fact that there are different subspecies of humans, then it should be possible to find a reference for that.
Precise equality isn't required for a conceptual discussion, especially one that's so ill defined/subjective as the concept of subspecies [1].
It's an established political fact that classifying humans, at any level, could never be presented. That's not a bad thing, but it's also a mostly arbitrary thing.
[1] https://bioone.org/journals/the-auk/volume-132/issue-2/AUK-1...
Tribes from the Horn of Africa have more common with Swedes than they have with East African tribes.
What I mean is that, you can have two closely related populations with their own distinct phenotypes that are actually closely related.
An interesting example are the Negritos of SE Asia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrito
Here is what they look like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrito#/media/File:Taman_Nega...
Any person simply going off of looks, would obviously assume these people are African.
However, they are indeed most closely related to their sister population, the fair-skinned small-eyed (please no offense, we all know what I'm talking about) East Asians.
Their look is due to convergent selection that favors darker skin, wider noses, etc.
They are actually vastly genetically different than the Africans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negrito#/media/File:PCA_of_Ora...
This is what I mean by phenotype and genotype are not perfectly correlated.
More precision is better, but we don't have rapid genetic tests that can distinguish West vs. East African ancestry on the spot, so race is the only proxy available when you're, say, treating a patient in the ER.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajhg.2025.02.003
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying there are no differences between ethnicities, just that those differences are based on ancestry not race. People of a specific "race" don't share the same ancestry all the time, some times they have more in common with a different "race" than their own. Race as we know it today is a means of classifying humans that came about at a time when colonial expansion was booming. Classifying people based on their outward appearance was all too convenient. It's like someone learning how to code who found out there are thousands of programming languages and categorized them using terms like "curly brace language","lots of parenthesis language","indentation oriented language". It's lazy and childish. But once you learn more about the languages you should abandon the old ways of classifying things.
The journal Nature Human Behaviour published ethics guidelines in Aug 2022 which touch on this:
> Race and ethnicity are sociopolitical constructs. Humans do not have biological races, at least based on modern biological criteria for the identification of geographical races or subspecies.
> Studies that use the constructs of race and/or ethnicity should explicitly motivate their use. Race/ethnicity should not be used as proxies for other variables — for example, socioeconomic status or income.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01443-2
There was a furore here in the discussion of it on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32595083
Cats are interesting, tabby cats are most like humans, because they are very "mixed" but not with a purpose, just at random and by convenience. Orange cats have specific behavioral traits, but they weren't bred on purpose either.
The "on purpose" part is important because in those cases, we keep breeding them until specific traits are exaggerated to the max. With human reproduction, if having a blonde hair is considered ideal in a specific part of a country over several hundred years, then yeah, you'll see blondes mate more than non-blondes and you'll have lots of blondes, but you'll still see blondes marry non-blondes so their great-grandchildren could have red or black hair just the same. Now instead of hair consider behavioral traits. Those are even more complicated because us humans don't operate on a purely instinctual directive like animals. if a person has a genetic propensity for violence for example, that doesn't mean much because they can still decide to act against their "genetics" (otherwise, it doesn't make sense to punish them). Even dogs bred for their violent nature can be trained out of it to a large extent.
But the whole arena is fraught with the risk of disaster. It's apparently OK to admit that a group of people are likely to be better at X because they're on average taller, but going further gets very dangerous.
> Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations. Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters.
That’s not true. AI can determine race from even from x-rays: https://www.nibib.nih.gov/news-events/newsroom/study-finds-a...
> In a recent study, published in Lancet Digital Health, NIH-funded researchers found that AI models could accurately predict self-reported race in several different types of radiographic images—a task not possible for human experts.
AI confirming human bias because it was trained on it doesn't mean much.
That's it. It's a classification system, a taxonomy, a social construction, a coarse categorization (all these things). But it's a bad one that only loosely correlates with a small handful of phenotypes. There isn't zero correlation which is why I disagree, as a matter of precision, with people who say race doesn't exist. The quality of a given taxonomy exists on a spectrum and race is a pretty damn bad one when you consider how inaccurately it separates the phenotypes it claims to care about, and how many genotypes/phenotypes (the vast majority) it fails to separate at all beyond a coin flip.
One quote from that:
> We are learning that while race may be a social construct, differences in genetic ancestry that happen to correlate to many of today’s racial constructs are real.
My summary would be that race is a heuristic. It's not perfect but it's a broadly accurate and often useful category. For example, whether someone has dark skin says quite a bit about their propensity for skin cancer. Whether someone is Jewish says a lot about their propensity for certain rare genetic diseases.
There are bunch of unrelated people that do research with vastly different opinions and methods. (Thing in common: scientific method and review,publications)
When it comes down to layperson, research results are averaged out and de-nuanced by jounalists.
This concept of race is designed so that one race can claim better evolution than the other, as a whole that is. People with specific ancestry might be better at specific things (provided they pursue those things to their potential), but associating that with an entire race was only useful at the time of this social constructs' creation because Europe needed to conquer the world and what do Europeans have in common the rest of the world doesn't have? Skin color. Which due to the latitude of Europe as a continent, people whose ancestors are from there have less melanin in their skin to account for lesser sunlight (You can see the same effect with north-east Asians). If you think about it, the western classification of "race" has more to do with geography than genealogy.
The US government scheme has more than four top-level racial categories, and "Hispanic or Latino", in that system, is an ethnicity, not one of the races.
I think that is an understandable feeling and I think that says a lot about the concept of race. Her statement doesn't make race any less real, but it does indicate what race IS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9mtCLL8rI0
Culture is definitely the major part of 'race'.
There are hispanic creoles, native american creoles, german creoles, italian creoles, so forth and so on. Because to be a Louisiana creole isn't to rely on any racial marker at all. It just signifies that your ancestors lived here at a particular time.
So if someone says that they're Cajun, not creole, they're lying to you. ALL cajuns, without exception, are creole.
And most people who claim to be Cajun are either not Cajun at all or they've mistaken their surname for being Cajun. Like a guy who told me I was wrong about a food item and he knew better because he's a Cajun, being a Champagne from Golden Meadow.
Only problem is that Champagne isn't a cajun surname. The Champagne family came over directly from France.
You might have seen Isaac Toups on TV hawking a cookbook. The Toups surname is actually German (originally spelled Dubs but the French authorities did their thing), and they landed in the US in 1718-19 in Biloxi, MS.
And so on, and so on...
I think that some "cajuns" would be more willing to call themselves creole if they knew that in addition to the native americans, the other group that saved their asses when they came to the territory were the German creoles. Those people had it far, far harsher than the Acadian disapora ever did. When they got to the territory, they were not allowed to use beasts of burden for a full decade. This means that when they were dropped off and told to go farm rice (which none of them had ever done before), they had to till their fields and deliver their product to New Orleans from the River Parishes, up to 60 miles away without horses. By the time the Cajuns got here, there were plenty of horses for working the land and other livestock that you were legally allowed to eat.
Anyway, that's just one little speck of a much larger ethnic pie.
And i got to share that "creole" has many meanings, including the stuff that forms on the inside of a BBQ itself.
The registrar of births in Orleans Parish used to essentially blackmail several prominent families about how far back the black was in their birth certificates and lineage.
I assume this refers to figure 7 of the study [1]. Figure 7C shows 63/124,341 self-identified Whites had predicted African ancestry from their genome, 45,206/45,761 Blacks, and 19/7,419 Asians.
Figure 7D shows predicted European ancestry, which was 120,127/124,341 for Whites, 110/45,761, and 39/7,419 for Asians. This seems like remarkably good correspondence to me?
> Race, ethnicity don’t match genetic ancestry
The title is missing "self-reported" at the start. Without that, the article isn't even self-consistent - "race is meaningless, it does not perfectly match genetic ancestry from historical geographical groups"? You haven't done away with race, you just renamed it to "African ancestry", "European ancestry", "Asian ancestry", etc.., and found that they have somewhat intermixed in the US. But it has been known since literally ancient Greece that races can intermix, and that their variation is geographically gradual, so the study hasn't discovered or disproven anything new.
It's amusing to contrast this with science's findings on non-human animals: there are 16 subspecies of brown bear, 38 subspecies of wolf, 46 subspecies of red fox, 9 subspecies of tiger, and 12 subspecies of house sparrow.
[1] https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(25)00173-9
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with...
2. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/nation
I’m Asian and I grew up in the U.S. and for years I didn’t realize the stomach problems I was having were from drinking milk when most asians cannot drink milk, while most European Americans can: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/16jcecc/map_of_lac.... Is race a rough proxy? Sure. But it’s an easy proxy to administer which in the medical context gives it a certain value for making people aware of differences that may be salient.
Our kids are half white so we were unsure if they’d be lactose intolerant. At the first sign of stomach problems in the youngest, we switched him to lactose free milk and the problem went away immediately. If we took him to a doctor we might’ve gone down a whole rabbit hole of dead ends. And if we weren’t aware of the issue and looking out for it, we may have not done anything and just let him deal with the discomfort. After all, kids get tummy aches for a million reasons.
I myself, being from the Balkans, don't even pretend to have a clue of what my genetic ancestry might be, and don't feel like finding out through some Find Your DNA ancestry (parasitic data harvesting) startup.
The idea what we are a homogenous species with no biologically important distinctions between groups - which became popular in the postwar period - is coming to end. But, we are also not returning to racial essentialism of the past. The new narrative of human differences will be far more complicated.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-025-02117-1
> Tony Clayton, a black man and a prosecutor who tried one of the Baton Rouge murder cases, concedes the benefits of the test: "Had it not been for Frudakis, we would still be looking for the white guy in the white pickup." Nevertheless, Clayton says he dislikes anything that implies we don't all "bleed the same blood." He adds, "If I could push a button and make this technology disappear, I would."
https://www.wired.com/2007/12/ps-dna/
I'm sure they'll use it whenever possible, regardless of his quote.
1) I'm mostly British/Irish (largely Welsh apparently)
2) I have no African or Asian heritage
idk I had always just called myself "American" and assumed I'd be a mix of a lot of things.
All of a sudden, people have the ability to determine if distant ancestors came from a different continent. Even if it's just 1 or 2% or even a trace amount, they're checking off boxes identifying themselves as multiracial.
For the 2020 census, it resulted in a 276% increase in the number of people self-identifying with more than one racial group. This is far more than could be explained by immigration or children born to parents from different backgrounds since 2010.
This NPR article (https://www.npr.org/2021/08/28/1030139666/2020-census-result...) explains the dynamic:
Its findings suggest adults 50 and up are most likely to self-identify as multiracial on surveys after receiving a report about the potential roots of their family tree based on a DNA analysis of their saliva. The study of more than 100,000 adults registered as potential bone marrow donors in the U.S. also found that DNA test takers were especially likely to identify with three or more racial groups. ...
"Native American was the one identity people really wanted to have and really wanted to prove," Roth says, adding that she has also found that some people stopped claiming Native American identity after the results of a test did not show any genetic ancestry.
You can imagine the problem when self-reported racial identities could really cloud the waters for determining a suitable bone marrow donor or other health application.
This is not necessarily wrong though. In many cases I've seen where children of grandparents from a particular region showing up on those products as having low percentage heritage from those areas.
If your grandmother was born in China and is - for all intents and purposes - clearly Chinese, yet you show up with 3% Chinese DNA on these products, does that mean you can't identify as having Chinese in your family background? Who determines where this line is drawn?
Re: the bone marrow thing, no one is using self identification as a way of doing blood or organ transplants ("you say you are black so your marrow will probably work for him"). There are real medical tests to check for all this.
My understanding from the sidelines was that the reported ethnicity of "oh you have a little french in you" had no meaningful basis, and was absurdly inaccurate. People treating it as anything more than fiction were making a mistake.
One could imagine (climate change not withstanding) that different geographic human populations would always tend to evolve to the same phenotype over time.
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But in general, it gets dismissed as "Woke."
They say its nonsense but then go and make admittance decisions based on it.
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You couldn't accurately fill out your ancestry on the form, even if you wanted to.
Race was a crude approximation and better techniques are available today. There is a push to use a wider variety of reference genomes which makes sense especially now that that computers are more powerful. There seems to be an assumption by others here that going from an unsophisticated crude approximation to a sophisticated one will somehow validate their other assumption that 'race is only skin deep'. I am not as optimistic.
No, for most purposes they never did (in fact, for many purposes where this is used, it is immediately separated from anything that would associate it with the submitter, so it would be hard for them to come back and ask you for anything), and the 2024 revisions to the definitions of the minimum categories removes the language about maintaining an ongoing affiliation ("who maintains tribal affiliation or community attachment") from the definition of that category. [0]
[0] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/03/29/2024-06...
In practical usage, they'd far more likely be called Spanish or European in the US context.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic
"The term commonly applies to Spaniards and Spanish-speaking populations and countries in Hispanic America and Hispanic Africa" I.e. not mainland Spain.
This is not a complex sentence.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispania
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispaniola
So it makes sense that you could be a Caucasian Hispanic.
These all have just as much claim from a cultural-diaspora perspective eh? With a wide variety of phenotypes, if we go back a bit. Though Indian should probably be more finely divided if we’re being honest.
If you really wanted to piss people off, we could of course lump Indian, Singaporean, Australian, American, etc. under English Ethnicity.
The only reason Hispanic is one is because the conquistadors were really, really persistent, murderous, and shameless eh?
That said, there is probably a good argument for breaking out at least South Asian from Asian as a distinct top-level racial category, in the same way that MENA recently was. (But note that all of the top-level categories also have more detailed breakdowns available, and recent revisions have also moved to require the more detailed options to collected in a wider range of circumstances.)
> The only reason Hispanic is one is because the conquistadors were really, really persistent, murderous, and shameless eh?
Mostly, the opposite: that the successors to the conquistadors were less genocidal and more assimilationist than their British and British-descended North American counterparts.
The only reason these groups are included this way is because of lobbying power (for and against) and $$ and privileges related to being in or out of various categories.
From an ontological perspective, your argument is BS looking at the actual distributions and ground truth of these groups.
What racial groups in the minimum reporting scheme does this ethnic group cut across, and in what rough proportions?
(But I don't think "white supremacy" is a good way to think about the Nazis' hatred of Jewish people. They were white supremacists, but they hated the Jews for other reasons and if by some miracle they had abruptly stopped being white supremacists I think they would have gone right on persecuting Jewish people.)
Hispanics are Caucasian in the original classification:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caucasian_race
Just compare a Mexican Mariachi with an Asturian folk guy playing Celtic songs with bagpipes. Or the differences on ideology, state support, progressiveness... as much as a Brit and the average North American if not more.
The modern concept of "race" in general is a BS construct that was invented to support and justify European imperialism, and which has long been recognized as having only the loosest relation to biological reality despite in its own terms being conceptualized as a biological reality of some importance.
OTOH, its also produced very real communities of differentiated experience, identity, and treatment, and it is largely that which the US government system of race (plus one ethnicity, in the minimum scheme) is designed to gather data related to.
> If I understand them correctly,
You do not.
> officially someone from Portugal or France is supposed to be Caucasian
"Caucasian" is not part of the official race/ethnicity scheme used in US federal government reporting. Someone who has prehistoric ancestors who were from the region which is now Portugal or France, and who identifies with the racial group into which people with that ancestry are categorized, would be White, possibly with another racial and/or ethnic category depending on what other ancestry they identified with.
> whereas someone from Spain is supposed to be Hispanic
With the same description as above, replacing "Portugal or France" with "Spain", the person would still be White.
A person who also identifies with Spanish or South, Central, or North American (south of the US border) national/cultural origin would be Hispanic or Latino by ethnicity (the only ethnic category in the scheme) as well as any racial category or categories they identify with.
Here's a news release on 2024 updates to the scheme, which involve combine the race/ethnicity questions into a single multiple answer allowed question (the race question was already multiple answers allowed, but the presence or absence of the one ethnic category was a separate question) as well as other updates to the scheme: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2024/...
Is ‘caste’, race? Because it sure is used that way (or worse) in places that have it. And that’s been going on for longer than what we currently call European civilization.
Regional customs vary, but southern indian cousin marriage traditions in particular are heavily caste oriented.
The only thing not ‘race’ about it, is the word.
Spain and it’s colonies also had a ‘casta’ system with simpler and more explicit rules.
French colonists to the new world freely intermarried (and had kids) with Native Americans and people brought over from Africa, and eventually those same groups were prevented from marrying under racist american laws.
So there's lots of french blood in black people in the southern united states, but they were eventually prevented from marrying white french people, even when they were literally part of the same large family tree! There are long lines and families of black people who literally descend from my ancestors that I wouldn't have been allowed to marry!
Which should clearly demonstrate that it was never about your genetic or biologic ancestry, as modern science knows.
Wikipedia claims America's "blacks can't marry whites" laws have no precedent.
Similarly, there was lots of inter-racial relations before some colonies banned it, and other colonies never banned it.
It's almost like our perceived identity is just a user interface, and the genetic code is the raw assembly language underneath. It makes me wonder, how much of our cultural narrative is shaped by these historical "coding errors" or, perhaps, deliberate obfuscations? And what happens when more and more people start running these genetic "debuggers" on their own personal history? Are we headed for a significant "reboot" of how we understand race and identity in society? Just food for thought.
People talk about the irony of Black people adopting the faith of their oppressors when really that is the case for most monotheists today when you start to consider the historical contexts of why their lineage adopted the monotheistic faith at the time.
Africans in the USA is certainly a special sociological case due to the largest importation of agricultural slaves in Western history. As almost everyone knows, not all people shipped in chains to the US South were illiterate. Literacy is a central feature of Christian practice. All else aside, literate people in chains adopting the literate religion does not sound too far fetched to me.
And what does that mean, anyway? That some people in your family were born inside some arbitrary lines drawn on the ground? Who cares?
This sort of classification is meaningless.
(I, too, have Italian ancestry, but that's a small part of the overall picture, and has little to do with anything "real" about me, like my health or looks.)
What did the Elves say? “To sheep other sheep no doubt appear different. Or to shepherds. But Mortals have not been our study.”
People can get really prickly about it, for example lumping all people south of the US border as "Hispanic" or calling everyone in the UK "English".
You joke, but "assigned at birth" is probably apt. You may have discomfort or comfort in identifying with it. It may subtly change your perceptions and perceptions of you.