Looks like the TL;DR conclusion is that "race" is not just a social construct, but actually has genetic markers which are expressed beyond ethnic heritage. As the authors conclude, this could be extremely important in tailoring medical treatments for people for differences in their genetic makeup based on their race. In other words harder sciences are proving that social sciences obsession with identity politics has hindered medical advancements once again.
Actually the genetic differences between races are far smaller and more blurry than most people would imagine (based on differences in appearance).
The Atlantic had an article about exactly the kind of thing you're taking about, and how this kind of pseudoscience is being pushed by neo-nazis and the alt-right: http://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/510962/
Thanks for once again proving that nobody can ever have a serious discussion about science related to ethnicity because someone will always jump up, point at them, and scream "racist". I wonder if it's occurred to you how many people suffer from medical conditions because they're either untreated or treated poorly because we don't bother studying and reporting on things like this, specifically and exactly because there's a hundred people just waiting in the wings to call you a racist for studying it?
Nothing in the article is racist, nor is anything in my statements. Please take your ad hominem elsewhere.
I think he's responding to the line "harder sciences are proving that social sciences obsession with identity politics has hindered medical advancements" which I would consider false. The existence of genetic diseases that are largely present in a single race has been known for a long time. Tay-Sachs is seen almost entirely in Ashkenazi Jews, Sickle Cell is mostly seen in Africans, etc. I don't think "identity politics" is rejecting this notion, or if it is it's doing a bad job of it.
> I wonder if it's occurred to you how many people suffer from medical conditions because they're either untreated or treated poorly because we don't bother studying and reporting on things like this, specifically and exactly because there's a hundred people just waiting in the wings to call you a racist for studying it?
How will that solve for people of mixed heritage? Grandkids of mixed ancestry may look "white" (redheaded whitey here, with great-grandparents that are very obviously native american) and still have genetic predispositions passed down.
The solution is not to clump by skin color. But to assess individuals specifically for certain markers.
To be honest, it's equally difficult to have a serious discussion about science related to ethnicity when people insist on using an interesting piece of research as a launchpad to make tangential and evidence-free claims that social science is harming serious research, regardless of whether they actually harbour any sympathy for the viewpoints of your garden variety racist or not.
At the time of this article only two of the many subthreads related to this article had descended into politics and name-calling. One was initiated by your very own unsubstantiated attack on "identity politics". The other (considerably less favourably-received) post was claimed the notion of a social element to race that was the work of "lunatics and agitators seeking to attack and disrupt western society" and argued the researchers were doing themselves and society a disservice by engaging with it. Remind me who it was that's putting a negative slant on useful medical research again.
I'll admit my snipe at the end about identity politics was inflammatory, but it's specifically because of my frustrations trying to have any sort of serious discussion about these types of topics. People immediately throwing out the racist card and comparing you to neo-nazis for wanting to discuss the topic is /exactly/ what I mean by "identity politics" although its just one of the more pernicious subsets. My attack on "identity politics" is substantiated by my own experiences and a significant body of philosophical work, but probably this is not the appropriate forum for it.
As a side note, when I started my thread there were more than 60 upvotes on the article and no comments. At least there's a discussion.
How did you come up with that? Did you even understand the article? It is quite literally saying social/cultural changes leave an impact on genetic transcription of DNA through methylation and epigenetic markup. In fact, this proves just the opposite. That social factors are intricately tied to genetic output. What this proves false are the hardliners of each side of the debate that espouse race is a purely social construct, and the other end that naively call race a simple set of genetic traits.
I am not a geneticist, so perhaps I misunderstand, but the conclusion I formed seems to be reinforced by the quotes from the authors in the article. That is, there are specific gene expressions which are relevant in a medical context affected by cultural factors that are genetically transmitted. Genetic transmission at least to me implies that a person receives these things from their parents at birth, regardless of their own specific upbringing, because of cultural factors of their parents upbringing, and so on. As in, cultural differences can be expressed over time as genetic differences.
“These data suggest that the interplay between race and ethnicity as social constructs and genetic ancestry as a biological construct is more complex than we had realized,” said Noah Zaitlen, PhD, a UCSF assistant professor of medicine and co-senior author on the new study. “In a medical context both elements may provide valuable information.”
Setting aside the fact that this is such a touchy issue that the authors are carefully couching their language, it looks like there may be ways in which this new information can help people by tailoring medical treatments. I'd love a ELI5 explanation of this if I'm somehow misunderstanding, but the conclusion I formed seems to be supported by the article to my reading of it.
Note, I'm not taking a hardline stance. That's why I said "race is not just a social construct" in my conclusion.
The classic example discussed is a study of children born during a famine. Children born during famine are going to be smaller than normal, but it was found that their children and grandchildren would be born smaller than normal, even though the famine has long since passed. This change has been attributed to a particular methylation pattern that was passed down.
It's known that things like exposure to famine and abuse can change methylation patterns, but this study suggests that non-traumatic things like your cultural upbringing can affect methylation.
Thanks for the link. I read that, it seems to support my conclusion of this article as well. "As in, cultural differences can be expressed over time as genetic differences."
It seems like the debate we're having is a rehash of nature vs nurture, where it seems like the new research indicates nurture can affect nature for future generations through gene expression.
Biological populations certainly do exist, it's just that they don't correlate well with prevailing concepts of "race". The average western African is more similar to the average European than to the average southern African.
But people are ignorant of Africa in general. When they talk about an African race they're ignoring Ethiopians or khoisans or pygmies - they mean Bantu people.
I don't think there's more genetic diversity among Bantus than the rest of the world combined.
Biological populations certainly do exist, it's just that they don't correlate well with prevailing concepts of "race". The average western African is more similar to the average European than to the average southern African.
Would the layman consider Khoisan and Bantu people to be of the same race? I mean after learning about the existence and names of both of them.
I am a layman who knows next to nothing about genetics, but a bit about Africa, and I would not consider the two peoples to be in the same race. They look completely different - which is what most laymen use to determine race, isn't it?
I think a layman, at least in the US and countries that define race in similar ways as it is defined in America, would consider Khoisan and Bantu people the same race (black), even if they knew they were different groups. African Americans in the US often look different but are all considered "black".
I feel like biological populations can be reduced down to one individual and up to all of humanity. You can attempt to make logical decisions about where to draw these lines in between, but you'll get overlapping populations at different levels given different traits. These epigenetic flags are not dissimilar to genetic traits in that no one, nor group of them unequivocally define an individual into a biological group except if that group is "organisms that express this trait". It definitely won't square cleanly with our social macro-constructions around "race".
Actually my read was that environment can influence epigenetic markers, and that environment is measureable in aggregate based on ethnicity - in this study.
The study does not compare other groupings of people who share a common environment and the influence on their epigenetic markers.
Actually my read was that environment can influence epigenetic markers, and that environment is measureable in aggregate based on ethnicity - in this study.
The study does not compare other groupings of people who share a common environment and the influence on their epigenetic markers.
Actually my read was that environment can influence epigenetic markers, and that environment is measureable in aggregate based on ethnicity - in this study.
The study does not compare other groupings of people who share a common environment and the influence on their epigenetic markers.
1. Race as a social construct. It does exist in that capacity - as an extreme example Irish were not considered "white" in America (google for some "hilarious" images from "back in the day").
2. Race as a biological reality. This is a touchy subject for a variety of reasons. But that doesn't mean that well documented taxonomic differences between human races are "fake". They do exist and are more than "skin deep" - things like bone density, cranial capacity, maturation etc etc. Ask your dentist if he can tell by looking at someone's jaw x-ray whether it belongs to an east asian or sub-saharan african.
What I understand of the issue is that genetic differences between populations are real, but they form a continuum whose boundaries are extremely blurry if visible at all from a genetic level. Thus the drawing of boundary lines and the assignment of individuals into those handful of categories is something subject to change from culture to culture. In other words, genetic differences do not make race a "biological reality".
If you do a clustering analysis on a large sample of DNA data you will get different clusters corresponding to the usual definitions of races or ethnicities, depending on the number of clusters you choose.
That wiki page has a pretty substantial "Criticism" section. The Rosenberg et. al. paper even says their paper "should not be taken as evidence of our support of any particular concept of biological race." Their study shows that genetic distance is roughly linear with physical distance, barring obstacles like mountains and oceans. The consensus in the field, based on citations on that wiki page, seems to be that human diversity is a continuum, so any dividing lines you try to make to partition it will be largely arbitrary. It's like looking at a rainbow at trying to divide up the yellow from the orange from the red and so on: you can do that, but your color categories don't completely capture the spectrum visible.
You can make meaningful and consistent groupings in a continuum . For example you can make a distinction between poor and rich citizens, even tough the income distribution is a continuum. Same goes for the rainbow, the fact that it is continuous doesn't prevent people from being able to differentiate yellow and blue.
But even so the human genome is not continuously distributed, even if the difference is linear with distance, simply due to the fact that humans are not continuously distributed geographically. You can't handwave oceans and mountains away.
The main criticism of clustering is that the hierarchy of clusters that you obtain depend on the distribution of your samples, and that we currently do not have a good uniform sampling of human DNA. In short clustering can tell you reliably if someone is Irish or Italian, but may falsely identify the french as italian if there are not enough samples for french people.
Just because there's "color brown" doesn't mean there's no "red" or "green" used to produce it even if (hypothetically) in someone's culture "brown" is considered to be "red-ish" :)
What does it mean for "race" to be a "biological reality"? Interpopulation diversity of both phenotype and genotype isn't remarkably different from intrapopulation diversity. There are no genetic markers that taken together say "this person is black" or "this person is white". The concept of race was never grounded in real science and its proponents constantly change their justifications after the fact. At one point the "biological reality" of race was said to be rooted in phrenology.
Race is not just a word for different breeding populations of humans. The dilution of its meaning into something so innocuous is ahistorical, in fact it contradicts what was claimed to be the reality of race just decades ago. It's a political concept first and foremost.
No biological theory predicts races. Races are categories rooted in historical economic exploitation and domination that are a posteriori fitted with whatever truthy pseudoscientific justification is catchy at the time. Any categories of humans that biological measurements would come up with would hardly match racial categories. Perhaps the most racialized group that has distinct biological markers are Ashkenazi jews. However, the relation between Ashkenazi jews, Sephardic jews, and ethnic Arabs is very strong.
There's many different angles to approach the topic from. I added a link to my post providing a legal point of view. Law is an excellent historical record in many ways and it provides a window into what the ruling class thought of race. Here's a book with a much wider scope that requires a little ambition to read: https://eserver.org/Clogic/1-2/allen.html
I am hesitant to recommend it because I have not read much critique of its central points. But I think it's good.
There are no genetic markers that taken together say "this person is black" or "this person is white".
Actually, there very much are.
I think what you're trying to say is that not all black people have all the "black people genetic markers," and likewise for other groups. This is true, but this is not necessary to distinguish well-defined groups.
Family resemblance is a philosophical idea made popular by Ludwig Wittgenstein
It argues that things which could be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all.
"Race" is more of a sociopolitical idea with a particularly noxious history, but human groups with differentiable shared recent ancestry - while fuzzy - do exist. Because "race" can be described as a continuous distribution, it helps to think about it probabilistically: there are no "definitely Caucasian" SNPs, but we do have suites of what we call Ancestry-Informative Markers that can be use to infer the likelihood that someone belongs to a particular ancestry group. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the polymorphisms associated with pigmentation are informative in this regard.
The fuzziness of the continuum means that it is quite possible to define an arbitrary number of "races", depending on your chosen criteria. And admixture at multiple points in history further complicates the picture. But it is possible to discern biogeographical mappings within a generous error margin. As the parent poster points out, these mappings sometimes conflict with the those that we've constructed out of ideological convenience.
Looks like the TL;DR conclusion is that "race" is not just a social construct, but actually has genetic markers which are expressed beyond ethnic heritage.
That's not how I read it. My takeaway was that "race" is a social construct that can leave epigenetic markers. In other words, culture can affect physiology.
In other words harder sciences are proving that social sciences obsession with identity politics has hindered medical advancements once again.
I would agree that many in the social sciences create epistemological problems for ideological reasons.
It's pretty clear you skimmed the article and read from it what you wanted, instead of what it actually said. I read through the responses and you've been pretty thoroughly proven wrong so I won't reiterate the points.
Constructively, try not to see news as a chance to reinforce your existing views. Try and do the opposite. try to expand your world view.
Cultural changes rate are too infinitesimal compared to the time which is required for any genetic change to get a chance to form and propagate through a population to attain a stable presence (forming a distinct trait).
The probability that a certain cultural difference induced mutation could be formed (given that there is no flow of information from a phenotype back to genotype) is something incalculable.
What might work for a bacteria does not work for humans due to, you see, fundamental differences in the reproductive system and development.
There are a few main principles from genetics 101 to consider before making any attempts of "doing science".
1. all mutations are *random*
2. there is no backward flow of information
3. environment does not alter DNA. random mutations do
4. propagating of a mutation is an extremely rare event
5. it takes *many* generations.
To understand these principles think why we do not have much mutations of, say, hemoglobin or glucose pathway enzimes.
There is another fundamental principle: way to many hipsters in what they call "modern science".
The article talks about gene expression, which is much more fluid. Another factor that influences gene expression whose effects are just starting to be measured is poverty.
> The study examined DNA methylation—an “annotation” of DNA that alters gene expression without changing the genomic sequence itself—in a group of diverse Latino children. Methylation is one type of “epigenetic mark” that previous research has shown can be either inherited or altered by life experience.
I am arguing against ignoring the fundamental principle about one-way flow of information DNA->RNA->protein which makes life sustainable.
Anything which contradicts with this principle is plainly nonsense - a product of unconstrained imagination.
BTW, any changes which could be propagated through the mother's body, the way some deceases do, would not get into the DNA. This is another fundamental principle which contributes to sustainability of life - it is about isolation and washing out of pathogens.
See my comment above. DNA can be commented in/out during an organism's lifetime. And these comments/silencing capabilities are in fact transferable to a child with some fidelity. And in that way those changes are heritable and genetic, if not actually altering the DNA of the child in any way. This capability is called epigenetics.
You are correct that the code of the DNA itself is not being altered, but there are other heritable mechanisms that affect the structure, capability and accessability of that DNA - i.e. gene expression, beyond the code of DNA itself. This enables capabilities encoded in DNA to be passed down to children without actually using them - or conversely, to enable certain latent capabilities under certain environmental conditions.
Life is a bit more nuanced than the dogmatic one-way flow of information we teach as 'the central dogma'. It gains its complexity by always having an exception to its own rules somewhere at some point if it physically possible so, as to hedge against some change in conditions where that exception becomes more powerful than the existing rule. The exception may be inconsequential and of little benefit - until such time as it is not.
What you are taking about is an ordinary blood-borne sexually transmitted decease model (or a virus), and it has nothing to do with genetics (gene expression is a developmental topic), so there will be no "marks on a DNA" in principle - it does not work that way.
There, however, could be some certain proteins bound to DNA, but it is a not a genetic but biochemical (pathogenic-like) change. Those proteins could be treated as markers.
The propagation rate of such proteins is still limited by the generation time, so any connection to cultural differences is nonsense.
So, it is not genetic, there is no marks on DNA, it is not cultural. Period.
You are falling into a linguistic trap. The idea of a 'gene' 150 years ago was a "unit of heritable information". We didn't actually know how that information was stored - but we knew it was there (see Mendel's pea pod experiment). In the last 70 years it was elucidated that the primary heritable material was DNA. And so the older term 'gene' became convoluted with a newer concept of DNA. There is currently no good physical definition of a 'gene' - is it the expressed protein, the region required to express the protein, does it include introns, exons, etc? And so other terminology has been adopted. A 'gene' is not just a strand of coding DNA, and technically can include any 'heritable information' - though the primary and most common concept of a gene is a strand of protein-coding DNA, though most biologists would also include the upstream/downstream regulation of that coding sequence in the definition of the gene (promoter, terminator, introns, exons, etc.).
The methylation of histones (one type of epigenetic modification) which is a chemical modification of a protein bound to DNA is absolutely a heritable modification, and thus is technically a component of your 'genetic information' - but it itself not DNA. Regardless of terminology, a histone's chemical marks (and biochemical/phenotypic effects) are capable of being transmitted between mother and child, as well as between mother cell and daughter cell. If cell A switches from being heat-sensitive with respect to X, to no longer heat-sensitive with respect to X because a particular promoter was silenced by a histone modification, that phenotype will be passed down to the all of cell A's children (including gametes). That is absolutely a heritable genetic characteristic that has nothing to do with the editing or sequence of DNA.
This gets confusing because now our newer definition of gene, which was simplified to be synonymous with coding DNA, actually is more complicated.
Finally, gene expression is not just a developmental topic. Gene expression is not only what determines how you develop, but everything else in your body too. Gene expression is how your stomach determines how much enzymes to produce in a given hour, how your white blood cells determine which antibodies to produce in a given season, how your brain determines which neurotransmiters to produce in a given hour, how your skin determines how much pigment to make, how your beta cells determine how much and when to produce insulin, or how your body keeps track of its circadian rhythm, among everything else your body does. Gene expression is one of the primary mechanisms of bioregulation - especially for biological changes that take between a few hours and a few generations.
I do not understand your discussion of disease models/virus/pathogens. I'm unclear how those concepts are relevant here.
A hypothetical cultural example: A young boy is not well fed and eats a lot of a certain kind of hard-to-digest plant in place of meat. That young boy's own gene regulation may shift towards those enzymes which can break down that plant material and away from genes used to metabolize meat. Further, the entire metabolism may slow because of his cultural environment. It is very reasonable that those regulatory modifications to his own metabolism will be passed to his children. Not changes in the sequence of DNA, but heritable genetic regulation none-the-less. The effects are subtle, and can likely be relatively quickly overcome were the child to experience a significantly different cultural environment.
Living DNA exists in complex coils, smothered in a jelly of inter-mediating molecules. It's quite messy and poorly understood! What is understood is that inheritance and expression of DNA information are absolutely non-linear.
A cultural environment could induce a nearly instantaneous change in the genetics of a population though.
Say some percentage of a population has tails. Then they start getting killed because they have a tail. A generation or two later, a much smaller percentage of the population will have tails. The likelihood of tails appearing in the population has decreased dramatically, due to culture.
One day, the 20 without tails kill the 5 with tails.
So at time=0, the prevalence of tails is 20%. At time=1 day the prevalence of tails is 0%.
The remaining members of the population may still have the genes to make a tail, but no one currently has a tail. If tails are a dominant trait, they won't. If tails are a recessive trait, a couple generations of killing babies with tails will do quite a lot to further diminish the prevalence of the trait.
As is common with popular education, the "101" classes tend to propagate outdated information and ideas. For some reason they think they need to teach things in historical order.
While this article isn't entirely, reality denying non-sense, in fact mostly the opposite. The researchers do themselves and their readers huge a huge disservice with notions like,
“These data suggest that the interplay between race and ethnicity as social constructs and genetic ancestry as a biological construct is more complex than we had realized,
Putting forth these notions makes study and understanding of genetics far more convoluted and difficult than it needs to be.
Race is ancestry, ancestry is race, plain and simple.
Race is ancestry, ancestry is relatedness. Ancestry is the factor of relatedness, relatedness is the factor of race. For example an Englishman has a relatedness factor to a Dane that is hundreds of times greater than than the relatedness factor the Englishman has to a Nigerian. An Englishman and a Dane are of the European race, a Nigerian is of the (sub-Saharan) African race.
You'd think this would be the simplest thing in the world to understand, but something about the modern world has caused otherwise for some people.
Races are simply large extended families that came about due to imposing natural barriers in the ancient world, deserts, oceans, mountain ranges.
"Social constructs" are claptrap that came about from nihilist "post-modernists," and "critical theory" lunatics and agitators seeking to attack and disrupt western society.
The construction of whiteness as an ideology of European imperial powers is well documented and well studied. I doubt you've ever read any scholarship on the matter.
If someone were on Hacker News trying to insist that they had violated the laws of thermodynamics or invented a perpetual motion machine, I would not be called upon to prove those laws. Race is a crank theory. It is a most pernicious crank theory because it is tied with some of the greatest brutality the world has ever seen.
You have the Internet. Go use it. It is preposterous to give racists the benefit of the doubt and put the burden on us to bring up the same arguments over and over again to refute them.
>If someone were on Hacker News trying to insist that they had violated the laws of thermodynamics or invented a perpetual motion machine, I would not be called upon to prove those laws.
1. No you wouldn't. Unless you were making the assertion that it was widely known and well researched that the laws of thermodynamics could be broken.
>Race is a crank theory. It is a most pernicious crank theory because it is tied with some of the greatest brutality the world has ever seen.
2. Yet I am supposed to take at face value that "whiteness as an ideology of European imperial powers is well documented and well studied". That does not mean that I don't think race is a crank theory, but that your initial assertion remains unproven.
>You have the Internet. Go use it. It is preposterous to give racists the benefit of the doubt and put the burden on us to bring up the same arguments over and over again to refute them.
3. Please stop using this argument. What you are saying is that you would rather hold hostage knowledge that is supposed to be widely known. The fact is that it's not a google search away. I don't expect you to do anything, but I would have hoped you would have prefaced what you said with a book or something (that isn't just ideological) to actually contextualize the assertion.
We asked you to please stop in response to this exact comment just over a month ago. Drive-by posts like this are not what Hacker News is for. We have to ban accounts that refuse to comment civilly and substantively.
if culture impacts DNA then the concept of DNA being subject to mutation as the primary driving factor is at last beginning to crumble.
Also if culture impacts genetics then the idea there are races is clearly not the case, but rather loosely organized behavioral groups that can change in whatever direction their common culture takes them next.
All of the conclusions being drawn about the implications of this for your hobby-grudges about politics are beyond inane
In my understanding, the article was saying that who your ancestors are has less of an impact on DNA methylation (epigenetic markers) than where you grew up. It's not about race, it's about ethnicity---the cultural identity of the individuals, the environment they lived in. It's not about DNA, it's about how DNA is actually manifested, as represented by methylation markers.
The articles states that at least 76% of the observed differences in the population come from their raw DNA. Epigenetics may thus affect up to 24% of the observed differences. So DNA is still the predominant factor.
I'll quote myself from a previous comment regarding epigenetics.
Epigenetics. It's the make-file for your genetic source code. Certain conditions can cause certain parts of your genetic code to be uncommented or commented-out. There are actually a number of different kinds of comments (histone modifications [1]) - each set of marks particular to a different compiler, in different contexts. And these comments/marks are copied with some fidelity to daughter-cells/children along with a high-fidelty copy of the underlying genetic code itself.
So the genes themselves are not being heritably altered, rather the recipe for which gene is where, when can be subtly changed. But again, the same mechanisms that permit the change in expression of those genes during a lifetime can be subsequently changed in the next just as easily.
In this way you can store the code for some trait or capability over many generations without having it always be running. It can manifest itself in individual organisms as having very different phenotypes even with the same underlying code.
LOTS of things affect epigenetics. It currently appears to be a messy, relatively non-deterministic process with lots of different pathways crossing wires with lots of other different pathways.
A snapshot of my mental model of epigenetics (warning: epigenetics/histone modifications are not my particular field of study): "The methylator slides along DNA to methylate histone tails at location 32 of histone 2 while in simultaneous competition the demethylator demethylates methyl groups of histone 1 at locations 4, 12 and 18 under most conditions, or location 32 of histone 2 IFF it is within three histones of an acetylated histone which itself has its acetylation competing with a deacetylator - constantly. And if a certain set of marks occur appropriately in combination, a set of neighboring histones wrap up and hide themselves and their DNA - preventing its hidden DNA from being used in that cell until some other mechanism can unwrap that section. Oh, and (most of) those marks are copied to children/daughter cells right along with the copying of DNA."
Because it's so fickle, non-deterministic, and tangled (unlike it's DNA counterpart) it's actually pretty hard to study and is currently (like this afternoon, down your street) a topic of a significant amount of cutting edge research. As the wikipedia article above shows, the 'Histone Code' is still a work in progress, and it now appears unlikely that there is a 1:1 relationship between this chemical mark and that effect, very much unlike the very nice deterministic relationship we found between DNA->RNA->Protein.
One common change I've read about that bubbles up to normal life is the capability of nicotine to affect histone acetylation. It seems to rapidly alter histone modifications so as to make other habits/actions more addictive [1] (precisely in a way that we now know THC does not - the original 'gateway drug' mis-extrapolation).
One thing that I don't hear talked about in many of these discussions about the genetic components of race is how the mixed racial ancestry of many "black" people in Europe and the Americas impacts these studies.
MANY blacks in the Americas and Europe have significant European DNA. For example, even though my family identifies as black, my mother and her siblings are almost 50℅ European according to DNA tests.
How does this factor in when making medical decisions based on assumptions regarding race?
Unfortunately, western medical practitioners and researchers often aren't aware of the complexities of race and racial identity. I spoke with my cousin recently (who is almost done with his pharmacy PhD) and was flabbergasted at how ignorant he was about race as a social, cultural and spiritual phenomenon. Yet he casually spoke of race as a simple demographic category with genetic basis. He'd never heard of "epigenetics", though when I explained it to him, he admitted that it was a plausible idea.
Racial identity translates very poorly into actual population genetics, let alone epigenetics.
"Scientists and clinicians have increasingly tried to move away from simplistic racial and ethnic categories in disease research, the authors say, and – with the rise of precision medicine – in clinical diagnosis and treatment as well. Studies by the Burchard group and others have found that using genetic ancestry rather than ethnic self-identification significantly improves diagnostic accuracy for certain diseases.
But the new data showing that a large fraction of epigenetic signatures of ethnicity reflect something other than ancestry suggests that abandoning the idea of race and ethnicity altogether could sacrifice a lot of valuable information about the drivers of differences in health and disease between different communities."
The study shows that abandoning the idea of ethnicity could sacrifice information, but it still seems to indicate that genetic ancestry is more useful than race. Why does the article seem to conflate the two?
You know what's crazy? My cousin is months away from finishing his PhD in pharmacy. Over thanksgiving break, he revealed to me that he had never heard the term "epigenetics". I explained it to him. He works for a drug company modeling interactions for new animal antibiotics and he'd never heard the term "epigenetics"
My cousin is a bright, driven guy. There are reasons I distrust the western medical establishment.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadThe Atlantic had an article about exactly the kind of thing you're taking about, and how this kind of pseudoscience is being pushed by neo-nazis and the alt-right: http://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/510962/
Nothing in the article is racist, nor is anything in my statements. Please take your ad hominem elsewhere.
How will that solve for people of mixed heritage? Grandkids of mixed ancestry may look "white" (redheaded whitey here, with great-grandparents that are very obviously native american) and still have genetic predispositions passed down.
The solution is not to clump by skin color. But to assess individuals specifically for certain markers.
Please take your strawman elsewhere.
At the time of this article only two of the many subthreads related to this article had descended into politics and name-calling. One was initiated by your very own unsubstantiated attack on "identity politics". The other (considerably less favourably-received) post was claimed the notion of a social element to race that was the work of "lunatics and agitators seeking to attack and disrupt western society" and argued the researchers were doing themselves and society a disservice by engaging with it. Remind me who it was that's putting a negative slant on useful medical research again.
As a side note, when I started my thread there were more than 60 upvotes on the article and no comments. At least there's a discussion.
“These data suggest that the interplay between race and ethnicity as social constructs and genetic ancestry as a biological construct is more complex than we had realized,” said Noah Zaitlen, PhD, a UCSF assistant professor of medicine and co-senior author on the new study. “In a medical context both elements may provide valuable information.”
Setting aside the fact that this is such a touchy issue that the authors are carefully couching their language, it looks like there may be ways in which this new information can help people by tailoring medical treatments. I'd love a ELI5 explanation of this if I'm somehow misunderstanding, but the conclusion I formed seems to be supported by the article to my reading of it.
Note, I'm not taking a hardline stance. That's why I said "race is not just a social construct" in my conclusion.
The classic example discussed is a study of children born during a famine. Children born during famine are going to be smaller than normal, but it was found that their children and grandchildren would be born smaller than normal, even though the famine has long since passed. This change has been attributed to a particular methylation pattern that was passed down.
It's known that things like exposure to famine and abuse can change methylation patterns, but this study suggests that non-traumatic things like your cultural upbringing can affect methylation.
It seems like the debate we're having is a rehash of nature vs nurture, where it seems like the new research indicates nurture can affect nature for future generations through gene expression.
I don't think there's more genetic diversity among Bantus than the rest of the world combined.
Not population geneticists. Africa in those cases == sub-Saharan African people, not just Bantu.
Absolute, utter hogwash.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2953791/
I am a layman who knows next to nothing about genetics, but a bit about Africa, and I would not consider the two peoples to be in the same race. They look completely different - which is what most laymen use to determine race, isn't it?
The study does not compare other groupings of people who share a common environment and the influence on their epigenetic markers.
It says nothing about identity politics.
The study does not compare other groupings of people who share a common environment and the influence on their epigenetic markers.
It says nothing about identity politics.
The study does not compare other groupings of people who share a common environment and the influence on their epigenetic markers.
It says nothing about identity politics.
1. Race as a social construct. It does exist in that capacity - as an extreme example Irish were not considered "white" in America (google for some "hilarious" images from "back in the day").
2. Race as a biological reality. This is a touchy subject for a variety of reasons. But that doesn't mean that well documented taxonomic differences between human races are "fake". They do exist and are more than "skin deep" - things like bone density, cranial capacity, maturation etc etc. Ask your dentist if he can tell by looking at someone's jaw x-ray whether it belongs to an east asian or sub-saharan african.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_clustering
But even so the human genome is not continuously distributed, even if the difference is linear with distance, simply due to the fact that humans are not continuously distributed geographically. You can't handwave oceans and mountains away.
The main criticism of clustering is that the hierarchy of clusters that you obtain depend on the distribution of your samples, and that we currently do not have a good uniform sampling of human DNA. In short clustering can tell you reliably if someone is Irish or Italian, but may falsely identify the french as italian if there are not enough samples for french people.
Race is not just a word for different breeding populations of humans. The dilution of its meaning into something so innocuous is ahistorical, in fact it contradicts what was claimed to be the reality of race just decades ago. It's a political concept first and foremost.
No biological theory predicts races. Races are categories rooted in historical economic exploitation and domination that are a posteriori fitted with whatever truthy pseudoscientific justification is catchy at the time. Any categories of humans that biological measurements would come up with would hardly match racial categories. Perhaps the most racialized group that has distinct biological markers are Ashkenazi jews. However, the relation between Ashkenazi jews, Sephardic jews, and ethnic Arabs is very strong.
P.S. A review of the legal history of race in colonial America: https://sph.umd.edu/sites/default/files/files/Harris_Whitene...
I am hesitant to recommend it because I have not read much critique of its central points. But I think it's good.
to quote my own post - well documented taxonomic differences between human races.
Or are you talking about biological differences as they correlate with geographic locality?
"Heaps don't exist because you can't prove an ironclad boundary between heaps and non-heaps."
"Tallness isn't a thing because you don't have a firm, binary definition of when someone is tall."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
Actually, there very much are.
I think what you're trying to say is that not all black people have all the "black people genetic markers," and likewise for other groups. This is true, but this is not necessary to distinguish well-defined groups.
Family resemblance is a philosophical idea made popular by Ludwig Wittgenstein
It argues that things which could be thought to be connected by one essential common feature may in fact be connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance
That's not how I read it. My takeaway was that "race" is a social construct that can leave epigenetic markers. In other words, culture can affect physiology.
In other words harder sciences are proving that social sciences obsession with identity politics has hindered medical advancements once again.
I would agree that many in the social sciences create epistemological problems for ideological reasons.
Constructively, try not to see news as a chance to reinforce your existing views. Try and do the opposite. try to expand your world view.
I mean, come on. This is news? What was he thinking were the different crime rates come from?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The probability that a certain cultural difference induced mutation could be formed (given that there is no flow of information from a phenotype back to genotype) is something incalculable.
What might work for a bacteria does not work for humans due to, you see, fundamental differences in the reproductive system and development.
There are a few main principles from genetics 101 to consider before making any attempts of "doing science".
To understand these principles think why we do not have much mutations of, say, hemoglobin or glucose pathway enzimes.There is another fundamental principle: way to many hipsters in what they call "modern science".
What are you even arguing against?
Anything which contradicts with this principle is plainly nonsense - a product of unconstrained imagination.
BTW, any changes which could be propagated through the mother's body, the way some deceases do, would not get into the DNA. This is another fundamental principle which contributes to sustainability of life - it is about isolation and washing out of pathogens.
You are correct that the code of the DNA itself is not being altered, but there are other heritable mechanisms that affect the structure, capability and accessability of that DNA - i.e. gene expression, beyond the code of DNA itself. This enables capabilities encoded in DNA to be passed down to children without actually using them - or conversely, to enable certain latent capabilities under certain environmental conditions.
Life is a bit more nuanced than the dogmatic one-way flow of information we teach as 'the central dogma'. It gains its complexity by always having an exception to its own rules somewhere at some point if it physically possible so, as to hedge against some change in conditions where that exception becomes more powerful than the existing rule. The exception may be inconsequential and of little benefit - until such time as it is not.
What you are taking about is an ordinary blood-borne sexually transmitted decease model (or a virus), and it has nothing to do with genetics (gene expression is a developmental topic), so there will be no "marks on a DNA" in principle - it does not work that way.
There, however, could be some certain proteins bound to DNA, but it is a not a genetic but biochemical (pathogenic-like) change. Those proteins could be treated as markers.
The propagation rate of such proteins is still limited by the generation time, so any connection to cultural differences is nonsense.
So, it is not genetic, there is no marks on DNA, it is not cultural. Period.
The methylation of histones (one type of epigenetic modification) which is a chemical modification of a protein bound to DNA is absolutely a heritable modification, and thus is technically a component of your 'genetic information' - but it itself not DNA. Regardless of terminology, a histone's chemical marks (and biochemical/phenotypic effects) are capable of being transmitted between mother and child, as well as between mother cell and daughter cell. If cell A switches from being heat-sensitive with respect to X, to no longer heat-sensitive with respect to X because a particular promoter was silenced by a histone modification, that phenotype will be passed down to the all of cell A's children (including gametes). That is absolutely a heritable genetic characteristic that has nothing to do with the editing or sequence of DNA.
This gets confusing because now our newer definition of gene, which was simplified to be synonymous with coding DNA, actually is more complicated.
Finally, gene expression is not just a developmental topic. Gene expression is not only what determines how you develop, but everything else in your body too. Gene expression is how your stomach determines how much enzymes to produce in a given hour, how your white blood cells determine which antibodies to produce in a given season, how your brain determines which neurotransmiters to produce in a given hour, how your skin determines how much pigment to make, how your beta cells determine how much and when to produce insulin, or how your body keeps track of its circadian rhythm, among everything else your body does. Gene expression is one of the primary mechanisms of bioregulation - especially for biological changes that take between a few hours and a few generations.
I do not understand your discussion of disease models/virus/pathogens. I'm unclear how those concepts are relevant here.
A hypothetical cultural example: A young boy is not well fed and eats a lot of a certain kind of hard-to-digest plant in place of meat. That young boy's own gene regulation may shift towards those enzymes which can break down that plant material and away from genes used to metabolize meat. Further, the entire metabolism may slow because of his cultural environment. It is very reasonable that those regulatory modifications to his own metabolism will be passed to his children. Not changes in the sequence of DNA, but heritable genetic regulation none-the-less. The effects are subtle, and can likely be relatively quickly overcome were the child to experience a significantly different cultural environment.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160105-supercoiled-dna/
Living DNA exists in complex coils, smothered in a jelly of inter-mediating molecules. It's quite messy and poorly understood! What is understood is that inheritance and expression of DNA information are absolutely non-linear.
Say some percentage of a population has tails. Then they start getting killed because they have a tail. A generation or two later, a much smaller percentage of the population will have tails. The likelihood of tails appearing in the population has decreased dramatically, due to culture.
How exactly, given that a generational time for humans is about 20 years?
One day, the 20 without tails kill the 5 with tails.
So at time=0, the prevalence of tails is 20%. At time=1 day the prevalence of tails is 0%.
The remaining members of the population may still have the genes to make a tail, but no one currently has a tail. If tails are a dominant trait, they won't. If tails are a recessive trait, a couple generations of killing babies with tails will do quite a lot to further diminish the prevalence of the trait.
I used a cartoonish model to starkly illustrate the possibility of the effect.
That doesn't mean I think reality would have such stark effects. It doesn't mean I think I've proved the effect occurs in reality.
https://www.gesundheitsindustrie-bw.de/en/article/dossier/ep...
“These data suggest that the interplay between race and ethnicity as social constructs and genetic ancestry as a biological construct is more complex than we had realized,
Putting forth these notions makes study and understanding of genetics far more convoluted and difficult than it needs to be.
Race is ancestry, ancestry is race, plain and simple.
Race is ancestry, ancestry is relatedness. Ancestry is the factor of relatedness, relatedness is the factor of race. For example an Englishman has a relatedness factor to a Dane that is hundreds of times greater than than the relatedness factor the Englishman has to a Nigerian. An Englishman and a Dane are of the European race, a Nigerian is of the (sub-Saharan) African race.
You'd think this would be the simplest thing in the world to understand, but something about the modern world has caused otherwise for some people.
Races are simply large extended families that came about due to imposing natural barriers in the ancient world, deserts, oceans, mountain ranges.
"Social constructs" are claptrap that came about from nihilist "post-modernists," and "critical theory" lunatics and agitators seeking to attack and disrupt western society.
You have the Internet. Go use it. It is preposterous to give racists the benefit of the doubt and put the burden on us to bring up the same arguments over and over again to refute them.
1. No you wouldn't. Unless you were making the assertion that it was widely known and well researched that the laws of thermodynamics could be broken.
>Race is a crank theory. It is a most pernicious crank theory because it is tied with some of the greatest brutality the world has ever seen.
2. Yet I am supposed to take at face value that "whiteness as an ideology of European imperial powers is well documented and well studied". That does not mean that I don't think race is a crank theory, but that your initial assertion remains unproven.
>You have the Internet. Go use it. It is preposterous to give racists the benefit of the doubt and put the burden on us to bring up the same arguments over and over again to refute them.
3. Please stop using this argument. What you are saying is that you would rather hold hostage knowledge that is supposed to be widely known. The fact is that it's not a google search away. I don't expect you to do anything, but I would have hoped you would have prefaced what you said with a book or something (that isn't just ideological) to actually contextualize the assertion.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/t...
Also if culture impacts genetics then the idea there are races is clearly not the case, but rather loosely organized behavioral groups that can change in whatever direction their common culture takes them next.
All of the conclusions being drawn about the implications of this for your hobby-grudges about politics are beyond inane
Epigenetics. It's the make-file for your genetic source code. Certain conditions can cause certain parts of your genetic code to be uncommented or commented-out. There are actually a number of different kinds of comments (histone modifications [1]) - each set of marks particular to a different compiler, in different contexts. And these comments/marks are copied with some fidelity to daughter-cells/children along with a high-fidelty copy of the underlying genetic code itself.
So the genes themselves are not being heritably altered, rather the recipe for which gene is where, when can be subtly changed. But again, the same mechanisms that permit the change in expression of those genes during a lifetime can be subsequently changed in the next just as easily.
In this way you can store the code for some trait or capability over many generations without having it always be running. It can manifest itself in individual organisms as having very different phenotypes even with the same underlying code.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histone_code
A snapshot of my mental model of epigenetics (warning: epigenetics/histone modifications are not my particular field of study): "The methylator slides along DNA to methylate histone tails at location 32 of histone 2 while in simultaneous competition the demethylator demethylates methyl groups of histone 1 at locations 4, 12 and 18 under most conditions, or location 32 of histone 2 IFF it is within three histones of an acetylated histone which itself has its acetylation competing with a deacetylator - constantly. And if a certain set of marks occur appropriately in combination, a set of neighboring histones wrap up and hide themselves and their DNA - preventing its hidden DNA from being used in that cell until some other mechanism can unwrap that section. Oh, and (most of) those marks are copied to children/daughter cells right along with the copying of DNA."
Because it's so fickle, non-deterministic, and tangled (unlike it's DNA counterpart) it's actually pretty hard to study and is currently (like this afternoon, down your street) a topic of a significant amount of cutting edge research. As the wikipedia article above shows, the 'Histone Code' is still a work in progress, and it now appears unlikely that there is a 1:1 relationship between this chemical mark and that effect, very much unlike the very nice deterministic relationship we found between DNA->RNA->Protein.
One common change I've read about that bubbles up to normal life is the capability of nicotine to affect histone acetylation. It seems to rapidly alter histone modifications so as to make other habits/actions more addictive [1] (precisely in a way that we now know THC does not - the original 'gateway drug' mis-extrapolation).
[1] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/why-nic...
MANY blacks in the Americas and Europe have significant European DNA. For example, even though my family identifies as black, my mother and her siblings are almost 50℅ European according to DNA tests.
How does this factor in when making medical decisions based on assumptions regarding race?
Outside of Africa, that's probably to be expected.
I too am "black", with two "black" parents but my mother had red hair and green eyes. My son has blonde hair and blue eyes.
Racial identity translates very poorly into actual population genetics, let alone epigenetics.
But the new data showing that a large fraction of epigenetic signatures of ethnicity reflect something other than ancestry suggests that abandoning the idea of race and ethnicity altogether could sacrifice a lot of valuable information about the drivers of differences in health and disease between different communities."
The study shows that abandoning the idea of ethnicity could sacrifice information, but it still seems to indicate that genetic ancestry is more useful than race. Why does the article seem to conflate the two?
My cousin is a bright, driven guy. There are reasons I distrust the western medical establishment.