October 11, 2004

• "Could it be that this terrain is too dangerous to let anyone, no matter how well meaning, try to navigate it?" Considering that we are talking about peoples health here, let's hope not.
• First we need to define what we mean by "race" and how that is distinct from or related to ethnicity, ancestory and physical traits. If someone could do that (and I don't think I could) then I might be able to discuss it.
• I kinda think ya can't.
• Id the word race a scientific term?
• In fact, whenever asked "What race are you?" on forms, I always answer Homo sapiens sapiens, and this answer seems always to be acceptable.
• Okay, I've not read all of this yet - one day, the NYT will learn the meaning and beauty of the word "concise" - so perhaps it covers this point later on, but... ...at this point, geneticists cannot sequence individual genomes in a cost-effective way. Until they can, they may view race as a handy shortcut, a way to make some useful generalizations about how an individual patient will fare with a particular drug. But while using race this way might increase the odds of finding the right medication, it is an imprecise method, a kind of roulette in which the physician is making educated guesses based on probabilities. My problem is that it's such a poor "handy shortcut" - a lazy and inaccurate one. There are, of course, genetic differences between populations, but with the exception of groups that have been genetically isolated for a large amount of human history, these differences do not organise themselves into simple, discrete clusters. They change in frequency gradually across populations, and they certainly don't conform to our current cultural and politcal classifications. When you consider that there is more genetic variation amongst one particular African lineage than there is amongst the whole of the rest of humanity, the idea that our current classifications of "race" exist in any meaningful genetic sense flies out the window. (Small, vaguely related anecdote: a lecturer once gave a class of us - second year Biological Anthropology students, Cambridge Uni, all of us getting good grades - 100 photos of people from around the world, and a map of the globe with 100 locations on it. We had to put the pictures where they came from in the world. There were no "trick questions" - all the photos were of members long-term indigenous populations in that area. We got four right. Out of a hundred. We were close, ish, on about ten others. People are shit at correlating their perceptions of race to actual, accurate information about population group ancestry.) To prescribe someone different medicine because they are "black" or "white" is an extremely crude method of matching drugs to genotypes. Certainly, it will be more effective than completely untargetted prescription, on a purely probabilistic basis, and that's a good thing - but it's a blunt instrument. My worry would be that our preconceptions of race (searching for drugs for whites, drugs for blacks, drugs for subcontinental Asians) could actually hinder better, more detailed work that could truly provide tailored medicine - tailored for groups which genuinely share common genetic traits, as opposed to ones that happen to fit into convenient demographic models. On preview: bees, no, the word "race" is about as far away from a scientific term as you can get. "Smelly" is a more scientifically precise term than "race".
• I think the easiest solution would be to remove the word "race" entirely from the discussion and use a genomic definition. There is certainly some genetic overlap anyway with all us hybrids. (The equivalent for gender would be "XY and XX" as opposed to male and female)
• Heh. That's always been my understanding, too, flashboy. If memory serves, somewhere in monkeyfilter's [currently amnesiac] collective past we had at least one thread in which this very word arose and was dealt with. Wish it would go and stay gone, but it's like flat-earthism, it just won't be banished, it seems.
• We can't end the race until we all decide it's okay not to win.
• The American Anthropological Association has a "Statement on 'Race'" at their website that is fairly dismissive of racial categorization, pointing out for example that there is much greater genetic diversity within so-called races than between them, etc. (Didn't I read some years back that the average Central African village has much greater genetic diversity than any of the other continents?) But interesting, they do not come right out and say that race is not a scientific category. You can see the AAA statement at http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm .
• I read through that entire long article and was astonished that never once did the author make the simple point Etherial Bligh made so eloquently in the MeFi thread (which I urge all interested parties to read): the undoubted fact that many US Blacks share genetic patterns that allow targeting by particular diseases and medicines says nothing about the existence of a "black" "race," because the patterns shared by many US Blacks are not shared by the vast majority of people (say, in Africa) perceived by people who believe in race to be of the same race. US Blacks come mainly from a limited part of West Africa, and certain genetic lines wound up being favored, so yes, there is a biologically meaningful population segment, just as there is in, say, Iceland, or among Ashkenazic Jews; the fact of biologically meaningful population segments says nothing about the existence of "races," which are broad alleged divisions of humanity with no biological significance, useful only for purposes of prejudice. (The example of Rwanda, mentioned in the article, is particularly instructive; the Hutu and Tutsi, who share culture, language, and religion, were called different "races" by race-crazed Belgians, and came to so see themselves, leading to the recent bloodbaths. "Race" is a bad, bad idea.)
• A people-hating word, too casually said, too often heard: there's no sound basis for saying races.
• Some years ago, the hispanics in my part of the world began using "la raza" ("the race") as a rallying point for uniting their communities. I think it was supposed to instill pride in their native American and Hispanic heritage in contrast to the "Anglo" culture they live in. The term seems to have gone by the wayside, now. It was really artificial to begin with, but I can understand the pull to define and inform a culturally different population, which felt overwhelmed by the majority, would want to use the term. So, is it possible that "race" might become a term which says more about culture than about genetics? (Though, I agree with languagehat that it's still a devisive term.)
• As we learned from smears against Cruz Bustamante's bid for CA governor last year, he was once associated to Movimiento Estudiantil de Aztlan (a.k.a. MEChA), which has as its motto "Por La Raza todo; Fuera de La Raza nada". Their philosophy is drenched with statements like "we are a bronze people with a bronze culture". It would appear that they do distinguish, but do not dissociate, the concepts of race and culture.
• Us and them, us and them. They eat their babies, don't you know?
• Regarding the American Anthropology Association, they are talking about social science and from an anthropological point of view, since "race" is a term that is used by the man on the street and the concept, as defined by a specific population, is used as a justification for certain societal/cultural beliefs, then there may be some use for Anthropologists to explore how notions of "race" play a role in a society. Anthropologists often deal with the roles of religions in societies, and so they can deal with the roels of race in soceities but in neither case nothing mandates that they have to beleive in the concept to look at the role it plays.
• flashboy - actually, treatments based on race often pave the way for more detailed research. Epidemiological findings that people of a certain race react differently to a drug or treatment can be used as a justification to try to isolate the gene, or genes, involved and develop a genetic screen for treatment. And current successful screening by the blunt instrument of race goes a long ways in getting funding for further research.
• I think we can safely use the concept of race for genetic research purposes (although I agree it's a gross oversimplifaction) without giving a leg to ideologies like racial superiority, and farcical politics like eugenics. Getting rid of terms like race would as stupid as getting rid of other classification terms like gender and sexual orientation (although the later is ratter fussy) IMHO. The problem is that humans tend to use classifications mostly to distinguish them from us and put barriers between. But that's a human nature's foil, not a scientific one.
• Well, I disagree, Zemat, for unless scientists define very exactly and precisdely and publicly and loudly over and over for decades and decades what they man by "race", the average person is ging to think the same old word is the same old thing. So why not discard it altogether, and use some other word instead for a cluster of people with common genetic traits or whateve the hell it may be, see? The word is too stained with incidents and attitudes of cruelty and death and exclusion and privilege for anyone aware of its abusive history to support, scientist or otherwise.
• Very true, bees - but you don't need to reference the evil that has been done in the name of race to suggest that it's of absolutely no use in science (I sometimes feel that "eugenics" almost deserves a Godwin's Law of its own, especially for discussions of biology). It is not merely that it's a gross oversimplification, Zemat, it's that it's completely inaccurate. It has no clear scientific definition or meaning that can be agreed upon, which leaves us only with the cultural construct of race, and of what those races are. And such concepts of race simply do not tie in with accurate classifications of actual population groups or genetic lineages. You can make one set of categorisations on a certain genetic basis (let's say, vulnerability to sickle-cell anaemia, as EB used for an example in his excellent MeFi comment). For that case, you can then divide people up into accurate, medically useful groups (which may, in some cases, correspond to ideas of race - as EB noted, most North American black people originate from specific areas of west Africa, and so a bottleneck effect of sorts occurrred). But take a different example - say, vulnerability to Type 2 diabetes - and your categories shift (African-Americans, Mexicans, and Pima Indians are now a group). An idea such as race is only of any use if it has a stable meaning across a wide variety of cases. It hasn't, and so we should lose the term. It's like suggesting that "animals with four legs", "animals with brown fur" or "animals that emit a noxious slime" are zoological classifications of any use (outside of the specialist studies of legs, fur or slime). A thought that occurs, with regards to the longevity of the race idea, is that the nature of the African-American population is highly influential. Because, by and large, it's a relatively homogenous genetic group with a very recent historical bottleneck, it's probably one of the closest matches between cultural notions of race and the biological reality (outside of certain tribal groups and isolated island nations). When trying to remember examples of genetically-linked diseases with "racial" variations, I couldn't actually remember any examples that didn't involve African Americans. And casually browsing PubMed and other such sites for information about the pan-African situation of such diseases, it seemed that most of the studies focussed on specific areas of West Africa, often referencing the origin of African Americans. While, to reiterate, I don't think that this is actively a bad thing, I wonder if it shows how research into genetic groups is a lot easier to achieve if there's a percieved cultural group that corresponds to it... which is sort of the problem I was suggesting in the first place. Just a thought, though - based on impressions, not firm evidence.
• Gosh, quite a reaction. Well, I can't say I disagree with you, flash. Nice answer.