Why does biology not define race

In humans, as in all species, genetic changes are the result of random mutations—tiny tweaks to DNA, the code of life. Mutations occur at a more or less constant rate, so the longer a group persists, handing down its genes generation after generation, the more tweaks these genes will accumulate.

Meanwhile, the longer two groups are separated, the more distinctive tweaks they will acquire. By analyzing the genes of present-day Africans, researchers have concluded that the Khoe-San, who now live in southern Africa, represent one of the oldest branches of the human family tree.

The Pygmies of central Africa also have a very long history as a distinct group. All non-Africans today, the genetics tells us, are descended from a few thousand humans who left Africa maybe 60, years ago. These migrants were most closely related to groups that today live in East Africa, including the Hadza of Tanzania. Somewhere along the way, perhaps in the Middle East, the travelers met and had sex with another human species, the Neanderthals; farther east they encountered yet another, the Denisovans.

Some scientists also believe the exodus 60, years ago was actually the second wave of modern humans to leave Africa. If so, judging from our genomes today, the second wave swamped the first.

In what was, relatively speaking, a great rush, the offspring of all these migrants dispersed around the world. By 50, years ago they had reached Australia. As they moved into different parts of the world, they formed new groups that became geographically isolated from one another and, in the process, acquired their own distinctive set of genetic mutations.

Most of these tweaks were neither helpful nor harmful. But occasionally a mutation arose that turned out to be advantageous in a new setting. Under the pressure of natural selection, it spread quickly through the local population. At high altitudes, for instance, oxygen levels are low, so for people moving into the Ethiopian highlands, Tibet, or the Andean Altiplano, there was a premium on mutations that helped them cope with the rarefied air.

Similarly, Inuit people, who adopted a marine-based diet high in fatty acids, have genetic tweaks that helped them adapt to it. Such is the case with a variant of a gene called EDAR pronounced ee-dar. Most people of East Asian and Native American ancestry possess at least one copy of the variant, known as A, and many possess two. The mice look ordinary, with sleek brown coats and shiny black eyes. But examined under a microscope, they are different from their equally cute cousins in subtle yet significant ways.

Their hair strands are thicker; their sweat glands are more numerous; and the fat pads around their mammary glands are smaller. Perhaps, Kamberov speculates, the ancestors of contemporary East Asians at some point encountered climate conditions that made more sweat glands useful. Or maybe thicker hair helped them ward off parasites. Genetics frequently works like this: A tiny tweak can have many disparate effects. Photographer Robin Hammond followed their lead, visiting five representative language communities.

DNA is often compared to a text, with the letters standing for chemical bases —A for adenine, C for cytosine, G for guanine, and T for thymine. The tweak that gives East Asians thicker hair is a single base change in a single gene, from a T to a C. About a decade ago a pathologist and geneticist named Keith Cheng, at Penn State College of Medicine, discovered the mutation by studying zebrafish that had been bred to have lighter stripes.

The fish, it turned out, possessed a mutation in a pigment gene analogous to the one that is mutated in Europeans. Studying DNA extracted from ancient bones, paleogeneticists have found that the G- to -A substitution was introduced into western Europe relatively recently—about 8, years ago—by people migrating from the Middle East, who also brought a newfangled technology: farming.

That means the people already in Europe—hunter-gatherers who created the spectacular cave paintings at Lascaux, for example—probably were not white but brown. The ancient DNA suggests that many of those dark-skinned Europeans also had blue eyes, a combination rarely seen today. There are no fixed traits associated with specific geographic locations, Reich says, because as often as isolation has created differences among populations, migration and mixing have blurred or erased them.

Across the world today, skin color is highly variable. Much of the difference correlates with latitude. Near the Equator lots of sunlight makes dark skin a useful shield against ultraviolet radiation; toward the poles, where the problem is too little sun, paler skin promotes the production of vitamin D.

I have also come to this conclusion. Whites are primitive and fearful, for an unknown reason. Perhaps it is genetics. But I think one day science will have the answer. I thought only the evil white man could be so violent???? What you wrote comes from a fearful and hateful mind and soul. Are you caucasian?

I do not see as many caucasians acting as you claim as I see people of other genetic backgrounds acting as you describe. Your entire diatribe is nonsense, hypocrisy and pure bull shit. Your tripe just exposed you as both an idiot and a racist!

The article by Vivian Chau was a lesson on political bias masquerading as science. The jabs at President Trump and the White House totally reduces your attempt at an interesting article to no more than propaganda and trash.

I agree totally. This was a political article,not a scientific one. And can I just point out a truth? Our president and the people who support his efforts to protect our country are NOT racists. That includes me. I judge people on their belief systems and what they DO…not on their color, or their race.

That means nothing. But those who hate us and want to harm us are not welcome here…those laws have been on the books for decades,they are not the invention of Trump. The liberal media twists every truth into a lie they can use to get Power. It makes me sick. I refuse to accept the politically motivated labels they put on me. I know the truth. More Americans are now employed than ever recorded before in our history. We have created more than , manufacturing jobs since my election.

Economic growth last quarter hit 4. New unemployment claims recently hit a year low. Median household income has hit highest level ever recorded. African-American unemployment has recently achieved the lowest rate ever recorded.

Hispanic-American unemployment is at the lowest rate ever recorded. Asian-American unemployment recently achieved the lowest rate ever recorded. Youth unemployment has recently hit the lowest rate in nearly half a century. Lowest unemployment rate ever recorded for Americans without a high school diploma. Almost 3. Retail sales surged last month, up another 6 percent over last year. Signed the biggest package of tax cuts and reforms in history.

As a result of our tax bill, small businesses will have the lowest top marginal tax rate in more than 80 years. Helped win U. Record number of regulations eliminated. Enacted regulatory relief for community banks and credit unions.

Obamacare individual mandate penalty GONE. My Administration is providing more affordable healthcare options for Americans through association health plans and short-term duration plans. Last month, the FDA approved more affordable generic drugs than ever before in history. And thanks to our efforts, many drug companies are freezing or reversing planned price increases. We reformed the Medicare program to stop hospitals from overcharging low-income seniors on their drugs—saving seniors hundreds of millions of dollars this year alone.

Signed Right-To-Try legislation. We have reduced high-dose opioid prescriptions by 16 percent during my first year in office. Increased our coal exports by 60 percent; U. United States is a net natural gas exporter for the first time since Cancelled the illegal, anti-coal, so-called Clean Power Plan. Process has begun to make the Space Force the 6th branch of the Armed Forces.

Confirmed more circuit court judges than any other new administration. Withdrew from the horrible, one-sided Iran Deal. Moved U. Embassy to Jerusalem. Issued Executive Order to keep open Guantanamo Bay. Just one. What merit is it? Ride On , How faux moral supremacist do not see their own racism! How come Nazi Germany did not abolish private property and private corporations if they were socialists?

As a Graduate chemist at Emory studying genetics, I assure this article has narrative, and is lying to you. Racial differences are largely caused by genetics- not environment. Considerable differences in traits exist between races and ethnicities within those races. Some have blue eyes, some exclusively brown; some are shorter, some are taller; some are more intelligent, some are less- these are all in relative comparison to the averages.

Height is heavily influenced by genetics. The dutch are the tallest groups of people, and we can map the genetic markers that cause this. However, if we give proper nutrition to a random dutch and random Koreans from birth, the dutch will be much taller on average. Now environment has no effect on intelligence. This is true in their adulthood as well. These were all true in as well. The environment has no effect on intelligence??? Just as you stated that if you starve Dutchmen…they might be shorter than Koreans, the same could be said about intelligence.

Genetics do have a role in intelligence, but the environment a child grows up in is a major factor, too. I disagree as I have seen people in poverty overcome disparities and become more successful than those with wealth and privilege. That has to be generics…. Jews were journeymen.

Where do you think the genetic differences come from? Have you read the theory of evolution, or even glanced at its basic principles? They are literally shaped by their environment. Otherwise the mutations created by these genetics would mean that random traits would be the most common genetic factor. The fact that everyone is different from one another. Are you telling me skin color just appeared in all people randomly at the same time in a specific area of the world because of genetics alone?

Could you be more wrong? You should study biology and conduct some experiments in black box recombinant genome mapping. If you do not agree that there is more variation within ancestral groups debunked term races than between them, you do not even comprehend the basics of what we have already learned.

My advice, stick to your discipline! Just differently evolved. For simple example- dark skin is better for survival if you live in a region of high solar radiation. More racist lies…nothing to do with whites and Asians being more evolved. It simply means everybody outside of Africa had to adapt more to their environment but genetically, you are exactly the same. Every phenotype can be found in Africa….. Caucasians look Nilotic….

Native Americans look Nilotic and Surmic. Australian Aborigines look Bantu and so forth. Same with Jews. IQ is not nature but nurture. To do so would render you apathetic and apathy is not advantageous for any culture or society. Where do you think depression, anxiety, narcissistic personality disorder, anti social personality disorder, somatic disorders, deviant behavior disorders, sexual abuse, physical abuse comes from? Trump tapped in to that, smartly so, and therefore he got the votes. Also, if a person can brown pride or black pride, than they also can white pride.

Personally, I think race or skin color pride of any variety is silly, and possibly racist. I believe fighting with science is futile — much better to accept the differences and focus on fighting racism. Where are the group or groups of chimpanzees that homo sapiens descended from?

Should be genetic evidence everywhere but there is none. However, there is plenty of genetic evidence that tracks where homo sapiens originated from.

Just an example of someone who is clever at masking primitive human behavior and presenting inauthenticity. Remember, serial killers are successful because they wear masks to hide their primitive behavior. Sight has been the curse of homo sapiens! IQs are not biological but nurture based. The higher the IQ, the more abuse and narcissism occurs in the home as well as the prevalence of apathy…..

And anyone who raises that fact is labeled a racist. We also know that every environment has a species that is best suited for it and thrives the most. We also know that within that species there is an individual or group that is most suited for that environment and thrives even more so.

We also know that cats and dogs are found on every continent along with roaches and rats too. I mean good grief, do people not realize that humans and animals are very good at adaptation…. Are you under the assumption that homo sapiens just showed up on different continents and were automatically suited to their environment?

While I agree with the sentiment here. We do have to factor the politics and funding involved in these types excavations that will delay the truth from being found. Other than that ancestry is the word that people fear the most because without it you only have the race argument.

I wonder how a Data Scientist working at MicroSoft is qualified to lecture us all about genetics. How about proving you know what you are talking about by publishing this in a Journal specializing in genetics? It did NOT stop , years ago with H sapien sapien. Like their religious counterparts, they also deny evolution on theological grounds. The bomb threats like all hate crime bs is a hoax.

Keeping to ourselves and having our own laws rules and culture was not racist. It was to protect us from others who would force us to live different or take advantage. Our army has been used to fight your wars. Guilted like we have no right to be left alone. Like every other race who wants left alone. You may use the argument that all dogs share Africans were the originators of this earth and we are a hybrid race of aliens. Ironically the only thing missing from your article is how much those same sciences contributed to the problem they now claim to be rid of.

Yes they disproved purity. But to suggest that a little difference genetically should be ignored. Is the worst kind of whitewashing. Academically, especially the medical field and the field of statistics are suggesting the topic is more complicated.

But neither predicts or determines the other. All your article proves is that there are no all or nothing in humans. No purity. Thought that was given. Instead we play semantics with ethnicity by calling it ancestry. It reminds me of the whole color blind debate.

Race for ethnicity disguised as ancestry. Let us know when that gets uncomfortable and we can hit reset. Thank you so much for this clarity. Thank you! The elephant in the room is of course the low IQs scored by black people everywhere. They are in the US and every where else on the planet disproportionately responsible for violent crime.

There are of course no white men in the Olympic m final. None of this reality should lead to racism. After all, Asians on average score somewhat higher than whites in a traditional IQ test.

And whites in turn score a bit higher than blacks. Do note, this very likely reflects average educational level and other factors and not race.

It is very unlikely that intelligence as it is measured is hereditary only. There are numerous other factors which could explain the differences found. Factors like culturally determined attitude towards work, socioeconomic status, health and educational differences are divided unequally between races.

In fact it would be illogical if no differences would be found between races. Is a German Shepherd a Golden Retriever? Is a Lion a Tiger? No they make a Liger. They are making a hybrid. This article is full of contradiction and opinion. We can be scientific with every other species, let give our own the same respect. We are made of several hominids and are still figuring out who we are and what we will become.

Also, most of these comments must have been written on cell phones late at night. Lots and lots of spelling and punctuation errors, in addition to the pseudo science.

Only Harvard would be deluded enough to publish an article about genetics with lots of underlying political narrative from a Microsoft data scientist. Watch closely how the baby does or does not stay focused on the parent holding them in speaking to them. Some different races of babies will stay focused on the parents face and keep staring at the moving lips for the blinking eyes. That shows that those particular races of babies can mentally stay focused long enough on various things that are happening around them which improves their mental ability of learning and understanding.

Do you want to know what those two races are? Do you have the guts and mental ability to accept what is extremely obvious? And do you want to know why? Because the particular various Asian and Caucasian people around the world during the last years or longer did NOT allow Genetic Incest to occur in their villages because they knew of how destructive it is to the mental and physical health.

And for you illiterate idiots out there: the definition of Genetic Incest is when family members have children from the same family members. Mean while China are stealing all our IP left right and centre and will just come and crush us anyway. Black, white yellow, green stick to your own and shut the hell up and get on with it. An interesting hypothetical: What do you think the world would be like if there were races according to biology?

For instance, do you think it might foster greater tolerance for diversity, to name just one possibility? I think your article is intentionally misrepresenting information in an attempt to present a version of this argument that suits your ideological predispositions.

You link to an Atlantic article which further attempts to obscure these findings claiming it as evidence that science has not found differences in intelligence when the Atlantic article itself concedes that there are in fact measurable differences in IQ between populations of people. It is a sad day when our finest academic institutions are intentionally misrepresenting information to suit their ideological purposes. These findings are incendiary and can create issues including racist behavior; however, the idea that somehow you will be able to brush the findings under the rug will do nothing other than discredit you and your institutions opinion and reduce your ability to add important moral interpretations to the findings to avoid discriminatory behavior.

Where were you when I was completing my history degrees? Perhaps you should be a lecturer, except five very important things:. Your argument is you mounting a mighty fine, high horse with clearly nothing in the stable. The fact that you are so morally obligated without offering any scientific research, contributing to a critically-constructive dialogue, indicates you are a self-righteous moron.

I care not if you are degreed. Hmmm scratching my head …I love circular logic. Either you are his son, or a wanna-be thief. Uhhhh, I like your findings. I mean for one thing you just made the jump that white nationalism and ethno purism are synonymous with the alt right.

It just kinda perpetuates the very same issues people are having today. Still fantastic work though. Also white power. Is that a certification, degree? Totally agreed: her basis of 0. Thomas Sowell, You kinda had me at the beginning of your comment. Then you sorta lost me. Since you preach about poor grammar to bolster your premise and to agrandize your superior education, you should accept the idea that your inflated ego and lack of introspection is probably not due to a genetic flaw, but one due to a habit of being a pretentious windbag…hypenated as wind-bag.

Do you know your white to, why are you complaining against white makes if your the same ethnicity as them. S I was hardly discriminated. When a child is born they did not choose to be white, black, Hispanic or arab. God Allah chose it for them and they should be grateful that their ethnicity race dosent exist was chosen by god.

Just because some of your ethnicity did something it dosent the whole ethnicity is punished. We Somalians were already enslaving each other before the white peoples came to west Africa. East and west Africans and Arabs where working together to enslave whites Mostly Balkan and French, Spanish and other blacks and Arabs. It was called the Barbary slave trade when Arabs and East Africans worked together to enslave whites and capture them.

Phillipe Rustone and Arthur Jenson do debunk this salacious articles claims. Not to mention Richard Lynn and Charles Murray. Hold on is this a serious reply? Is this who you are in person…? Wow sad… Lisen your belt a little there Poindexter. Spot on. This article is completely unconvincing. So what if most of our genome is the same and only a small percentage differs.

That in no way negates what are readily obvious biological differences. I find highly dubious the claim that there is no connection between the processes of natural selection that produce different skin color and intelligence.

This is propaganda, not science. As someone who i s non-political, i find it intriguing to find nearly everyone has some form of bias. Indeed, this article is rubbish. This is because our science has been sterwarded by greed and industry- not truth and honest philanthropy.

What type of human being defends cultures which fail to recognize the simple reality of land carrying-capacity? A flawed being, that is who. No hope for humanity…. Thank you Arthur, I feel exactly the same way. The UN has conducted world wide iq testing 3 times in the past 50 years showing without deviation a gap of 30 points between Caucasians and subsaharan blacks, 35 points for north Asians and black Africans. These are hardly minor finding and the genetics represent the entire difference.

This author is a flake with an agenda. To get conclusive results for a test such as this they should have done one IQ test every year, NOT 3 in a span of How do you even see this as anything major with such little data? Also, were the individuals who were given this test raised with access to identical schooling, material, mentorship? Did these Individuals have similar life styles and hobbies?

Did they all have to work in some way or another, besides school, in their free time? How many were testing in each region? I could be completely wrong about you purposely delegating what will be seen and what will not. However, even I, a young college student still in the early stages of her schooling, can see your statement is lacking. It makes me wary to even consider anything you have to say or relay to be anything but fake. I have met similarly intelligent people who are labelled as other races.

I have two points that the vast majority of the comments seem to ignore. It is a tactic used to divide so that power can be stripped from one label and concentrated in another.

The fact that kind, gentle and passive people will always be the most common victims shows the inequity of concentrations of power. Applying Intelligence to Understanding and Experience leads to Wisdom. Not a lot of wisdom in focusing on meaningless physical differences instead of focusing on moral and philosophical ones. LCinSC wins the comment battle. Thank you for eloquently expressing my thoughts.

Racism exists on either end of the political spectrum, yet this article focuses on one. I only say this because that one fact makes this article irrelevant.

Intelligent truth that unmasks the propaganda presented in this article! Furthermore, recent studies reveal that the variation between any two individuals is very small, on the order of one single nucleotide polymorphism SNP , or single letter change in our DNA, per 1, That means that racial categorization could, at most, relate to 6 percent of the variation found in 1 in 1, SNPs. Put simply, race fails to explain much. Again, all of these individuals will be remarkably the same: On average, only about 1 out of 1, of their DNA letters will be different.

A study by Ning Yu and colleagues places the overall difference more precisely at 0. The researchers further found that people in Africa had less in common with one another than they did with people in Asia or Europe. Homo sapiens evolved in Africa; the groups that migrated out likely did not include all of the genetic variation that built up in Africa.

Genetic variation across Europe and Asia, and the Americas and Australia, is essentially a subset of the genetic variation in Africa.

If genetic variation were a set of Russian nesting dolls, all of the other continental dolls pretty much fit into the African doll.

Genetic variation is highly correlated to geographic distance. Those osteoporosis doctors might argue that even though socially defined race poorly describes human variation, it still could be a useful classification tool in medicine and other endeavors. When the rubber of actual practice hits the road, is race a useful way to make approximations about human variation? Sickle cell is a genetic trait: It is the result of an SNP that changes the amino acid sequence of hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen in red blood cells.

When someone carries two copies of the sickle cell variant, they will have the disease. In the U. Yet scientists have known about the much more complex geographic distribution of sickle cell mutation since the s. It is almost nonexistent in the Americas, most parts of Europe and Asia — and also in large swaths of Northern and Southern Africa. Globally, it does not correlate with continents or socially defined races.

In one of the most widely cited papers in anthropology, American biological anthropologist Frank Livingstone helped to explain the evolution of sickle cell. He showed that places with a long history of agriculture and endemic malaria have a high prevalence of sickle cell trait a single copy of the allele. He put this information together with experimental and clinical studies that showed how sickle cell trait helped people resist malaria, and made a compelling case for sickle cell trait being selected for in those areas.

Evolution and geography , not race, explain sickle cell anemia. What about forensic scientists: Are they good at identifying race? Forensic anthropologists assume these algorithms work. But my analysis of four later tests showed that the correct classification of Native American skulls from other contexts and locations averaged about two incorrect for every correct identification. The results are no better than a random assignment of race. The backlash against Richwine and Murray, after all, gives some indication that their views are widely considered beyond the respectable pale in the post- Bell Curve era.

Richwine and Murray are really extreme branches of a core assumption that is much more pervasive and dangerous because it isn't necessarily racist on the surface: the belief in biological "races. Public outcry always greets the second Richwine-Murray-esque claim. But the first assumption required to reach it is more common and based on as shaky an intellectual foundation, even as it continues to escape equal scorn.

Even so, the critique of biologically innate race is hardly new. In , the Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin famously observed more genetic variation within populations than between them, undercutting the case for fixed and timeless genetic boundaries that demarcated "races. As I wrote in a piece , "the numbers, names, and members of respective races are always in flux. Go somewhere else on the planet or step back a century, and you'll likely encounter a different racial schema all together," pointing to the Dillingham Commission of the United States Congress, which wrote a century ago: "Some writers have reduced the number of such basic races to 3, while others have proposed, 15, 29, or even But since that piece, the belief in the intellectual validity of racial biology has persisted, along with claims about specific outcomes allegedly associated with distinct "races," including disease rates, physiological abilities, or intelligence.

Disease information sheets available online and in physicians' offices are one common means of reinforcing the notion of biological races. For example, the popular site WebMd. Another WebMD fact sheet on hypertension similarly declares that "high rates of high blood pressure in African-Americans may be due to the genetic make-up of people of African descent.

The mutations are found in other racial and ethnic groups as well, but it is not known how common they are," unintentionally accepting the premise that traits and characteristics of bounded racial and ethnic groups might contribute to differences in disease incidence among them.