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Genetic ancestry tests are a multi-billion dollar industry. In exchange for a sample of genetic material, one receives charts and figures mapping them onto popular concepts of race. The problem with this approach is that although there are minor genetic differences that allow geneticists to trace population migrations, these differences don't support the idea that one can sort races on genetic differences alone. Social scientists have argued that given how race definitions have changed over time and place, that race classifications are more a social construct defined more in terms of geographic proximity and cultural norms than they are based on genetics. At the other end of the spectrum is the concept of genetic essentialism. This views the concept of race as being exclusively defined in terms of genetic makeup and how these differences imbue different races with different inherent abilities or liabilities. Genetic essentialist views promote the concept of genetic exclusivity and reinforces racial stereotypes, underpinning negative policies such as eugenics and apartheid.
The problem with genetic ancestry testing, apart from the privacy issues that we typically see stories about here, is the inconsistency of analysis and popular misconceptions of what the results mean. With tens of millions of people taking these tests every year, an open question has been what effect these results have on people's concepts of race. Some have argued that they are likely to reinforce a genetic essentialist view of race because the results are broken down into distinct groups and people interpret the results as being objective and authoritative. Others have argued the opposite in that people have a more social construct idea of race when the results do not confirm their experience ("All my life I thought I was German, but I found out I'm actually Italian!").
Researchers from the University of British Columbia attempted to answer this question with a paper published in the open access journal Plos One. They conducted a randomized controlled trial where they assembled a group of people who were willing to take a genetic ancestry test and provided half of them with a test. The group was then evaluated to gauge the extent that they supported genetic essentialism ideas. In addition, at the outset the group was also quizzed on their general knowledge of genetics. What the researchers found was that, on average, getting these test results did not change one's views on genetic essentialism; however, when considering a person's overall level of genetics understanding, they found that genetic essentialism ideas were strengthened in people who had lower knowledge of genetics after they received their ancestry test results. "Taking a test thus has a polarizing effect, magnifying differences in essentialist beliefs even further between those with weaker and stronger understandings of the science behind them."
Roth WD, Yaylacı Ş, Jaffe K, Richardson L. (2020) Do genetic ancestry tests increase racial essentialism? Findings from a randomized controlled trial. PLoS ONE 15(1): e0227399. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0227399
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10 2020, @03:46PM (10 children)
So one thing doesn't exist, yet can be determined by a genetic test. And the other is a social construct, yet can also be determined with an extremely high rate of accuracy from a genetic test? It's ironic that the social sciences are all about pedantry with 'words have meaning' when aiming to push on agenda, yet turn around and completely butcher all meanings, connotations, and denotations to push another agenda.
The world would truly be a better place if the social sciences simply did not exist. All it seems to do is generate divisive pseudo-scientific clickbait that's often not even replicable. What exactly are these fields adding to humanity?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10 2020, @05:33PM
That is the drill, man. The same order who imported tobacco then pushes for no smoking in your own car. The same order behind industrialization and nature exploitation is pushing legislation against CO2 emissions. The objective is to end up with people who just don't care about logic and observation. If it is written that the sky is pink then it is pink, citizen.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10 2020, @05:36PM (8 children)
It's completely consistent. You can tie constellations of genes to a region, but you can't draw a line between what is and isn't a specific race as there's a huge degree of bleed over.
As far as races go, 23 and me thoroughly debunked that years ago. There are no genes specific to a group that are both necessary and essential to a person's race.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10 2020, @06:45PM (3 children)
i like how these propagandists make up nitpicky reasons why race doesn't matter. I guess dog breeds having different propensities, intelligence, physical characteristics, strengths and weaknesses is all in our imagination too just b/c they are all dogs... these fucks(mostly self loathing, brainwashed whites) are just pushing White Genocide through misegenation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10 2020, @08:00PM (2 children)
Rightwing nutjobs = Daring Journalists Uncovering Truths The System Doesn't Want You To Know!
Science = propaganda fake newwwwzzzz
I think I found the cause of all US problems, and it appears to be a white people thing. Thankfully not all white people, the irony of tolerance and non-bigotry is in there somewhere for you dipshits to figure out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10 2020, @11:57PM (1 child)
The hate is strong in this one!
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday February 11 2020, @03:53AM
Where's the hate, specifically? The post that one's replying to sounds a lot more hateful.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10 2020, @08:01PM (3 children)
This [nih.gov] is a study assessing a number of claims relating to group genetics and race.
Rather than describe the paper in detail, I'm going to go with a simple analogy. Imagine you take a sample of people writing a 7 and then analyze it at an extremely high level of detail (perhaps per pixel with at an ultra-high resolution), without any concern for structure or patterns. You would likely see nearly as much variation between those 7s as you would between a 7 and another random character. At an extremely high level of detail, very little is going to match well. Of course you'd never then take this argument so suggest that 7s do not exist, nor to argue that a 7 and 1 are the same thing. What's necessary is to look at the defining characteristics, the aggregate properties, of a given character. And that's precisely what that paper did. And they found that "[classification statistics] can approach 100% accuracy with as few as 100 loci".
And indeed this is exactly how, for instance, machine learning algorithms can now determine what you've written with very near 100% accuracy. It, to oversimplify things, sees what statistically makes up a 'group' (for instance a '7') and compares that against other groups. This allows it to assign a probability weighting for each character. And in general one is vastly more likely than any other. The exact same is true of humans and various group classifications including race. As an aside this is also where statements such as "two random individuals from any one group are almost as different [genetically] as any two random individuals from the entire world" (as stated by the Human Genome Project) derive from. It's true but rather extremely disingenuous!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10 2020, @10:31PM (2 children)
You'd likely make the argument that it's foolish to group people based upon how they write their 7s as the difference between one way and another isn't binary and the line between two different ways would be completely arbitrary.
Which is essentially what's going on with race. There isn't a clean way of defining the line at which somebody becomes a different race and the individuals within a race seem to share as much in common with different races as they do within the classification. Further more, the intellectual characteristics of individuals are much more tied into culture than they are into race which will, by necessity, include people of various different ethnicities as it's an incredibly broad way of categorizing people and done primarily based upon the shape of the skull.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 11 2020, @06:41AM
Right!
Except that it's not totally arbitrary. People who cross their 7s are older, and will correlate more with heart attack sufferers. People who have messy 7s will more likely be left handed. People with shaky ones, more likely have Parkinson's.
It doesn't mean every shaky 7 is a Parkinson's signal, but it does mean that it's not unwise to note if one's 7s become shaky.
Similarly, some diseases group along "racial" lines. Melanoma? Much more a white person disease. Sickle cell anemia (sub-populations of African groups), insulin response patterns (Inuit) and others.
I used to make the mistake of saying "all races are identical." Now it's "every human has equal rights, including the right to not be discriminated against for their genetics." But "race" goes in scarequotes above because yes of course we have labels which correlate with some genes/loci, but the idea itself is not a hard definition like that for what exponentiation means.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 11 2020, @01:58PM
You miss the point of the analogy.
In this case the numerals themselves *are* the races. This is the point. The large variation within sevens, when considered in isolation, is meaningless. Because what defines a 7 is a statistical, yet perfectly well defined series of criteria. It's the same thing for race. It's not this loci or that loci, but a statistical grouping of approximately 100% loci to hit on 100% accuracy when identifying e.g. race.