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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: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10 2020, @05:01PM (3 children)
You are so brainwashed.
How can you explain humans are the only animal species with no races?
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10 2020, @05:14PM
How about you explain your positive assertion that, say, c. elegans has “races” before anyone need bother that humans are unique in its negation.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday February 10 2020, @06:05PM (1 child)
You're intentionally confusing the terms "race" and "genetic variation". All species, including humans, have a bunch of genetic variations, because that's how evolution works. Those variations have basically nothing to do with social categories of people created 5 centuries before the Theory of Evolution was discovered and confirmed with the discovery of DNA and genetics.
As with many other supposed inherent differences between different groups of people divided more-or-less arbitrarily, it turns out the variation within each population is far greater than the variation between those groups. For instance, there's more of a measured genetic difference between different kinds of Chinese people than there is between the average Chinese person and the average Siberian person. And, furthermore, there's none of the sharp genetic dividing lines between those groups of people that you divided them into, it's more of a steady drift based on geography. This is all the result of a longstanding phenomenon throughout the animal kingdom: Whenever different variations of the same species meet up, babies with characteristics of both variations result.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 10 2020, @09:12PM
Different AP here. Have to hit on this comment, because it's a sort of pet peeve. This [nih.gov] is a study assessing a number of claims relating to group genetics and race, directly related to the comment you've made.
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. This is where these sort of statements, such as the one I quoted come from. They're the worst sort of facts - ones that are true, but are designed to make people believe something that is *not* true.