SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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.