Racialism is the
pseudo-scientific view that humans can be pigeon-holed into relatively discrete, large (continental) groups of populations, or that human populations are substantially different from each other in some measure to support biological classification below the
species level. Most racialists maintain there is also a
racial hierarchy.
Early attempts at race classification drew largely on Carl Linnaeus'
Systema Naturae (1735), in which he posited five races: the
Europeanus, the
Africanus, the
Americanus, the
Asiaticus, and the
Monstrosus (made up of
mythical creatures).[SUP]
[1][/SUP] Racialism was virtually unchallenged until the 1960s — 70s, when it was shown to be
erroneous by genetics:
"The rejection of the race concept by most anthropologists beginning most recently in the 1960s, was based on the genetic evidence... Conformity to
political correctness was not the cause of these changes.[SUP]
"[2][/SUP]
People who today identify as "racial realists" (e.g.
David Duke,
Jared Taylor[SUP][
wp][/SUP] and
Metapedia) should be a big clue as to the
far-right politics behind 21st century racialism."
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Racialism
The biological basis of race
I know, I know… if you want to be one of the popular kids, you insist that everyone is equal, we all want the same things, and we all have inalienable rights and we’re all OK.
If you’re a realist, you know that people are different, have different abilities, and some are born bad and some are born good, and that all categories get fuzzy around the edges but still apply.
Then you run into the modern dogma that race is a “social construct,” or has no basis in biology. As you remember from biology class, your genotype or genetic makeup determines your phenotype or the traits that show up in you. Obviously, then, consistent differences between people have some root in genetics.
But thanks to those who want to be the popular kids, that’s not what you’re hearing from the multibillion dollar media sources of your government and your mainstream media.
However, some information has sneaked through the cracks and so I’m compiling it here. The purpose of this post is not to affirm racism, superiority or inferiority, or any of that jazz; its only purpose is to point out that race does have a biological construct, and because all traits originate in genetic information, it’s insane to insist any consistent difference in appearance, behavior or biological process has anything but a genetic basis.
Let’s begin.
Recent research has produced a surprise, however. Population geneticists expected to find dramatic differences as they got a look at the full genomes — about 25,000 genes — of people of widely varying ethnic and geographic backgrounds. Specifically, they expected to find that many ethnic groups would have derived alleles that their members shared but that were uncommon or nonexistent in other groups. Each regional, ethnic group or latitude was thought to have a genomic “signature” — the record of its recent evolution through natural selection.
All of Earth’s people, according to a new analysis of the genomes of 53 populations, fall into just three genetic groups. They are the products of the first and most important journey our species made — the walk out of Africa about 70,000 years ago by a small fraction of ancestral Homo sapiens.
One group is the African. It contains the descendants of the original humans who emerged in East Africa about 200,000 years ago. The second is the Eurasian, encompassing the natives of Europe, the Middle East and Southwest Asia (east to about Pakistan). The third is the East Asian, the inhabitants of Asia, Japan and Southeast Asia, and — thanks to the Bering Land Bridge and island-hopping in the South Pacific — of the Americas and Oceania as well.
Washington Post
The writer injects a certain amount of political correctness into the article, so I reversed the order of the three paragraphs above. The point is this: we can trace the history of evolution through genes, and it shows us three groups which have small but crucial differences caused by “genetic drift” — in this case, the traits kept by being successful in the different areas to which these new populations adapted.
Geneticists are uncovering another level of human ethnic diversity: It may not be which genes we have so much as the way they behave that accounts for our differences. Using the International HapMap Project, which catalogs human gene variants across populations, University of Pennsylvania researchers Vivian Cheung and Richard Spielman first collected the gene sequences of a particular white blood cell from 82 Asians and 60 people of European descent. Then, using microarray chips, they measured expression levels of those genes.
What they found was surprising: Although which genes were present didn’t differ dramatically between the Asians and the Europeans, their expression did. And that expression was governed by single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)—one-letter changes in DNA*—in nearby regulator regions that determine how much of a gene’s product is made. Overall, 25 percent of the genes seem to show different levels of expression in Asians versus Europeans, and SNPs in regulatory regions probably account for much of the difference. In the case of one gene, researchers found that Caucasians expressed it at 22 times the strength that Asians did.
Discover
I quote this article first for two reasons: first, it shows the clear differences in genetics; second, it shows that we’re not looking for a race gene, or identical genetics; we’re looking for genetic coding that expresses what goes into the organism.
As the article points out, the differences weren’t dramatic — but they occurred in crucial areas, just like the difference between the computer code for a word processor and a database program is mostly the same, but has important details changed. It’s like saying to person A “Take ten of these red pills, and five of the green, after each meal” and to person B “Take five of these red pills, and ten of the green, before each meal” — small but vitally different instructions.
And lest you missed it:
25 percent of the genes seem to show different levels of expression in Asians versus Europeans
One quarter of the instructions you give to person A and person B are substantially different, although both involve red pills and green pills.
Next up, a neat cascade by Steve Hsu, who fired off one of the more recent salvos in this fight by pointing out the obvious:
We were told long ago that there is no scientific basis for race. Yet, it would be surprising if the distribution of individual genes were the same in all ethnic groups, with their different evolutionary histories of the last tens of thousands of years. In fact, mtDNA tests can readily identify which of a few dozen matrilineal lines any modern human belongs to. Each of these lines can in turn be traced to certain geographical regions to which early humans migrated from Africa, and correspond reasonably well to conventional racial categories.
Researchers last week described a new drug, called BiDil, that sharply reduces death from heart disease among African-Americans. …But not everyone is cheering unreservedly. Many people, including some African-Americans, have long been uneasy with the concept of race-based medicine, in part from fear that it may legitimize less benign ideas about race.
…The emergence of BiDil, described last week in The New England Journal of Medicine, is a sharp reality test for an academic debate about race and medicine that has long occupied the pages of medical journals. Is there a biological basis for race? If there is not, as many social scientists and others argue, how can a drug like BiDil work so well in one race?
…This month, in a special issue on race published by the journal Nature Genetics, several geneticists wrote that people can generally be assigned to their continent of origin on the basis of their DNA, and that these broad geographical regions correspond to self-identified racial categories, such as African, East Asian, European and Native American. Race, in other words, does have a genetic basis, in their view.
…Some African-Americans fear that if doctors start to make diagnoses by race, then some in the public may see that as a basis for imputing behavioral traits as well. ”If you think in terms of taxonomies of race, you will make the dangerous conclusion that race will explain violence,” says Dr. Troy Duster, a sociologist at New York University.
NYT
InfoProc
I like how he excerpts the vital parts of this article. But the point is clear, and this article was the first mention of it in the public eye: the races are biologically different, e.g. in homeostatic process, not just bone density, skull/facial shape, skin color, hair type, etc.
But now we’re looking at it as biology as well:
But several other geneticists writing in the same issue of the journal say the human family tree is divided into branches that correspond to the ancestral populations of each major continent, and that these branches coincide with the popular notion of race. “The emerging picture is that populations do, generally, cluster by broad geographic regions that correspond with common racial classification (Africa, Europe, Asia, Oceania, Americas),” say Dr. Sarah A. Tishkoff of the University of Maryland and Dr. Kenneth K. Kidd of Yale.
Although there is not much genetic variation between the populations of each continent, write Dr. Joanna L. Mountain and Dr. Neil Risch of Stanford University, new data “coincide closely with groups defined by self-identified race or continental ancestry.” The data is based on DNA elements outside the genes with no bearing on the body’s physical form.
The pattern reflects the fact that once humans dispersed from Africa, the populations on each continent started breeding in isolation and developing their own set of genetic variations.
NYT
“Not much” is somewhat arbitrary. Just as one percent of a computer program being changed could cause it to act radically differently, even a tenth of a percent of our DNA being different could create different results. Even more, DNA is not linear, so a single difference in a key place makes it operate differently. So when scientists bandy about terms like us being 90% similar to chimpanzees, or 99% similar between ethnic groups, keep in mind that those figures understate how radically different the results can be.
Forensic experts are increasingly relying on DNA as “a genetic eyewitness,” says Jack Ballantyne, associate director for research at the National Center for Forensic Science at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, who is studying whether a DNA sample can reveal a person’s age.
The push to predict physical features from genetic material is known as DNA forensic phenotyping, and it’s already helped crack some difficult investigations. In 2004, police caught a Louisiana serial killer who eyewitnesses had suggested was white, but whose crime-scene DNA suggested — correctly — that he was black. Britain’s forensic service uses a similar “ethnic inference” test to trace murderers and rapists.
In 2007, a DNA test based on 34 genetic biomarkers developed by Christopher Phillips, a forensic geneticist at the University of Santiago de Compostelo in Spain, indicated that one of the suspects associated with the Madrid bombings was of North African origin. His body was mostly destroyed in an explosion. Using other clues, police later confirmed he had been an Algerian, thereby validating the test results.
Worried about the ethical and social challenges, Germany doesn’t permit the forensic use of DNA to infer ethnicity or physical traits. Nor do a handful of U.S. states, including Indiana, Wyoming and Rhode Island. The U.K. and the Netherlands allow it.
DNA-based racial profiling “has to be used carefully,” especially in a diverse country like America, says Bert-Jaap Koops of Tilburg University in the Netherlands, who has studied the regulatory picture in different countries. “Some people could make connections between race, crime and genetic disposition” and thereby encourage stigmatization.
WSJ
A small amount makes a big difference. And by reading that genetic history, we can tell where something evolved and, increasingly, what its traits are.
Biologists have constructed a genetic map of Europe showing the degree of relatedness between its various populations.
All the populations are quite similar, but the differences are sufficient that it should be possible to devise a forensic test to tell which country in Europe an individual probably comes from, said Manfred Kayser, a geneticist at the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands.
The genetic map of Europe bears a clear structural similarity to the geographic map. The major genetic differences are between populations of the north and south (the vertical axis of the map shows north-south differences, the horizontal axis those of east-west). The area assigned to each population reflects the amount of genetic variation in it.