Posted: Sun 28 Aug 2005 01:09 Post subject: A Family Tree in Every Gene
The great "mixed race" continuum doesn't exist to these people who are desperate to prove that the official racial categories are valid.
Quote:
March 14, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
A Family Tree in Every Gene
New York Times
By ARMAND MARIE LEROI
London — Shortly after last year's tsunami devastated the lands on the Indian Ocean, The Times of India ran an article with this headline: "Tsunami May Have Rendered Threatened Tribes Extinct." The tribes in question were the Onge, Jarawa, Great Andamanese and Sentinelese - all living on the Andaman Islands - and they numbered some 400 people in all. The article, noting that several of the archipelago's islands were low-lying, in the direct path of the wave, and that casualties were expected to be high, said, "Some beads may have just gone missing from the Emerald Necklace of India."
The metaphor is as colorful as it is well intentioned. But what exactly does it mean? After all, in a catastrophe that cost more than 150,000 lives, why should the survival of a few hundred tribal people have any special claim on our attention? There are several possible answers to this question. The people of the Andamans have a unique way of life. True, their material culture does not extend beyond a few simple tools, and their visual art is confined to a few geometrical motifs, but they are hunter-gatherers and so a rarity in the modern world. Linguists, too, find them interesting since they collectively speak three languages seemingly unrelated to any others. But the Times of India took a slightly different tack. These tribes are special, it said, because they are of "Negrito racial stocks" that are "remnants of the oldest human populations of Asia and Australia."
It's an old-fashioned, even Victorian, sentiment. Who speaks of "racial stocks" anymore? After all, to do so would be to speak of something that many scientists and scholars say does not exist. If modern anthropologists mention the concept of race, it is invariably only to warn against and dismiss it. Likewise many geneticists. "Race is social concept, not a scientific one," according to Dr. Craig Venter - and he should know, since he was first to sequence the human genome. The idea that human races are only social constructs has been the consensus for at least 30 years.
But now, perhaps, that is about to change. Last fall, the prestigious journal Nature Genetics devoted a large supplement to the question of whether human races exist and, if so, what they mean. The journal did this in part because various American health agencies are making race an important part of their policies to best protect the public - often over the protests of scientists. In the supplement, some two dozen geneticists offered their views. Beneath the jargon, cautious phrases and academic courtesies, one thing was clear: the consensus about social constructs was unraveling. Some even argued that, looked at the right way, genetic data show that races clearly do exist.
The dominance of the social construct theory can be traced to a 1972 article by Dr. Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist, who wrote that most human genetic variation can be found within any given "race." If one looked at genes rather than faces, he claimed, the difference between an African and a European would be scarcely greater than the difference between any two Europeans. A few years later he wrote that the continued popularity of race as an idea was an "indication of the power of socioeconomically based ideology over the supposed objectivity of knowledge." Most scientists are thoughtful, liberal-minded and socially aware people. It was just what they wanted to hear.
Three decades later, it seems that Dr. Lewontin's facts were correct, and have been abundantly confirmed by ever better techniques of detecting genetic variety. His reasoning, however, was wrong. His error was an elementary one, but such was the appeal of his argument that it was only a couple of years ago that a Cambridge University statistician, A. W. F. Edwards, put his finger on it.
The error is easily illustrated. If one were asked to judge the ancestry of 100 New Yorkers, one could look at the color of their skin. That would do much to single out the Europeans, but little to distinguish the Senegalese from the Solomon Islanders. The same is true for any other feature of our bodies. The shapes of our eyes, noses and skulls; the color of our eyes and our hair; the heaviness, height and hairiness of our bodies are all, individually, poor guides to ancestry.
But this is not true when the features are taken together. Certain skin colors tend to go with certain kinds of eyes, noses, skulls and bodies. When we glance at a stranger's face we use those associations to infer what continent, or even what country, he or his ancestors came from - and we usually get it right. To put it more abstractly, human physical variation is correlated; and correlations contain information.
Genetic variants that aren't written on our faces, but that can be detected only in the genome, show similar correlations. It is these correlations that Dr. Lewontin seems to have ignored. In essence, he looked at one gene at a time and failed to see races. But if many - a few hundred - variable genes are considered simultaneously, then it is very easy to do so. Indeed, a 2002 study by scientists at the University of Southern California and Stanford showed that if a sample of people from around the world are sorted by computer into five groups on the basis of genetic similarity, the groups that emerge are native to Europe, East Asia, Africa, America and Australasia - more or less the major races of traditional anthropology.
One of the minor pleasures of this discovery is a new kind of genealogy. Today it is easy to find out where your ancestors came from - or even when they came, as with so many of us, from several different places. If you want to know what fraction of your genes are African, European or East Asian, all it takes is a mouth swab, a postage stamp and $400 - though prices will certainly fall.
Yet there is nothing very fundamental about the concept of the major continental races; they're just the easiest way to divide things up. Study enough genes in enough people and one could sort the world's population into 10, 100, perhaps 1,000 groups, each located somewhere on the map. This has not yet been done with any precision, but it will be. Soon it may be possible to identify your ancestors not merely as African or European, but Ibo or Yoruba, perhaps even Celt or Castilian, or all of the above.
The identification of racial origins is not a search for purity. The human species is irredeemably promiscuous. We have always seduced or coerced our neighbors even when they have a foreign look about them and we don't understand a word. If Hispanics, for example, are composed of a recent and evolving blend of European, American Indian and African genes, then the Uighurs of Central Asia can be seen as a 3,000-year-old mix of West European and East Asian genes. Even homogenous groups like native Swedes bear the genetic imprint of successive nameless migrations.
Some critics believe that these ambiguities render the very notion of race worthless. I disagree. The physical topography of our world cannot be accurately described in words. To navigate it, you need a map with elevations, contour lines and reference grids. But it is hard to talk in numbers, and so we give the world's more prominent features - the mountain ranges and plateaus and plains - names. We do so despite the inherent ambiguity of words. The Pennines of northern England are about one-tenth as high and long as the Himalayas, yet both are intelligibly described as mountain ranges.
So, too, it is with the genetic topography of our species. The billion or so of the world's people of largely European descent have a set of genetic variants in common that are collectively rare in everyone else; they are a race. At a smaller scale, three million Basques do as well; so they are a race as well. Race is merely a shorthand that enables us to speak sensibly, though with no great precision, about genetic rather than cultural or political differences.
But it is a shorthand that seems to be needed. One of the more painful spectacles of modern science is that of human geneticists piously disavowing the existence of races even as they investigate the genetic relationships between "ethnic groups." Given the problematic, even vicious, history of the word "race," the use of euphemisms is understandable. But it hardly aids understanding, for the term "ethnic group" conflates all the possible ways in which people differ from each other.
Indeed, the recognition that races are real should have several benefits. To begin with, it would remove the disjunction in which the government and public alike defiantly embrace categories that many, perhaps most, scholars and scientists say do not exist.
Second, the recognition of race may improve medical care. Different races are prone to different diseases. The risk that an African-American man will be afflicted with hypertensive heart disease or prostate cancer is nearly three times greater than that for a European-American man. On the other hand, the former's risk of multiple sclerosis is only half as great. Such differences could be due to socioeconomic factors. Even so, geneticists have started searching for racial differences in the frequencies of genetic variants that cause diseases. They seem to be finding them.
Race can also affect treatment. African-Americans respond poorly to some of the main drugs used to treat heart conditions - notably beta blockers and angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors. Pharmaceutical corporations are paying attention. Many new drugs now come labeled with warnings that they may not work in some ethnic or racial groups. Here, as so often, the mere prospect of litigation has concentrated minds.
Such differences are, of course, just differences in average. Everyone agrees that race is a crude way of predicting who gets some disease or responds to some treatment. Ideally, we would all have our genomes sequenced before swallowing so much as an aspirin. Yet until that is technically feasible, we can expect racial classifications to play an increasing part in health care.
The argument for the importance of race, however, does not rest purely on utilitarian grounds. There is also an aesthetic factor. We are a physically variable species. Yet for all the triumphs of modern genetics, we know next to nothing about what makes us so. We do not know why some people have prominent rather than flat noses, round rather than pointed skulls, wide rather than narrow faces, straight rather than curly hair. We do not know what makes blue eyes blue.
One way to find out would be to study people of mixed race ancestry. In part, this is because racial differences in looks are the most striking that we see. But there is also a more subtle technical reason. When geneticists map genes, they rely on the fact that they can follow our ancestors' chromosomes as they get passed from one generation to the next, dividing and mixing in unpredictable combinations. That, it turns out, is much easier to do in people whose ancestors came from very different places.
The technique is called admixture mapping. Developed to find the genes responsible for racial differences in inherited disease, it is only just moving from theory to application. But through it, we may be able to write the genetic recipe for the fair hair of a Norwegian, the black-verging-on-purple skin of a Solomon Islander, the flat face of an Inuit, and the curved eyelid of a Han Chinese. We shall no longer gawp ignorantly at the gallery; we shall be able to name the painters.
There is a final reason race matters. It gives us reason - if there were not reason enough already - to value and protect some of the world's most obscure and marginalized people. When the Times of India article referred to the Andaman Islanders as being of ancient Negrito racial stock, the terminology was correct. Negrito is the name given by anthropologists to a people who once lived throughout Southeast Asia. They are very small, very dark, and have peppercorn hair. They look like African pygmies who have wandered away from Congo's jungles to take up life on a tropical isle. But they are not.
The latest genetic data suggest that the Negritos are descended from the first modern humans to have invaded Asia, some 100,000 years ago. In time they were overrun or absorbed by waves of Neolithic agriculturalists, and later nearly wiped out by British, Spanish and Indian colonialists. Now they are confined to the Malay Peninsula, a few islands in the Philippines and the Andamans.
Happily, most of the Andamans' Negritos seem to have survived December's tsunami. The fate of one tribe, the Sentinelese, remains uncertain, but an Indian coast guard helicopter sent to check up on them came under bow and arrow attack, which is heartening. Even so, Negrito populations, wherever they are, are so small, isolated and impoverished that it seems certain that they will eventually disappear.
Yet even after they have gone, the genetic variants that defined the Negritos will remain, albeit scattered, in the people who inhabit the littoral of the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea. They will remain visible in the unusually dark skin of some Indonesians, the unusually curly hair of some Sri Lankans, the unusually slight frames of some Filipinos. But the unique combination of genes that makes the Negritos so distinctive, and that took tens of thousands of years to evolve, will have disappeared. A human race will have gone extinct, and the human species will be the poorer for it.
Armand Marie Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist at Imperial College in London, is the author of "Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body."
Posted: Sat 03 Oct 2009 20:47 Post subject: Is Race Real?
HERE is an interesting site relating to the Leroi controversy. It includes many essays addressing this paper.
Quote:
In a March 14, 2005, Op-Ed piece published in The New York Times, Dr. Armand Marie Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist at Imperial College in London, challenged scholarly approaches that treat race as a social construction, arguing that recent research in the biological and the social sciences offers fresh evidence that racial differences are genetically identifiable. His editorial, "A Family Tree in Every Gene," expresses a more widespread tendency among certain communities of researchers to revise longstanding scientific understandings about the relationship between race and genetics.
The SSRC believes the subject of race and genomics warrants critical reflection and debate among researchers and the broader public, given its important implications across an array of disciplines in the biological and social sciences, its potential impact on a number of policy domains, as well as broader consequences for society at large. In an effort to contribute to this discussion, we have commissioned a series of short essays by leading researchers with a diverse set of disciplinary and analytic perspectives. We hope this forum will serve as a tool for scholars, educators, policy makers and students, and promote informed debate on what is no doubt one of the most important public issues of our time.
Contributors to the forum include:
*Troy Duster, member and then chair of the advisory committee on Ethical, Legal and Social Issues (ELSI) program at the National Human Genome Research Institute (Human Genome Project), is president of the American Sociological Association and has published widely on the subject of race and genetics, including the book Back Door to Eugenics.
*Alan Goodman is professor of biological anthropology at Hampshire College and co-editor of Genetic Nature/Culture: Anthropology and Science Beyond the Cultural Divide and Building a New Biocultural Synthesis: Political-Economic Perspectives on Human Biology. He is president-elect of the American Anthropological Association.
*Joseph L. Graves, Jr. is University Core Director and Professor of Biological Sciences at Fairleigh Dickinson University. His research concerns the evolutionary genetics of postponed aging and biological concepts of race in humans. He is the author of The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium, and The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1994.
*Evelynn M. Hammonds is professor of the history of science and of African and African American studies at Harvard University. Her current work focuses on the intersection of scientific, medical, and socio-political concepts of race in the United States. She is completing a book called The Logic of Difference: A History of Race in Science and Medicine in the United States, 1850–1990.
*Ruth Hubbard is Professor Emerita of Biology at Harvard University. She has worked and written on the politics of health care since the early 1970s. In 1993 she and her son, Elijah Wald, wrote Exploding The Gene Myth: How Genetic Information Is Produced and Manipulated by Scientists, Physicians, Employers, Insurance Companies, Educators, and Law Enforcers.
*Jay Kaufman is an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health and a fellow of the Carolina Population Center. He has written a number of articles on the ways in which health status varies by race, class and other socioeconomic quantities, and has co-written an important essay for the New England Journal of Medicine called "Race and Genomics."
*Nancy Krieger is associate professor of society, human development, and health at Harvard University. She has published numerous articles on social inequalities in health and has recently edited Embodying Inequality: Epidemiologic Perspectives.
*Roger N. Lancaster is professor of anthropology and director of the Cultural Studies Ph.D. Program at George Mason University. His most recent book is The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture.
*Armand Marie Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist at Imperial College in London, is the author of Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body.
*R.C. Lewontin, Alexander Agassiz Professor Emeritus of Zoology at Harvard University, has written a number of books and articles on evolution and human variation, including Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA and The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment.
*Jonathan Marks is a molecular anthropologist who teaches at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He is author of Human Biodiversity and What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee.
*Ann Morning, assistant professor of sociology at New York University, has published a number of articles having to do with race and ethnicity, especially racial classification. Her most recent work is "From Sword to Plowshare: Using Race for Discrimination and Antidiscrimination in the United States" (with Daniel Sabbagh), forthcoming in International Social Science Journal.
*Jenny Reardon is assistant research professor of women's studies and Institute of Genome Sciences and Policy scholar at Duke University. She is the author of Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in a Genomic Age (Princeton University Press). Brady Dunklee is a recent graduate of Brown University in biology and science and technology studies (STS). Kara Wentworth is completing a bachelor's degree in human biology: race and gender and a high school teaching certificate program at Brown University this year.
*Jacqueline Stevens is an assistant professor in the Law and Society Program at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She writes on how states establish taxonomies of race and ethnicity. Her publications on this topic include Reproducing the State (Princeton, 1999) and "Racial Meanings and Scientific Methods: Policy Changes for NIH-funded Publications Reporting Human Variation," Journal of Health Policy Politics and Law (2003).
I have been reading up a bit in order to try and figure out where Armand Leroi was coming from, and was hoping to get some views from members of this forum. His homepage is down (at least temporarily) but here is a video entitled THE NATURE OF NORMAL HUMAN VARIETY. A transcript of the video is found HERE. It relates to his 2003 book on "Mutants" which surely relates to his thinking on the NYTimes piece.
Somewhat seperately, it does not seem to me that his biology is his problem, but that he has a misunderstanding of sociology and that "race" in society is not the same thing as what he discusses as "race" in biology, which might more aptly termed as "clustering" to avoid confusion.
"race" in society is not the same thing as what he discusses as "race" in biology, which might more aptly termed as "clustering" to avoid confusion.
The lack of objective definition is what stifles discussion of "race." Almost everyone "knows" what they mean by the term "race", but no one can define it objectively. If "races" are genetic traits that cluster geographically and can reliably differentiate human populations, then the most thoroughly replicated, well-known "races" are called "A", "B", "AB", and "O". To which most reply, "that's not what I mean by 'race'." To which I reply, "Then what do you mean?" To which most reply, "White, Black, Red, and Yellow," (or some other equally arbitrary a priori grouping that can be replicated only by the speaker).
Without objective definition even the most elementary communication is impossible. The hallmark of those who opine on "race" is their scrupulous avoidance of objective definition, exploiting creative ambiguity in every clause. They thus expel themselves from the realm of scientific discourse and join the realm of politics/religion.
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