Mixed Race Studies

Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You, Second Edition: Busting Myths about Human Nature

University of California Press
May 2022
352 pages
Illustrations: 10 b/w illustrations
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 9780520379602
eBook ISBN: 9780520976818

Agustín Fuentes, Professor of Anthropology
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

A compelling takedown of prevailing myths about human behavior, updated and expanded to meet the current moment.

There are three major myths of human nature: humans are divided into biological races; humans are naturally aggressive; and men and women are wholly different in behavior, desires, and wiring. Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You counters these pervasive and pernicious myths about human behavior. Agustín Fuentes tackles misconceptions about what race, aggression, and sex really mean for humans, and incorporates an accessible understanding of culture, genetics, and evolution that requires us to dispose of notions of “nature or nurture.”

Presenting scientific evidence from diverse fields, including anthropology, biology, and psychology, Fuentes devises a myth-busting toolkit to dismantle persistent fallacies about the validity of biological races, the innateness of aggression and violence, and the nature of monogamy, sex, and gender. This revised and expanded edition provides up-to-date references, data, and analyses, and addresses new topics, including the popularity of home DNA testing kits and the rise of ‘”incel” culture; the resurgence of racist, nativist thinking and the internet’s influence in promoting bad science; and a broader understanding of the diversity of sex and gender.

We need treatments based on actual and not assumed genetic variation. That means assessing the patterns of diversity that reflect the distribution of human genetic variation across the globe. To this end, genetic ancestry should be understood as a continuum that it is not categorized in such a way that serves as a surrogate for race (40). Contemporary usage of continental ancestry categories (e.g., European, Middle Eastern, South Asian, Oceanic, East Asian, American, and African) serves as an example of how presumed “ancestral” geographies are assumed as equivalent to biological categories and serve as a false proxy for race. Such groupings correspond to Western racial categorizations and assume genetic homogeneity based on geographical separation, but these groupings misrepresent the actual distribution of genetic variants and neglect continuous movement of people and the resulting degree of mixture across global populations.

Talia Krainc and Agustín Fuentes, “Genetic ancestry in precision medicine is reshaping the race debate,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 119, Number 12, Article e2203033119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2203033119.

Sucks that this needs repeating: "Black" "White" "Asian" "African" "European" are not biological groupings/categories or proxies thereof. Thus using such labels in genetic analyses is error laden. Great paper showing (yet again) how and why this is the case soon.

— Agustin Fuentes (@Anthrofuentes) March 29, 2022

Genetic ancestry in precision medicine is reshaping the race debate

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Volume 119, Number 12, Article e2203033119
4 pages
2022-03-16
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2203033119

Talia Krainc
Department of Anthropology
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Agustín Fuentes, Professor of Anthropology
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey

Precision medicine is an emerging field with immense potential for better understanding of diseases and improved treatment outcomes (1). Its focus: patterns of human genetic variation in populations and individuals—and how such patterns influence disease pathology and treatment. The field rejects the “one size fits all” approach to understanding disease, aspiring to develop tailored therapies that optimize treatment efficacy. It’s a promising but fledgling field that faces numerous challenges, both scientific and practical. But one challenge has not been fully appreciated: the lack of genetic diversity in research and clinical studies (2, 3)…

Read the entire article here.

How Not To Talk About Race And Genetics

BuzzFeed
2018-03-30

Micah Baldwin / Via Flickr: micahb37

Race has long been a potent way of defining differences between human beings. But science and the categories it constructs do not operate in a political vacuum.

This open letter was produced by a group of 68 scientists and researchers. The full list of signatories can be found below.

In his newly published book Who We Are and How We Got Here, geneticist David Reich engages with the complex and often fraught intersections of genetics with our understandings of human differences — most prominently, race.

He admirably challenges misrepresentations about race and genetics made by the likes of former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade and Nobel Laureate James Watson. As an eminent scientist, Reich clearly has experience with the genetics side of this relationship. But his skillfulness with ancient and contemporary DNA should not be confused with a mastery of the cultural, political, and biological meanings of human groups.

As a group of 68 scholars from disciplines ranging across the natural sciences, medical and population health sciences, social sciences, law, and humanities, we would like to make it clear that Reich’s understanding of “race” — most recently in a Times column warning that “it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among ‘races’” — is seriously flawed…

Read the entire letter here.

Things to Know When Talking About Race and Genetics

Psychology Today
2014-05-13

Agustín Fuentes, Professor of Anthropology
University of Notre Dame

On May 5th, 2014, I shared the platform in a webinar debate with Nicholas Wade (former NYTimes Science Writer) about his new book “A Troublesome Inheritance – A discussion on genes, race and human history.” The debate was sponsored by the American Anthropological Association.

Wade’s assertions in the book (and our discussion) are that Humans are divided into genetically identified “continental races” and that there are significant differences in genetically based social behaviors between these “races” as a result of the last 50,000 years of human evolution.

Wade argues that social scientists are covering up these ideas and claims that a true discussion on race is repressed by most academics out of political correctness. These points were also made by Charles Murray in a laudatory review of Wade’s book in the Wall Street Journal. They are both wrong.

I am an academic and I love to talk about the data on race, so do many of my colleagues. The scientific data on human genetic variation and human evolution refute the claims there are multiple biological races in humans today and in the debate I offered articles, datasets, and work by biologists, geneticists, evolutionary theorists and even anthropologists to demonstrate this. Unfortunately, in such discussions the bulk of data, and its complexity, are too often ignored.

Avoiding direct challenge is a common tactic by people trying to use select slices of genetic data to “prove” that there are multiple biological races in humans today. This is a problem because dialogue on such an important topic should be encouraged and as open minded as possible, but it must also be accurately informed by the science of human biology. So here is a mini-primer on what we what we know about human genetics to help such a discussion (see the bibliography at the bottom of this post for very good articles on the topic)…

…5) Nearly all the genetic variation in our entire species is found in populations just in Africa, with most of the variation found in all populations outside of Africa making up a small subset of that variation…

…Given these facts, here is the key argument you need to remember: While different populations vary in some of the .1% of the genome, the way this variation is distributed does not map to biological races, either by continent or otherwise.

For example, when you compare people from Nigeria, Western Europe and Beijing you do get some patterned differences…but these specific groups do not reflect the entire continental areas of Africa, Europe, and Asia (the proposed “continental races” of African, Caucasian and Asian). There are no genetic patterns that link all populations in just Africa, just Asia or just Europe to one another to the exclusion of other populations in other places. If you compare geographically separated populations within the “continental” areas you get the same kind of variation as you would between them. Comparing Nigerians to Western Europeans to people from Beijing gives us the same kind of differences in variation patterns as does comparing people from Siberia, Tibet and Java, or from Finland, Wales and Yemen, or even Somalia, Liberia and South Africa— and none of these comparisons demonstrates “races.”…

Read the entire article here.