{"id":56020,"date":"2018-03-25T02:14:09","date_gmt":"2018-03-25T02:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=56020"},"modified":"2018-03-25T03:00:22","modified_gmt":"2018-03-25T03:00:22","slug":"how-genetics-is-changing-our-understanding-of-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=56020","title":{"rendered":"How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of \u2018Race\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

How Genetics Is Changing Our Understanding of \u2018Race\u2019<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Sunday Review<\/a>
\nGray Matter<\/a>
\nThe New York Times<\/a>
\n2018-03-23<\/p>\n

David Reich<\/strong><\/a>, Professor of Genetics
\nHarvard Medical School<\/em>
\nalso, Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\nAngie Wang<\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

In 1942, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu<\/a> published \u201cMan\u2019s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race<\/a>,\u201d an influential book that argued that race is a social concept with no genetic basis. A classic example often cited is the inconsistent definition of \u201cblack.\u201d In the United States<\/a>, historically, a person is \u201cblack\u201d if he has any sub-Saharan African ancestry; in Brazil<\/a>, a person is not \u201cblack\u201d if he is known to have any European ancestry. If \u201cblack\u201d refers to different people in different contexts, how can there be any genetic basis to it?<\/p>\n

Beginning in 1972, genetic findings began to be incorporated into this argument. That year, the geneticist Richard Lewontin<\/a> published an important study of variation in protein types in blood. He grouped the human populations he analyzed into seven \u201craces\u201d \u2014 West Eurasians, Africans, East Asians, South Asians, Native Americans, Oceanians and Australians \u2014 and found that around 85 percent of variation in the protein types could be accounted for by variation within populations and \u201craces,\u201d and only 15 percent by variation across them. To the extent that there was variation among humans, he concluded, most of it was because of \u201cdifferences between individuals.\u201d<\/p>\n

In this way, a consensus was established that among human populations there are no differences large enough to support the concept of \u201cbiological race.\u201d Instead, it was argued, race is a \u201csocial construct,\u201d a way of categorizing people that changes over time and across countries.<\/p>\n

It is true that race is a social construct. It is also true, as Dr. Lewontin wrote, that human populations \u201care remarkably similar to each other\u201d from a genetic point of view…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have deep sympathy for the concern that genetic discoveries could be misused to justify racism. But as a geneticist I also know that it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among \u201craces.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2039,8],"tags":[1409,28252,28254,28251,28253,18810,28255,13562,2640,9029,2470,2327],"class_list":["post-56020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-health-medicine","category-media-archive","tag-ashley-montagu","tag-augustine-kong","tag-beth-shapiro","tag-daniel-benjamin","tag-danielle-posthuma","tag-david-reich","tag-henry-harpending","tag-james-watson","tag-new-york-times","tag-nicholas-wade","tag-richard-lewontin","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56020"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56021,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56020\/revisions\/56021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}