{"id":59146,"date":"2019-10-27T01:15:37","date_gmt":"2019-10-27T01:15:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=59146"},"modified":"2019-10-27T01:15:37","modified_gmt":"2019-10-27T01:15:37","slug":"race-genetics-and-pseudoscience-an-explainer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=59146","title":{"rendered":"Race, genetics and pseudoscience: an explainer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Race, genetics and pseudoscience: an explainer<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Ewan’s Blog: Bioinformatician at Large<\/a>
\n2019-10-24<\/p>\n

Ewan Birney<\/strong><\/a>, Joint Director
\nEuropean Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom<\/em><\/p>\n

Jennifer Raff<\/strong><\/a>, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
\nUniversity of Kansas<\/em><\/p>\n

Adam Rutherford<\/strong><\/a>, Professor of Genetics, Evolution & Environment
\nUniversity College London<\/em><\/p>\n

Aylwyn Scally<\/strong><\/a>, Professor of Genetics
\nUniversity of Cambridge<\/em><\/p>\n

Human genetics tells us about the similarities and differences between people \u2013 in our physical and psychological traits, and in our susceptibility to disorders and diseases \u2013 but our DNA<\/a> can also reveal the broader story of our evolution, ancestry and history. Genetics is a new scientific field, relatively speaking, merely a century old. Over the last two decades, the pace of discovery has accelerated dramatically, with exciting new findings appearing daily. Even for scientists who study this field, it\u2019s difficult to keep up.<\/p>\n

Amidst this ongoing surge of new information, there are darker currents. A small number of researchers, mostly well outside of the scientific mainstream, have seized upon some of the new findings and methods in human genetics, and are part of a social-media cottage-industry that disseminates and amplifies low-quality or distorted science, sometimes in the form of scientific papers, sometimes as internet memes \u2013 under the guise of euphemisms such as \u2018race realism\u2019 or \u2018human biodiversity\u2019. Their arguments, which focus on racial groupings and often on the alleged genetically-based intelligence differences between them, have the semblance of science, with technical-seeming tables, graphs, and charts. But they\u2019re misleading in several important ways. The aim of this article is to provide an accessible guide for scientists, journalists, and the general public for understanding, criticising and pushing back against these arguments…<\/p>\n

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

The aim of this article is to provide an accessible guide for scientists, journalists, and the general public for understanding, criticising and pushing back against these arguments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,2039,8,23],"tags":[30454,20331,30453,30457,30459,30458,30455,30456],"class_list":["post-59146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-health-medicine","category-media-archive","category-teaching","tag-adam-david-rutherford","tag-adam-rutherford","tag-aylwyn-scally","tag-ewan-birney","tag-ewans-blog","tag-ewans-blog-bioinformatician-at-large","tag-jennifer-a-raff","tag-jennifer-raff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59146","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=59146"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59147,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59146\/revisions\/59147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}