Race

[Anonymouse]

It should be noted that I do not agree with everything revisionism proclaims. However, let's not divert too much from the intended topic. Moderator's could perhaps weed out the above to posts.

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Forensic anthropology and the concept of race: If races don't exist, why are forensic anthropologists so good at identifying them?

Norman J. Sauer

Department of Anthropology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, U.S.A.

Available online 28 June 2002.


Abstract

Most anthropologists have abandoned the concept of race as a research tool and as a valid representation of human biological diversity. Yet, race identification continues to be one of the central foci of forensic anthropological casework and research. It is maintained in this paper that the successful assignment of race to a skeletal specimen is not a vindication of the race concept, but rather a prediction that an individual, while alive was assigned to a particular socially constructed `racial' category. A specimen may display features that point to African ancestry. In this country that person is likely to have been labeled Black regardless of whether or not such a race actually exists in nature.

Author Keywords: forensic anthropology; race; race identification; human variation

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"Human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. Evidence from the analysis of genetics (e.g., DNA) indicates that there is greater variation within racial groups than between them. These facts render any attempt to establish lines of division among biological populations both arbitrary and subjective."

American Anthropological Association, 1998

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Race and Gene Studies:
What Differences Make a Difference?


by Larry Adelman

In 1851 the Louisiana physician Dr. Samuel Cartwright observed a behavior evident in African African Americans but absent in whites. They tended to run away from slave plantations. He attributed this odd behavior to a disease peculiar to Negroes. He even gave the affliction a name, "drapetomania."

Cartwright's "run-away" disease elicits derisive laughter today. So too do all the other 19th and early 20th century exertions to distinguish races by facial angle, skull size, cranial index, length of shin bone and blood type. Our growing knowledge of the genome and human evolutionary history help us understand why all such efforts to locate the source of innate racial difference were doomed: it doesn't exist. Most geneticists and anthropologists who study human variation agree that humans just don't come bundled into three or four separate groups according to skin color and other physical traits.

Nonetheless, "discoveries" of racial difference resurface in the press with predictable regularity. Often they spotlight differential rates of diseases, or responses to a drug. Sometimes they zero in on a genetics study.

That was the case recently with a report published in Science magazine (Dec. 20, 2002). Noah Rosenberg, Marcus Feldman and others analyzed the variation in 377 different DNA sequences from 1056 individuals from around the world. They found that 95% of the DNA variation they studied is due to differences between individuals within any continent. But they also found they could use the remaining 5% of the variation as genetic "footprints" indicating the continent from which an individual's recent ancestors came.

Some were quick to interpret these results as evidence that old-fashioned notions of the "races of man" have been correct all along. But does it? What do these studies actually tell us? And why should our interpretations matter?

Reports about such studies commonly fall prey to three confusions: they conflate DNA markers of ancestry with markers of race. They mistake the fact that some gene variants are more common in some populations than others as signs of racial "difference" between those populations. And they assume that disparities in group outcomes can be attributed to inborn, or genetic, differences between races.

The idea of biological race assumes traits come packaged together, even color-coded for our convenience, as anthropologist Jonathan Marks jokes. In otherwords, if biological race were real, we'd find that skin color or other "racial" markers would correlate with a suite of other genetic traits. Knowing an individual's "race" should enable us to predict his or her other genes and traits.

But the DNA sequences studied by Rosenberg and his colleagues are not genes. Known by geneticists as "microsatellite short tandem repeats" (and more colloquially as "junk DNA"), they do not code for proteins, but just sit there taking up space in our DNA. Mutations in DNA sequences that don't code for anything are not affected by natural and sexual selection. They are neither selected for nor against but are simply passed down, generation to generation. Comparing these accumulated mutation patterns can provide clues to ancient population movements. But they have no effect on physical traits such as skin color or hair form or blood type.

In other words, the study accomplished the same thing our eyes do everyday. You can look at someone and stand a pretty good chance of identifying the continent where that person's recent ancestors lived, especially if you're gazing at someone whose family has resided in the same place for several generations - as did all the subjects of the study.

But what's that got to do with "race"? We all have ancestors from elsewhere - and if we go back far enough, about 70,000 or so years ago, all our ancestors can be traced back to Africa. But if our idea of race assumes that different groups each share among themselves a different suite of inborn traits, then we have to ask, "What difference makes a difference?" Certainly not micro-satellite short tandem repeats.

Still, there's no question that some gene forms show up more often in some populations than others: alleles that code for blue eyes, or the A, B, O blood groups, and of course, those alleles that influence skin color . (We all have the same 30,000 or so genes. But some genes come in different forms, or varieties, called alleles.) But just because some members of a population might carry a specific gene form, doesn't mean all members do. Only a small percentage of Ashkenazi Jews carry the Tay-Sachs allele. When a couple I know were screened upon their pregnancy, the non-Jewish partner was found to be the Tay-Sachs carrier, not the Jewish one.

That's because most human variation falls within, not between populations. About 85% of all genetic variation can, on average, be found within any local population, be they Swedes, Kikuyu, or Hmong. About 94% can be found within any continental population, consistent with what the Rosenberg Science study found. In fact, there are no characteristics, no traits, not even one gene that turns up in all members of one so-called race yet is absent from others.

Take sickle cell. Doctors were long taught that sickle cell anemia was a genetic disease of Negroes, a marker of their race. Yet sickle cell is found among peoples from central and western Africa, but not southern Africa. It is also carried by Turks, Yemenis, Indians, Greeks, and Sicilians. That's because sickle cell arose several thousand years ago as a mutation in one of the genes that codes for hemoglobin. The mutation soon spread to successive populations along the trade routes where malaria was common. It turns out that inheriting one sickle cell allele confers resistance to malaria and thus provides a selective advantage in malarial regions (inheriting sickle cell alleles from both parents causes sickle-cell disease). In other words, sickle cell, like tandem repeats in the Science study, is a marker not of skin color or race but ancestry, or more precisely, having ancestors from where malaria was common.

Like sickle cell, most traits are influenced by separate genes and inherited independently one from another. They are said to be "non-concordant." Someone with brown hair might carry A, B or O blood. Sub-Saharan Africans tend to have dark skin. But so too do Dravidians from India, Aborigines from Australia, and Melanesians from the South Pacific. Large numbers of West Africans are lactose intolerant as are Japanese, but East Africans aren't. German and Papua New Guinean populations have almost exactly the same frequencies of A, B and O blood. At one point on the genome an individual might share a gene form common in Africa, at another site East Asia, and still another, Europe. Jared Diamond and others have pointed out that for each trait we can classify people into "races" by that trait, each giving us different and overlapping races depending on the trait selected.

Indeed, the Rosenberg team found they could cluster the individuals in their sample into several different statistically significant groups, only one of which corresponded to five continents. They also found that no matter which clustering scheme they used, individuals could be placed in more than one group.

The reason for all this within-group variation is because unlike most other species, modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, are young, only about 150,000 years or so old, and we've always moved. As humans migrated around the globe, populations bumped into each other and shared their mates - and genes. Sometimes genes flowed across great distances - through trade, war, slavery, piracy, exile and migration. More often they flowed from village to village to village. Human populations just haven't been isolated from each other long enough to evolve into separate sub-species, or races.

Ancestry is important in genetics and health care. I would like to know if I were descended from a population at risk for sickle cell, or the blood disease porphyria, or Tay Sachs. Oliver Sachs has even written famously of an island of the colorblind. But because of non-concordance, the geographic shape of populations at genetic risk for a specific disease or adverse drug response change amoeba-like depending upon the trait under study. These populations do not map onto what we think of as race. To assume they do is medically troublesome on several accounts.

First, doctors might be tempted to use race as a very unreliable surrogate for an individual's own unique ancestry and patterns of inheritance. And insofar as 94% of all genetic variants can be found within any continent, assigning someone to a "racial" continent of origin is too gross a scale to narrow down the range of possibilities very much. (Some variants do correlate on a finer scale with ethnic groups, and on a scale smaller yet with recent family descent.)

But a belief in biological race also obscures the very salient consequences of race as lived experience. Race may be a biological myth, a social construction, but it nonetheless remains very real. It can even have biological effects. African Americans have among the highest rates of hypertension in the world. This was long assumed to be genetic, a "marker" of their nature. But then it was found that West Africans have among the world's lowest hypertension rates. A focus on race as innate biology, as genetic difference, would lead health professionals and policy makers to overlook social factors that might contribute to African American hypertension and heart disease, including the added stressor of living in a racist society.

Race is terribly relevant to life outcomes. The likelihood that toxic waste has been dumped in your neighborhood, your ability to get a home loan, the quality of your kid's education, connections to job opportunities, whether or not you're likely to be followed in a department store or pulled over by police, are all influenced by your race. Race does matter. Not race as genetics but race as lived experience, what sociologists call "social" race. Social race is an important variable for health researchers and epidemiologists.

The factors that lead to differential outcomes between races live not in any "racial" genes but in our social institutions and practices. It's easy to confuse the two. But doing so, like Dr. Cartwright's drapetomania, displaces our attention from those discriminatory practices to the "nature" of the victims. Blindness to the continuing impact of racism can be just as harmful as believing that race is biologically real. They both let society off the hook.

Larry Adelman is Series Executive Producer of RACE - The Power of an Illusion and co-director of California Newsreel.

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Race: Anthropologists say divisions were made by man

http://www.gazette.net/200018/frederickcty/state/10106-1.html

by Walter Lee Dozier
Staff Writer


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May 4, 2000


Evelyn Arias did not want to appear naïve when she asked her colleagues about a question on her census form.

But the 36-year-old Virginia resident was struggling with the section that asked her to identify herself in a racial category.

Both of her parents and grandparents were born in Costa Rica. Her mother has dark skin. Her father has light skin. She has Jamaican and Spanish ancestry. In Costa Rica, where she lived until she was 16, no one ever asked her about her "race."

"I said, 'Wow, this is hard,' " Arias said. "It asks me for my race, but I don't know what race I am. Is somebody supposed to tell me?"

Arias is not alone.

For more than 300 years, obsession with racial identity has permeated the social, political and economic structures of American society. At the beginning of the 21st century, it is a chief concern for politicians, activists, educators and religious leaders, who are scrambling to right the wrongs of the past and anticipate the challenges of the future.

But there is a growing core of social scientists who say there can be no social solution to race-related problems until Americans confront and understand the biological myths related to race.

They say it is essential to question the biological legitimacy and acceptance of the popular racial categories: Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid (white, Asian and black).

Anthropologists, who have been noticeably absent from much of the current discourse on race, are at the forefront of this new challenge. They are among scholars in disciplines such as biology, genetics and sociology who argue that nature did not make "race."

Society did.

Race and biology

"The notion of race has become a central theme for anthropologists because anthropologists were so critical in the development of the notion of race," said Leith Mullings, an anthropologist at the City University of New York Graduate Center. "Physical anthropology came into its own because of the concept of race."

The word "race" generally has been used and accepted as a synonym for "subspecies," which is defined as a distinct evolutionary lineage within a species. "Race" is mistakenly used to describe what anthropologists call human variation or diversity.

Human variation is the way anthropologists describe and explain diverse populations throughout the world. For example, skin color varies largely from light in the temperate areas in the north to dark in the tropical areas in the south. But skin tone is not related to nose shape or hair texture.

Dark skin may be associated with frizzy or kinky hair or with curly or wavy or straight hair -- all of which can be found among indigenous peoples in tropical regions. Anthropologists say these variations render any attempt to establish lines of divisions among biological populations both arbitrary and subjective.

DNA evidence indicates that most physical variation -- almost 94 percent -- takes place within so-called racial groups.

Americans are socially conditioned to view race as biologically natural and based on visible physical differences, such as skin color, hair texture, eye color, appearance and nose shape.

But scientific evidence shows that these physical traits have more to do with environmental factors than biogenetics. Thus, from a scientific perspective, race has no intrinsic relationship to human variation. It simply reflects the social meaning that has been imposed upon the variation.

Anthropologists argue that the consequence of continued use of outdated and confusing classifying terms is not a trivial issue.

"Over the years, and certainly today, the concept of race has contributed far more to misunderstanding and conflict among humans than it has to understanding and cooperation," said Alvin Wolfe, an anthropologist at the University of South Florida in Tampa. "For the past century, scientists have tended to confirm a European cultural belief that humans could be usefully categorized into three basic types -- Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid."

As science improved, Wolfe said, it became clear that human variation was much more complicated than racial classifications allow.

Scientific evidence also shows that the amount of variation among humans is less than in other species.

Most data about human variation come from genetic studies. These studies are quantifiable and replicable.

They show that regardless of how racial groups are defined, two people from the same racial group are about as different from each other as are two people from any two different racial groups.

"Skin color is not an accurate reflection of genetic makeup," said Fatimah Jackson, a biological anthropologist at the University of Maryland, College Park. "Scientific evidence does not support 19th century notions of human variation. We are one race from a biological point of view."

Jackson directs the Genomics Models Research Group, which uses anthropology, history and ecology to develop models for the study of human genetic diversity.

She said U.S. society has placed far too much importance on the way people look and has misunderstood that visual traits are a tiny, often insignificant component of overall human diversity or human variation.

"The physical traits have been overemphasized and uncritically linked to nonphysical assessments such as intelligence, morality and creativity," she said. "Especially in the United States where racial classifications are more rigid than in many other places in the world."

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Race and society

The Virginia-based American Anthropological Association calls race the most contentious issue in contemporary American society.

Founded in 1902, the association encourages research, promotes public understanding of anthropology and fosters the uses of anthropological information in addressing human problems.

AAA seized the theme of race in its September 1998 edition of its American Anthropologist journal to provide scientific clarification to the concept of race in order to foster a better understanding of racism.

"A lot of anthropologists tried to deconstruct these categories in the 1930s," said Margaret Overbey, AAA's director of government relations. "A lot of anthropologists viewed it differently from the beginning."

Overbey said the deconstruction of "race" as a biological category is essential for any earnest discussion about the social implications of race and, subsequently, racism.

However, Overbey said, AAA will not accept the often-raised notion that because there is no biological race, then there is no racism.

Race, she said, is not real, but racism is because it is the result of the social construction of race, which is based on an embedded hierarchical belief in a system of material relations that produce assumed power and privileges.

Research has shown that the idea of race has always carried more meaning than mere physical differences, she said. In the United States, race was a social invention of the 18th century.

The categories were constructed by leaders among European Americans who fabricated the cultural/behavioral characteristics associated with each race, linking superior traits with Europeans and negative and inferior traits with blacks and Indians.

"As long as people continue to think of race as biological, they will continue to see it that way," Overbey said. "Forensic anthropologists have been slower to come to this conclusion, but biological and cultural anthropologists came to the consensus that race is a social construction."

Race and history

When asked, many Americans cannot define race, except by physical appearance.

Racial categories have been particularly burdensome for blacks, but they have created significant social divisions and distance among many groups.

Virginia Commonwealth University anthropologist Audrey Smedley said race is a rather recent concept in human history. The historical record, she said, shows that neither the idea nor ideologies existed much before the 17th century.

In the United States, biophysical features have become markers of social status. Historically, Smedley said, race has been grounded in the myth of biologically separate, exclusive and distinct human populations.

"The English did not use race until the 17th century," said Smedley, who has taught a class called "The Origins of the Idea of Race" for nearly 20 years. "By the 18th century, everyone was using the terms. The terms became useful in the 18th century as a way to justify slavery and other unequal populations."

In this way, she said, racial categories have not lived up to their intended purpose -- to explain variations among humans.

What prevents us from understanding our diverse cultural norms and components, Smedley said, is the way we see race as a separate, biologically determined pattern of cultural behavior.

For example, certain diseases such as sickle-cell anemia and Tay-Sachs have been linked to specific racial groups -- sickle cell to blacks and Tay-Sachs to Jews.

While sickle-cell anemia is labeled a "black disease," scientific evidence shows that while the disease is frequent among American blacks and the West African peoples from whom slaves descend, it is also frequent among nonblack populations in Greece, Southern India and other regions of the world where high rates of malaria exist.

"The frequency of sickle-cell anemia is higher in some parts of Greece, Italy and East India than in many parts of Africa," the University of Maryland's Jackson said. "The responsible gene is linked to exposure to malaria."

Howard University biological anthropologist Michael Blakey concurs. He said early erroneous research hailed sickle cell as a marker for "Negro-ness."

"When it was found in Europeans, it was thought to be because of gene flow or through marriage," he said. "Sickle cell evolved as an adaptation for malaria. The trait is related to malaria and not race."

Race and medicine

Race also has been problematic in biomedical issues such as bone marrow donations. Many anthropologists say that when bone marrow matches are sought, using race may slow the process of finding a match. They recommend instead looking at a person's ethnic and geographic background or family history.

Consider the case of Brian Bauman, a U.S. Air Force Academy cadet who was diagnosed with leukemia several years ago.

Bauman was born in South Korea of Korean parents and adopted by U.S. citizens. After failing to find his biological parents or a match in the United States, Bauman's adoptive parents looked to his birthplace. The South Korean army had its soldiers tested, a match was found, and Bauman survived.

In this situation, anthropologists argue, a public appeal to Asians in general would have been far less effective.

"There is a need for more diversity among donors," Jackson said. "But when people use terms like 'Asian American' or 'white,' you have to ask what does that really mean.

"I've been at community settings where the issue of race-specific organ donations has been discussed, and it goes against what we understand about human diversity. It's not enough to ask African Americans or Hispanics to donate when looking for a particular match for a person who is socially classified African American or Hispanic."

University of South Florida secondary education professor Barbara Cruz found that out when she tried to answer a plea for a bone marrow donation.

Last year, Cruz, who was born in Cuba, responded to a bone marrow appeal for a 10-year-old boy in the Tampa Bay area. The boy was described as Hispanic.

When Cruz called to make arrangements for testing, she said, she was grilled by appeal organizers about her Hispanic origins and was asked to prove them by speaking Spanish.

When she added that her husband was willing to be tested, too, she was told he would not be a good candidate because he was not Hispanic.

"They said the test is very expensive, and thus only limited it to Hispanics," she said. "When I went for the test, I was taken to the area where the blood is extracted, and the nurse looked at me and asked me if I was a real Hispanic. I had to speak Spanish again.

"Their thinking is that linguistic ability makes you more Hispanic. What about second-generation people who do not have Spanish-language skills? Are they less Hispanic?"

Cruz said the irony of the situation is that a month or so later, she read in a newspaper that a match for the boy was found -- in Scandinavia.

"You would think someone would eat humble pie," said Cruz, who is writing a book for and about multiethnic teens and their identity issues. "This thing called race is not a biological reality. His match was found as far away as possible. This could have been used as a critical educational opportunity, but the article simply noted that a match was found. It was a bizarre experience."

The term Hispanic includes people from Spain to Costa Rica to Bolivia. The only thing they may have in common is language. Genetically, they may have a great deal of diversity.

Yet, Jackson points out, many medical doctors and epidemiologists continue to use racial categories as a premise for many of our medical models.

"Biomedicine has had a hard time dealing with human variation," she said. "We can't talk about discreet groups when it comes to biology. Yet in this country we continue to emphasize the categorization of people."

Race and intelligence

The American Anthropological Association is deeply concerned by recent public discussions that imply that intelligence is biologically determined by race.

When race is placed into a biological category, Margaret Overbey said, it legitimizes books and flawed research that inextricably link intelligence and race.

"The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life" by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, for example, declared in 1994 that whites in the United States are inherently more intelligent than blacks. The authors said they arrived at that conclusion after testing the IQ of blacks and whites.

"'The Bell Curve' prompted the AAA statement on race and intelligence," Overbey said. The statement said that intelligence cannot be measured by race, and that there are many kinds of intelligence with no proven scientific methods of accurately measuring.

"We don't know who they tested," said Jackson, referring to "The Bell Curve" authors. "Blacks and whites in this country have overlapping genealogies. ... They are ignoring the historical continuum of European and African people. They don't know to what extent the genetic identification differs from the cultural identification."

From a biological point of view, scientists say, the average black gets 30 percent of his or her genetics from non-African ancestry.

Historian F. James Davis wrote in his 1991 book "Who is Black? One Nation's Definition" that an unknown amount of white-black relations took place in Africa and Europe, long before European settlements of North America began.

Davis is convinced that the population in the United States is far less divided biologically than socially.

"Portuguese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and other European explorers, traders, conquerors and colonizers had produced racially mixed offspring, especially in African coastal areas," Davis wrote, adding that African Moors and Arabs colonized the Iberian Peninsula for some 700 years.

Thus, he concluded, European settlers in the American colonies were not pure whites, and the enslaved people they brought were not pure African blacks.

Furthermore, anthropologists say, scientific knowledge is not yet sophisticated enough to establish what intelligence really is.

"Studies show that there is greater IQ variation among the white population in the United States than between whites and blacks," Audrey Smedley said. "IQ means knowledge. There are many kinds of intelligence."

Jackson said Americans have spent too much time and energy focusing on human differences when resources would be better spent trying to understand what differences exist within groups and, better yet, what different groups have in common.

For example, she said, science has found that 20 percent of the population in Western Europe have a genetic condition that prevents the development of AIDS.

In this population, the HIV virus cannot get into the cells to reproduce itself. These individuals can transmit the virus to others, but they themselves cannot develop AIDS.

"Human variation is a good thing," Jackson said. "Variation in humans buffers us from extinction. If we were all uniform we would all be equally susceptible to new viruses like those responsible for AIDS.

"Variation in humans is life-saving for our species."

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NO BIOLOGICAL BASIS FOR RACE, SCIENTISTS SAY

Distinctions prove to be skin deep
Charles Petit, Chronicle Science Writer

The San Francisco Chronicle Monday, February 23, 1998



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The President's Initiative on Race, designed to attack prejudice by bringing people of different races together to talk, may have overlooked something. Namely, that the very concept of race is bogus and has no basis in biology, according to most scientists. "This dialogue on race is driving me up the wall," said Jefferson Fish, a psychologist at St. John's University in New York who has written extensively about race in America. "Nobody is asking the question, 'What is race?' It is a biologically meaningless category. It is a cultural term that Americans use to describe what a person's ancestry is.

"But biologically the human species does not have categories. It just has variations as one travels around the world."

True, a walk along Market Street or almost any main street in a major U.S. city will reveal a host of people of various colors and cultures. Surely, one may suppose, the American melting pot is brimming with different races and racial mixtures.

Wrong, say a broad coalition of experts.

"The concept of race is a social and cultural construction. . . . Race simply cannot be tested or proven scientifically," according to a policy statement by the American Anthropological Association. "It is clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups. The concept of 'race' has no validity . . . in the human species."

Although few people would mistake a group of Arapahos for Finns, or Malays for Tutsis, anthropologists can find no clear racial boundaries to show where one "racial" group stops and another begins.

Jonathan Marks, a University of California at Berkeley anthropologist, said the only pattern that shows up consistently is that as one surveys traditional homelands, "people are similar to those from (areas) geographically nearby and different from those (who are) far away." The bigger the distance, the more different people tend to look. Conversely, while people don't fit into neat racial cubbyholes, the more closely related they are, the greater the chances of finding good tissue matches for such things as bone marrow transplants.

Despite this, many Americans still believe in three great racial groups, a system developed in Europe and North America in the 18th century. Under that notion, indigenous residents of France, Iran and Poland, for example, are all Caucasoids, members of the so-called white race. People from Somalia, Nigeria and Zimbabwe in Africa are all Negroid, belonging to the black race. Ethnic Chinese, Koreans, Malays and American Indians are all Mongoloids, variants of the yellow race. And people born to, say, ethnic Swedish and Chinese parents are of mixed race.

No way, say scientists, who call such thinking a folk myth.

"We don't even come close to having enough genetic diversity for races, or subspecies -- not close," said Robert Sussman, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis and editor of a newsletter of the anthropological association that has taken on race and racism as its yearlong theme.

"It's hard to get across," said Sussman. "The best audience to try to get to is probably high school and young college students. But even they are steeped in American folklore, and the folklore is that races really exist."

One reason race is a myth, the great majority of anthropologists agree, is that there has not been enough time for much difference to build up between human beings. By most measures, modern humans arose in Africa less than 200,000 years ago, a short time by evolutionary time scales. And the migration out of Africa by the ancestors of today's Europeans, Asians, and North and South Americans took place less than 100,000 years ago.

Environmental pressure produced different physical appearances, including slightly different physiques, and Africa has the most human genetic diversity of any continent.

"But the environment, literally, works only on the surface, changing skin and hair a little bit," said Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, a Stanford University geneticist."Underneath, there has been little change."

So, although admirable, Clinton's initiative -- by its very name -- reinforces a false sense that biological races are real, say anthropologists who asked to be on the president's panel but were turned down.

"If Americans in general understood the history of the concept of race, the erroneous biological connotations of race, and the cultural and social dimensions of race, they could better address the initiative's goal of 'One America in the 21st Century,' " said Mary Margaret Overbey, a lobbyist for the association.

If anything, the president's initiative should have been on racism, say the scientists. For, even without race, racism can exist as a belief that ancestry is a significant factor in cultural and behavioral differences among peoples.

Rather than race, scientists like to discuss "clinal variations," or physical types that may be found in one general area but that fade more or less evenly into other types as one move about the globe.

At best, race is a clumsy term for people like Fish, the St. John's University psychologist, who is married to a Brazilian. By standard American usage, he is white because his ancestry is all European, and she is black because some of her ancestors were African. But she is not really the color black, rather more of a light brown, with ancestry from many parts of the globe.

In Brazil, people are labeled not by race, but by "tipo," Portuguese for type, and some families have many tipos. And she is a morena, which means, roughly, brunette. "Americans think you can't change race, that it's like changing genes," Fish said. "But my wife can change her race by taking an airplane home."

Last year, the association urged the government to drop the term race from its census categories in favor of blurrier, but more useful, terms such as ethnicity that also reflect culture and the psychological tendency of people to label themselves.

Now, while strict racial categories are not being abandoned altogether, censuses will permit people to list themselves in several races if they so choose. Since 1900, 26 different racial categories have been used in various censuses, including Hindu and Mexican. At the turn of the century in the United States, Italians, the Irish, and Jews were all thought to be racial groups.

Nearly all college textbooks have long since dropped the idea that humanity can be neatly, or even sloppily, divided into races.

And a recent survey found that some experts in the 19th century graded humanity into as many as 300 races. Even current encyclopedias routinely list as many as nine races (African, American Indian, Asian, Australian, European, Indian,Melanesian, Micronesian, and Polynesian).

In years past, children of mixed marriages "were assigned the racial (and legal) status of the more subordinate parent," said Faye Harrison, an anthropologist at the University of South Carolina. "That rule, called . . . the 'one drop rule' (for one drop of blood), has worked to classify me as African American, period," said Harrison. "Despite the fact that I, like most other African Americans I know, have a mixed heritage and mixed 'race' genealogy. But that multicultural or multiracial reality is part of my extended family's private transcript, not our public identity as blacks, as African Americans."

Studies show that the ancestry of American blacks is about 70 percent African, with the rest European and American Indian.

Stanford geneticist Cavalli- Sforza and his colleagues are collecting genes from traditional peoples all over the world. From them, they can get a good idea how past populations migrated and intermingled.

The gradients, or rate of change from place to place, "are all gradual. The idea of race is not tenable," Cavalli-Sforza added. The geographic patterns of some sets of genes do not match other sets of genes, showing clearly that human populations have been merging, migrating, and intermarrying from the start.

While some racist groups may believe there once were pure African or Nordic or other races, genes tell a different story, according to Alan R. Templeton, a biologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

Still, anthropologists know they have a hard sell.

"Teaching that racial categories lack biological validity can be as much of a challenge as teaching in the 17th century that the Earth goes around the sun," said Marks.

[Fadix]

"Scientists: Idea of Race is Only Skin Deep," by Robert Boyd, Miami Herald (Oct. 13, 1996; p. 14A):

WASHINGTON -- Thanks to spectacular advances in molecular biology and genetics, most scientists now reject the concept of race as a valid way to divide human beings into separate groups. Contrary to widespread public opinion, researchers no longer believe that races are distinct biological categories created by differences in the genes that people inherit from their parents...."Race has no basic biological reality," said Jonathan Marks, a Yale University biologist....Instead, a majority of biologists and anthropologists, drawing on a growing body of evidence accumulated since the 1970s, have concluded that race is a social, cultural and political concept based largely on superficial appearances. "In the social sense race is a reality. In the scientific sense, it is not," said Michael Omi, a specialist in ethnic studies at the University of California at Berkeley.

The idea that races are not the product of human genes may seem to contradict common sense. "The average citizen reacts with frank disbelief when told there is no such thing as race," said C. Loring Brace, an anthropologist at the University of Michigan. "The skeptical layman will shake his head and regard this as further evidence of the innate silliness of those who call themselves intellectuals."

The new understanding of race draws on work in many fields. "Vast new data in human biology, prehistory and paleontology...have completely revamped the traditional notions," said Solomon Katz, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania. This is a switch from the prevailing dogma of the 19th and much of the 20th century. During that period most scientists believed that humans could be sorted into a few...inherited racial types....As recently as 1985, anthropologists split 50-50 when one of their number, Leonard Lieberman of Central Michigan University, asked in a survey if they believe in the existence of separate biological races....As a sign of the change, Lieberman said most anthropology textbooks published in this decade [the 1990s] have stopped teaching the concept of biological race....[T]he revised concept of race...reflects recent scientific work with DNA...."We are beginning to get good data at the DNA level," said a Yale geneticist, Kenneth Kidd....[which]"support the concept that you can't draw boundaries around races."

[Darorinag]

Thanks to spectacular advances in molecular biology and genetics, most scientists now reject the concept of race as a valid way to divide human beings into separate groups.

Bias?

As a sign of the change, Lieberman said most anthropology textbooks published in this decade [the 1990s] have stopped teaching the concept of biological race....

What I don't understand is how they claim that there are no races, yet use terms such as Negroid, Caucasoid, Med, Nord, in anthropology...

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December 20, 2002

Scientists studying the DNA of 52 human groups from around the world have concluded that people belong to five principal groups corresponding to the major geographical regions of the world: Africa, Europe, Asia, Melanesia and the Americas.

The study, based on scans of the whole human genome, is the most thorough to look for patterns corresponding to major geographical regions. These regions broadly correspond with popular notions of race, the researchers said in interviews.

The researchers did not analyze genes but rather short segments of DNA known as markers, similar to those used in DNA fingerprinting tests, that have no apparent function in the body.

"What this study says is that if you look at enough markers you can identify the geographic region a person comes from," said Dr. Kenneth Kidd of Yale University, an author of the report.

The issue of race and ethnicity has forced itself to biomedical researchers' attention because human populations have different patterns of disease, and advances in decoding DNA have made it possible to try and correlate disease with genetics.

The study, published today in Science, finds that "self-reported population ancestry likely provides a suitable proxy for genetic ancestry." In other words, someone saying he is of European ancestry will have genetic similarities to other Europeans.

Using self-reported ancestry "is less expensive and less intrusive" said Dr. Marcus Feldman of Stanford University, the senior author of the study. Rather than analyzing a person's DNA, a doctor could simply ask his race or continent of origin and gain useful information about their genetic make-up.

Several scientific journal editors have said references to race should be avoided. But a leading population geneticist, Dr. Neil Risch of Stanford University, argued recently that race was a valid area of medical research because it reflects the genetic differences that arose on each continent after the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.

"Neil's article was theoretical and this is the data that backs up what he said," Dr. Feldman said.

The new result is based on blood samples gathered from around the world as part of the Human Genome Diversity Project, though on a much less ambitious scale than originally intended. Dr. Feldman and his colleagues analyzed the DNA of more than 1,000 people at some 400 markers. Because the sites have no particular function, they are free to change or mutate without harming the individual, and can become quite different over the generations.

The Science authors concluded that 95 percent of the genetic variations in the human genome is found in people all over the world, as might be expected for a small ancestral population that dispersed perhaps as recently as 50,000 years ago.

But as the first human populations started reproducing independently from one another, each started to develop its own pattern of genetic differences. The five major continental groups now differ to a small degree, the Science article says, as judged by the markers. The DNA in the genes is subject to different pressures, like those of natural selection.

Similar divisions of the world's population have been implied by earlier studies based on the Y chromosome, carried by males, and on mitochondrial DNA, bequeathed through the female line. But both elements constitute a tiny fraction of the human genome and it was not clear how well they might represent the behavior of the rest of the genome.

Despite the large shared pool of genetic variation, the small number of differences allows the separate genetic history of each major group to be traced. Even though this split broadly corresponds with popular notions of race, the authors of Science article avoid using the word, referring to the genetic patterning they have found with words like "population structure" and "self-reported population ancestry."

But Dr. Feldman said the finding essentially confirmed the popular conception of race. He said precautions should be taken to make sure the new data coming out of genetic studies were not abused.

"We need to get a team of ethicists and anthropologists and some physicians together to address what the consequences of the next phase of genetic analysis is going to be," he said.

Some diseases are much commoner among some ethnic groups than others. Sickle cell anemia is common among Africans, while hemochromatosis, an iron metabolism disorder, occurs in 7.5 percent of Swedes. It can therefore be useful for a doctor to consider a patient's race in diagnosing disease. Researchers seeking the genetic variants that cause such diseases must take race into account because a mixed population may confound their studies.

The new medical interest in race and genetics has left many sociologists and anthropologists beating a different drum in their assertions that race is a cultural idea, not a biological one. The American Sociological Association, for instance, said in a recent statement that "race is a social construct" and warned of the "danger of contributing to the popular conception of race as biological."

Dr. Alan Goodman, a physical anthropologist at Hampshire College and an adviser to the association, said, "there is no biological basis for race." The clusters shown in the Science article were driven by geography, not race, he said.

But Dr. Troy Duster, a sociologist at New York University and chairman of the committee that wrote the sociologists' statement on race, said it was meant to talk about the sociological implications of classifying people by race and was not intended to discuss the genetics.

"Sociologists don't have the competence to go there," he said.

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Notice above, how it's the sociological association is the one that claims that it's dangerous and therefore "wrong" that someone claims that races are different.

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A view widespread among many social scientists, endorsed in official statements by the American Sociological Association and the American Anthropological Association, is that race is not a valid biological concept. But biologists, particularly the population geneticists who study genetic variation, have found that there is a structure in the human population. The structure is a family tree showing separate branches for Africans, Caucasians (Europe, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent), East Asians, Pacific Islanders and American Indians.

Biologists, too, have often been reluctant to use the term "race." But this taboo was broken last year by Dr. Neil Risch, a leading population geneticist at Stanford University.

Vexed by an editorial in The New England Journal that declared that race was "biologically meaningless," Dr. Risch argued in the electronic journal Genome Biology that self-identified race was useful in understanding ethnic differences in disease and in the response to drugs.

Vexed by an editorial in The New England Journal that declared that race was "biologically meaningless," Dr. Risch argued in the electronic journal Genome Biology that self-identified race was useful in understanding ethnic differences in disease and in the response to drugs.

Racial differences have arisen, they say, because after the ancestral human population in Africa spread throughout the world 40,000 years ago, geographical barriers prevented interbreeding. On each continent, under the influence of natural selection and the random change between generations known as genetic drift, people would have diverged away from the common ancestral population, creating the major races. Within each race, religious, cultural and geographical barriers fostered other endogamous, or inbreeding, populations that led to the ethnic groups.

Common diseases are found worldwide. But though much less is known about them, they may be caused by different genes in different racial groups, Dr. Risch says. In Caucasians, mutations in a gene called CARD15 make a person susceptible to Crohn's disease, but Japanese with Crohn's disease have none of these mutations. Presumably a different gene, yet to be found, contributes to Crohn's in Japanese.

"It may be tempting to abandon the notion of race altogether," Dr. Risch and his colleagues write, especially if attention to racial differences should perpetuate discrepancies, but because of the leading clues provided by race to the cause and treatment of disease, such a course "would be detrimental to the very populations and persons that this approach allegedly seeks to protect."
An opposing article by Dr. Richard S. Cooper, of the Loyola Stritch School of Medicine in Maywood, Ill., is more skeptical. Doctors have been too quick, Dr. Cooper and his co-authors write, to suggest genetics as the reason for the greater susceptibility of African-Americans to certain diseases, when the true reason may be social factors.

Dr. Cooper, an expert in the epidemiology of heart disease, agrees that some rare diseases are particular to certain populations, but he says the genetic variants that underlie common diseases are not.

"We can expect genomics increasingly to negate the old-fashioned concept that differences in genetic susceptibilities to common diseases are racially distributed," he says. For example APOE4, a genetic variant that contributes to Alzheimer's disease, is found in all populations, he writes.

But even with APOE4, Dr. Risch says, knowledge of racial background provides important insights because the risk conferred by the gene varies by race. Inheriting two APOE4 genes, one from each parent, raises the risk of Alzheimer's 33 times in Japanese populations, 15 times in Caucasians and only 6 times in Africans. This suggests that some unknown factor modifies the effect of the APOE4 gene in different races, he says.

Dr. Cooper is also concerned that if medical geneticists were to prove that race is a valid biological concept, then social and political aspects of race, some not so benign, might also seem to be validated. MY COMMENT: They accuse those who insist on racial differences of racism and political agendas, yet they have racist agendas too (arguably because they want to deny objective truth for the sake of an equality (on all levels) that doesn't exist.

"Race already has a meaning," he writes. "To invoke the authority of genomic science in the debate over the value of race as a category of nature is to accept the social meaning as well."
Two years ago an editorial by Robert S. Schwartz, deputy editor of The New England Journal, dismissed the idea of race as a scientific concept. But in today's issue another deputy editor, Elizabeth G. Phimister, says only that it "remains to be seen" whether continental-based racial definitions will help track the variant genes that cause common diseases.

Dr. Phimister concludes that it would be "unwise to abandon the practice of recording race when we have barely begun to understand the architecture of the human genome" and its clues to the genetic basis of disease.

She said in an e-mail message, however, that an editorial in the journal "conveys the views of the author only, rather than views germane to journal policy." MY COMMENT: She is afraid of being too politically incorrect. Only a few dare to insist openly on racial differences, at the risk of their careers. THOSE are the ones who are true to the traditions of truthful objective science.

Dr. Risch said in an interview that anxiety about the genome and race might have arisen among minorities who did not always feel in control of their own genetic information. Despite initial fears of discrimination, he said, Jews had taken charge of the information about diseases more common in Ashkenazis and now accepted its usefulness.

"The more minorities we can get doing the research, the more these issues will dissipate," he said.

http://www.racearchives.com/archived/viewnews.asp?newsID=405056178570

[Darorinag]

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The results are the same irrespective of the type of genetic markers employed, be they classical systems [5], restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLPs) [6], microsatellites [7,8,9,10,11], or single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) [12]. For example, studying 14 indigenous populations from 5 continents with 30 microsatellite loci, Bowxxxx et al. [7] observed that the 14 populations clustered into the five continental groups, as depicted in Figure 1. The African branch included three sub-Saharan populations, CAR pygmies, Zaire pygmies, and the Lisongo; the Caucasian branch included Northern Europeans and Northern Italians; the Pacific Islander branch included Melanesians, New Guineans and Australians; the East Asian branch included Chinese, Japanese and Cambodians; and the Native American branch included Mayans from Mexico and the Surui and Karitiana from the Amazon basin. The identical diagram has since been derived by others, using a similar or greater number of microsatellite markers and individuals [8,9]. More recently, a survey of 3,899 SNPs in 313 genes based on US populations (Caucasians, African-Americans, Asians and Hispanics) once again provided distinct and non-overlapping clustering of the Caucasian, African-American and Asian samples [12]: "The results confirmed the integrity of the self-described ancestry of these individuals". Hispanics, who represent a recently admixed group between Native American, Caucasian and African, did not form a distinct subgroup, but clustered variously with the other groups. A previous cluster analysis based on a much smaller number of SNPs led to a similar conclusion: "A tree relating 144 individuals from 12 human groups of Africa, Asia, Europe and Oceania, inferred from an average of 75 DNA polymorphisms/individual, is remarkable in that most individuals cluster with other members of their regional group" [13]. Effectively, these population genetic studies have recapitulated the classical definition of races based on continental ancestry - namely African, Caucasian (Europe and Middle East), Asian, Pacific Islander (for example, Australian, New Guinean and Melanesian), and Native American.

http://www.racearchives.com/archived/viewnews.asp?newsID=650768458843

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Bottom line is: whether or not it was geographical location that caused the differences over thousands of years to develop doesn't matter. We are talking about the existence of races. And according to studies done on people from various groups, they have been grouped into certain races by genetic analysis.