lpetrich
Contributor
What Both the Left and Right Get Wrong About Race – Nautilus – Medium
Authors Dalton Conley & Jason Fletcher then criticize arguments on both the Left and the Right.
On the Left, many people point out our great genetic similarity and how some 85% of genetic variation is in-population variation. However, many genes are known that make a big difference in various phenotypic features, and some such genes vary between populations. Genes involved in skin color, for instance. Furthermore, evolution can happen fast when it involves selection among already-existing alleles or gene variants in populations, though it may take some time to restore the original amount of variation.
Even so, some traits have evolved rather fast, like lactose tolerance. It evolved in human populations with a long tradition of herding conveniently milkable animals like cattle and horses, and that only happened well into the Holocene.
On the Right, there are cases of seeming evidence of genetic differences in behavior that turned out to be false alarms. Like the monoamine-oxidase "warrior gene".
For instance, in 1994, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray wrote a book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, where they claimed that such differences exist, that "white" people are genetically predisposed to be smarter than "black" people. However, that book contained no molecular genetic data.
This is often more fine-grained than traditional classifications of race, because the more common such classifications are very broad. Anthropologists have had different opinions on how many races of humanity there are, though part of it is lumpers vs. splitters (a few large groups vs. many small groups: Lumpers and splitters). Continental ancestry avoids this issue altogether.Setting the scientific record straight on race, IQ, and succes
Race does not stand up scientifically, period. To begin with, if race categories were meant primarily to capture differences in genetics, they are doing an abysmal job. The genetic distance between some groups within Africa is as great as the genetic distance between many “racially divergent” groups in the rest of the world. The genetic distance between East Asians and Europeans is shorter than the divergence between Hazda in north-central Tanzania to the Fulani shepherds of West Africa (who live in present-day Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, and Guinea). So much for Black, White, Asian, and Other.
Armed with this knowledge, many investigators in the biological sciences have replaced the term “race” with the term “continental ancestry.”
Authors Dalton Conley & Jason Fletcher then criticize arguments on both the Left and the Right.
On the Left, many people point out our great genetic similarity and how some 85% of genetic variation is in-population variation. However, many genes are known that make a big difference in various phenotypic features, and some such genes vary between populations. Genes involved in skin color, for instance. Furthermore, evolution can happen fast when it involves selection among already-existing alleles or gene variants in populations, though it may take some time to restore the original amount of variation.
Even so, some traits have evolved rather fast, like lactose tolerance. It evolved in human populations with a long tradition of herding conveniently milkable animals like cattle and horses, and that only happened well into the Holocene.
On the Right, there are cases of seeming evidence of genetic differences in behavior that turned out to be false alarms. Like the monoamine-oxidase "warrior gene".
Then the contentious issue of possible genetic differences in cognitive ability between various self-identified races in the United States.The mistake that many genetic determinists make is assuming that because we can observe this clear relationship between environment and genetics in some physical characteristics, we can unproblematically expand it to highly complex human behaviors and mental characteristics. That we can see selective pressures at work in generating phenotypic differences in traits that rely on a small number of genes — such as skin tone, eye color, or lactose tolerance — does not easily translate to a clear relationship between a highly polygenic trait such as cognitive ability and the social or physical landscape.
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In addition to the complex and polygenetic structure of many behaviors at one point in time, rapid changes in economic fortunes during the last 50 years make simple genetic explanations of relative success by ethnic groups in the modern world all the more dubious.
For instance, in 1994, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray wrote a book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, where they claimed that such differences exist, that "white" people are genetically predisposed to be smarter than "black" people. However, that book contained no molecular genetic data.