ApostateAbe
Veteran Member
- Joined
- Sep 19, 2002
- Messages
- 1,299
- Location
- Colorado, USA
- Basic Beliefs
- Infotheist. I believe the gods to be mere information.
Black patient: "I'm not buying into no racist drug, okay?"
Dr. House: "It's racist because it helps black people more than white people? Well, on behalf of my peeps, let me say, thanks for dying on principle for us."
Dr. House: "It's racist because it helps black people more than white people? Well, on behalf of my peeps, let me say, thanks for dying on principle for us."
Disagreements about race are often placed in the context of politics, because, though human genetics should be a purely scientific thing, politics intimately affects our opinions, whether we like it or not. Even when the debate is about medicine, when we introduce the biological concept of race, there is no escaping the political objections, as there has been a social movement to make race nothing but an issue of politics. Unfortunately, the seat of this movement is academia, where practical application of good ideas is not always necessary. Though races plainly vary in the frequency of diseases and disease resistance (i.e. Yudin et al's "Distribution of CCR5-delta 32 gene deletion across the Russian part of Eurasia," 1998) and effectiveness of drugs (i.e. Wilson et al's "Population genetic structure of variable drug response," 2001), there are academics who believe that doctors should be blind to race. Creationists are not normally allowed to promote their falsehoods at the expense of sound medicine in reputable medical/scientific journals, but other pseudoevolutionists can, and such a pseudoevolutionist includes Alan H. Goodman, who wrote "Why genes don't count (for racial differences in health)," published in the American Journal of Public Health, of November 2000, at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1446406/pdf/11076233.pdf.
His arguments are:
The concept of race is based on the idea of fixed, ideal, unchanging, discontinuous, consistently-classifiable types. No, it isn't and never was. In evolutionary biology, the concept of race has long been thought of as spectral, to fit both data and evolutionary theory. See, for example, EO Wilson and WL Brown's "The Subspecies Concept and Its Taxonomic Application," 1953, arguing that the spectral nature of races is a problem for taxonomic classifications of subspecies but just fine for non-taxonomic "races." To completely deny the biological significance of races on this basis is the
continuum fallacy. The same style of argument would deny the physical significance of colors, each color being a combination of primary colors arbitrarily defined as portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. Is "red" 620–750 nm, or is it 618-745 nm? Or can red be subdivided further, into cherry, fire truck and ladybug? If so, how many subdivisions are correct? If we can't agree on a single consistent classification scheme, then colors have no basis in physical reality? No rational person should think that way. Races are similarly defined based on the spectral phenomena of gene frequencies, but spectral phenomena do not lose objective reality nor empirical significance if they don't fit so well into our habits of discrete division.Human variation is nonconcordant, i.e. the sickle cell trait is shared not only by eastern and southern Africans but also by Southern Europeans, Japanese, and Native Americans. Yes, so you propose instead thinking about the distributions of disease as though they are perfectly random scatter among the races? Again, no rational person should think this way. It is not necessary that there must be only a one-to-one correspondence between a particular race and a particular disease, any more than there must be a one-to-one correspondence between a behavior and a disease. Too much sunlight causes skin cancer but so do tanning beds, therefore such inferences have no medical value? Are you out of your mind?
Within-group genetic variation is much greater than variation among "races." The statistical argument that has become know as "
Lewontin's Fallacy," since the rebuttal by AWF Edwards in 2003. Lewontin's argument ignores the dimension of genetic variation within each individual, which amounts to significant genetic and phenotypic variations between races.Classifications of race based on bones are unreliable. The argument is based on the perceived unreliability of a study from 1962, but this practice within forensic anthropology does not depend exclusively on data from 1962, and this practice remains universally accepted within the field. See, for example, Ousley, Jantz, and Freid, "Understanding race and human variation: why forensic anthropologists are good at identifying race," 2009, and Norman Sauer's "Forensic anthropology and the concept of race: if races don't exist, why are forensic anthropologists so good at identifying them?," 1992.
Racial differences in disease rates, such as type 2 diabetes among Native Americans, can be attributed to lifestyle differences. The CAUSE of racial differences of disease rates, be it genetic or environmental, is of secondary importance to medical doctors in search of probable diagnoses and patient advice. Let's assume that genetic heritability of racial variations of diseases are relevant. As type 2 diabetes is less genetically heritable, the science is mixed about the cause of racial differences. However, for those diseases that are nearly 100% heritable, such as cystic fibrosis (purely a genetic disease), there can be no question about genetics being responsible for racial differences. See the following table from the University of Michigan's department of anthropology to get an idea of the signficance of genetic racial disparities. A Caucasian is almost 13 times more likely than an Asian to be a victim of cystic fibrosis.
It is the consensus of anthropologists that race isn't biological. You may think that an argument from authority has no place in science, but it most certainly has a place in either editorial pop science or pseudoscience.
Race-as-genetics is closely related to the racism of 19th and 20th centuries. This is how the author concludes, because political history is presumed to be relevant to the objective realities of modern medicine.
Goodman's article is not the only such article, but there have been many others, each publishing in reputable journals and each attempting to put racial blinders on doctors, including Joseph Graves and Michael Rose's "Against racial medicine," 2006, Joseph Graves' "Biological V Social Definitions of Race: Implications for Modern Biomedical Research," 2009, Dorothy Roberts' "What’s Wrong with Race-Based Medicine?," 2011, Michael Root's "The use of race in medicine as a proxy for genetic differences," 2003, and Robert Schwarz's "Racial Profiling in Medical Research," 2001--which goes as far as to chastise the use of race even in RESEARCH as "pseudoscience."
A reliable way to separate sound science from pseudoscience is: which theory is being practically and beneficially applied? The race-denialist theory comes into direct conflict with the everyday practices of both medicine and forensic anthropology. In the case of medicine, if medical doctors accept their non-sequitur arguments, the pseudoscience not only corrupts coherent thought but can actually cost lives.
