,
11 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
Some thoughts about this piece on 'race' and population genetics. It's nice that it affirms that population geneticists are not actual racists. And there are indeed some relevant criticisms one could make about popgen as a field, both in general and in specific instances.
But I'm concerned that readers might conclude that what geneticists study as population structure is somehow a continuation of racist ideas. This is wrong. Population structure is not 'race', and in scientific work geneticists never use that term or the concept it represents.
One important difference between 'race' and the population structure we observe is that there is no natural categorisation at any global scale, either in geography or genetic difference. This is not the same as saying there is no significant structure at all.
Genetic differences between humans are not uniform and the structures we find are not arbitrary; they reflect our complex evolutionary history and are not without consequence for human traits, including meaningful things like varying susceptibility to certain diseases.
Another difference is that real genetic structure has little or nothing to do with the range of anatomical features used by race scientists in the past, like pigmentation or cranial shape, and is in no meaningful sense equivalent to categorising people as 'yellow', 'brown' etc.
There are valid and important reasons to study human genetic variation, such as understanding our rich and interconnected evolutionary history, or discovering genomic medical insights with relevance beyond the range of ancestry found in wealthy developed countries.
In describing our findings, geneticists necessarily have to label some of the structures we find, and often this is done with insufficient anthropological or historical awareness. We need to do better in this regard.
We must also continue to acknowledge the deeply problematic history of human genetics and anthropology, and we need to bring this understanding to the fore in our interactions with indigenous communities, and radically improve their participation in this science.
But there is also a responsibility for people communicating to the public. To link the complex structure of shared and varied genetic ancestry we find between humans worldwide with 'race', as conceived of by race scientists, is to do some of the latter's work for them.
Race scientists desperately want the distinction between their outdated pseudoscience and modern genetics to be blurred, and for their beliefs to be validated and made relevant by new discoveries. They frequently co-opt statistical analyses of data and terms like 'diversity'.
It's obvious that's not a project the author of this piece subscribes to - quite the contrary, but I'm worried that without understanding these important distinctions, readers will take away that message nevertheless.
