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"Race and Medicine, Part LXXV"

18 Comments -

1 – 18 of 18
Anonymous eh said...

...adding to the debate about whether race has scientific validity in modern DNA-based medicine.

I would expect there's not much debate about that amongst the "scientific". Elsewhere, perhaps.

8/1/11, 12:19 AM

Anonymous RS said...

>> genes vary as much among people who identify themselves as the same race as among groups segregated along traditional racial lines.

> Except that they don't

Yeah... Lewontin's fallacy is highly misleading but literally correct, whereas this is just nonsense.

8/1/11, 12:23 AM

Anonymous Thomas said...

There's a policy org in the Bay Area focused heavily on this issue: http://www.geneticsandsociety.org/

Ludditism and Lysenkoism live.

It's telling how many of the people nattering on about this have no background in hard science. They're lawyers or social scientists (if we can even still call anthropology a science, even anthropologists aren't sure about that anymore). It's also telling how often the consequentialist argument gets used. Maybe they should just up and say "DNA be racist."

8/1/11, 1:27 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

My private DNA analysis service didn't seem to have too many PC qualms. Many statements were suffixed by '...for a person of European descent.'

Also there was a pie chart which came out reassuringly pink. I kid you not.
Gilbert P.

8/1/11, 3:15 AM

Anonymous Inkraven said...

The concept of HBD must be gaining some traction, if in a very rudimentary way, to be showing up on Yahoo's front page:
http://news.yahoo.com/gene-discovered-raises-asthma-risk-blacks-202443130.html

If we can find the genes for asthma, certainly we can find those for intelligence, among other things

8/1/11, 3:18 AM

Blogger AMac said...

For a patent to be granted, an invention must meet three criteria:

1. It must have some utility.

2. It must be novel.

3. It must be non-obvious (to a skilled practitioner of the art).

4. It must meet or exceed the EEOC's Four-Fifths Rule.

Let's see, three criteria, numbered one through four, with a fraction to boot. Dang, advanced mathematics is hard!

8/1/11, 4:37 AM

Anonymous Marlowe said...

Is it really so hard for the medical profession? How do veterinarians deal with different breeds of dogs, cows, sheep and horses? I've seen stories recently about the medical problems of pure breeds. It seems to me that the concept is employed all the time in the animal breeding world and only becomes a problem when one tries to include humans as part of the animal kingdom.

8/1/11, 5:10 AM

Anonymous Shawn said...

I thought there was only just as much variation within racial categories because of junk genes, the genes that do not do anything.

8/1/11, 6:15 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Steve,
The whole thing is merely an exercise in futility and sophistry, literally arguing that 'black is white' - and declaring yourself the winner because you've used more big words and shouted down the opponents loudest.
Doctors are practical and intelligent people.They will mouth off enough of the prerequisite verbiage to cover themselves, but apart from that will do what they need to do.

8/1/11, 8:53 AM

Blogger Luke Lea said...

FWIW: Dienekes on Race and Reproductively Isolated Populations (posted April 07, 2003):

"There seems to be a confusion between race and 'inbred population', or 'reproductively isolated population'. For example, Steve Sailer defines race as follows: A racial group is an extended family that is inbred to some degree. goddless capitalist uses races as a synonym for "reproductively isolated groups".

It's true that relative inbreeding (within the race) is a necessary condition for a race to exist. But, it is not sufficient as we will show by means of examples.

Example #1. The Amish are an inbred population. Occasionally foreigners marry into the Amish population, but not often. The Amish are a population that is inbred not to some degree, but to a great degree. Are they a race? Of course not. They are simply a genetic isolate within the Caucasoid race.

The same is true for the Samaritans, a genetic isolate of about 650 members in Syria and Lebanon. The Samaritans are also a genetic isolate within the Caucasoid race.

It was recently proven that Caucasoids, Mongoloids, Negroids, Australoids and Amerindians could be distinguished from one another with an objective test. That is because these groups are inbred populations that have had enough time to evolve group specific genetic profiles. That is what makes a race.

Consider the example of a hypothetical island on which 500 Swedish and 500 Nigerian settlers intermix to form a hybrid population. After a few generations of interbreeding, the population will remain what it is: a racially mixed population. Its individuals will be random assortments of genes in the parental gene pools.

But, they won't be a race distinct from others in the sense that Caucasoids and Mongoloids are distinct. Over time, this inbred population may also develop into a race, as it evolves separately from the rest of mankind and develops its own genetic profile.

These examples should caution us against using "reproductively isolated group", or "partially inbred extended family" as synonyms for race."

8/1/11, 9:07 AM

Anonymous Kylie said...

From the Washington Post article:

"On a practical level, it may result in doctors using tests or treatments on one ethnic group and not another, denying people care based on the color of their skin...On a more disturbing level, it could fuel racism."

Shades of General Casey's response to the Fort Hood massacre: "And what happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here."

Right. Because living human beings are not as important as empty abstractions.

8/1/11, 10:35 AM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

You seem to suggest that a lot of very smart people are in fact very very dumb because they deny race or at least they deny race in the sense that you believe it to be important. Could they all be wrong and you and only you are right?

8/1/11, 12:27 PM

Anonymous Kylie said...

"You seem to suggest that a lot of very smart people are in fact very very dumb because they deny race or at least they deny race in the sense that you believe it to be important. Could they all be wrong and you and only you are right?"

It isn't a question of "you and only you", as you know--or should know. So drop the straw man already.

Steve is not the only one who holds these views re race. He is, however, one of the few publicly to admit to holding such views.

So could they all be wrong and those who hold opposing views right? Yes.

8/1/11, 12:46 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Personalized medicine. How about personalized education?

8/1/11, 2:02 PM

Anonymous Randall H said...

' “It has the social consequence of making it seem that differences among groups are fundamentally biological,” said Barbara A. Koenig, a medical ethicist and anthropologist at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. “Inevitably, in our history, that leads back to the idea that one race is better than another.”

But others say that although race is far from perfect, some genetic variations with meaningful implications for health can be much more common among certain groups. '

- It is a disturbing sign of the times that 'ethicists' promote flat-earthism for political reasons even at the expense of human lives.

8/1/11, 7:20 PM

Anonymous ben tillman said...

Yeah... Lewontin's fallacy is highly misleading but literally correct....

It is not literally correct. Here's what he said:

"The results are quite remarkable.
The mean proportion of the total species diversity that is
contained within populations is 85.4% . . . . Less than 15%
of all human genetic diversity is accounted for by differences
between human groups! Moreover, the difference between populations within a race accounts for an additional 8.3%, so that only 6.3% is accounted for by racial
classification."

It can't be literally correct because IT HAS NO LITERAL MEANING!

8/1/11, 8:18 PM

Anonymous Reg Cæsar said...

Now, if you and your spouse just got off the plane from, say, the highlands of Ethiopia, well, maybe not, but you are the exception.

Not in my neighborhood!

When I take my kid to the local storytime, sometimes he's the only non-Ethiopian child there. This leads to strange situations. For Father's Day week, the white lady director read a typical picture book about fathers to a small crowd of rapt Ethiopian and Somali toddlers. (And our sandy-haired token, too.) All the kids knew exactly what a father was.

There are other black neighborhoods in the area in which she wouldn't dare read that book!

8/2/11, 12:10 AM

Anonymous Reg Cæsar said...

...a medical ethicist and anthropologist at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.

It's "Mayo Clinic", not "the Mayo Clinic". After that boner, who can trust anything the article says?

And what do they know about race in Rochester? That has to be the largest city in America that's 99% white.

What do you call a non-white person in Rochester?
His Honor...

8/2/11, 12:34 AM

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