Some geneticists have expressed their unease about a figure in a high-profile Nature paper that was published earlier this week1, noting that it could be misinterpreted as reinforcing racist beliefs. The figure has reignited a long-standing debate among geneticists about how best to discuss and depict race, ethnicity and genomic ancestry, given how these terms can be misinterpreted and weaponized by extremists.
“The problem is, a lot of people will see figures like this as supporting a viewpoint” that race and ethnicity are closely aligned with genetics, says Ewan Birney, deputy director-general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Cambridgeshire, UK. “And then they build castles in the air from all this.”
Alexander Bick, a physician and geneticist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, who co-authored the paper in which the figure appears, acknowledged in an e-mail to Nature’s news team that “it’s clear that the figure fell short of our intended goal for this paper”.
The study in question is called the "All of Us" research program and it's being funded by the National Institutes of Health. Its alleged purpose is to "tackle inequities in genetics research by assembling detailed genomic and health profiles" of a large, diverse group of people. The controversial graph I mentioned above is available at the Nature link provided, but I'll include a smaller version of it here for you since it was paid for by the taxpayers.
Most of us looking at that graph probably don't see anything beyond some colorful blobs representing genetic details from various groups of people broken down by racial profiles, primarily whites, Blacks, and Asians in descending order based on the number of samples of each. So how can that possibly be "racist" or open to "weaponization?" It's just science.
Well, the critics in the scientific community and even the authors of the study have an answer for you. You may want to buckle up before proceeding, boys and girls. These are actual quotes. The idea that ethnic groups are distinct genetic categories and that people in each group share genetic similarities is, "a pseudoscientific belief." Instead, according to these experts, "race and ethnicity are social constructs that do not have a basis in genetics.” They point to the Buffalo mass shooter who killed multiple Black people and note that his manifesto contained "several citations and figures from genetics papers." Really? That's where you're getting your public opinions and analysis?
Allow me to repeat my disclosure that I'm not a scientist and I don't even play one on TV. But I think even most laymen have a fundamental grasp of the origins of human racial development. At some point in the distant past, perhaps 160,000 years ago, the first modern homo sapien sapiens appeared. The archeological record suggests this probably took place In sub-Saharan Africa, though competing theories assert that it might have been in Australia. Then, small groups of these early humans somehow made their way to all of the continents except Antarctica. How they did that will likely be forever unknown.
Once in place, our species appears to have splintered off into its own distinct groups. Those in hotter, sunnier climates developed darker skin tones with greater amounts of melanin to protect them. Those in colder, wintry climates went in the opposite direction, eventually leading to the emergence of white, Black, Asian, and indigenous races. And while the differences were incredibly minor, there were genetic distinctions between them along those lines. That doesn't mean that any one group was inherently "better" or "worse" than the others. They just developed minor differences.
In fairness to the authors of the study and their critics, I will admit that those differences have largely started to fade away at this point. After living in isolated groups for tens of thousands of years, once we started packing up and hitting the road, people were traveling all around the world and the different groups began encountering each other. That often ended tragically for one group or the other, but a lot of interbreeding was also taking place. That process has continued apace and there probably aren't any fully "pure" examples of any of the four primary racial groups left anymore. My own adventures in DNA testing showed me what an absolute mutt I am.
But that doesn't make the entire concept of race "a pseudoscientific belief." It also doesn't mean that race is a "social construct." First, the medical community came out and tried to tell us that gender is a social construct. Now this hyperwoke nonsense has crept into the field of genetics. Granted, race is a far more stark and obvious dividing line than race, but both are part of the human story of our evolution and development. (With apologies to all of the creationists, of course.) We are losing real, objective scientific skills at an increasing pace, and it's beyond frightening.
