race
razib | July 30, 2009An ancestry informative marker set for determining continental origin: validation
and extension using human genome diversity panels:
Results
In this study, genotypes from Human Genome Diversity Panel populations were used to further evaluate a 93 SNP AIM panel, a subset of the 128 AIMS set, for distinguishing continental origins. Using both model-based and relatively model-independent methods, we here confirm the ability of this AIM set to distinguish diverse population groups that were not previously evaluated. This study included multiple population groups from Oceana, South Asia, East…
emjohnson | July 25, 2009Stanley Fish, distinguished law professor and close friend of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., puts the arrest of Gates and President Obama's comments into perspective in his latest piece for The New York Times:
Gates is once again regarded with suspicion because, as the cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson put it in an interview, he has committed the crime of being H.W.B., Housed While Black.
He isn't the only one thought to be guilty of that crime. TV commentators, laboring to explain the unusual candor and vigor of Obama's initial comments on the Gates incident, speculated that he had probably been…
razib | July 24, 2009With the whole Henry Louis Gates affair there has been some talk about how racist Boston is. This is a joke. I am aware that the North has a checkered history, from busing in Boston in the 1970s to Bensonhurst in the 1980s. But calling Boston the Alabama of the North is an insult to our intelligence. Part of the issue here I think is that it is easy to show how racist the North is, and how far the South as come, by using as a counterpoint a cartoon model of race relations as a function of geography which never existed. It is a fact that in much of the North blacks were excluded from…
emjohnson | July 22, 2009President Obama just stated the following at a press conference:
Now, I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there's a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That's…
emjohnson | July 22, 2009Cambridge authorities are now dropping the disorderly conduct charge against the country's leading African-American scholar, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (see right), after he was arrested in his own home when police confused him with a burglar. This was after Gates showed both his Harvard ID and Driver's License that gave proof of address.
Probably the best reaction to this story came from Al Sharpton who stated:
I've heard of driving while black, and I've heard of shopping while black. But I've never heard of living in a home while black.
Gates is asking for a formal apology…
emjohnson | July 4, 2009On July 4th, 1852, Frederick Douglass gave a speech at an event commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence, held at Rochester's Corinthian Hall entitled, "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro":
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of…
razib | June 2, 2009On a recent diavlog between Dayo Olopade and Reihan Salam the role of minorities as integrators and catalysts for cultural ferment & change was brought up. Minorities being minorities naturally by definition would, one assumes, be the ones assimilating and integrating into the majority matrix. 70% of the American population is non-Hispanic white, so assuming a random mixing situation this segment will be preponderant. But there's a problem I have with this narrative: it ignores population structure. Integration and assimilation are real dynamics of American society, but obviously so is…
razib | May 15, 2009
When I was reviewing the paper on skin color and ethnic ancestry a few days ago I saw a peculiar figure in a related paper which I thought I would highlight. The paper is Skin pigmentation, biogeographical ancestry and admixture mapping. The samples were 232 African and African-American individuals living in Washington, D.C., 173 British African Caribbean persons, and 187 individuals of European-American ancestry living in State College, Pa. The goal was to compare the ancestry of individuals to see how it related to their complexion. The African ancestry of these populations was:
African…
razib | May 14, 2009One of the peculiarities of American discussion about race is that skin color is assumed to be synonymous with racial distinctions. That is, skin color is not just a trait, but it is the trait which defines between population differences. There's a reason for this, the skin is the largest organ and it is very salient. Populations with little phylogenetic relationship to each other, from India to the Pacific to Southeast Asia have been referred to as "black" by lighter-skinned populations. No population is referred to by their neighbors as those "straight hairs," to my knowledge. But another…
razib | April 28, 2009Dan MacArthur has a post, Genetics of complex traits in Europeans and East Asians: similarities and differences:
With those goals in mind, you can expect to see many more GWAS of non-European populations over the next couple of years, and some explicit comparisons of the differing genetic architecture of complex traits between populations. Exciting times for those of us interested in the genetic and evolutionary basis of between-population differences...
This reminds me of A variant of the gene encoding leukotriene A4 hydrolase confers ethnicity-specific risk of myocardial infarction:…
dgmacarthur | April 28, 2009Cho, Y., Go, M., Kim, Y., Heo, J., Oh, J., Ban, H., Yoon, D., Lee, M., Kim, D., Park, M., Cha, S., Kim, J., Han, B., Min, H., Ahn, Y., Park, M., Han, H., Jang, H., Cho, E., Lee, J., Cho, N., Shin, C., Park, T., Park, J., Lee, J., Cardon, L., Clarke, G., McCarthy, M., Lee, J., Lee, J., Oh, B., & Kim, H. (2009). A large-scale genome-wide association study of Asian populations uncovers genetic factors influencing eight quantitative traits Nature Genetics, 41 (5), 527-534 DOI: 10.1038/ng.357
A paper just released in Nature Genetics takes the most comprehensive look yet at the genetic factors…
razib | April 26, 2009Since the post on anti-miscegenation laws got a lot of attention, I was curious about analogs in the World Values Survey. There are two such questions of interest:
Important for succesful marriage: Same ethnic background(D042)
and
Important for succesful marriage: Religious beliefs(D031)
These data are skewed toward European nations. Below the fold are data are % who assert that same ethnic background is NOT very important, or that same religious beliefs are NOT very important. I will admit that the international pattern is surprising to me.
Same Religion Not Very Important…
edyong | April 16, 2009In American high schools, black students typically perform worse than their white peers, which can damage their self-esteem and their future prospects. Studies have found that the fear of living up to this underachieving stereotype can cause so much stress that a child's performance suffers. Their teachers may even write them off as lost causes, and spend less time on them.
With so many students caught in this vicious cycle, where the stereotype of poor performance strengthens itself, it might seem absurd to suggest that you could turn things round in less than an hour. But try telling that…
gregladen | April 6, 2009In June of 1940, France fell to Germany. Among the troops who were overwhelmed by the German attacks were about 17,000 black West African colonial troops with the French Army. Many of these soldiers were shot do death by the Germans, who considered these Africans to be subhumans, as they stood in surrender. Surely, it would be fair to consider this to have been part of the Holocaust.
Then the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese did a pretty good job of trying to take over the world, millions upon millions died in that war, and the rest of the Holocaust happened.
The Allies banded together…
razib | March 21, 2009A few years ago a brown friend of mine complained that there were all these diseases which non-white people were susceptible to at a higher rate (e.g., Type II Diabetes, hypertension, ateriosclerosis, etc.), perhaps the white race was really superior (or medical geneticists were entering into a conspiracy to prove that this was so). So with that, I point to a new PLoS Genetics paper, An African Ancestry-Specific Allele of CTLA4 Confers Protection against Rheumatoid Arthritis in African Americans:
Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a systemic autoimmune condition affecting the synovial membranes of…
dgmacarthur | March 12, 2009I posted a while back on two duelling essays in Nature on the intensely controversial subject of whether scientists should be permitted to study group differences in cognition. Nature now has a series of correspondence on the topic in its latest issue.
Firstly, there are rebuttals from the authors of the two original essays: Steven Rose argues that the debate is dead and that reviving it serves no purpose, while Ceci and Williams argue (substantially more convincingly, in my opinion) that Rose's declaration of these areas of research as invalid is premature.
Some of the other opinions are…
thusspakezuska | March 1, 2009Well, February has come and gone, Black History Month is over for another year, and we've had the first round of the Diversity in Science carnival. I am sure some of you who blog may have thought about contributing to this carnival but didn't for a variety of reasons. Maybe, like me, you had family issues and/or health issues going on; I almost didn't make it to contribute to the carnival myself. Maybe your job was making you crazy. Or maybe you thought to yourself, "I am not an expert on diversity. I don't want to offend anyone. I don't really know how to go about writing on this topic…
gregladen | February 18, 2009Nature, the publishing group, not the Mother, has taken Darwin's 200th as an opportunity to play the race card (which always sells copy) and went ahead and published two opposing views on this question: "Should scientists study race and IQ?
The answers are Yes, argued by Stephen Cici and Wendy Williams of the Dept of Human Development at Cornell, and No, argued by Steven Rose, a neuroscientist at Open University.
I would like to weigh in.
The real answer, as is so often the case, is "You dumbass, what kind of question is that? Think about it further and rephrase the question!"
But I don't…
gregladen | February 18, 2009The Kennedy School of Government had banned all smoking within the building, but had not yet banned smoking just outside the doors facing the Charles River, to the south of the complex. An African American woman, about fifty years of age, took a light from me, and we stood in the falling snow enjoying our smokes. That was a heavy year for snow. It seemed that every day about the same time the two of us would be standing here in a blizzard.
I never knew her name, but I knew she worked in the cafeteria. We talked about a wide range of topics, including (and possibly mainly) the weather. A week…
dgmacarthur | February 18, 2009I was surprised by the response to my brief post on the question of whether group (race or gender) differences in intelligence are a valid topic for scientific investigation: not only because of the volume of comments, but also because the ensuing debate was largely civil and on-topic. The post was sparked off by two conflicting essays in the most recent issue of Nature, one by Steven Rose opposing research into such differences, and another by Ceci and Williams arguing that sealing off certain lines of enquiry - however contentious - is dangerous and unscientific.
There's now more on this…