A New Label: Race As Social Construct

One of the great articles of faith to progressives is that race and sex are both social constructs: created entirely by our expectations and prejudices, and therefore flexible and mutable (unlike homosexuality, which is inborn and immutable).  Some of this is driven by the progressives having taken women's studies, gay studies, and philosophy in school, not sciences.  I have added a new label race as social construct for postings about evidence that progressives as usual are ignorant liars. 

Remember, Race Is A Social Construct

Nothing to do with genetics.  Just ignore articles like this:

San Diego, CA (Scicasts) - Researchers at the University of California, San Diego and the School of Medicine have found that the three-dimensional shape of the cerebral cortex - the wrinkled outer layer of the brain controlling many functions of thinking and sensation - strongly correlates with ancestral background. The study, published online July 9 in Current Biology, opens the door to more precise studies of brain anatomy going forward and could eventually lead to more personalized medicine approaches for diagnosing and treating brain diseases.

"If we can account for a large percentage of brain structure based on an individual's genes, we're in a better position to detect smaller variations in the brain that might be important in understanding disease or developmental issues," said the study's senior author Anders Dale, PhD, professor of radiology, neurosciences, psychiatry and cognitive science, and director of the Center for Translational Imaging and Precision Medicine at UC San Diego.

In their study, the researchers found they could predict with "a relatively high degree of accuracy an individual's genetic ancestry based on the geometry of their cerebral cortex."...

"The geometry of the brain's cortical surface contains rich information about ancestry," said the study's first author, Chun Chieh Fan, MD, a graduate student in cognitive science. "Even in the modern contemporary U.S. population, with its melting pot of different cultures, it was still possible to correlate brain cortex structure to ancestral background."

Four continental populations were used as ancestral references: European, West African, East Asian and Native American. The metrics for summarizing genetic ancestry in each ancestral component were standardized as proportions ranging from 0 to 100 percent.

"We looked to see how well we could predict how much genetic ancestry they had from Africa, Europe and so forth," said study co-author Terry Jernigan, PhD, professor of cognitive science, psychiatry and radiology, adding that cortex differences between various lineages were focused in certain areas. "There were various systematic differences, particularly in the folding and gyrification patterns of the cortex," said Jernigan, also director of the university's Center for Human Development. "Those patterns were quite strongly reflective of genetic ancestry."

The researchers reported that the cortical patterns accounted for 47 to 66 percent of the variation among individuals in their genetic ancestry, depending on the ancestral lineage.

Race as Socially Constructed

It is a fundamental assumption of progressives that race is a social construction: that there is no underlying genetic origin to race.  My students show up having been thoroughly indoctrinated to believe this.  But like most things that the schools teach, it is false.  From Nature Genetics 36, S28 - S33 (2004)

Genetic variation, classification and 'race'

Lynn B Jorde & Stephen P Wooding

Analysis of many loci now yields reasonably accurate estimates of genetic similarity among individuals, rather than populations. Clustering of individuals is correlated with geographic origin or ancestry. These clusters are also correlated with some traditional concepts of race, but the correlations are imperfect because genetic variation tends to be distributed in a continuous, overlapping fashion among populations.  ...

A statistically more sophisticated approach for cluster definition is afforded by the structure program³⁸, in which individuals are first randomly assigned into one of k groups, without regard to population affiliation. Individuals are then moved between groups to minimize Hardy-Weinberg disequilibrium and interlocus linkage disequilibrium within each group (minimal within-groups disequilibrium ensures genetic homogeneity within each group). Posterior probabilities of membership in each of the k groups are then estimated for each individual. Figure 3a shows the results of applying the structure program to individuals from the populations shown in Figure 2. When 100 Alu insertion polymorphisms and 60 short tandem repeat (STR) polymorphisms were used, all Europeans, East Asians and Africans were correctly placed according to their respective continents of origin.

Science vs. Politics: The Social Construction of Race

There are diseases that are overwhelmingly present in some ethnic or racial groups, such as cystic fibrosis (European ancestry), Tay-Sachs (Ashkenazi Jews), sickle-cell anemia (blacks), or hereditary haemachromatosis (Celts, British, and Scandinavian).  You can find individuals outside those groups with these diseases, but they are generally rare.

If you go to WebMD, you get a screed about how racial differences in diseases aren't real because race is socially constructed, and that poverty and racism are the real causes of apparent racial differences.  Yet when you go to scholarly papers, there are plenty of studies that are examining differences that are genetic, and not environmental, such as this paper from Circulation, "Race-Specific Differences in Endothelial Function: Predisposition of African Americans to Vascular Diseases."  The paper demonstrates using "single human umbilical vein endothelial cells" drawn from health-matched black and white Americans that there are genetically-based differences in NO/O₂⁻/ONOO⁻ release that explains, even apart from diet, poverty, and medical care, why American blacks have higher rates of diabetes and hypertension than WHITES.

This is a serious problem: pretending that every difference in illness among different ethnic and racial groups is non-genetic is a recipe for health care system disaster.  It would be like deciding to apportion Tay-Sachs screening clinics in Casper, Wyoming using the same per capita as New York City or Los Angeles, or deciding that funding for sickle cell anemia treatment should be distributed across every state proportionate to population, rather than based on likely risk.

More Social Construction of Race

This July 2, 2014 BBC report discusses some recently published work that shows that Tibetan adaptation to high altitude is not just exposure, but genetic, and something that came from the Denovisians, not the Neanderthals or our African ancestors:

Now, researchers have linked an unusual variant of the EPAS1 gene, which is involved in regulating the body's production of haemoglobin - the molecule that carries oxygen in the blood - to the Denisovans. When the body is exposed to the low oxygen levels encountered at high elevations, EPAS1 tells other genes in the body to become active, stimulating a response that includes the production of extra red blood cells.

The unusual variant in question is common among Tibetans and probably spread under natural selection after they moved onto the high-altitude plateau in Asia several thousand years ago.

"We have very clear evidence that this version of the gene came from Denisovans," said principal author co-author Rasmus Nielsen, from the University of California, Berkeley.

If the headline puzzles you, let me explain: it became an article of faith on the left that racial differences, such as tolerance of sunlight, altitude adaptations like this, sickle-cell anemia (a mutation that provides significant advantages in malarial areas), are social constructs: that there are no real differences between races except the ones that our cultures create.  Here's a recent example of this claim:

Our notion of what constitutes "white" and what constitutes "black" is a product of social context. It is utterly impossible to look at the delineation of a "Southern race" and not see the Civil War, the creation of an "Irish race" and not think of Cromwell's ethnic cleansing, the creation of a "Jewish race" and not see anti-Semitism. There is no fixed sense of "whiteness" or "blackness," not even today. It is quite common for whites to point out that Barack Obama isn't really "black" but "half-white." One wonders if they would say this if Barack Obama were a notorious drug-lord.