Ongoing Human Evolution

Ah. Andrew Sullivan looks forward--a little too eagerly?--to the division of the human race into subspecies along racial lines:

www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish: Humans are still evolving - and at quite a brisk pace, according to new research. Bad news for liberals: at the rate research is going, you will soon have to choose between believing in evolution and denying any subtle, genetic differences between broad racial groups.

He is, of course, wrong. He hasn't done the math. The human gene pool will be well-mixed as long as there is even a very small amount of cross-population genetic mixing.

To see this, let's suppose that you have two groups of humans--population 1 and population 2--that are almost completely separated: only one in a thousand marriages crosses group lines. And let's suppose that there is a highly favorable dominant mutation--one that increases the holder's relative chances of surviving to reproduce by five percent. Let's make 20 years be a generation. And let's further suppose that this mutation has spread so that 1% of the people in population 1 possess the mutation, and nobody in population 2 possesses it.

Now turn this situation loose. What will happen over time?

This:

There will be an age--about 1500 years--in which a few people in population 1 have this mutation, and almost nobody in population 2 has it. There will be an age--about 750 years--in which about half of the people in population 1 have this mutation, and a few people in population 2 have it. There will be an age--about another 750 years--in which it is rare that somebody in population 1 doesn't have this mutation, and in which less than half of population 2 has it. There will be an age--another 1500 years--in which effectively everybody in population 1 has this mutation, and more than half but not yet effectively everybody in population 2 has it.

There is no age in which you can say what Andrew Sullivan wants to say: that there are subtle, genetic differences between "broad racial groups" in the sense that members of population 1 have the mutation, and members of population 2 do not.

There is surely enough mixing in the human gene pool today to prevent any future strong segregation of genetic markers by groups even as strong as what we see today with the epicanthal fold. Even today, I guess that my children's ancestors 750 years ago lived in what is now the United States, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, Germany, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Madeira, somewhere in West Africa, Italy, Sicily, Poland, Lithuania, White Russia, Ukraine, Great Russia, and Mongolia--and more.

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UPDATE: Comments closed--I don't have time to keep them a discussion rather than a food fight.

Comments

[JDC]

Brad, this is the dumbest thing you have ever written. You think Sullivan *could* do the math? Or maybe you're simply optimistic.

[anne]

http://www.goodrumj.com/Mayr.html

Winter, 2002

The Biology of Race and the Concept of Equality
By Ernst Mayr

There are words in our language that seem to lead inevitably to controversy. This is surely true for the words "equality" and "race." And yet among well informed people, there is little disagreement as to what these words should mean, in part because various advances in biological science have produced a better understanding of the human condition.

Let me begin with race. There is a widespread feeling that the word "race" indicates something undesirable and that it should be left out of all discussions. This leads to such statements as "there are no human races."

Those who subscribe to this opinion are obviously ignorant of modern biology. Races are not something specifically human; races occur in a large percentage of species of animals. You can read in every textbook on evolution that geographic races of animals, when isolated from other races of their species, may in due time become new species. The terms "subspecies" and "geographic race" are used interchangeably in this taxonomic literature.

This at once raises a question: are there races in the human species? After all, the characteristics of most animal races are strictly genetic, while human races have been marked by nongenetic, cultural attributes that have very much affected their overt characteristics. Performance in human activities is influenced not only by the genotype but also by culturally acquired attitudes. What would be ideal, therefore, would be to partition the phenotype of every human individual into genetic and cultural components.

Alas, so far we have not yet found any reliable technique to do this. What we can do is acknowledge that any recorded differences between human races are probably composed of cultural as well as genetic elements. Indeed, the cause of many important group differences may turn out to be entirely cultural, without any genetic component at all. Still, if I introduce you to an Eskimo and a Kalahari Bushman I won't have much trouble convincing you that they belong to different races.

In a recent textbook of taxonomy, I defined a "geographic race" or subspecies as "an aggregate of phenotypically similar populations of a species inhabiting a geographic subdivision of the range of that species and differing taxonomically from other populations of that species." A subspecies is a geographic race that is sufficiently different taxonomically to be worthy of a separate name. What is characteristic of a geographic race is, first, that it is restricted to a geographic subdivision of the range of a species, and second, that in spite of certain diagnostic differences, it is part of a larger species.

No matter what the cause of the racial difference might be, the fact that species of organisms may have geographic races has been demonstrated so frequently that it can no longer be denied. And the geographic races of the human species - established before the voyages of European discovery and subsequent rise of a global economy - agree in most characteristics with the geographic races of animals. Recognizing races is only recognizing a biological fact.

Still, the biological fact by itself does not foreclose giving various answers to the question, What is race? In particular, adherence to different political and moral philosophies, as we shall see, permits rather different answers. But I believe it is useful at the outset to bracket the cultural factors and explore some of the implications of a strictly biological approach....

[Kate Gilbert]

And isn't the other problem that, of course, Sullivan thinks that an evolutionary model predicated on survival of the fittest-for-that-environment offspring will duplicate a social darwinist theories of a small number of lunatics discussing social evolution over very small periods of time (evolutionarily speaking) and extremely large periods of time (socially speaking?).

Kate

[Kate]

Sorry for the typo, should be "the social darwinist pseudo theories of a small number of lunatics..."

[gcochran]

I suppose that people are reacting to the new Bruce Lahn papers? Well, the new ASPM variant has a gene frequency of about 50% in France, zero in most Amerindian populations, low in sub-Saharan Africa, very low (0-5%) in most western and southern sub-Saharan African populations. Zero among the Bushmen, zero among the Bantu poulation of South Africa, 2% among the Yoruba: get the picture? Higher in East Africa - Arab gene flow, probably.

It's been increasing like mad: has something like a 6% advantage in fitness, maybe more.

[Joe O]

60% frequency in PNG.

[Martin James]

There is a critical assumption in this scenario that makes the scenario improbable. It is unlikley that a mutation would have a similar effect on reproductive success in two "almost completely separated" populations.

Curiously, Brad also frames reproductive success in terms of surviving to reproductive age rather than in terms of the number of offspring. In our low mortality environment, reproductive success and genetic change are almost completely driven by the number of offspring not by pre-reproductive age mortality.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/science/09brain.html?ex=1283918400&en=d8f1aae514ecf407&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Brain May Still Be Evolving, Studies Hint
By NICHOLAS WADE

Two genes involved in determining the size of the human brain have undergone substantial evolution in the last 60,000 years, researchers say, leading to the surprising suggestion that the brain is still undergoing rapid evolution.

The discovery adds weight to the view that human evolution is still a work in progress, since previous instances of recent genetic change have come to light in genes that defend against disease and confer the ability to digest milk in adulthood.

It had been widely assumed until recently that human evolution more or less stopped 50,000 years ago.

The new finding, reported in today's issue of Science by Bruce T. Lahn of the University of Chicago, and colleagues, could raise controversy because of the genes' role in determining brain size. New versions of the genes, or alleles as geneticists call them, appear to have spread because they enhanced brain function in some way, the report suggests, and they are more common in some populations than others.

But several experts strongly criticized this aspect of the finding, saying it was far from clear that the new alleles conferred any cognitive advantage or had spread for that reason. Many genes have more than one role in the body, and the new alleles could have been favored for some other reason, these experts said, such as if they increased resistance to disease.

Even if the new alleles should be shown to improve brain function, that would not necessarily mean that the populations where they are common have any brain-related advantage over those where they are rare. Different populations often take advantage of different alleles, which occur at random, to respond to the same evolutionary pressure, as has happened in the emergence of genetic defenses against malaria, which are somewhat different in Mediterranean and African populations.

If the same is true of brain evolution, each population might have a different set of alleles for enhancing function, many of which remain to be discovered.

The Chicago researchers began their study with two genes, known as microcephalin and ASPM, that came to light because they are disabled in a disease called microcephaly. People with the condition are born with a brain much smaller than usual, often with a substantial shrinkage of the cerebral cortex, that seems to be a throwback to when the human brain was a fraction of its present size....

[Ralph]

Andrew Sullivan is apparently unaware that he is himself an evolutionary retard.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/14/opinion/14leroi.html?ex=1268456400&en=e9d678c88126e083&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

A Family Tree in Every Gene
By ARMAND MARIE LEROI

London — Shortly after last year's tsunami devastated the lands on the Indian Ocean, The Times of India ran an article with this headline: "Tsunami May Have Rendered Threatened Tribes Extinct." The tribes in question were the Onge, Jarawa, Great Andamanese and Sentinelese - all living on the Andaman Islands - and they numbered some 400 people in all. The article, noting that several of the archipelago's islands were low-lying, in the direct path of the wave, and that casualties were expected to be high, said, "Some beads may have just gone missing from the Emerald Necklace of India."

The metaphor is as colorful as it is well intentioned. But what exactly does it mean? After all, in a catastrophe that cost more than 150,000 lives, why should the survival of a few hundred tribal people have any special claim on our attention? There are several possible answers to this question. The people of the Andamans have a unique way of life. True, their material culture does not extend beyond a few simple tools, and their visual art is confined to a few geometrical motifs, but they are hunter-gatherers and so a rarity in the modern world. Linguists, too, find them interesting since they collectively speak three languages seemingly unrelated to any others. But the Times of India took a slightly different tack. These tribes are special, it said, because they are of "Negrito racial stocks" that are "remnants of the oldest human populations of Asia and Australia."

It's an old-fashioned, even Victorian, sentiment. Who speaks of "racial stocks" anymore? After all, to do so would be to speak of something that many scientists and scholars say does not exist. If modern anthropologists mention the concept of race, it is invariably only to warn against and dismiss it. Likewise many geneticists. "Race is social concept, not a scientific one," according to Dr. Craig Venter - and he should know, since he was first to sequence the human genome. The idea that human races are only social constructs has been the consensus for at least 30 years.

But now, perhaps, that is about to change. Last fall, the prestigious journal Nature Genetics devoted a large supplement to the question of whether human races exist and, if so, what they mean. The journal did this in part because various American health agencies are making race an important part of their policies to best protect the public - often over the protests of scientists. In the supplement, some two dozen geneticists offered their views. Beneath the jargon, cautious phrases and academic courtesies, one thing was clear: the consensus about social constructs was unraveling. Some even argued that, looked at the right way, genetic data show that races clearly do exist.

The dominance of the social construct theory can be traced to a 1972 article by Dr. Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist, who wrote that most human genetic variation can be found within any given "race." If one looked at genes rather than faces, he claimed, the difference between an African and a European would be scarcely greater than the difference between any two Europeans. A few years later he wrote that the continued popularity of race as an idea was an "indication of the power of socioeconomically based ideology over the supposed objectivity of knowledge." Most scientists are thoughtful, liberal-minded and socially aware people. It was just what they wanted to hear.

Three decades later, it seems that Dr. Lewontin's facts were correct, and have been abundantly confirmed by ever better techniques of detecting genetic variety. His reasoning, however, was wrong. His error was an elementary one, but such was the appeal of his argument that it was only a couple of years ago that a Cambridge University statistician, A. W. F. Edwards, put his finger on it.

The error is easily illustrated. If one were asked to judge the ancestry of 100 New Yorkers, one could look at the color of their skin. That would do much to single out the Europeans, but little to distinguish the Senegalese from the Solomon Islanders. The same is true for any other feature of our bodies. The shapes of our eyes, noses and skulls; the color of our eyes and our hair; the heaviness, height and hairiness of our bodies are all, individually, poor guides to ancestry.

But this is not true when the features are taken together....

[PaulC]

We'll hit Drexler's nanotech singularity long before evolution has any appreciable effect on the human genome, whether it happens within my own lifetime or 1000 years from now.

Heck, with or without nanotech, we'll understand so much more about genetics before the next generation comes of age, that it's sort of silly to speculate about "natural" selection of humans. Regulation might slow down proactive attempts at eugenics, but unless we're willing to stop work on treating birth defects, our lineage is going to look almost nothing like the result of natural selection.

This is all barring some sort of catastrophe, of course, but I feel pretty safe in ruling out some kind of gradualist scenario in which the patent office shuts down and all innovation is replaced by stylistic redesigns of existing products. Assuming innovation at the same rate as the last few centuries or even a substantially slower rate (and the correct assumption is probably an ever accelerating rate) it's pretty clear that something big is around the corner.

[Sam]

I believe it would be closer to the target to simply state that Andy's argument suffers from false dilemma. There is positively nothing that prevents a reasonable person from believing BOTH (1) in evolution and (2) that there are subtle, genetic differences between broad racial groups. For example, has anyone else noticed the apparent "subtle, genetic difference" between African Americans and Caucasians in basketball ability?

[Jeff]

Gene flow between geographically previously isolated populations is happening at such a rate as to make this discussion moot. Human populations ("races") will no longer be genetically distinguishable within several generations. Which is not to say that we won't be able to find significant and informative genetic markers more or less peculiar to certain geographical groups. (I.e., if I, an English/Scottish American, have a child with a nearly non-European black American, then the child's genotype--if not phenotype--would still reveal peculiarities of both "races," for example freckling and sickle-cell (hopefully not expressed.)

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

Martin James, yes.

Of course Andy can't do the math, but Brad's math is way too facile, for the reason James mentioned (selective advantage depends on environment)and others, including the fact that mixing between human populations is not random.

Other things being equal, running fast and jumping high are selectively advantageous, so how do you account for the spread and persistence of mutations that have left Europeans and Orientals relatively slow and ground-bound compared to our ancestral populations in Africa?

The most economical hypothesis is that short, thick bodies and limbs have an advantage for conserving heat that outweighs the disadvantage in lost agility.

Academics are probably the only people in the world who could bring themselves to disbelieve in racial differences. This professed disbelief in what everybody can see leaves the field of racial differences as the exclusive province of the racists.

[bambi vs godzilla]

I vaguely remember reading in an essay by Gould about Kinsey that biologists have come to some agreement since Mayr that sub-species is linguistic fluff.

[sister of ye]

What an ignorant twisting of science, Anne.

Get a clue: there never have been any pure races. Humans have been moving about and intermingling since before recorded history. In some areas, such as southwest Asia, it has been especially pronounced, but there is no population on earth that has been cut off long enough to speciate.

Some metabolic processes do seem to correlate to "race" as currently distinguished. But those traits are few against the total human number. In any case, it still is only a general guideline; each individual must ultimately be treated as him/herself.

Moreover, some traits appear to vary by environment, not cosmetic features. People whose ancesters were herders overall tolerate non-human milks better than those whose were not, regardless of ancestral continent. Many African-Americans are lactose-intolerant. And I know many Polish-Americans descent (such as myself) who are as well.

A Discovery Channel program some months back did a search for the "lost tribes" of Israel. It led to an African group that claims that descent. Though "Negro" in appearance, genetic tests determined that they do, indeed, have key markers that they share not with their African neighbors, but with Semitic groups including Jews.

In an age of international travel and fading taboos against intermarriage, these archaic categories will soon be moot. And none too soon.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

Anne - "His error was an elementary one"

I didn't quite follow your argument, but wasn't his error in confusing the variability of neutral genes (those that carry little or no selective advantage, usually because they code for the same protein) with the variability in genes that are actively selected? Neutral genetic variation is high in all populations, but that's not true of the genes that determine the obvious differences between Swede and Bushman, and it's not true for perhaps thousands of other genes with selective advantages in their respective environments.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

sister, sister - "Get a clue: there never have been any pure races."

If you are going to criticize someone, try criticizing them forsomething they said instead of some completely extraneous crap. Anne didn't claim that different races were "pure" and she certainly didn't claim they were subspecies (Though I would claim that it's quite plausible that the recently discovered, but apparently late, "hobbit people" were a distinct subspecies).

Long periods of comparative genetic isolation have existed though - the aboriginal Austrailians were essentially isolated for tens of thousands of years, and the native Americans for 12,000 years.

[Ronald Brak]

Personally I'd rather my decendants be Morlocks than Eloi. At least Morlocks get things done.

[Nagual Haven]

Those who complain that the DeLong's example does not take into account that mixing of populations is not random are off-base, I believe. If you have a model for such mixing that is better than assuming random mixing, please present it. Otherwise, all you are doing is expressing a prejudice (in the non-pejorative sense of the word). DeLong's point is that even assuming a very small amount of random mixing the scenario that Sullivan outlines won't work.

As for the environment being more favorable in one population for selecting for a particular trait, that is only true if the environment is much the same for a long period of time. Going forward from now, does anyone have a clue what those factors will be?

[Brad DeLong]

Well, yes, if there are traits that are advantageous some places and disadvantageous in others, you'll find geographic differences. Consider skin color: you need low melanin levels in the north or you'll suffer from vitamin D deficiency and get rickets; you need high melanin levels near the equator or you'll get melanoma...

If you herd cows, there's selection pressure for lactose tolerance. It's not clear to me what the advantage in non cow-herding cultures to lactose intolerance is...

[JimPortlandOR]

Most of the comments above hint that all that matters in evolving forms are the genes in DNA.

A recent book by Sean B. Carroll (Endless Forms Most Beautiful - the New Science of Evo Devo amd the Making of the Animal Kingdom: NY: Norton, 2005) opened my eyes much wider on genetics and evolutionary development.

Carroll describes how areas of DNA that are not 'genes' function as switches and tool kits to structure evolution at work. The DNA/RNA form proteins that trigger tool kit components which are in turn interpreted by varying genetic (DNA) switches. Fascinating stuff!

I highly recommend the book for those who want to understand how the evolutionary development folks are reworking our understanding of genetics. Carroll discusses lots of evidence and has some fascinating color photos that show how the tool kits and switches work in shaping the development of the animal embryo at various points in each animal's development to a mature individual.

IMO, when we understand this story better, we will be surprised how homo sapien's story is much more complex than current scientific and popular discussion indicates - which seems based solely on how genes differ as a explanation/refutation of 'races'.

[Rapier]

Sullivan evidently has strayed off the Intellegent Design ranch since you can't argue about evolution no matter how badly, and be in the IE camp. Well I suppose you can if your a totally committed politician like Frist who by the way wrote a vanity family history 'Good People Beget Good People: A Geneology of the Frist Family' which evidently is an exploration of Social Darwinism where surprise surprise the Frists are on top.

I hope Sully might someday do a paper on the evolutionary advantages of homosexuality. I know this is totally unfair but what the heck. As long as he is going to make science the servant of ideology he deserves it.

[MillionthMonkey]

"Bad news for liberals: at the rate research is going, you will soon have to choose between believing in evolution and denying any subtle, genetic differences between broad racial groups."

Since when have "liberals" been "denying any subtle, genetic differences between broad racial groups"?

What the "liberals" (I'm reading that as "scientists") deny is that the differences between racial groups bear any significance compared to the variation within individual racial groups. There is much more variation among Asian people than there is between Asians and whites considered as groups. Racial differences are attributable to a very small number of genetic variations.

[Pro-miscegeny]

I thought two critters belonged to the same "race" if they could mate and produce offspring. I would want to see an Eskimo and a Kalahari pygmy "in action" before I'd be so easily persuaded by Mr. Scientist.

Race exists not because of genetics but because people think it exists. Race "exists" about as much as Santa Claus exists.

[scott]

Sullivan seems to be engaging in the usual right-wing projection. In my experience it's not "liberals" that choose to "stop believing" in established scientific fact when it conflicts with some personal or political agenda.

[krimpet]

What bothers me most in this, besides the pig-headed stupidity and the racism is the way that Andrew, like most members of the the conservatocracy, can't seem to string three sentences together without tossing out some gratuitous pot-shot against "liberals". What is it with these people? Liberal-bashing seems to be their most heartfelt conviction. It's like they need to keep reinforcing their hate to maintain their group identity.

It's really a shame too, Andrew is often eloquent about gay rights issues.

[MillionthMonkey]

Well race certainly does exist. Any two human observers can, independently of each other, reliably classify a large mixed-race group of people into racial subsets that have statistically significant overlap across classifiers. (Meaning the chance is vanishingly small that you and I would both pick the same group of 20 people out of 100 as being white if we were selecting them randomly.) If you try to convince people that race doesn't exist, you'll run right into "who I going to believe, you or my lying eyes?"

Race (as understood in the vernacular, not as an ability to produce offspring) is ill-defined because it is based on a large set of genetic variations (which is dwarfed by the set of all genetic variations found in humans). That doesn't mean it doesn't exist at all.

[The artist formerly known as M.]

The ability to digest lactose as an adult would probably be a neutral trait unless you're herding cows (or goats or other milk-producing critters). Milk is going to be a much bigger part of your diet if you're a herder, but it's something non-herders can take or leave.

So as a neutral trait, it can disappear through genetic drift. A mutation which prevents you from digesting lactose as an adult hurts your fitness as a herder, but does not hurt your fitness as a non-herder.

[Roger Albin]

The late, great Ernst Mayr to the contrary, the case for subspecies among humans is not very strong. A reasonable way to look at this issue is to examine the amount of genetic difference between well studied and recognized subspecies. The degree of genetic differences between well characterized Drosophila subspecies in geographically connected ranges, for example, is much greater than the difference between Africans and Amerindians. There is some evidence that humans exhibit less genetic variation than other primates, suggesting a fairly recent population bottleneck.
As for recent genetic data regarding human races, well, this depends on how you define race. If you mean a group of individuals who share a geographically common region of origin and consequently have a statistical likelihood of having some allele frequencies different from a group of individuals from another region, then yes, races exist. But there will be individuals within each "race" whose distribution of alleles is much closer to the group mean of those from the other region. This situation is quite different from the historic and in many circles still popular concept of race, which is a social construct implying qualitative genetic differences.
The controversy over "race" among geneticists isn't so much an argument about whether "race" exists, there is a good common understanding of the phenomenon, but as whether or not what we define as race in the vernacular sense can be used as a useful tool in genetic analyses, particularly for disease processes. Some argue that what we commonly call race can be used to provide proxy information about genetic background and be useful in such analyses, particularly for complex disease traits. Others argue that this is both unecessary and imprecise because improved genotyping methods provide much more information. This group is concerned also because that it tends to reinforce the popular view of race as a qualitative phenomenon.
As for the Edwards argument about coincidence of multiple features providing a template of "race", this is a much less powerful argument than it initially seems. All these features and underlying allele frequencies are continuously distributed. In these continuous distributions, where can you actually draw the line as dividing one "race" from another?

[nate]

Professor DeLong:

Did you go to Harvard? Do you know people at Harvard?

http://www.isc.hbs.edu/about-staffbios.htm

There is a spelling mistake at the site above. It should be "Arthur Andersen" and not "Anderson". This may seem nitpicky, but... if you could let someone know who could ensure Andersen is spelled correctly, it would be appreciated.

http://www.andersen.com/

[clue]

Brad -

Next time you're here, please delete this and the previous comment.

The page linked to has many email addresses to which this person can mail a complaint.

Years from now, when this person understands the Internet, email and web logs better, he will laugh at this episode.

[gcochran]

"But there will be individuals within each "race" whose distribution of alleles is much closer to the group mean of those from the other region. "

So, if you look at a large number of polymorphic loci, there will be Zulus that will be (in a genetic-distance sense) closer to the Finnish mean than the Zulu mean?

Doesn't happen. Ever. If you look at a few loci, maybe: as you you look at more and more loci, it becomes vanishingly improbable.

This is not unrelated to the fact that you will never, ever mistake _any_ Zulu for a Finn.

[bambi vs godzilla]

Yes races exist as thoughts in the philosophy of taxonomy. They aren't so much a property of nature as a means to coordinate and elucide data that comes to us in waves in an irreducible continuum of variation. Personally I like to think of myself as a colony of cells rather than as an organism in the species H. Sapiens. I mean why not?

[steve]

As mentioned, Brad's calculation neglects the possibility that mutations which might be adaptive in one environment are not necessarily adaptive in another.

According to the recent Lahn research (linked to by Anne, above), certain alleles of genes with direct effects on brain function have been subject to strong selection over the last tens of thousands of years. In certain populations (e.g., in Eurasia), the new alleles have rapidly replaced their predecessors, so they were clearly adaptive in those environments. In other populations (sub-Saharan Africa), the new alleles are rare, so they were probably less adaptive.

I don't know what will happen in the future, but current research shows that geographically-isolated populations can have very different distributions of certain alleles, and not just those related to superficial features like skin or hair color.

Most fascinating is the possibility that relatively recent mutations had something to do with the rapid advancement of human civilization over the last 5000 years. (The ASPM variant may have emerged about that long ago.)

[P.M.Lawrence]

It's a wise child that knows its own father. Brad DeLong is mistaken; absolutely NONE of his ancestors lived in Madeira 750 years ago. In fact, absolutely none of anybody's ancestors did. I'm not even sure if it featured on the map of Piri Reis.

[nate]

"The page linked to has many email addresses to which this person can mail a complaint."

This person has used an email address at the page listed. It fell on blind eyes. If the person would have fixed it, there would be no need for me to point this out to an alum.

I am not laughing now. One never knows about the future, yet I doubt I laugh about it. Spell a proper noun properly.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

pro-misc "I thought two critters belonged to the same "race" if they could mate and produce offspring. I would want to see an Eskimo and a Kalahari pygmy "in action" before I'd be so easily persuaded by Mr. Scientist."

You have confused race with species.

[Dan Nexon]

"Has anyone else noticed the apparent "subtle, genetic difference" between African Americans and Caucasians in basketball ability?"

Has anyone noticed the apparent "subtle, genetic difference" between African Americans and Caucasians in Ice Hockey ability? Clearly, selective pressures dating back to the Ice Age explain the superiority of Caucasians at skating and hitting pucks with sticks; not to mention brawling in very cold temperatures.

But this doesn't explain why Lacrosse, for example, remains dominated by Caucasians. Perhaps there's a good racial-evolutionary explanation for that too?

Or, perhaps, we're telling "just so" stories to explain phenomena that have little to do with putatively racial genetic variation...? Nah, couldn't be.

[MTC]

P. M Lawrence -

Madeira is on the Piri Reis. Check it out:

http://www.prep.mcneese.edu/engr/engr321/preis/pirimap3.jpg

As for your criticism of the 750 years error, we can give the professor partial credit (the Erie Canal runs from the Great Lakes to Hudson Bay...).

[MasonMcD]

"It's a wise child that knows its own father. Brad DeLong is mistaken; absolutely NONE of his ancestors lived in Madeira 750 years ago. In fact, absolutely none of anybody's ancestors did. I'm not even sure if it featured on the map of Piri Reis."

I think he was listing all of the regions his ancestors have come from over the past 750 years up to and including the present, but nice way to parse the sentence to whip out the trivia.

[nate]

More on spelling:

Spelling stuff wrong does not bother me in the overwhelming majority of instances. For example, consider blogging. Focusing excessively on spelling might slow down or inhibit ideation and spontaneity. Spelling on unpublished or working papers may also be okay. Focusing on bigger ideas may be more important.

However, an outward facing sight at a university such as Harvard should spell names correctly. It is not very respectful toward Arthur Andersen to spell his name incorrectly (Arthur Andersen was a real person around 70 years ago). Given what has happened , it seems like people should at least spell his name correctly.

[nate]

One more: my posting was not a "complaint".

Someone who makes a suggestion that is very easy and inexpensive to implement, and that will objectively improve something, is not a complainer.

A lot of people do not want to improve.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

I hate to be in the position of defending Andy, even if he does seem to have seen some of the light on Bush, but if his point is that racial differences exist between human groups, it looks unassailable. There is clearly an element of social construction in how we divide up races. Naive observers might classify the dark skinned inhabitants of India, Australia, and the several quite distinct dark skinned peoples of Africa in one "race," but that's just lack of knowledge. Because human races grade into each other, its not possible to draw really sharp lines, either.

It's very likely that since our common ancestor of 100,000 years or so ago, humans have diversified into dozens or hundreds of different races - groups geographically isolated long enough to develop significant differences in gene frequency and appearance. Mostly they have been lost in the tide of the years. Africa, the home continent, has five native races in Diamond's count including caucasian types in the north, Asian/Polenesians in Madagascar and the nearby coast, and at least three dark skinned races, each as different from each other as from Europeans.

[Nals]

Everybody should keep fucking everybody else until we're all one color.

[Redshift]

MillionthMonkey:
Race (as understood in the vernacular, not as an ability to produce offspring) is ill-defined because it is based on a large set of genetic variations (which is dwarfed by the set of all genetic variations found in humans). That doesn't mean it doesn't exist at all.

No, it's ill-defined because it's a cultural construct, not a biological one. Americans, in our usual sense of "everyone thinks pretty much like us, right?" assume that "everyone" knows there are four races, but in different places and even in America at different times, races have been defined differently.

Yes, racial concepts are always based on how people look, and there are genes that produce skin tone, hair texture, and so on, but that doesn't mean the groupings are biologically meaningful. In the early 20th century in America, the Irish were considered "black." In some European countries, there is racial prejudice against Romani ("gypsies"), and looking at pictures of people of both "races" from the same country, I sure can't tell the difference.

[Redshift]

*sigh* I keep forgetting the comments here don't do italics -- the first paragraph was quoting, the rest was mine.

[Sirkowski]

Andrew Sullivan, the living oxymoron.

[tom f]

So some people claim that variation across populations(races) is dwarfed by variation w/in populations.

Along comes gcochran (see above) to say "not true". Human populations geographically seperate for thousands of years are in fact genetically distinct.

Am I getting this right, or is the human-race-has-no-biological-foundation line in serious question?

[gcochran]

It's a bit complicated. If you look at overall genetic variation, most is within-group (~85%) rather than between-group (~15%). That leaves out a lot: it ignores correlations betweens genes affecting a particular trait.
Here's an example: imagine a particular locus with two alleles, distributed 70-30 in population A and 30-70 in populationn B. The genetic variation is then close to the 85% within-population, 15% between populations. Now imagine a whole raft of loci with the same stats: the split is still 85%-15%. Now imagine that in every single case, the allele that is most common in population A makes you taller than the alternative. Then the differences add up: you can have phenotypic differences as large as you want, to the point where populations A and B have no overlap in height at all. This is what happens, mostly, between breeds of dogs: there are few or no alleles unique to a given breed, but correlated differences ensure that there is no phenotypic overlap at all between dachshunds and Great Danes, no chance of ever mistaking one for the other.
Humans are not as morphologically varied as dogs, but then dogs are the most morphologiclaly varied of all mammals. We're number two.

I can give you a simple and harmless example: we know of a number of genes that influence inflammatory responses, and we know that some variants of those genes cause stronger inflammation, others less. People of sub-Saharan African descent tend to have the more pro-inflammatory variants: so much so that altogether they have a significantly stronger inflamamtory response, which can matter medically.

Correlated genetic differences explain why there is no overlap at all in skin color between Finns and Bantu. The Finn and the Bantu might have the same variant of one of the the genes infuencing skin color (although it's not too likely), but they will almost certainly differ (in a systematic way) at most of the other loci influencing skin colcor.

[Elliott Oti]

Am I getting this right, or is the human-race-has-no-biological-foundation line in serious question?

The problem is the persistent conflation of the fuzzy, indeterminate concept of "race", and the somewhat more precise concept of "population".

Certain traits may be generally identifiable within a certain, geographically localized population (diasporas discounted). Sickle-cell, Tay-Sachs, curly hair, lactose tolerance, subcutaneous fat distribution etc etc.

In practice the boundaries between populations are fluid, as wholly isolated tribes are the exception, not the norm. The boundaries of populations depend also to some extent on the groups of traits one uses to characterize a particular population.

The concept of "race", on the other hand, is pretty much meaningless, especially in the relative melting-pot of the US. Sorting all human beings into three groups, i.e. "blacks", "whites" and "orientals" is a pointless exercise. When used as a pseudo-scientific explanatory concept e.g. white men can't jump it becomes farcical.

[folkers]

Other things being equal, running fast and jumping high are selectively advantageous, so how do you account for the spread and persistence of mutations that have left Europeans and Orientals relatively slow and ground-bound compared to our ancestral populations in Africa?

CapitalistPig, I hate to tell you, but whites dominate the high-jump. Nary a dark skin to be found. Basketball isn't the only sport in the world.

[Tim Worstall]

Nice catch PML. Quite, Madeira, settled 1430s or so. And MasonMcB, yes it’s nitpicking but fun all the same, no?

[Ginger Yellow]

"It had been widely assumed until recently that human evolution more or less stopped 50,000 years ago"

This is an outright lie. It had been widely assumed that our current phenotype(s) was largely determined by the selective pressures present over the last few million years of our evolution, and that the different selective pressures present in the last few thousand years have not had enough time to make a significant difference in the population. Even this assumption was full of acknowledged and well documented exceptions such as adult lactose tolerance, sickle cell anaemia and so on. To say that people thought human evolution stopped 50,000 years ago is just nonsense.

"Other things being equal, running fast and jumping high are selectively advantageous, so how do you account for the spread and persistence of mutations that have left Europeans and Orientals relatively slow and ground-bound compared to our ancestral populations in Africa?"

I don't like where this seems to be going, and I absolutely don't accept the premises of your question. Anyway other things aren't equal. The stronger muscles needed to run fast and jump higher require more energy consumption, which must come from somewhere. Everything in evolution is a trade-off. Our ecological niche is a cognitive one, where improvements in "brainpower" are more selectively advantageous than most other "improvements". That's why reason we can't all see like hawks, run like gazelles and kill things like bears.

[P.M.Lawrence]

Folkers - the present population of Africa isn't strictly ancestral to the rest of the human race, rather it shares common ancestry.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/14/opinion/14leroi.html?ex=1268456400&en=e9d678c88126e083&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

A Family Tree in Every Gene
By ARMAND MARIE LEROI

The dominance of the social construct theory can be traced to a 1972 article by Dr. Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist, who wrote that most human genetic variation can be found within any given "race." If one looked at genes rather than faces, he claimed, the difference between an African and a European would be scarcely greater than the difference between any two Europeans. A few years later he wrote that the continued popularity of race as an idea was an "indication of the power of socioeconomically based ideology over the supposed objectivity of knowledge." Most scientists are thoughtful, liberal-minded and socially aware people. It was just what they wanted to hear.

Three decades later, it seems that Dr. Lewontin's facts were correct, and have been abundantly confirmed by ever better techniques of detecting genetic variety. His reasoning, however, was wrong. His error was an elementary one, but such was the appeal of his argument that it was only a couple of years ago that a Cambridge University statistician, A. W. F. Edwards, put his finger on it.

The error is easily illustrated. If one were asked to judge the ancestry of 100 New Yorkers, one could look at the color of their skin. That would do much to single out the Europeans, but little to distinguish the Senegalese from the Solomon Islanders. The same is true for any other feature of our bodies. The shapes of our eyes, noses and skulls; the color of our eyes and our hair; the heaviness, height and hairiness of our bodies are all, individually, poor guides to ancestry.

But this is not true when the features are taken together. Certain skin colors tend to go with certain kinds of eyes, noses, skulls and bodies. When we glance at a stranger's face we use those associations to infer what continent, or even what country, he or his ancestors came from - and we usually get it right. To put it more abstractly, human physical variation is correlated; and correlations contain information.

Genetic variants that aren't written on our faces, but that can be detected only in the genome, show similar correlations. It is these correlations that Dr. Lewontin seems to have ignored. In essence, he looked at one gene at a time and failed to see races. But if many - a few hundred - variable genes are considered simultaneously, then it is very easy to do so. Indeed, a 2002 study by scientists at the University of Southern California and Stanford showed that if a sample of people from around the world are sorted by computer into five groups on the basis of genetic similarity, the groups that emerge are native to Europe, East Asia, Africa, America and Australasia - more or less the major races of traditional anthropology.

One of the minor pleasures of this discovery is a new kind of genealogy. Today it is easy to find out where your ancestors came from - or even when they came, as with so many of us, from several different places. If you want to know what fraction of your genes are African, European or East Asian, all it takes is a mouth swab, a postage stamp and $400 - though prices will certainly fall.

Yet there is nothing very fundamental about the concept of the major continental races; they're just the easiest way to divide things up. Study enough genes in enough people and one could sort the world's population into 10, 100, perhaps 1,000 groups, each located somewhere on the map. This has not yet been done with any precision, but it will be. Soon it may be possible to identify your ancestors not merely as African or European, but Ibo or Yoruba, perhaps even Celt or Castilian, or all of the above.

The identification of racial origins is not a search for purity. The human species is irredeemably promiscuous. We have always seduced or coerced our neighbors even when they have a foreign look about them and we don't understand a word. If Hispanics, for example, are composed of a recent and evolving blend of European, American Indian and African genes, then the Uighurs of Central Asia can be seen as a 3,000-year-old mix of West European and East Asian genes. Even homogenous groups like native Swedes bear the genetic imprint of successive nameless migrations.

Some critics believe that these ambiguities render the very notion of race worthless. I disagree. The physical topography of our world cannot be accurately described in words. To navigate it, you need a map with elevations, contour lines and reference grids. But it is hard to talk in numbers, and so we give the world's more prominent features - the mountain ranges and plateaus and plains - names. We do so despite the inherent ambiguity of words. The Pennines of northern England are about one-tenth as high and long as the Himalayas, yet both are intelligibly described as mountain ranges.

So, too, it is with the genetic topography of our species. The billion or so of the world's people of largely European descent have a set of genetic variants in common that are collectively rare in everyone else; they are a race. At a smaller scale, three million Basques do as well; so they are a race as well. Race is merely a shorthand that enables us to speak sensibly, though with no great precision, about genetic rather than cultural or political differences....

[JK]

Brad wrote:

"Even today, I guess that my children's ancestors 750 years ago lived in what is now the United States, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, England, Germany, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Madeira, somewhere in West Africa, Italy, Sicily, Poland, Lithuania, White Russia, Ukraine, Great Russia, and Mongolia--and more."

The more is likely to be a long list. Here is an exercise. Estimate how many ancestors you had living 750 years ago. Compare this to world population at that time.

I believe that you need only go a little further back than 750 years to find the world population roughly divide into two groups: those with no living descendents and those who have as descendents almost everyone alive today.

Why are we not homogenous? If you did the exercise above you will deduce that it's due to different proportions of inbreeding.

The stupidity of trying to make race in to a scietific category has been covered by other commentators. Let me add that a historical review would show "race" is first used to naturalise inequality *within* European societies, i.e. class difference. Only later is it transformed to refer to skin colour. Race is a social construct. It is no less real for that, but it is unsurprising that attempts to understand medical or sporting racial differences in biological terms often tend to come apart pretty quickly.

[Ginger Yellow]

"I believe that you need only go a little further back than 750 years to find the world population roughly divide into two groups: those with no living descendents and those who have as descendents almost everyone alive today."

Dawkins has a bit on this in The Ancestor's Tale, unsurprisingly. I can't remember exactly what number he comes up with, but it isn't all that far back. The one thing you have to bear in mind is isolated pockets like the Tasmanians, who had no outside contact for around 10,000 years.

[Janet]

Still, gcochran, the separation of Finns and Zulus or Bantus has no relevance to the situation today where the Finns and the Zulus or Bantus have children together, and those children and the Japanese have children together, and so on and so on. Geographic isolation is more dead than ever. Racial purity is rare and getting rarer. Your arguments will never have meaningful application to any individual.

Ditto, steve. Geographically-isolated populations are disappearing rapidly, which is Brad's point. None of these arguments are relevant, and nothing that you learn from studying such populations can be used to set meaningful policy for the vast numbers of mixed-parentage persons in the US.

[Dave]

"But this doesn't explain why Lacrosse, for example, remains dominated by Caucasians. Perhaps there's a good racial-evolutionary explanation for that too?"

One of the best lacrosse players of the 1950s? Jim Brown. Not the "I Feel Good" James Brown, but the running back. Starred at Syracuse University.

And of course, lacross is originally an Indian game.

And Nate: lighten up dude. Why in the world should Professor DeLong take resonsbility for every error made at Harvard? It's a mistake. It's not Brad's fault.

[Martin James]

So, is the good news that if race is not biologically meaningful, then racism is not biologically meaningful?

And also that "racial" or "cultural" genocide is not biologically meaningful, since all groups are similar enough genetically that the elimination of a cultural grouping through genocide does not make meaningful changes in the gene pool?

[nate]

Dave-

thanks for the input. i was not suggesting DeLong take responsibility for it, or that it is his fault. just pointing it out.

[tom f]

Janet (to gcochran):

"Geographic isolation is more dead than ever. Racial purity is rare and getting rarer. Your arguments will never have meaningful application to any individual.

...or ever be an issue worthy of front page coverage in a major daily?

"Heart Drug for Blacks Endorsed
Racial Tailoring Would Be a First; Idea Stirs Debate

"By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 17, 2005; Page A01

"Federal health advisers yesterday endorsed the approval of a drug to treat heart failure in African Americans, which would make the controversial pill the first medicine targeted at a specific racial group...

"...Studies have suggested that blacks tend to have lower levels of nitric oxide, and researchers noticed during studies in the 1980s that the drug combination, while appearing to offer no benefit in the general population, may be useful among black patients."

[Julian Elson]

Just because race has a sketchy biological basis doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The biological basis of the difference between a Pole and an American is probably even sketchier than the biological basis of the difference between an East Asian and a Middle-Easterner, but who denies that there are "really" Poles and "really" Americans? Of course an American can switch from being an American to being a Pole, and vice versa, but then, some people can switch their races too, in the right circumstances (I can't).

Bah, trying to homogenize the human species into all one color and look. Humbug, I say! In the future, we should have customizations of humanity that will make our current variation look homogeneous! Humans with opposable big toes! Humans with webbed fingers and toes! Interchangable body parts! Photosynthetic skin! Decorative antlers! Melanin patching, creating tiger stripes or polka dots! Internal digital watches, installed directly in the brain, along with calculators! Data ports for jacking directly into computers! Secondary hearts! Pulmonary systems with air flowing in one direction!

Okay, I'm getting a bit carried away.

I think that the dialogue about biology and race goes something like this:

Steve Sailer and friends: Low IQs are associated with poor economic success, as shown in IQ and the Wealth of Nations by Lynn and Vanhannen, and black people have lower inborn IQ levels, but current policies in the West are dysgenic, not eugenic, since they encourage low-IQ people to reproduce, so IQs and wealth throughout society are in a freefall, except that the Flynn effect shows IQs have been continuously rising, and then there's this variable called "heritability," which I'll claim means "genetic..." and... uhmm...

Normal people: That doesn't make any sense.

Bruce Lahn: Here, some new data on allele frequency and race!

Steve Sailer and friends: Liberals are against science!

Normal people: What?

[Nagual Haven]

Martin James, let's assume that "'racial' or 'cultural' genocide is not biologically meaningful." So what? The biological import isn't what makes it abhorent. What exactly is your point here? I seem to be missing it.

[Carleton Wu]

"Bad news for liberals: at the rate research is going, you will soon have to choose between believing in evolution and denying any subtle, genetic differences between broad racial groups."

Uh, Im pretty sure that most liberals won't deny subtle genetic differences: for example, most of us freely admit that caucasians are genetically different than africans insofar as the latter produce more melanin in their skin.

Andrew Sullivan, erector of strawmen extrordinaire.

[Gideon S]

Wow, Armand may be a great geneticist but he's missing the point of what Lewontin is saying. Confusing the "genetic topography" of our species with the social construct of race is inane.

[JK]

From http://www.kenanmalik.com/essays/times_bidil.html

"Is this the future we really want? different drugs for different races

Kenan Malik

This essay was published in the [London] Times, 18 June 2005.

...Critics charge that the study was flawed and that NitroMed, the makers of BiDiL, are exploiting race for financial reasons - its patent for the general use of BiDiL has run out but it has won a new patent until 2020 for the use of the drug on African Americans....

Since most variation exists at the individual level, doctors ideally would like to map every individual's genome to be able to predict better their potential medical problems and their responses to different drugs. Such individual genotyping is currently both practically unfeasible and too costly. Therefore, doctors often resort to using surrogate indicators of an individual's risk profile - such as his or her race.

Until recently people were more likely to marry a neighbour than someone who hailed from distant lands. As a result the further apart two populations are geographically, the more distinct they are likely to be genetically. Icelanders are genetically different from Greeks, but they are genetically closer to Greeks than they are to Nigerians. The difference is tiny, but it can have a medical impact. Knowing the population whence your ancestors came can provide hints as to what genes you might be carrying. Hence race, Sally Satel suggests, is a 'poor man's clue' in medicine.

But a poor man's clue may be as reliable as an intelligence dossier from the British secret service. ... One of the dangers of marketing BiDiL as a black drug is that it may be given to American Americans who won't respond to it, but denied to non-blacks who would benefit.

Secondly, different genes are distributed differently among populations. ... Finally, many medical differences associated with race or ethnicity are likely to be the result of environmental rather than genetic differences, or to be a combination of the two. In the case of BiDiL no one knows which is more important.

What all this suggests is that the question of whether medicine should be colourblind depends on the particular problem we want to address. It is a pragmatic issue, not one rooted in scientific or political principle...."

See also http://www.kenanmalik.com/reviews/entine_taboo.html

"Jon Entine Taboo

Kenan Malik

This review first appeared in Nature, 14 September 2000

Next Saturday, the Olympic men's 100m champion will cross the finishing line just 10 seconds after leaving the starting blocks. The winner may be America's Maurice Greene. He may be Trinidad's Ato Boldon. He may even be Britain's Dwaine Chambers. But whoever takes the gold medal, one thing is certain: he will be black. Indeed it's a racing certainty that all eight finalists will be black, just as they have been at the past four Olympics. Almost as certain is that every race from 100m to 5000m will be won by an athlete of African descent – just as they were in Atlanta four years ago.

What lies behind such black domination of the track? And not just of the track. Sixty per cent of American footballers, for instance, are African American. Among basketball players, the figure rises to 80 per cent. Of basketball stars, almost 95 per cent are black. The traditional liberal answer points the finger at social factors....

American journalist Jon Entine dismisses this as 'political correctness'. The liberal consensus, he argues in Taboo, has served only to disguise the truth about the black domination of sport - which is that blacks are naturally built to run and to jump.

...But his own argument shows why it is not so. According to Entine, East Africans are naturally superior at endurance sports, West Africans at sprinting and jumping, and 'whites fall somewhere in the middle'. But if East and West Africans are at either end of a genetic spectrum of athletic abilities why consider them to be part of a single race, and one that is distinct from whites? Because conventionally we use skin colour as the criterion of racial difference.

...The most irritating aspect of Taboo is Entine's constant dismissal of his critics – including Richard Lewontin and Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza – as 'postmodernists' or simply motivated by ideology. Such bluster cannot hide the gaping holes in his argument. Is athletic talent at least in part inherited? Undoubtedly. Are there genetic differences between populations? Clearly. Are West Africans and Kenyans genetically built for running? Possibly. Are blacks naturally better athletes than whites? Not necessarily. After all, how many African Pygmies have you seen garlanded with Olympic medals?"

[gcochran]

It was certainly widely assumed, or at least stated, that there had been no significant human evolution above the neck in the last 50,000 years. If not, people in different parts of the world are likely to have different psyches, since last common ancestry is about that far back. This is considered an axiom of anthropology - 'the psychic unity of mankind'. Of course it never made any biological sense.

As for the idea that the races are blending together with incredible speed - true compared to the past, true on an evolutionary time scale, not true over a human lifetime or a few human lifetimes. Not very true for Finns and Zulus.

[gcochran]

On another point - "so how do you account for the spread and persistence of mutations that have left Europeans and Orientals relatively slow and ground-bound compared to our ancestral populations in Africa?"

Right now I don't know how to account for them, but I know one of them - the null allele of alpha-actinin-three. The gene shows up in fast-twitch muscles. There are two common versions in humans - one functional and very similar to that found in other mammals, the other nonfunctional. You find both versions everywhere, but the distribution varies a lot. The null allele has a 10% frequency in sub-Saharan Africa, about 50% in Europe and North Asia. The functional allele is a lot more common in top _white_ sprint athletes than you would expect. It helps you run fast - enough to make a difference at the highest level of competition. The Australians who did this work found weaker evidence that the null allele increased endurance.

[Martin James]

Nagual,

Why do abhorent actions take place?

According to an evolutionary perspective, they take place originally due to random variation and continually due to selection effects.

If abhorent actions provide a selection advantage they are more likely to take place despite the abhorence.

The good news would be that if genocide does not provide a selective advantage, then natural selection would be operating to eliminate it resulting in less to abhor.

Another point is just that "having a point" does not usually led to good predictions.

One's attitude towards "ought" invariably clouds one's perception of what "is". Having a point tends to excludes the "pointless" data which in the long run often turns out to have important effects.

For example, the inherent "abhorence" of an act does not cause us to abhor it, otherwise how could our standards of abhorence have changed over time?

This is not an argument to say that things aren't inherently abhorent, its an argument to say that what a particular person finds abhorent isn't caused solely and possibly not even primarily by the abhorence of the action.

But so few and far between are the people that admit and act on the fact that their standards of abhorence are in other ways caused, such as by the crowd they tend to hang with, the parents and mentors they have had, the advantages they see and so on.

In sum, isn't that the best thing about evolutionary theory, that it showed us that life does not operate like our minds, with objectives, but instead that life is pointless?

[steve]

Janet,

As already noted, it will take hundreds of years (at minimum) for mixing to eliminate the correlations between genes and "race" (or ancestral geographic lineage) that we currently have. That is a very long time from the perspective of social policy, although not in evolutionary terms.

I am by no means a fan of Sullivan, but I think he is correct to say that most liberals (I am one myself) have, due to wishful thinking, gratefully accepted the "there is no scientific basis for race" line. Anne's post of the NYTimes op-ed by LeRoi gives the history of this facile, but now doomed, position. (Cochran's explanation above is very clear - better than LeRoi's.) I don't think most people appreciate that we are now on a Moore's Law growth curve for genomic information. Google "hapmap" and have a look for yourself at the state of the art.

Rather than rely on the scientifically unsupported claim that "we are all equal," it would be better to teach our students that we all have inalienable human rights regardless of our abilities or genetic make up. Continuing to rely on the false equality premise only undermines the liberal position on race issues.

[Bubb Rubb]

For example, has anyone else noticed the apparent "subtle, genetic difference" between African Americans and Caucasians in basketball ability?

Posted by: Sam | Sep 12, 2005 5:10:58 PM

These types of comments belie both practical evidence and a lack of understanding of the relationship of genotype, phenotype, and environment.

As for practical evidence, one could sufficiently then ask why Argentinians are more genetically predisposed to basketball ability, because they did win the last Olympic Gold Medal in the sport. Or could one ask whether Argentinians have evolved basketball ability over the past 20 years? It is a ridiculous statement and comment. African Americans are better in basketball because they practice more. The USSR used to be a strong basketball power when they practiced more. Argentina is now a strong basketball power because they practice more.

While people love to comment on the superior athletic abilities of African Americans, I find that fascinating, because African Americans also have the worst health of all Americans (maybe except for Native Americans). It is odd that we can hold two views at once, both that African Americans are superior athletes and that African Americans have a higher incidence of serious chronic health problems, such as diabetes, HIV/AIDS, etc.

Futhermore, someone made some comments about height and jumping ability. While I cannot speak to jumping ability, I do know that average population height is a significant indicator of economic well being. There are strong correlations between the two variables and if you look at the data rather than assigning attributes based on pre-judged ideas, you would know that the Netherlands are the tallest country on average. So what does that mean? Who knows. But I sure wish that people would stop making blind assumptions about race, based not on facts but on cultural notions that are held deep within themselves. And please people, please, genotype and phenotype are not the same things.

[anne]

Steve Hsu:

'Rather than rely on the scientifically unsupported claim that "we are all equal," it would be better to teach our students that we all have inalienable human rights regardless of our abilities or genetic make up. Continuing to rely on the false equality premise only undermines the liberal position on race issues.'

Surely.

[anne]

What Charles Darwin taught was that unlike the other physical sciences, in biology our thinking must be population based. I have a small conure sleeping on my desk, happily. This conure is distinct from all other conures of her species, as the species is distinct. Each conure is a separate world. We are a range of capabilities and potentials, none of us being the same as anyone else even an identical twin, but nonetheless we may share similar attributes. Conures are each distinct, carbon atoms are each alike. Biology calls for population thinking, not for foolish stereotyping, but thinking of the ranges of our "potentials."

[Ginger Yellow]

"It was certainly widely assumed, or at least stated, that there had been no significant human evolution above the neck in the last 50,000 years. If not, people in different parts of the world are likely to have different psyches, since last common ancestry is about that far back. This is considered an axiom of anthropology - 'the psychic unity of mankind'."

a) Why do we care what anthropologists assumed about brain evolution? Why not ask a biologist? Or possibly a phsyical anthropologist? Without really meaning to demean anthropology, I can't think of many other schools of science which have based so many assumptions on so little evidence.

b) People in different parts of the world clearly do have different psyches. Otherwise comparative religion and literature courses would be very dull. How much of that difference is cultural, how much is genetic and how much is individual is up for debate.

Martin: no action is inherrently abhorrent without someone to abhor it, whether it's us as humans or God. Of course standards of abhorrence change over time - our morals have changed.

[Nagual Haven]

Martin,

Having a point when posting isn't required, but it is customary (no snark intended). From your response, I assume your original post is an observation to be taken at face value. In that case, I have to disagree with it a little bit.

I don't think it follows that if race is not biologically meaningful then racism is not biologically meaningful. The first proposition is that race is a social construct largely independent of the genetic reality of human populations. That is, society's racial distinctions are not necessarily an accurate reflection of the genetic differences. The second proposition is that the social constuct of race cannot have any long term effect on the population. The two statements are operating at different levels of abstraction.

There might be a genetic basis to racism, which might be nothing more than the predilection for one group to try to wipe out any other different group even if the differences have no genetic basis. The differences could be entirely cultural. In that case, race could be biologically meaningless, but racism biologically meaningful.

[kathe]

Well, rps, basketball used to be dominated by Jews. I expect it was because at the time, they were practicing more. I think it's obvious that professional sports provide an entry into a better life for people who can't advance in other fields due to prejudice. Therefore, it is a mistake to try to detect clues to "innate ability" in sports participation.

[boing!!!]

As an anthropologist what is apparent to me is there are a lot of people out there with preconceived notions of race, social status, and a weltanschaung based on ignorance and trivia.
The racial constructs of the 19th century that biologists (who are still abhorrent when it comes to the ethical treatment of humans) constructed based on a bit of Darwin and a lot of British classist and racist opinion. Of course, in my heirarchical structure, Norwegians are on top, Swedes and Finns are okay in the house during daylight hours, and most everyone else should be in irons. (this is a joke)
Race is subjective. In America race is very complicated because of slavery, and the fact that we have only very recently renounced outright racism, and that renunciation is always in question. We could be South Africa in no time because no one is willing to politically address the overt racism of the South or the occasionally overt racism of the North. Katrina as an example of a skin color based racism with overt inequality enforced by an empowered minority elite.
The short messages are: people are shitty to other people if they can find a reason, who breeds wins, and popular measures of race based athletic ability are socially constructed excercises designed to reinforce cultural norms. Add to that inequality and the force of state power and you have the current situation, where lazy elites loll like decadent Roman senators finding reasons why the savage tribe of the day's ponderings will never amount to anything. Like the Goths, or the Gauls. Scots. Filthy savages. Probably never amount to anything.

[Gerard MacDonell]

Andrew Sullivan seems quite stupid and weak, but only when placed in the environment in which rational empiricists prosper. It is possible that his ideas are well adapted for survival within the right. If so, then let us hope that he is more ebola than flu. With luck, he and his hosts will burn out quickly before they do serious damage to the broader population.

[Bubb Rubb]

Bubb Rubb, do you have any evidence that the obvious, undisputable dominance of basketball by blacks is because they practice more, or are you just talking out of your ass? I'm guessing the latter. You have a somewhat plausible hypothesis that fits with your point of view, so you assume it's as fact, while being condescending towards those who disagree (I'm sure they all know the difference between phenotype and genotype). That doesn't cut it.

Posted by: rps | Sep 13, 2005 11:00:56 AM

rps:
Well as kathe pointed out above, Jews also used to be dominant in basketball as well. She also graciously points out to you that sports participation and genetics are a hazardous road to argue.

The idea that African Americans are somehow better athletes than whites based on genetics is incongruous with the facts. African Americans certainly dominate sports, particularly basketball, in the United States, however why don't Africans (who presumably share the same genetic material) have stronger innate basketball ability? Or I could pick a sport that more people in the world play, soccer i.e. football/fussball/futbol. An African team has never won the World Cup. Do Brasilians have better innate ability? What is in their genes (Portuguese, Italian, Indian, Black) that makes them better? Or is it that hundreds of thousands of Brazilian kids are playing soccer every day in the streets dreaming of being Ronaldo, Pele or Ronaldino? Why is the best current soccer player in the World over the past decade a French born Algerian? Italians have won 3 World Cups, no one ever claims that Italians across the board are genetically better atheletes.

I hate to be completely unequivocal about anything, however as for sports participation and athletic ability goes, training and practice have a lot more to do with success, than race. If race has anything to do with it, it is likely to do with sport selection and social opportunity, not ability. My point is that people make assumptions based on the entire population of African Americans based on the accomplishments of a few hundred. That is remarkable and completely at odds with the actual fact that most African Americans live in extremely poor physical health.

As for you, I don't take well to unclever fools and have extremely judicious in not devolving into your brand of name calling. However, I will take a moment just to say that RPS, you are an idiot.

[gcochran]

The Olympic track event in which training and experience matter least is the 100-meter dash.
About 400 people on Earth have broken 10 seconds in the 100-meter dash. All but one are of West African descent.

[Bubb Rubb]

The Olympic track event in which training and experience matter least is the 100-meter dash.
About 400 people on Earth have broken 10 seconds in the 100-meter dash. All but one are of West African descent.

Posted by: gcochran | Sep 13, 2005 2:17:37 PM

There is so much ignorance in this statement, I don't know where to start. First of all, the major points of departure for slaves to the Americas were what is now Senegal, Ghana, Guinea, Benin, Nigeria, Republic of Congo, DRC and Angola. Now unless my geography is bad, the last time I checked the Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola are not located in West Africa. And to add further insult to injury, some estimates of the total number of slaves that were "exported" from central Africa constitute 40% of the total transatlantic slave trade.

http://africanhistory.about.com/library/bl/bl-slavery-stats4.htm#map%22

Now unless you have deployed the research skills of Alex Haley in tracking the ancestry of everyone that has broken the 10 second barrier in Olympic sprinting, your statement of "West African descent" was highly dubious and obviously ignorant.

Now as to the assertion whether the 100-m dash is the "event in which training and experience matter least". That is a value judgement with little if any basis in fact and I would bet it would be highly disputed by the participating athletes. From my personal experience witnessing this event, it seems that mental preparation and focus are equally important. Furthermore, execution of a strong start as well as proper form as a result of training probably are significant variables in outcomes.

[galah]

Wow, so the one person who's not of West African descent to have broken the 10sec barrier is Australia's Patrick Johnson (of I believe Australian Aboriginal-Irish descent)? 'On ya Pat!

I'd be interested to know who your 399 West Africans are, since the IAAF seems to think the 10sec barrier has beaten about 205 times by about 50 individuals.

An odd thing, though - this genetic ability seems to be concentrated in the male line. My rough take on the women's chart is that Eastern Europeans dominate non-US based sprinters of (roughly - I really don't have the ability to guess regional) African descent.

[gcochran]

You're right: ten seconds has been broken about 200 times, but about 50 individuals are responsible for those times.

As for this talent being concentrated in the male line -well, anabolic steroids make a bigger difference for women than men, who already have plenty, and cheating ability is more widely distributed than sheer running ability.

[a different chris]

Am I the only one who feels like taking a shower after every one of "gcochran"'s posts?

I wonder if Ben Johnson's "fast twitch muscles" due to his "West African descent" helped him to (temporarily) win that World Championship, or maybe he was genetically disposed to react more positively to his steroids than his opponents were? Boy, we can really go 'round and 'round on this, can't we?

BTW, go to the Beach Volleyball website that's been posting blogads recently and find out that some totally white guy has a vertical leap exceeding LeBron James' by a whopping 5 inches. This is typical, volleyballers can really jump.

But they almost invariably blow at basketball in my experience. Any chance it's because the way you practice for one is contraindicated for the skills you need for the other? Ya think?

Curiouser an curiouser, isn't this thing called "race"?

I've always pointed out this thought experiment. Take, say, Takeo Spikes and Tedy Bruschi (two pro football linebackers for the sports unaware), and, say Steve Nash and Reggie Miller, (two pro basketball guards). Now chop off all everybody's head. Dye the corpse's skins all an identical color. I suggest persimmon, because "persimmon" is fun to say. (although it doesn't look like I've spelled it correctly, alas)

Do you think, if you asked every passerby you could find to sort the bodies into two "races", that anybody besides a trained forensic scientist would get it right?

[James Wimberley]

Brad's original post used the idea of a rate of intermarriage of one in a thousand. He could just as well have used zero intermatrriage and one in a thousand births due to inter-group rape. The sexual history of European/African relations under slavery was one of concubinage and rape rather than intermarriage. The joke on American racism is that the modern Afro-American population is so genetically mixed, with inputs from white slave-masters and the forced mingling of different African populations, that it is not a race at all in any biological sense; any more than the similarly mixed population of American whites is a race.
A lot of the superiority of Africans at athletics is simply a reflection of the greater genetic diversity within Africa, our ancestral home.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

Kathe; "Well, rps, basketball used to be dominated by Jews."

Poetic exaggeration, perhaps. Of course it helped that segregation kept blacks from competing.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

diff Chris - "...This is typical, volleyballers can really jump."

"But they almost invariably blow at basketball in my experience. Any chance it's because the way you practice for one is contraindicated for the skills you need for the other? Ya think?"

After his career in Basketball, Wilt Chamberlin, maybe the great bballer of all, played some pro-volley ball. He was overwhelming.

Upper body strength is crucial for inside bballer, but almost irrelevant for vball.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

diff chris - "Am I the only one who feels like taking a shower after every one of "gcochran"'s posts?"

Probably not. There are likely a lot of dolts who are pathologically afraid that some bit of truth or knowledge might stick to them. Take another shower Chris.

[gcochran]

To CapitalistImperialistPig and steve: _real_ anthropologists study degenerate white dwarfs.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

Real astrophysicists know that all white dwarfs are degenerate.

[bambi vs godzilla]

Defined as genetically distinct groups, races don't exist. That’s what I learned, anyway, and nothing anyone has written here suggests I wasn’t paying attention to the teacher. Yes, some groups differ genetically from others; but how you divide groups depends on which genes you decide to examine. That means that if you are prepared to look obsessively you can find genetic markers to distinguish Poles from Swedes. For example, Swedes might have more wrinkly foreskins. Thus, Poles and Swedes are “different.” Great!

AFAIK (admittedly not very much) genetic diversity is irreducible. But if in fact there is a way to divide groups genetically that isn’t arbitrary, then fine, what is it? If in fact someone has devised a method to place an individual into one and only one racial group, what is that method?

[steve]

gcochran: social science is too important to be left to social scientists ;-)

[Elliott Oti]

CapitalImperialistPig:
"Your claim that sprinting is not mostly talent is silly. Ask any track or football coach. A kid is either fast or not."

That's the problem with the whole "Blacks of West African descent are naturally fast" theory. The number of actual West Africans who have broken 10 seconds is very small. Around 4 or 5 Nigerians and 1 or 2 Ghanaians, if memory serves. If West Africa is the genetic mother lode of natural sprinters, and Carribean\US sprinters their watered-down descendants, it sure isn't borne out by the statistics.

In addition, if I'm not mistaken, all sub-10 African sprinters trained and competed while studying in the US (with the exception of Francis Obikwelu who now has the Portuguese nationality).

Unfortunately, Jon Entine underestimates severely the effects of training and climate, and exaggerates the importance of the mythical WestAfrican sprinting gene. His prediction, made in 2000 shortly before the Sydney Olympics, that blacks would win all distances from 100m up, came just before the dominance of the Greek Kostadinos Kenteris in the 200m (olympic, world, and european golds) or American Jeremy Wariner in the 400m (Olympic and World gold)

In addition, East European women have been traditionally very good in the sprints, and in fact still hold virtually unbreakable records in the 400m and 800m. Much has been made of the drug usage by East European women to explain their relatively good performance. Unfortunately this explanation won't wash: black female athletes use and have used drugs too (Marion Jones, Kelli White, probably Florence Joyner-Griffith). The drugs playing field is level.

I also find it very interesting that, out of a population of roughly 250 million people, an excellent high-school and collegiate track system (probably the best in the world), good coaches and facilities, the United States produces no female white sprinters of any quality, and very, very few white sprinters. White US sprinters are vastly inferior to their European counterparts. Are Europeans genetically superior? Or could the explanation lie in other, sociological factors?

(It's interesting to look at the current cohort of 200m\400m sprinters. Current Olympic and world 400m champion Jeremy Wariner, and current world 400m silver medallist Andrew Rock, are both white.)

[J Thomas]

If it's rainimg om DC then there's a good chance it's raining in Silver Spring also, or it's about to or it just did. It doesn't make sense to pretend there are giant walls splitting the world up into lots of little weather patterns that are completely independent. And also it doesn't make sense to pretend that there's no such thing as local weather.

It looks to me like a lot of us take a political stand on race that says the stupid racists are making such a big mistake that we need to make the opposite mistake to balance it. I instinctively dislike that stand but it might be necessary. I'm not clear whether it's necessary or not.

There's no question that hunans are still subject to natural selection. People who eat a lot of wheat are getting selected for gluten tolerance. People who eat a lot of soybeans are getting selected for resistance to various soybean toxins. Etc.

But what if we had reason to believe there were important differences? If we thought that most blacks were inferior in something important like intelligence, that would be an excuse for institutional bias. Bad stuff. The only strong point I saw in *The Bell Curve* was the claim that africans and also self-identified american blacks had a different pattern on intelligence tests than self-identified american whites. They did better on some scales than others compared to american whites, and regardless of how well they did (well-off american blacks did better than othes of course) the pattern remained. (The graphs only showed 3 scales, I'm not certain how robust the result was.) To my way of thinking what that implied was that we should look at what teaching methods tend to work better with people who're high on each scale, and design teaching methodologies that tend to hit all the different strengths. It doesn't imply that we should teach one way for classes that are primarily black and another way for others. (That might lead to yet another version of teaching in some classes that does not work, with a justification that it's supposed to work there even though it doesn't work elsewhere.) But it does imply that teachers should get a broader set of tools and then learn to use the ones that work for them in their own classes. Which is a reasonable thing to do completely independent of racial claims.

I think it doesn't make sense to avoid scientific research on these topics even though they might have bad social effects. It does make sense to state the results of that research carefully to avoid offense. But if we avoid doing the science to avoid problems we'll still get those problems from the pop science. Pop science has at least as much effect on the public as real science, probably more. And we can't expect people who publish pop science to hold back just because the people who do research are holding back.

[J Thomas]

"But if in fact there is a way to divide groups genetically that isn’t arbitrary, then fine, what is it? If in fact someone has devised a method to place an individual into one and only one racial group, what is that method?"

Good question! It deserves a good answer.

Look at the breeds of dogs. Each breed has a defined appearance etc. There are people who make their living judging how well individual dogs fit the type. Each dog has a recorded pedigree, you can track who his parents were back a number of generations, and they were all dogs that came from that breed. Mongrels are not accepted. If someone were to start out with a whole lot of rottweilers and a whole lot of collies and use the genetic variation they got by mixing them to create (over a number of generations) something that looked and acted just like a german shepherd, it would not be accepted as a german shepherd. It would not have the right pedigree.

There are groups of human beings who more-or-less believe that they are breeding themselves this way. They keep track of their pedigrees, and marry within their groups. I doubt they're very effective at it, but they try. DNA testing has shown that in some places the person a mother claims is the father ia acually the biological father only 90% of the time. People who think of geneology like dog pedigrees have to assume it isn't true for the ones they're tracking -- though these days they could actually test it if they wanted to.

To the extent that it works, this method does allow people to assign race to the particular small groups they track. They must assume that the big majority of the population is mongrelised, as is indeed the case. I tend to disapprove of the attitudes behind human pedigrees -- if you don't have any idea who your grandchildren will marry, then getting ahead relative to some other group of people is strictly temporary, short of genocide. You might mistreat your slaves but in a few generations it will be all in the family. But if you believe and they believe that your people and their people will be distinct forever then it leads to bad blood. It's a lot worse being an Eloi owned by Morlocks than a human owned by humans. People who believe they're a breed apart are likely to do bad politics and bad governing.

Do races make sense when you don't know the bloodlines? Well, they can be a social thing. People treat each other differently depending on social roles. You don't treat an old woman in a wheelchair the same as you would a young man with blue spiky hair and a spiked collar. We don't want to treat everybody the same and people don't want to be treated the same. To the extent that races fit with ethnic groups you can treat people as they expect to be treated by checking their appearance. This sucks for people who don't want to be treated according to appearances they have trouble changing. So middle-class americans who look black tend to dress "better" than middle-class americans who look white. By showing they have money they get different treatment. Etc.

I once tutored a kid whose father was virginia-redneck and whose mother was korean. He looked korean to me though he probably didn't to koreans. He wanted people to think of him as a redneck. He wore a cap with a confederate flag on it, and an ornate belt buckle, and he decorated his books and notebooks with confederate flags. He wore a black trench coat and high black leather boots. He carried around a can of Copenhagen and offered it to people. He affected a redneck accent and redneck grammar. He drank all the liquor he could steal from his father and bragged about his hangovers. He disparaged blacks, jews, catholics, koreans, and homosexuals. I couldn't do anything with him, and I believe part of the reason was that he thought of math as something koreans did and not his kind of people. He got a degree of acceptance at his school despite his asian appearance.

And that example shows there is hope. To some extent you can be accepted for who you want to be despite who your parents were, even by people who care a lot about race.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

Elliot Oti makes some very good points. Obviously, training does have important effects, even in sprints.

We should not forget the element of self-selection, either. A black friend once said to me: "I was a good student in high school but I couldn't compete with the Jewish kids." If black American kids take themselves out of the intellectual competition, and white American kids take themselves out of sports like sprinting, social factors will reinforce perceived or real physically based differences.

I don't understand gcochran's crack about Diamond.

[CapitalistImperialistPig]

Elliot - "If West Africa is the genetic mother lode of natural sprinters, and Carribean\US sprinters their watered-down descendants, it sure isn't borne out by the statistics."

I certainly wouldn't rule out the possibility that hybrid West African-Europeans might have the best combinations of sprinting genes. It's also likely that the poverty of the West African countries leads to nutritional deficits and lack of opportunity which prevents them from realizing their potential.

Also, remember that essentially every world class athlete is what one basketball coach called "a freak of nature." You can't tell if someones going be a great athlete by casual inspection. It takes just the right combination body configuration, aerobic capacity, fast and slow twitch muscle fibers, mental toughness and probably many subtle metabolic factors to produce a world class athlete.

[J Thomas]

Diamond has been extremely weak on evolutionary stuff, but he's very good at some other things that tend to make up for it.

People who want to make fun of him often point to a paper he wrote dealing with testicular size and hormone levels among men of different races. I haven't looked at the paper myself but I get the impression that he compared other people's research data and did not actually do a lot of measurements himself.