October 03, 2003
RACE, ANCESTRY, AND GENES: Implications for Defining Disease Risk
Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics
Sep 2003, Vol. 4, pp. 33-67
Rick A. Kittles and Kenneth M. Weiss
Abstract Geneticists are interested in finding genes associated with disease. Because of widespread health disparities, race is a variable that is often said to be relevant in this context. The idea is that members of a preconceived "race" share common ancestry that may include genetic risk factors. Human variation has been shaped by the long-term processes of population history, and population samples that reflect that history carry statistical information about shared genetic variation or "ancestry." But race is an elusive concept and a term difficult even to define rigorously. Unfortunately, these problems are neither new nor related to recent genetic knowledge. Race is also one of the most politically charged subjects in American life because its associated sociocultural component has notoriously led to categorical treatment that has been misleading and politically misused. There are ways in which the concept of race (whether or not the term is used) can be a legitimate tool in the search for disease-associated genes. But in that context race reflects deeply confounded cultural as well as biological factors, and a careful distinction must be made between race as a statistical risk factor and causal genetic variables.
Posted by Dienekes at October 3, 2003 10:43 PM | PermaLinkThese guys waste no time getting into the standard left-wingism: " ... race is an elusive concept and a term difficult even to define rigorously." Puh-LEEEEZE. Race is no more or less difficult to "define rigorously" than tree, cloud, rock, octopus, planet, human being, glass of milk, or anything else whatsoever. If one is determined to plead inability to rigorously define a thing, the Heisenberg Indeterminacy Principle can always be invoked to blur the thing's momentum or position, and its various quantum characteristics can always be counted on to help a determined non-definer. A baseball has a wave function associated with it, after all -- and there's a chance it may be here one second and the next split second a billion miles away from here, not to mention the fact that no one can say precisely where a baseball's physical boundaries are.
Can every honest person please recognize and openly acknowledge pure sophistry when he sees it, and pure politics? We are not dealing here with honesty or with science.
That's point number one. Point number two: "race is a variable that is often said to be relevant in this context" is a phrase that is misleading at best; a brazen lie at worst. Race IS absolutely known to be relevant in epidemiology and in genetic susceptiblity to disease. There's no "often said to be" about it, you cowardly, dishonest journal editors.
Next, we have this bizarre sentence:
"The idea is that members of a preconceived 'race' share common ancestry that may include genetic risk factors."
What is a preconceived race, and why is race in quote marks? (Don't tell me -- I know. So does everyone reading Dienekes' blog right now. We all know the answer; some come right out and say it; some refuse to do that for whatever political or social reasons.) As far as the "common ancestries" that are associated with race go (that's a redundant construction but these people always have to beat around the bush), it's outrageously political and unscientific to say that they "may include genetic risk factors." It is known that they DO include genetic risk factors for disease.
In the next sentence, why is ancestry in quote marks? Is that also impossible to "define rigorously"? If these people get their rocks off by talking about "rigorous definitions" they should read any higher mathematics textbook. Then at least they'll know what a "rigorous definition" is.
"There are ways in which the concept of race (whether or not the term is used) can be a legitimate tool in the search for disease-associated genes." It's already been done, pal -- there are tons of known race-related diseases and differential risk-factors.
"But in that context race reflects deeply confounded cultural as well as biological factors, and a careful distinction must be made between race as a statistical risk factor and causal genetic variables." Complete, one-hundred percent left-wing politicized gibberish. NOT science of any kind.
Pathetic.
Please tell us how you really feel. :)
Posted by: Friedrich Braun at October 5, 2003 11:05 PMI don't mean to beat a dead horse and I'll shut up and let others talk. This is just to say I got an e-mail about my above comment that accused me of "grasping at straws" in citing the quantum-mechanical properties of things to show they can in some ways be hard to define. But that was exactly the point of my comment in that regard (though I admit I failed to make clear that I was being sarcastic): if one is really and truly determined to insist that a thing can't be defined, one can do it with anything under the sun. ANYTHING. But you don't need quantum mechanics to do it: by the same purely verbal sophistries the leftists use to claim race can't be defined, one can claim rocks and trees and automobiles and everything else in the world can't be defined either.
It's really funny -- Negroes, yellows, and whites "can't be defined," but when there are affirmative-action goodies to be handed out, or really ridiculous charges of racism to be leveled at somebody, suddenly the definitions all become crystal-clear and the leftists know exactly who belongs to what race or ethnicity.
It's too bad that some journals are so politicised -- but that's the way of Marxism, which unfortunately didn't die with the 1989-1991 collapse of communism, but merely morphed into the form we struggle against here.
Posted by: Unadorned at October 6, 2003 04:19 AMI suspect that once Kittles gets past the throat-clearing, his article would turn out to be pretty sensible. I've interviewed him, and he's a straigthforward guy doing good work on things like racial differences in androgen receptors. But he teaches at Howard U., so he's got to be particularly "sensitive" and all that.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at October 7, 2003 06:39 PM