Race Is a Social
Construct?
Scientists Argue
Racial categories are weak proxies for genetic diversity and
need to be phased out
By Megan Gannon, LiveScience on February 5, 2016
Credit: Christopher Futcher ©iStock.com
More than 100 years ago, American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois was concerned
that race was being used as a biological explanation for what he understood to
be social and cultural differences between different populations of people. He
spoke out against the idea of "white" and "black" as discrete groups, claiming
that these distinctions ignored the scope of human diversity.
Science would favor Du Bois. Today, the mainstream belief among scientists is
that race is a social construct without biological meaning. And yet, you might
still open a study on genetics in a major scientific journal and find categories
like "white" and "black" being used as biological variables.
In an article published today (Feb. 4) in the Journal Science, four scholars say
racial categories are weak proxies for genetic diversity and need to be phased
out. They've called on the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering
and Medicine to put together a panel of experts across the biological and social
sciences to come up with ways for researchers to shift away from the racial
concept in genetics research.
"It's a concept we think is too crude to provide useful information, it's a
concept that has social meaning that interferes in the scientific understanding
of human genetic diversity and it's a concept that we are not the first to call
upon moving away from," said Michael Yudell, a professor of public health at
Drexel University in Philadelphia.
Yudell said that modern genetics research is operating in a paradox, which is
that race is understood to be a useful tool to elucidate human genetic diversity,
but on the other hand, race is also understood to be a poorly defined marker of
that diversity and an imprecise proxy for the relationship between ancestry
and genetics.
"Essentially, I could not agree more with the authors," said Svante Pääbo, a
biologist and director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology in Germany, who worked on the Neanderthal genome but was
not involved with the new paper.
"What the study of complete genomes from different parts of the world has
shown is that even between Africa and Europe, for example, there is not a
single absolute genetic difference, meaning no single variant where all
Africans have one variant and all Europeans another one, even when recent
migration is disregarded," Pääbo told Live Science. "It is all a question of
differences in how frequent different variants are on different continents and
in different regions."
In one example that demonstrated genetic differences were not fixed along
racial lines, the full genomes of James Watson and Craig Venter, two famous
American scientists of European ancestry, were compared to that of a Korean
scientist, Seong-Jin Kim. It turned out that Watson (who, ironically, became
ostracized in the scientific community after making racist remarks) and
Venter shared fewer variations in their genetic sequences than they each
shared with Kim.
Assumptions about genetic differences between people of different races have
had obvious social and historical repercussions, and they still threaten to
fuel racist beliefs. That was apparent two years ago, when several scientists
bristled at the inclusion of their research in Nicholas Wade's controversial
book, "A Troublesome Inheritance" (Penguin Press, 2014), which proposed
that genetic selection has given rise to distinct behaviors among different
populations.
In a letter to The New York Times, five researchers wrote that "Wade
juxtaposes an incomplete and inaccurate account of our research on human
genetic differences with speculation that recent natural selection has led to
worldwide differences in IQ test results, political institutions and economic
development."
The authors of the new Science article noted that racial assumptions could
also be particularly dangerous in a medical setting. "If you make clinical
predictions based on somebody's race, you're going to be wrong a good chunk
of the time," Yudell told Live Science. In the paper, he and his colleagues used
the example of cystic fibrosis, which is underdiagnosed in people of African
ancestry because it is thought of as a "white" disease.
Mindy Fullilove, a psychiatrist at Columbia University, thinks the changes
proposed in the Science article are "badly needed." Fullilove noted that by
some laws in the United States, people with one black ancestor of 32 might be
called "black," but their 31 other ancestors are also important in influencing
their health. "This is a cogent and important call for us to shift our work,"
Fullilove said. "It will have an enormous influence. And it will make for better
science."
So what other variables could be used if the racial concept is thrown out?
Pääbo said geography might be a better substitute in regions such as Europe to
define "populations" from a genetic perspective. However, he added that, in
North America, where the majority of the population has come from different
parts of the world during the past 300 years, distinctions like "African
Americans" or "European Americans" might still work as a proxy to suggest
where a person's major ancestry originated.
Yudell also said scientists need to get more specific with their language,
perhaps using terms like "ancestry" or "population" that might more precisely
reflect the relationship between humans and their genes, on both the
individual and population level.
The researchers also acknowledged that there are a few areas where race as a
construct might still be useful in scientific research: as a political and social,
but not biological, variable.
"While we argue phasing out racial terminology in the biological sciences, we
also acknowledge that using race as a political or social category to study
racism, although filled with lots of challenges, remains necessary given our
need to understand how structural inequities and discrimination produce
health disparities between groups," Yudell said.
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