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Genetic Reality of Race

In */WHERE DO WE COME FROM: The Molecular Evidence for Human
Descent/* (Springer, 2002) Klein and Takahata write, on page 381,

''The species, as the only biologically definable category,
provides a dividing line in biological classification. Most of the other
categories (genus, family, order, etc) are positioned above the species
level, while only a few are in the sub-species level. The latter, which
include variety, subspecies, and race, are poorly defined and ambiguous.
Any deviation from the /holotype, /the specimen on which the description
of a new species is based, is referred to as a/ variety/, even when the
deviation is in a single morphological character. A subspecies is a
population or a group of phenotypically similar populations inhabiting a
geographically defined region and differing from other populations of
the same species in diagnostic characters. Race is used by taxonomists
either as a synonymn of sub-species or as a designation of a local
population within a sub-species. Different variants, subspecies, or
races of the same species are either known or expected to interbreed if
given the opportunity.??

[Note that only a single character is enough to distinguish a 'variety',
and SOME distinguishing designation is certainly called for between
Europeans and Asians. Thus we can* */conservatively/ say Euros and
Asians are different varieties.

Next, consider that statement, ''race is used by taxonomists either as a
synonym of sub-species or as a designation of a local population within
a sub-species''. That means race signifies a /greater distinction than
variety, and it might be used to distinguish a /'/lesser/'/ difference
than subspecies. /

Klein and Takahata discuss how the gorillas are divided into subspecies
by their fur length and color or various morphological characteristics.
They go on to say,]

''All this is biological reality which raises few emotions.
Taxonomists may disagree on the number, delineation, name, indeed on the
very existence of the subdivisions in a particular species, but other
than that they find nothing objectionable about the notion of species
consisting of populations between which gene flow has been reduced,
because of the geographical distance between them, for example.'' and
''Biologically, H. /sapiens is a species like any other and as such it
might be expected to be differentiated into subspecies, especially since
its global distribution creates opportunities for adaptation to
different climatic conditions and so for morphological divergence./''

[Commenting on the current, PC effort to deny the very existence of
race, K and T write,]

''The proposal to scrap the concept of race altogether is currently
only one extreme in a range of views. It is certainly not shared by all
anthropologists and is by no means the majority opinion of the public at
large. *It appears to be a conclusion reached more on the basis of
political and philosophical creeds than on scientific arguments.
Correspondingly, anthropologists who do hold this opinion often attempt
to shout down their opponents rather than convince them by presentation
of facts. Their favored method of argumentation is to label anybody who
disagrees with them as racist.* The public, however, seems unimpressed
by their rhetoric. It refuses to believe that the differences they see
are a mere figment of their imagination. */A lay-person can tell with a
high degree of accuracy where individuals come from just by glimpsing
their features./?*

[The authors give a specific example and go on to write,]

''Except for some anthropologists, everybody else seems to be able
to distinguish people from different parts of the world at a glance by
their outward appearance. This apparently is also the view of some
government administrators in countries with programs designed to fight
racial discrimination. Obviously, there is a credibility gap between
some anthropologists on the one side and the public, as well as the
governments of some countries, on the other. One way to settle the
arguments among anthropologists and to reconcile anthropologists with
the public might be to move away from physical characteristics and focus
on the genes. If races are real, they should have a genetic basis
separable from environmental and cultural influences.'' and ''Provided
the races separated a long time ago, random genetic drift should have
diversified their genetic composition even in the absence of selection.
It can be expected that the longer ago the races diverged, the greater
the differences between them will be. Even if there has not been enough
time to 'fix' different alleles in distinct races, at least differences
in gene frequencies should have been generated.''

[The research discussed in */Letter to the Editor of Discover/* (posted
on site) describes the results from the sort of study Klein and Takahata
suggest. It turns out there ARE fixed alleles that vary by race, and
different frequencies that are associated with Africans, Europeans, and
Asians. In other words, there ARE genetic 'races' in spite of the
disingenuous statements that are publicized in an attempt to obfuscate
and deny the facts. Everyone has noted that Europeans have white skins;
many of them have lightly pigmented eyes and hair; on the other hand
Africans have dark skin, hair, and eyes, while Asians have dark eyes and
hair, and Eurasian hair has a different texture from that of Africans.

Harding et al. (in */Evidence for Variable Selective Pressure at MC1R/*,
Amerian Journal of Human Genetics, 66:1351-61, 2000) studied the MC1R
gene, which influences the pigmentation of eyes, hair, and skin. They
found that all Africans, and tropical indigenes in general, had an
ancestral form of the gene: there were NO non-synonymous alleles. Thus,
they contend that MC1R is tightly constrained in the tropics; this
implies that any indigenous population radiating 'Out of Africa' would
have been /black. /By contrast, there were several alleles, at various
frequencies among European populations, accounting for the observed
ubiquity of white skin, and substantial frequency of light hair and eye
colors./ These alleles could ONLY have arisen in populations that left
the tropics a very long time ago, or never lived there to begin with. It
would have taken a long time for the mutations in these alleles to occur
and then rise to the observed distribution. Harding et al. calculate
that at least a hundred thousand years, and possibly more than twice
that long, might be required for one of these alleles to reach its
current frequency. /I defy any population geneticist to produce a
credible model of genetic mutation and diffusion that turns an all-black
African population into an all-white European population in the 50 to 70
thousand years that current Out of Africa models permit! And remember
that those same afrocentrists claim the African radiation replaced the
indigenous Eurasians, rather than interbreeding with them, so they can?t
postulate acquisition of MC1R alleles from archaic Europeans, followed
by selection to achieve fixation of euro-genes; that would be more like
absorption than replacement! Moreover, they must, but can?t, explain why
the putative African radiation in Asia produced an entirely different
/variety/ and set of alleles. The afrocentrists appeal to selection, but
Harding finds evidence that MC1R has NOT been selected at Euro-specific
alleles, though it has been tightly CONSTRAINED to the ancestral form in
the tropics. Klein and Takahata, writing of the various attempts to
explain what kind of selection would make ALL Europeans white, or
account for their eyes and hair, concede that,]

*?None of these explanations is fully satisfactory? and ?Satisfactory
explanations are also not available for hair color and texture, eye
color, and other external differences between human races.? *

[Before the recent advances in genetics it was possible to contend that
black Africans were somehow converted into Eurasians. Geneticists speak
glibly of ''drift'' as if it were a serious theory for how ALL those
putative black Africans turned white in Europe and yellow in Asia; and
not just their skin color, but all the other soft tissue, cranial, and
intellectual features. Everybody changed completely and there was no mix
of people with different degrees and phenotypic expressions of
afro-characters.  What kind of a pseudo-science theory of population
dynamics could yield an ALL white-characteristic Europe from blacks? 
There is an old saying that some ideas are so dumb only highly educated
people can believe them.

As noted above, no satisfactory explanations were forthcoming for
such conversion, but the socio-political, PC 'virtue' of an African
origins theory was irresistible to academia and media opinion makers.
The early research on mtDNA was misinterpreted to support the ''African
Eve'', or ''Out of Africa'' theories, by asserting that all human mtDNA
came from an African woman. This assertion is maintained today, and it
continues to be represented as 'proving' African replacement, even
though the data does NOT justify such an assumption. See */Plural
Lineages in the Human mtDNA Genome/* (posted on site) for contraindications.

Since the morphological, genetically mediated, differences between
Europeans, Asians, and Africans are so obvious, those who wish to deny
the biological reality of race are forced (against all common-sense) to
argue that such differences are /statistically trivial. /Lewontin, for
instance, argues that since ''only'' 15% of the variation in the human
genome is completely correlated to race, that such differences are
trivial. As noted in the closing paragraph of/ *Letter to the Editor
of*/* DISCOVER*, this is a deceitful argument. Klein and Takahata are
quite PC on the subject of race, but they have too much scientific
integrity to misrepresent the data as Feldman does; here is what they say,]

''Formally, these findings demonstrate, first, that the species is
indeed subdivided into genetically definable groups of individuals and,
second, that at least some of those groups correspond to those defined
by anthropologists as races on the basis of physical characters.''

[Klein and Takahata note that, in spite of the genetic findings, many
continue to argue that such distinctions are trivial. Then they write,]

''By contrast, Sewall Wright, who can hardly be taken for a dilettante
in questions of population genetics, has stated emphatically that *if
differences of this magnitude were observed in any other species, the
groups they distinguish would be called /subspecies/.?*

[So, while *genetic research /does/ support traditional and common-sense
racial distinctions, it is even more consistent with a nuanced view that
the major distinction is between the indigenes of New Guinea/Australia
and sub-Saharan Africans versus Eurasians.* The differences between
Europeans and northern Asians are minor by comparison, so the old
tri-racial distinction of white, yellow, and black, while not invalid,
is not strictly accurate from a taxonomic perspective. Genetically, we
should regard Europeans and northern Asians as varieties of H. /s.
sapiens/; the *sub-Saharan Africans and Australian/NG populations as
subspecies*, and the back-crossed hybrid indigenes of N. Africa and much
of southern Asia as one or more races.

Klein and Takahata write,]

''One can extend Wright?s argument even further. The more than two
hundred species of haplochromine fishes in Lake Victoria differ from
each other much less than the human races in their neutral genes,
although they are presumably distinguished by genes that control
differences in their external appearances. The same can be said about at
least some of the currently recognized species of Darwin?s finches and
about other examples of recent adaptive radiations. *In all these cases,
reproductively isolated groups are impossible to tell apart by the
methods used to measure differences between the human races. *Obviously
human races are not reproductively isolated (interracial marriages are
common and the progenies of such marriages are fully fertile) but the
external differences between them are comparable to those between the
cichlid fishes and Darwin's finches. Under these circumstances,* to
claim that the genetic differences between the human races are trivial
is more a political statement than a scientific argument.* Trivial by
what criterion? How much difference would Lewontin and those who side
with him consider non-trivial?''

[Actually Klein and Takahata /under/state human racial differences by
calling them ''comparable'' to the finches and cichlids, because only an
expert can tell those birds and fishes apart, while any ordinary person
can tell another person?s race at a glance!

K and T go on to write,]

*?By mixing science with politics, geneticists and anthropologists are
committing the same infraction of which they are accusing other
scientists, whom they themselves label as racists. Even worse, by
dismissing genetic differences as insignificant, they play into the
hands of genuine racists who can easily demolish this claim.?*

[These genetic differences between human races offer an important test
of the Out of Africa theory, and it *fails!*]

*?Multiregionalists have no difficulty explaining the 10-15% differences
between the human groups. Since they assume that the differentiation
began up to 2 my ago,* when H.* */erectus /established founding
populations in the different regions, there has been sufficient time to
accumulate the differences./ /*Uniregionalists *[Out of Africa
theorists]* who assume that the differentiation into groups began after
the exodus of H. /sapiens/ from Africa, are at a disadvantage, because
calculations indicate that only under highly unrealistic assumptions
*(e.g., no gene flow between populations)* would the time interval
suffice for the origin of the observed differences.?*

**Here is some research that gives a perspective on the claims that
differences between human races are genetically insignificant.

In *Number of ancestral human species: a molecular perspective*

D. CURNOE*, and A. THORNE, (in *HOMO* Vol. 53/3, pp. 201-224) write:

*?Nuclear DNA*

Our analyses using 24 genetic distances provide an estimated speciation
rate of 1-13 with a mean of 4 for all DNA distances (table 1). Some of
the speciation rates in table 1 are <1. This results from the fact that
some of the distances between humans and chimpanzees, when halved, are
below those between Africans and Asians.?

*Just think about that: /some of the genetic differences between
Africans and Eurasians, are more than half as great as between the
consensus human genome and chimpanzees!/ *

Compare the research cited above, in regard to the great difference
between African and Eurasian nuclear and mtDNA, to the deceptive
statements by Feldman, as quoted in Discover magazine (/IMO?/, posted on
site).

Next, consider how ?racial? differences, between Eurasians and
sub-Saharan Africans, compare to the difference between modern humans
and pre-human species of Homo.

?We estimate the mean distance between /H. sapiens/

and «terminal» /H. neanderthalensis from 16 distances to be around
0.08%. This is a very small distance and is less than half the estimated
genetic difference between living sub-Saharan Africans and Eurasians
(Starr & McMillan 2001). The mean of 8 genetic distances between H.
sapiens /and /H. neanderthalensis is 0.026-0.027. This is equivalent to
the genetic distance between Papua New Guineans and Thais or Na Dene and
Indonesians (Cavalli-Sforza et al 1994).?/

So, the difference between the modern human consensus genome, and /H.
neanderthalensis,/ is less than half the difference between s-S Africans
and Eurasians. *These are the differences*: /*twice as much *as the gulf
between Hss and Hn/, *which Lewontin and the race-deniers call ?trivial?!*

What about the genetic distance to /H. erectus/?

/?Homo sapiens and ? H. erectus /living about 0.3 Ma, ? may have shared
an ancestor around 1.5 Ma (a total divergence time of 2.4 million
years). The distance between them as determined from the mean of 16
distances may have been around 0.19%. This is about equivalent to the
estimated genetic difference between living sub-Saharan Africans and
Eurasians of 0.2% (Starr & McMillan 2001). The mean of 8 other genetic
distances between /H. sapiens and H. erectus /is 0.065-0.068. This
overlaps the range of distances for living humans, with the lower
estimate identical to the distance between «Bantu» and «Eskimo»
(Cavalli-Sforza et al 1994).?

So, modern Eurasians and s-S Africans are about as genetically distant
as modern humans are from /H. erectus! /The authors say/ erectus/ and
modern humans may have shared a last common ancestor about 1.5 million
years ago. Notice how that fits with the data on fossil mtDNA included
on chromosome 11 (see */Australian Ancestry/*) which /also /implies that
African erectus and Eurasians had diverged for more than a million
years, before [on my view] hybridization between Eurasian /sapiens/ and
tropical /erectus /produced the indigenous populations of Africa and
southern Asia.

Even authors who have, in the past, minimized the importance of racial
genetic distinctions are now admitting that the shibboleths, /?race is a
social construct?/ and /?we are all the same genetically?/, are just
plain wrong. As one reviewer wrote,

?New support for the existence and significance of group, or racial,
differences in medicine comes from several contributors to the [then]
current *Nature Genetics, *a leading journal of genetics. This already
widely noted issue is devoted to the question of whether inherited
differences between groups should be considered in medical research and
treatment, and though various authors deny the relevance of such
differences, Sarah Tishkoff (University of Maryland) and Kenneth Kidd,
of Yale, in */?Implications of biogeography of human populations for
race and medicine/*? report that racial differences indeed exist, while
Joanna L. Mountain and Neil Risch, both of Stanford, in */?Assessing
genetic contributions to phenotypic differences among ?racial? and
?ethnic? groups,?/* recognize racial disparities and regard them as
important for medical treatment.?

The reviewer comments that,

?The careful (and sometimes cautious) findings of these scholars may
seem all too obvious, but they are an important corrective, in an
authoritative source, to efforts to use such recent advances in genetic
knowledge as the Genome to obscure the fact and the importance of racial
differences.? The reviewer continues, writing of a recent Stanford study
that ?

??found a very close correlation between individuals' racial
self-identification and the evidence from their DNA. In */Genetic
Structure, Self-Identified Race/Ethnicity, and Confounding in
Case-Control Association Studies/*, which appears in the February 2005
issue of the *American Journal of Human Genetics, *a dozen researchers
report the way the 3,636 individuals studied classified themselves
racially tallied almost perfectly with their racial type as indicated by
326 signposts in their DNA: only 5 participants volunteered a racial
identity at variance with that indicated by their genetic material.
Intriguingly, the study also determined that the DNA of self-identified
African-American and Hispanic participants, despite their substantial
genetic admixture from other racial groups (and despite their historical
tendencies to identify with other racial groups), jibed with their
expressed racial membership as often as did those of whites and East
Asians. The largest of its kind to date, the Stanford study focused on
four major racial groupings (white, East Asian, African-American, and
Hispanic) and was conducted in fifteen locations in the United States
and Taiwan. Study leader Neil Risch, currently a professor at the
University of California at San Francisco, believes that the
demonstrated ability of prospective patients to accurately specify their
group DNA can save time and money otherwise spent on painstaking
individual genetic testing. ? Without knowing how the participants had
identified themselves, Risch and his team ran the results through a
computer program that grouped individuals according to patterns of the
326 signposts.* This analysis could have resulted in any number of
different clusters, but only four clear groups turned up. And in each
case the individuals within those clusters all fell within the same
self-identified racial group.?*

Risch said,

?people?s self-identified race is a nearly perfect indicator of their
genetic background, contradicting the race-as-social-construct view?.

I commend those authors for having the courage to tell even a little of
the truth about this PC-censored topic.

A paper by Deka, et al., titled: */Population genetics of dinucleotide
(dC-dA)n.(dG-dT)n polymorphisms in world populations/* (Am J Hum Genet.
1995 Feb;56(2):461-74) is both pertinent and long-ignored.

?We have characterized eight dinucleotide (dC-dA)n.(dG-dT)n repeat loci
located on human chromosome 13q in eight human populations and in a
sample of chimpanzees. Even though there is substantial variation in
allele frequencie at each locus, at a given locus the most frequent
alleles are shared by all human populations. ? The microsatellite loci
examined here are present and, with the exception of the locus D13S197,
are polymorphic in the chimpanzees, showing an overlapping distribution
of allele sizes with those observed in human populations.?

This study compares the genetic distances of eight human populations
(Samoans, North Amerindians, South Amerindians, New Guineans, Kachari
[Mongolids], Germans, more generalized Caucasians, and Sokoto:
sub-Saharan Africans from Nigeria) to each other and to chimpanzees. The
data were analyzed two ways - with Nei's standard genetic distance, and
with modified Cavalli-Sforza distance.

Using Nei's method, the Nigerian-chimp distance was 1.334 +/- 0.375, by
far the closest value. By the Cavalli-Sforza method, the Sokoto
Nigerians were again the closest to chimps (0.539) by a large margin.
The farthest were again the South Amerindians (0.712), with the Germans
(0.680) and general Caucasians (0.667) being a very close third and
fourth behind the South Amerindians as well as Samoans (0.711) and North
Amerindians (0.697). *So, while the two methods give slightly different
orders, in both cases the Nigerians are by far the closest group to the
chimps*. Once again, given the first method, these sub-Saharan Africans
were at 1.334 while all the other groups ranged from 1.527-1.901, and
given the second method they were at 0.539 while the other groups ranged
from 0.643 (Kachari again) to 0.712.

Finally, there have been numerous publications asserting that modern
humans are 99.9% genetically identical. EVEN if that were true, there
are so many loci in the human genome that a tenth of a percent of them
would be MILLIONS! As one of the authors (quoted below) observes, *?that
could explain differences?* ? NO doubt!

However, *that 99.9 figure is WRONG*.  As posted September 8^th , 2004,
in */World Science/*:

?New research casts doubt on the widely accepted belief that humans are
99.9 percent genetically identical. /That statement has been used to
argue that race isn't real./

But two new studies suggest that percentage is too high, researchers say
? ?*The 99.9 percent number is pure nonsense*,? wrote Michael Wigler, of
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York, in a recent e-mail. ?I will not
say anything more about it.? ? Wigler is a co-author of one of the two
studies, which is published in the July 23 advance online edition of the
prestigious research journal *Science. *In it, the researchers wrote
that they were surprised to find large-scale differences in human DNA.
*?There is considerable structural variation in the human genome
[genetic code], most of which was not previously apparent,? *they wrote.

Wigler?s group sampled DNA from 20 people from around the world. They
detected 76 major differences among the people, differences known as
copy number polymorphisms. This means that some sections of genetic code
are repeated, but the numbers of repetitions vary among people.

This* ?could explain why people are different?** ? *said Scherer, whose
team reached similar findings to those of the Cold Spring Harbor group.

?At first we were astonished and didn't believe our results because for
years we had been taught that most variation in DNA was limited to very
small changes,?* *Scherer said. But later he learned Harvard University
researchers were making similar observations, so the groups combined
their data and reached the same conclusion.

The Cold Spring Harbor team found that */these changes affected the code
for 70 genes /*[just in the small set studied]/./ These included genes
involved in Cohen syndrome - a form of mental retardation - as well as
brain development, leukemia, drug resistant forms of breast cancer,
regulation of eating and body weight.

That [99.9%] figure has become one of the most prominent pieces of their
[?race-isn't real? proponents] argument since about four years ago, when
the number came from scientists associated with the Human Genome
Project, a 13-year program to map the human genetic code.

*Lander - a researcher who has been quoted in published reports giving
the 99.9 percent figure, and who works with the Whitehead Institute in
Boston - didn?t respond to phone calls and e-mails requesting comment
for this story. His secretary said he was abroad. *

*Also unreachable was Craig Venter, chairman of the Institute for
Genomics Research in Rockville, Md., U.S.A. He was president of a
company whose research produced the 99.9 percent figure in 2001, Celera
Genomics. He didn't return phone calls or repeated emails.*

.Miami University?s Jon Entine, author of, *?Taboo: Why Black Athletes
Dominate Sports and Why We?re Afraid to Talk About It,? *wrote, in an
e-mail:* *

*?Rats are about 95 percent the genetic equivalent of humans. These are
ridiculous statements, although technically accurate. /The use of the
99.9 percent figure by the popular press and scientists is, frankly
scandalous./? *

* [I agree.]*

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