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In My Opinion

*/Letter to the Editor of DISCOVER:/*

*Editor:*
I was so dubious of Feldman's conclusions about human origins (page
56, right column, #7) that I looked up the research on which it was
based, and it seems he is telling us what he thinks we */ought/* to
believe, rather than what the data really implies.
He says:
"Humans are all so closely related that our entire population shows
less genetic diversity than that of a small group of chimpanzees. It's
almost as though we all came from the same town ... and perhaps we
did."... [the comment] is based on a study by Marcus Feldman, a
population geneticist at Stanford University;  Noah Rosenberg, a
computational biologist at the University of Southern California in Los
Angeles;  and Lev Zhivotovsky, a geneticist at the Russian Academy of
Sciences, Moscow. They examined short, repetitive fragments of DNA
called microsatellites, markers found in every person.  'We used 377
markers that are generally located in non-coding regions of the genome,
ones that are likely to be neutral, where there is no natural selection
involved,' says Rosenberg.  The beauty of microsatellites is that they
mutate frequently, at a steady pace, enabling scientists to infer ...
when human populations first diverged from each other. Studying those
mutations in 1,056 individuals clustered in 52 populations groups around
the world ..."

Feldman, and his research associates, are mentioned in a paper by
David Rotman, called */"Genes, Medicine, and the New Race Debate"/* from
*Technology Review*; Jun2003, Vol. 106, issue 5, pg. 41. The abstract
mentions the "danger of looking for genetic variations among racial groups."
The */danger/* of these genetic discoveries! If the data really
indicated that 'we are all the same' and 'we are all Africans', (as the
media science-writers confidently assure us) would these researchers
think that is 'dangerous'? You know better; but we don't have to infer
their views: they tell us, in that paper, what they fear and why. First,
they tell us that the *HapMap* "will make it possible to spell out in
great detail the genetic differences between people from different parts
of the world". [/Those differences that Feldman claims hardly exist!/]
So, "Sociologists, bioethicists, and anthropologists *worry* that the
genetic data could be manipulated to give an air of *biological
credence* to *ethnic stereotypes*, to revive discredited *racial
classifications*, & *even* to fuel bogus claims of *fundamental genetic
differences* between groups." [my emphasis] 
"Here's the rub", says Troy Duster, a sociologist, "...The danger"
[there it is again, that */danger/*] is that people will associate those
differences with racial groups, and Jonathan Kahn, bioethicist, suggests
that, "it is all too easy for biological and genetic categories to
become conflated with racial ones." No doubt they will, because that is
exactly what the data implies: Feldman's */own/* researchers reported "
... detailed data on gene samples from individuals from 52
populations..." and, bottom line: "how people categorized themselves -
whether they called themselves black or white or asian - correlated
closely with the genetic categories."
Duster thinks that ordinary folk are not to be trusted with this
"dangerous" genetic knowledge: he says that "...to map differences
between various populations while avoiding the *dangers* of *racial
stereotypes* is a conundrum without an answer." He doesn't quite say the
truth should be withheld from us vulgar rabble, but it is clearly
implied that genetic researchers had better come to the right
conclusions when reporting research.  Feldman's */DISCOVER/* comments
seem to be an example of concealing that "dangerous" truth!
Feldman claims those 377 microsatellites show so little diversity we
could all be from one village, but this is the */same/* data-set, that
is discussed in *Does Race Exist*, */Sci. Am./*, Dec 2003. That article
grudgingly admitted the race-genetic correlation. "...we needed  60
polymorphisms to assign individuals to their continent of origin with
90% accuracy. To achieve nearly 100% accuracy, however, we needed to use
about 100...". This article reveals that Noah Rosenberg and Jonathan
Pritchard, *formerly of Feldman/'/s laboratory* used 375 of those sets
of polymorphisms from 1000 people of 52 ethnic groups to find that,
"...by looking at varying frequencies of these polymorphisms they were
able to distinguish five different groups of people whose ancestors were
typically */isolated/* by oceans, deserts, or mountains: sub-Saharan
Africans; Europeans and Asians west of the Himalayas; east Asians; ...
Melanesia; and Native Americans." They were also able to identify
subgroups within each region that usually corresponded with each
member's self-reported ethnicity". [*/What a village!/*] That
information is all extracted from the variation among those
microsatellites that Feldman characterizes as having "less diversity
than a chimpanzee troop". While perhaps technically true, the impression
imparted is deceptive.
Feldman asserts that we "are all so closely related" because there
is 'so little diversity' among those carefully chosen microsatellites.
Here's a quote from the abstract of, */Human Genetic Diversity:
Lewontin's Fallacy/*, A.W.Edwards, Bioessays Aug 2003; Vol. 25: (8)
798-801 http://www.goodrumj.com/Edwards.pdf
that gives perspective on Feldman's conclusions. "In popular articles
that play down the genetical differences among human populations, it is
often stated that about 85% of the total genetic variation is due to
individual differences within populations and only 15% to differences
between populations or ethnic groups. ...this argument ignores the fact
that most of the information that distinguishes populations is hidden in
the correlation structure of the data and not simply in the variation of
the individual factors." In other words, */this is a deceitful argument,
and those who make it know that./*

Even the NY Times, that bastion of PC, is beginning to admit the
truth about Lewontin’s error, albeit only in an OP-editorial. On March
14, 2005, ARMAND MARIE LEROI wrote specifically about Lewontin, in the
aptly titled, *A Family Tree in Every Gene:*

“The [Lewontin’s] 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.”

More on this subject at:*/ The Genetic Reality of Race
<./html/genetic_reality_of_race.html>/*

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