Maddenation
Is Race Real?
Dad sent me an email with a New York Times article called Is Race Real?. He should have posted it here, I thought, so I’m doing it. You can discuss the article on the NYT web site, and maybe even have the author answer your email, but I thought I’d rather do it here, where I have a friendly audience of intelligent people. So go read the article (you may have to sign in or create an account with the NYT), then come back and discuss, if you’re so inclined.
I think the interesting thing about this article is that it reduces “racial difference” to DNA, as if that were the end-all arbiter of difference. This is one of the dangers of science-worship, I think. I realize that racial difference is often used to justify cruelty to others, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t differences foreign to the DNA code. Just as there are differences between nationalities and clans and families and individuals, even between identical twins, who, if I’m not mistaken, share the same DNA. Differences arise (and didn’t we recently read about the most recent word on the nature/nurture debate?) through an infinity of influences and over time. I guess the scientists are trying to claim that at some fundamental biological level, there is no race difference, but the article sure seems to overextend that observation and turn it into a sort of metaphor for peace and love. That’s the right motivation, but does the end justify the means? I think it doesn’t. If we’re looking to solve the world’s problems (and we are, and have been forever), I don’t think it’s going to happen by trying to convince people that their DNA is the same as their enemies’. Brothers kill brothers and children kill parents knowing full well that very fact. Another danger I see to the recent DNA understanding/mapping is that we turn our lives into deterministic, chemical processes. Everyone should read, by the way, “My Father’s Brain,” by Jonathan Franzen, which I can’t find online, but which is in the 2002 Best American Essays. He confronts his father’s death of Alzheimers (or complications arising therein), and the new scientific discoveries about genetics and chemicals and brain damage, but comes away with a sort of agnostic’s faith in the soul. For me, resistance to the meanings proposed as interpretations of new knowledge is not some Luddite refusal to advance, nor some blinded grab at cherished principles, it is a refusal to be wafted on the waves of fashionable doctrines that, however advanced and correct in the foundations, still deny the numinous, the mysterious, that we know exists, whether we call it God or soul or coincidence.
Patrick • Ideas • 07/15/03 • 4 comments
Comments
Dad • 07/15/03 • 1:55 PM:NYT articles tend to disappear after about a week, so I’m duplicating the article here. Patrick makes some very good points. After all, the very slight DNA differences Kristof cites have created the Newtons and Einsteins of the world as well as many and various idiots. If DNA research has taught us anything, it is that nature is subtle, and small differences can create big differences over time. Chimps are 98% human, but that doesn’t mean we can teach them how to speak. (Other than in sign language.)
I think the most important lesson about racist is that people differ from each other as individuals, and these differences do not necessarily break down along racial lines. People can and should be judged (if you must ignore Christ’s advice) as individuals, and not prejudged as members of a given race.
Is Race Real?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
XFORD, England
I had my DNA examined by a prominent genetic specialist here, and what do you know! It turns out I’m African-American.
The mitochondria in my cells show that I’m descended from a matriarch who lived in Africa, possibly in present-day Ethiopia or Kenya.
O.K., this was 70,000 years ago, and she seems to be a common ancestor of all Asians as well as all Caucasians. Still, these kinds of DNA analyses illuminate the raging scientific debate about whether there is anything real to the notion of race.
“There’s no genetic basis for any kind of rigid ethnic or racial classification at all,” said Bryan Sykes, the Oxford geneticist and author of “The Seven Daughters of Eve.” “I’m always asked is there Greek DNA or an Italian gene, but, of course, there isn’t… . We’re very closely related.”
Likewise, The New England Journal of Medicine once editorialized bluntly that “race is biologically meaningless.”
Take me. Dr. Sykes looked at a sequence of my mitochondrial DNA to place me on a kind of global family tree. It would have been nice to learn that my ancestors hailed from a village on Loch Ness, but ancestry can almost never be pegged that precisely, and I appear to be a mongrel. One of my variants, for example, is scattered among people in Finland, Poland, Armenia, the Netherlands, Scotland, Israel, Germany and Norway.
On the other hand, is race really “biologically meaningless”? Bigotry has been so destructive that it’s tempting to dismiss race and ethnicity as artificial, but there are genuine differences among population groups.
Jews are more likely to carry mutations for Tay-Sachs, Africans for sickle cell anemia. It’s hard to argue that ethnicity is an empty concept when one gene mutation for an iron storage disease, hemochromatosis, affects fewer than 1 percent of Armenians but 8 percent of Norwegians.
“There is great value in racial/ ethnic self-categorizations” for medicine, protested an article last year by a Stanford geneticist, Neil Risch, in Genome Biology. It warned against “ignoring our differences, even if with the best of intentions.”
DNA does tend to differ, very slightly, with race. Profilers thought a recent serial killer in Louisiana was white until a DNA sample indicated he was probably black. (A black man has been arrested in the case.) As genetic science advances, the police may eventually be able to recover semen and put out an A.P.B. for a tall white rapist with red curly hair, blue eyes and perhaps a Scottish surname.
On the other hand, genetic markers associated with Africans can turn up in people who look entirely white. Indians and Pakistanis may have dark skin, but genetic markers show that they are Caucasians.
Another complication is that African-Americans are, on average, about 17 percent white: they have mitochondria (maternally inherited) that are African, but they often have European Y chromosomes. In other words, white men raped or seduced their maternal ancestors.
Among Jews, there are common genetic markers, including some found in about half the Jewish men named Cohen. But this isn’t exactly a Jewish gene: the same marker is also found in Arabs.
“Genetics research is now about to end our long misadventure with the idea of race,” Steve Olson writes in his new book, “Mapping Human History.”
When I lived in Japan in the 1990’s, my son Gregory had a play date with a classmate I hadn’t met. I asked Gregory, then 5, whether the boy’s mother was Japanese.
“I don’t know,” Gregory replied.
“Well,” I asked sharply, “did she look Japanese or American?” Although he’d lived in Tokyo for years, Gregory replied blankly, “What does a Japanese person look like?”
He was ahead of his time. Genetics increasingly shows that racial and ethnic distinctions are real — but often fuzzy and greatly exaggerated. Genetics will increasingly show that most humans are mongrels, and it will make a mockery of racism.
“There are meaningful distinctions among groups that may have implications for disease susceptibility,” said Harry Ostrer, a genetics expert at the New York University School of Medicine. “The right-wing version of this is `The Bell Curve,’ and that’s pseudoscience — that’s not real. But there can be a middle ground between left-wing political correctness and right-wing meanness.”
I’ll be searching for that middle ground this year as I’m celebrating Kwanzaa.
Genetic Bazaar
Anyone can get a DNA analysis to try to shed light on genetic origins, but for now don’t expect to be pegged too precisely. Bryan Sykes of Oxford University founded a company that offers analyses based on the rubric in his book “The Seven Daughters of Eve,” and more information is available at www.Oxfordancestors.com. That’s the company I used. An alternative is an American company offering DNA analyses with a genealogy focus, www.familytreedna.com.
David • 07/17/03 • 10:48 PM:Very interesting (and filled with yet more connections). And good idea to Dad on copying the article here. We should do that more often, so as to save $ and possibly a good deal of time for changed web addresses.
Maybe I needed proof, and yesterday I got it. We all have racist views of some sort. I confronted some of mine yesterday at the doctors office. Earlier in the year I switched from PPO to HMO and they messed up my request for a particular doctor. They then assigned me one that is relatively close to home. Yesterday I went in for a physical (because I hadn’t had one in 5 or so years). The place was in a not-so-hot section of downtown. And I was the only white person there. Everybody else, nurses, doctors, patients, was black. And I should be okay with that, but I wasn’t. I was uncomfortable and felt out of place. People looked at me funny - I imagined them wondering, “what’s that white guy doing here?” It turned out well, and I tried to use it as a learning/growing opportunity. I had a good talk with my black female doctor. She’s really cool. The overall visit wasn’t the best (to me, a very low-key physical), but I’m glad it happened.
Pat, you’re very right in dissagreeing with the article. I was at first thinking about showing to my class (I still might, but for different reasons) but then I realized the guy doesn’t factor in 1/2 the picture - NURTURE. Our environment has a gigantic impact on not just our behaviors and likes and such, but our genes, our DNA. And a large part of the differences in cultures is the NURTURE aspect.
I thought the article was not very informative and the writer was not very informed of the issues. Maybe I could have my kids read it and hopefully come to some of these same conclusions.
Pat, very nice last sentence, whatever it means. :)
Patrick • 07/17/03 • 11:34 PM:Sometimes the best sentences are those that feel nice, have some rhythm, even if we have to puzzle out their meanings. I’m writing more and more from that angle, and enjoying others’ mysterious sentences more and more.
Dad • 07/18/03 • 6:40 PM:It took me about 5 minutes to figure out which sentence David was referring too (part of the mystery of our website?) and then reread it again. That’s right, I didn’t just reread it, I reread it again! Wow. Blinded grab at cherished principles indeed! Read that aloud three times fast. I think I even understand it. But Kristof does more than deny the numinous. As David pointed out, he left out half the equation—experience. I have read recently, in more than one place, that the number of genes we have (30 to 40 thousand) is nowhere near enough to prescribe the complexity of a human being. I know this sounds like an oversimplification, but I think of it like the hardware/software analogy. The genes are sufficient to generate the brain’s neurons, but it’s our experience that makes the connections. That’s what separates the spear fisherman from the anthropologist.
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