Nature tackles race and eugenics in a torturous and tortuous article

Yes, folks, the science journals are still flaunting their virtue in articles that are similar to a gazillion articles published before. This time (and not the first time), the article is torturous because the assertions are mostly misleading.  And it’s tortuous because it weaves back and forth between two themes: eugenics and the assumed beneficial effect of diversity on scientific productivity. And the material in the article contradicts some of its own claims. The author, Genevieve L. Woicik, is identified as “an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,Baltimore, Maryland, USA.”

You can read the article by clicking on the title below, or find the pdf here.  If you were to read it without knowing better, you would get two false impressions:

1. The world, and especially America, is gearing up for a big bout of eugenics.
2. Race is a social construct that has nothing to do with biology

I see no evidence for #1 unless one is oblivious to reality, while #2, as Luana and I showed in our paper on The Ideological Subversion of Biology, is misleading. I recommend you read section 5, which is headed by one of the statements about genetics and evolutionary biology that we consider misleading: ““Race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological meaning.”

Moreover, the discussion tacitly admits that, yes, populations do have biological differences. As Luana and I wrote in our paper, we don’t like using the word “race” because in its classical form, it is misleading. Instead we say this:

Before we handle this hot potato, we emphasize that we prefer the words ethnicity or even geographic populations to race, because the last term, due to its historical association with racism, has simply become too polarizing. Further, old racial designations such as white, black, and Asian came with the erroneous view that races are easily distinguished by a few traits, are geographically delimited, and have substantial genetic differences. In fact, the human species today comprises geographically continuous groups that have only small to modest differences in the frequencies of genetic variants, and there are groups within groups: potentially an unlimited number of “races.” Still, human populations do show genetic differences from place to place, and those small differences, summed over thousands of genes, add up to substantial and often diagnostic differences between populations.

I prefer “populations” which are still not social constructs and do have biological meaning. But our paper shows how and why, so read section 5, which is not long.

Finally, Woicik’s article calls on all scientists to push back against racism and eugenics, and of course all people of good will should do so when they can. But her article is of a Chicken Little bent, as the first claim is wrong and the second distorted (as the progressives say, “it lacks nuance”).

Click below to read, or find the pdf here. It’s only two pages long

Here are the main topics:

Eugenics.

Let’s first take up the author’s overheated claim that “eugenics is on the rise again,”  I suppose if you trawled the white-supremacist or tinfoil-hat literature, you could find a few people who espoused eugenics (the sterilization, prevention of breeding, or even murder of members of minority groups), but really, that idea is dead as a doornail in science and in the public (when was the last time you found a call for eugenics in the MSM or in a biology textbook?)  Even Trump, despite his brief remark below, has not espoused eugenics.

In fact, Woicik cites only three bits of evidence for her claim that eugenics is on the rise:

In 1924, motivated by the rising eugenics movement, the United States passed the Johnson–Reed Act, which limited immigration to stem “a stream of alien blood, with all its inherited misconceptions”. A century later, at a campaign event last October, now US President Donald Trump used similar eugenic language to justify his proposed immigration policies, stating that “we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now”.

. . . . At a hearing in February, the now-confirmed head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, reiterated his past comments that Black children should receive different vaccine schedules from white children because of variations in their immune systems.

Kennedy’s motives in this regard are unclear. But after making numerous demonstrably false statements about vaccination, he is providing another layer of reasoning that the scientist whose work Kennedy cites described as “twisting the data far beyond what they actually demonstrate” while promoting racial essentialism: the false belief that people of different ‘races’ have inherently distinct biology^2,3.

and this:

In the United States, a reactionary political movement has ridden a populist wave into power, using dog-whistle rhetoric about race. This has happened just when scientists have the knowledge — and tools — to make strides towards a more equitable world.

Geneticists and others must stand against a global rise of white nationalism, which seeks to leverage scientific racism for eugenicist goals, and stop its talking points from entering the mainstream political discourse.

She does mention one case of race-motivated shooting, but that is murderous bigotry, not eugenics, which is the initiative of a government or professional body.  One cannot argue that each race-related shooting (including shooting of whites by minorities) is an instance of “eugenics.”

The only evidence for a rise of eugenics here is a throwaway remark by Trump.  The RFK Jr. statement may be misguided, but there are some “racial” differences in responses to treatment.  The last statement says that white nationalism has “eugenicist goals”.  Perhaps some extremists do, but I simply do not hear calls for the public, the government, or the scientific community to reinstitute eugenics in America.  Of course it would be bad to call for that and do that, but the threat of eugenics is simply not a problem.

The falsity of denying genetic differences between populations. The first thing to remember is what Luana and I wrote:

Of what use are such ethnicity clusters? Let’s begin with something many people are familiar with: the ability to deduce one’s personal ancestry from their genes. If there were no differences between populations, this task would be impossible, and “ancestry companies” such as 23andMe wouldn’t exist. But you don’t even need DNA sequences to predict ethnicities quite accurately. Physical traits can sometimes do the job: AI programs can, for instance, predict self-reported race quite accurately from just X-ray scans of the chest.

This along shows that there are biological differences between populations, and even those populations that are “self-reported races”, like white, black, Hispanic, or Asian.  But Wojcik, even disses the ancestry-testing companies. Wojcik:

One public-facing area is direct-to-consumer ancestry-testing services. These use computational algorithms to model the genetic similarity between individuals and reference populations to draw conclusions about people’s geographical origins. Many have pointed out that these services — which rely on geopolitical and ethnic categories — might be exacerbating racial essentialism.

Again we have a hyperbolic statement here; Luana’s finding out that she has ancestry that’s Hispanic, black, native American, and from other groups does not “exacerbate racial essentialism.” Ask yourself: have you ever seen anybody turn into a racist when they get their 23andMe results?

Here are a few more instances of biological differences between either populations or self-reported races cited by Luana and me. Have a look at the first study, involving “self reported race”:

Even the old and outmoded view of race is not devoid of biological meaning. A group of researchers compared a broad sample of genes in over 3,600 individuals who self-identified as either African American, white, East Asian, or Hispanic. DNA analysis showed that these groups fell into genetic clusters, and there was a 99.84 percent match between which cluster someone fell into and their self-designated racial classification. This surely shows that even the old concept of race is not “without biological meaning.” But that’s not surprising because, given restricted movement in the past, human populations evolved largely in geographic isolation from one another—apart from “Hispanic,” a recently admixed population never considered a race. As any evolutionary biologist knows, geographically isolated populations become genetically differentiated over time, and this is why we can use genes to make good guesses about where populations come from.

. . . More recent work, taking advantage of our ability to easily sequence whole genomes, confirms a high concordance between self-identified race and genetic groupings. One study of twenty-three ethnic groups found that they fell into seven broad “race/ethnicity” clusters, each associated with a different area of the world. On a finer scale, genetic analysis of Europeans show that, remarkably, a map of their genetic constitutions coincides almost perfectly with the map of Europe itself. In fact, the DNA of most Europeans can narrow down their birthplace to within roughly 500 miles.

We give other evidence, taking care to show that differences do not equate to a hierarchy. Populations have differentiated over time genetically, both through natural selection and genetic drift. Differences due to selection, like lactose tolerance or low-oxygen tolerance, cannot be equated to an overall superiority, only to a better ability to leave your genes in the environment wher eyou evolved.  Differences between populations will create racism only if people are motivated to be bigots.  Luana and I quote Ernst Mayr on this, who apparently was a far clearer thinker about genetics than both the author of this paper (who seems desperately afraid of differences even of the 23andMe type) and many others:

The great evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr stated it well:

Equality in spite of evident non-identity is a somewhat sophisticated concept and requires a moral stature of which many individuals seem to be incapable. They rather deny human variability and equate equality with identity. Or they claim that the human species is exceptional in the organic world in that only morphological characters are controlled by genes and all other traits of the mind or character are due to “conditioning” or other non-genetic factors. … An ideology based on such obviously wrong premises can only lead to disaster. Its championship of human equality is based on a claim of identity. As soon as it is proved that the latter does not exist, the support of equality is likewise lost. (Mayr 1963)

Thus, although the classical races are to some extent social constructs, they also jibe with biological differences. Wojcik:

. . . . there is broad consensus among researchers that social constructs of descent-based identity, such as race and ethnicity, do not align with genetic groupings. On the other, there is growing awareness that diversity matters for sound science and effective policy, including in health care. Embraced together, these two concepts have strengthened science and increased benefits to health.

This is misleading, as you can see by comparing the multivariate and principal-component genetic analyses that match very nicely with geographic locations.  As we said, there are “groups within groups within groups,” and thus we prefer to use the word “populations”. Here’s a genetic cluster analysis of Europeans by country of birth, which, as we note above, coincides remarkably well with geography. Are there “races” here? Well, no, but there are populations, and those populations are different in a consistent way that tells us something about geography and biology (people mate with those geographically close to them. Note as well that genetics has also helped us reconstruct the history of human migration out of Africa and across the globe.

Wojcik admits several times that there are genetic differences between populations.  This seems to be at odds with her thesis. Bolding is mine:

For example, the likelihood of people having haemoglobinopathies (inherited disorders that affect red blood cells) varies substantially depending on where in the world a person lives. In some regions of India, carrier rates for the blood disorder β-thalassaemia are estimated to be higher than 8%, whereas in areas of China, they can be as low as 2.7%. This heterogeneity would be missed if researchers simply grouped study participants as ‘Asian’, a term that refers to nearly 60% of the global population. Similarly, using the category ‘Hispanic’ without considering other factors would fail to reveal that the genetic variant associated with Steel syndrome, a rare genetic bone disorder, is more common in people from Puerto Rico than in those from the Dominican Republic or Mexico⁵.

But of course! We know this because researchers did NOT group populations as “Asian”.  Here’s another admission that geographic location is relevant to biology:

The availability of large-scale multimodal data and advanced statistical and computational tools is making it easier than ever for researchers to stop relying on race or ethnicity as proxies for biology or structural and social determinants of health. Instead, they can interrogate the effects of many well-defined variables, from people’s genetics and geographical location to their diet and income.

Again, genetics and geographical location (which of course differ among populations) are said to be relevant to biology and health.

The author seems to believe that physicians practice “race-based medicine”, but any doctor that doesn’t look beyond one’s self-identified or other-identified race or ancestry when diagnosing problems is a dreadful doctor. I’ve never met one—not even one asking me if I was an Ashkenazi Jew, which is what my genes tell me I am.  And yes, self-described race is associated with clinical risk, though some of that could be due to cultural differences among people of different ancestries.

Diversity.

Although Wojcik claims that race is a social construct, she also tells us that “diversity”–clearly of “self-defined race”—is something we need because higher (social-construct) diversity within groups leads to higher productivity and more valuable outcomes. While I agree that we need to increase diversity throughout society by affording all people equal opportunities from birth, that doesn’t mean that the sources cited bo Wojcik are dispositive:

Reports from the US National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, for instance, emphasize the need for more-diverse groups of participants to be included in genetics and genomics research², as well as in biomedical research more broadly³. They also stress the importance of a diverse workforce — which has consistently been shown to result in higher productivity, as well as in work that has a greater impact on people’s lives.

But there are many other studies showing no effect or negative effects, and these have been summarized by Lee Jussim in his report “The downsides of DEI“, which has compiled all available studies on aspects of this topic. Go to the section called “diversity does not produce its promised benefits.” As Lee said:

I curated this list to make it easy in situations like this to track down relevant resources.  And any article touting the joys of diversity for science/performance that simply ignores

these articles is more propaganda than science.  This is true even if it is unintentional, failing to know about the existence of evidence contrary to the claims one is touting is, at best, the scientific equivalent of negligent malpractice.

My point is simply that in calling for a reformation of science and society, Wojcik is making hyperbolic claims that are, more often than not, unjustified.  Races (or populations) don’t differ in meaningful biological ways, society is on the verge of adopting eugenics, and diverse groups don’t always do better than homogeneous ones. Of course I am not touting racism here, but I do maintain that we’re not on the verge of eugenics, and that differences between populations are biologically meaningful and will become more so as we learn more.

Near the end there is more hyperbolic rhetoric that verges on a call for censorship (my bolding):

Geneticists and others must stand against a global rise of white nationalism, which seeks to leverage scientific racism for eugenicist goals, and stop its talking points from entering the mainstream political discourse.

Of course I abhor white nationalism, even though I don’t think its goals are eugenics, but, regardless, I’m not calling for censorship in debates about race. Sunlight, they say, is the best disinfectant, and scientists need to engage with civility on all topics, including the hot potato of race.  Unfortunately, this article fails to do that. It is not a piece of science, or even of scientific analysis, but a tendentious ideological screed.

h/t: Roy