Posted: Aug 11, 2011 4:04 am
Biowatch wrote:1. Have you heard of the Lewontin Fallacy? Read Cambridge geneticist AWF Edwards' paper on it, or Steve Hsu's discussion here
It's not "The Lewontin Fallacy". It's just a single paper critical of Lewontin where Edwards, like many others, mistakes variation for race. What about Kaplan:
http://www.els.net/WileyCDA/ElsArticle/refId-a0005857.html
Although there exist human populations that differ in the proportions of particular alleles present, this fact does not support claims that ‘race’, as it is usually understood, is a biological rather than a social concept. Although there are differences in proportions of alleles in those races usually recognised in contemporary western social discourse (folk-racial categories), these differences are no more biologically significant than are the genetic differences that exist between populations that are not socially recognised as races (populations that do not correspond to folk-racial categories). This implies that whatever average genetic differences exist between the populations called ‘races’ in ordinary social discourse, those genetic differences are not what account for the folk-racial categories in use today. Despite recent research sometimes taken to imply otherwise, folk-racial categories – which remain of fundamental importance to people's life-prospects – remain social categories and not biological categories.
Biowatch wrote:2. What about the genetic diversity in comparison to other species which have sub-species or races?
It doesn't actually matter. We need to find distinct groups with some kind of unique profile regardless of the amount of variation. The statistical measurements Edwards made do not define races. Also see Genetic Similarities Within and Between Human Populations (Witherspoon et al).
The fact that, given enough genetic data, individuals can be correctly assigned to their populations of origin is compatible with the observation that most human genetic variation is found within populations, not between them. It is also compatible with our finding that, even when the most distinct populations are considered and hundreds of loci are used, individuals are frequently more similar to members of other populations than to members of their own population. Thus, caution should be used when using geographic or genetic ancestry to make inferences about individual phenotypes.
With multiple intersecting clines we can triangulate someone's position on the gene map but this is not race. There is no significant covariance.