http://genome.cshlp.org/content/19/5/703.full

in Genome Research 2009, by Kenneth M. Weiss and Jeffrey C. Long. Long is also a co-author for one of the “Race Reconciled” articles I recommended previously. However, this article has the advantage of being open access and is also specifically related to software packages and issues of ancestry, admixture, and populations discussed in the above comments.

Although I would welcome Razib’s analysis of the “Race Reconciled” articles, my feeling is that this article is much more pertinent to the comment stream on this post, and I’m sorry I had not seen it before.

There are many relevant sections to the article, but in relation to the above discussions, I found this quote very applicable:

“Often there is no explicit accounting for the fact that at some point the parental populations (whether they could be real today, or at any time in the past) must share ancestry with each other, and that the different parental populations ultimately share varying degrees of ancestry. Even if one were to grant that contemporary data only provide estimates of, rather than actual, ancestral parental genotype frequencies, there is no reason to think that there ever were isolated, homogeneous parental populations at any point in our human past. Why do we, even in science, so uncritically accept admixture-based analyses of global samples that give the appearance that human variation is clustered into a few major populations, portrayed in much the same way as classical races? These are not pleasant thoughts, but it is important to learn from history, and sometimes it is valuable to be brought face to face with one’s tacit assumptions or the nature of their underlying rationale.”

Dear Sandgroper,

Perhaps we are more alike than we think. Points taken and I agree we do not need to continue going around and around. I only came “bombing in” because of links to my site which I felt were taken out of context and misrepresented, along with broad-brush assertions and attacks on anthropology. I too look forward to reading Razib’s take on the references at some time.

Yeah, I suggested you get a sense of the level and nature of the long ongoing discussion before just bombing in and making assumptions about the need to deliver a lecture in Slavery & Genocide 101.

“I am in no way assuming the moral high ground.” Didn’t say you personally were. But you seem to think you need to keep repeating here your reference to history. You don’t. I don’t believe any regular commenter here needs to have this pointed out – we know. I don’t think the sloganising helps to dispel the notion that you could be trying to claim the high ground for anthropology, nor do I understand how you can start out with this kind of ‘mission statement’ and remain fully objective. Nothing is gained by failing to recognize that some traditional practices have been utterly repugnant; it merely serves to conceal and perpetuate them. If you check out civil engineering ethics, you will see that in theory at least we are a pretty altruistic bunch. Maybe we should have a slogan to dispel doubt about that, but I don’t see how you can cram a set of professional ethics and a code of conduct into a slogan.

“would not you have wanted to run as far away as possible from terminology” – No; call me a naive idealist, but I had hoped that in this era, people could come to understand the meaning of the scientific definition of “race” in the context of modern knowledge about human variation, and that it could sweep away all false constructions, past and present. I truly believe that the truth will set people free, if only they will choose to see it, and that nothing good comes from not recognising the truth. However, I have come to realize that people choose to continue to put false constructions on the word because it suits their purpose, and also that false constructions can cause the word to give offence and be hurtful to people who don’t deserve it. Consequently I intend to scrap it in favour of words which are less brief and convenient, but more self-explanatory.

I have genuine personal reasons for needing to preserve anonymity. Razib knows who I am, and if I really step out of line, be assured that he will pin my ears back in no uncertain fashion, and that I will accept his judgement. There is nothing sinister in it – it’s not like I’m some fly-by troll.

I think I’m done. I don’t see any point in continuing to go around and around this. You could no doubt teach me a lot about anthropology, but please be assured that I do not need lectures from you about human potential, or about past abuses against humanity – I had not forgotten them, and I think any ongoing discussion on that is both unnecessary and counter-productive. In any case, I need to get on an international flight and have no more time, so whether it’s done or not, it is. I would look forward to reading Razib’s take on the references some time.

OK, thank you for the clarification. It is perhaps partly a matter of communication. Race terminology has been used to justify destructive activities and is associated with those activities. Moreover, Sandgroper says that nobody is talking about traditional categories of race. So why would you want to use this terminology? I’m not really saying you should or should not, ought or ought not, but if you keep talking about race, then please don’t be suprised or offended when others outside your circle continue to associate that talk with either traditional race categories or historical and actual inequalities.

Hope that makes sense.

I don’t know, could you make the same argument to do away with terminology referring to Jews, Catholics & Muslims, or males and females?

The relevance of the moralistic fallacy is that you acknowledge above that within biology race is a perfectly good term. But because it has been misused for destructive ends so the term should not be acknowledged. Putting it another way: racism ought not to happen so race is not real (that seems to me to have been Lewontin’s motivation – although he was challenging the meaning rather than simply the terminology). Maybe I’m stretching the meaning of Davis’ phrase – another example of the moralistic fallacy Steven Pinker refers to is the Seville Statement on Violence.

In terms of the terminology it doesn’t really bother me, if you refer to population groups, races or otherwise.

First a thanks to Razib for uploading the files.

Anthropology as an academic discipline was born relatively late, roughly 1880s-1930s, during an age of colonial expansion often justified by racist ideas. By the time anthropologists visited peoples in Australia, the Kalahari, or the Amazon, most indigenous societies had already been quite in contact with Western powers, sometimes with devastating effects. Nevertheless, anthropologists have documented that people–even under very adverse conditions–have responded creatively to these circumstances and can have fascinating languages, complex kinship patterns, as well as an enormous knowledge of plants and non-human animals.

If you read Charles Mann’s book 1491, which Razib very helpfully links to here, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2011/09/10-questions-for-charles-c-mann/ you will find an incredible documentation of the achievements of native peoples in the Americas. These people were called “savages” and said to be unfit for the modern world and said to be deficient in “cognitive abilities,” and yet they were obviously able to create rich and varied societies.

Please don’t misunderstand–I am not saying everything native is good, or romanticizing the past, or saying any other way of life is better than our own. But we can be quite confident that those people who have so often been denigrated, left out, and subjected to miserable treatment can nevertheless have quite a lot of experience, wisdom, and understanding in the world.

So, if indeed every one of your “unfortunate facts” were discovered about a particular population–and I really have to wonder, is that what you are searching for?–we would still have quite good grounds for attempting to develop and encourage human potential rather than–well, what would you suggest exactly?

Thank you for the reply. First please note my name change. I decided if I am going to continue my sojourn on this site, I need a new moniker. Difficult to have an equal discussion with the likes of “Sandgroper” “Kiwiguy” and “candid_observer” if I have to use my real name. So you may still call me Jason if you prefer, but I think my new moniker reflects my position on this site as a defender of anthropological approaches. As I mentioned to Sandgroper, however, I am not here to defend any individual anthropologists or to take a moral high ground.

With regard to the moralistic fallacy, I followed your link to Wikipedia and responded from there. But even using Ridley’s definition of the leap from ought to is, I fail to see the relevance to what I observed. I am very simply making what I believe is a historically non-controversial point that the idea of race has been used to justify slavery, genocide, and inequality. I am not saying the idea of race was causal–in fact, it was probably most often used as an ex-post-facto justification. Nevertheless, traditional race categories were very much used as a justification. If I combine that with what Sandgroper wrote above, that “Nobody here is talking about ‘traditional categories of race’, i.e. in the pre-genomics era,” then my simple question is why you would at all feel compelled to retain the terminology, especially given these historical associations. Again, I fail to see the relevance of any ought to is leap.

I am interested that you bring up Matt Ridley. In Matt Ridley’s book “The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture,” Ridley writes “It is genes that allow the human mind to learn, to remember, to imitate, to imprint, to absorb culture, and to express instincts. . . . Somehow the adherents of the ‘nurture’ side of the argument have scared themselves silly at the power and inevitability of genes and missed the greatest lesson of all: the genes are on their side” (2004:6).

As I understood it, I didn’t think the Matt Ridley approach–how nature turns on nurture–was what the site was about, although I could be mistaken. Not that I’m a big fan of Matt Ridley–as I explain in an overview of “Human Nature and Anthropology,” Ridley’s “laundry list” approach to human nature doesn’t seem very coherent or intellectually satisfying:

http://www.livinganthropologically.com/anthropology/human-nature/

To begin with, many thanks for your offer to provide me access to the anthropology articles — I’ll email you shortly so that you can send me what I may need.

I took a look at your explanation on your web page about the meaning of “moral optimism” in the context of anthropology. I can see how, strictly speaking anyway, there may not be, in the context of anthropology, an inherent contradiction between the pursuit of the truth as a scientist, and a commitment to the kinds of moral goals you exhort anthropologists to embrace.

But I do seriously wonder how those two overarching goals reconcile themselves on a practical basis.

Let’s suppose that the finding of anthropology is that different populations of human beings evolved for lengthy periods of time quite separately from each other. Suppose further that the finding of anthropology is that one group is fairly significantly different from another in terms of their distributions of a number of measurable traits, some of which have great significance in modern society (such as certain cognitive abilities). And finally suppose it is well established that those distributions are largely due to differences in genetic distributions.

What is the morally optimistic point of view anthropology should adopt, if these are the facts from which it might need to work? My own take on these circumstances is that it would be unfortunate indeed if these were the facts determined by science. I feel optimistic that mankind would ultimately find a way to deal with those facts which would, in fact, embody an enlightened morality. But I should think it pretty obvious that we would live in a far better world were the belief in equality in socially important traits across all groups a true one. Insofar as we must deal with a world embodying such basic inequalities, it seems to require more than anything else a resignation to some unfortunate luck. Yes, there would be “variability”, all right, but nothing that we would likely be in any mood to celebrate.

So I do wonder what it might mean for a “moral optimism”, in your sense, to work with such potential facts.

#54 ***nor is it an assumption that what is “natural” is also good (the moralistic fallacy Kiwiguy accuses me of), ***

The moralistic fallacy as I understand it, & Matt Ridley calls it, is the reverse naturalistic fallacy: The leap from ought to is. So bad things have happened because of gender so there are no gender differences, or there should be no racism so race doesn’t exist.

I think the likes of Peter Singer and Steven Pinker have written about how you can avoid this type of fallacy while also recognising individual rights and dignity.

This is at least the second time in this thread that you have at best skimmed what I have to say and then misrepresented it. It is obvious from your comment #22 that you did not read what I wrote, or you would not have attributed to me a desire to group people by skin color. You have asked me to have “at least skimmed about 10 years’ worth of this blog + GNXP” before making any general commentary, yet you have not in any way reciprocated.

I am in no way assuming the moral high ground. By pointing out that race has been used to justify slavery, genocide, and inequality, I am simply making a factual observation about historical occurrences. More than a few anthropologists were involved in such justifications, and I claim no moral high ground for myself or for anthropologists as individuals.

If it is indeed true what you wrote that “Nobody here is talking about ‘traditional categories of race’, i.e. in the pre-genomics era,” then I am quite puzzled why we are having this conversation at all–would not you have wanted to run as far away as possible from terminology that almost everyone hears as pre-genomic and is associated with events like the Holocaust?

With regard to my website slogan–”the moral optimism of anthropology can change the world”–I will readily admit this is a slogan and is designed as an internet announcement. The reasoning behind the slogan is to promote what anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot said about anthropology: “anthropology as a discipline is the best venue through which the West can show an undying faith in the richness and variability of humankind” (Global Transformations 2003:139). This is not a defense of anthropologists past or present, nor a claim to moral high ground, nor is it an assumption that what is “natural” is also good (the moralistic fallacy Kiwiguy accuses me of), but urging anthropology to document human possibility, creativity, and variability.

If you would actually like to read more on the reasoning behind the slogan, please see

http://www.livinganthropologically.com/anthropology-powerpoint/moral-optimism/

My point is that anthropologists are in no position to assume they have the high moral ground.

“The moral optimism of anthropology can change the world”

“Anthropology documents human possibility and creativity to effect change. See Anthropology and Moral Optimism for free PowerPoint download.”

I knew one anthropologist ‘working’ in Australia who used ‘fieldwork’ among western desert Aboriginal groups as a cover for having sex with young Aboriginal girls. No doubt his argument would have been that what he was doing was in conformity with their traditional practices, and that “they can teach us a lot”.

Moralistic fallacy?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moralistic_fallacy

I do encourage you to browse some past posts and commentary.

While I think of it, and because John doesn’t accept comments and I don’t wish to bother him with emails, congratulations to John Hawks on his appointment as HMMI Fellow.

I wrote a long comment, and then realized that it was so long that perhaps I should get my own blog. So I scrapped it for this:

The argument about the word race reminds me of nothing so much as my 87 year old father’s bemoaning the change in the meaning of the word “gay”. Politically, he supports gay rights, gay marriage, etc., but he resents that the primary meaning of the word is no longer lighthearted and happy. Its colloquial meaning has changed. There are other words whose meanings have changed since he came of age, and he complains about many of them, but this is a particularly good example for what I want to say.

Race has a colloquial meaning and a scientific one. That racial definitions change with borders and over time does indeed make it a social construct, at least in the way it is used colloquially. People using the term colloquially have often used pseudo-scientific evidence, often supported by prominent scientists of the day, to horrifying effect. People who object to the conflation of the 2 meanings, and also insist on retaining the use of the word in scientific discussions or in serious discussions of the science, will, if successful, have to live with an unintended consequence — at a minimum, avoidable confusion about the implications of the science.

Insisting on keeping this word in scientific use reminds me of my father and the word gay, and of (the popular image of) King Canute, trying to command the tides. The word has a colloquial meaning. For a long time — decades? centuries? — what passed for science meant that there was no distinction between the colloquial and scientific meanings. The science has moved on. So has popular usage, but it has not kept up. Until it catches up, if it ever does, trying to retain the word for science will lead to more heat than light. (I am writing from a US perspective-English language perspective, but I don’t think the limitations of my point are that severe.)

Thank you for the polite reply. When I wrote that in my blog-post, I did not mean to refer to my interactions on this site, which have indeed been quite polite, and I made the over-generalizing statement about comment streams everywhere. This was more related to surveying the blog-climate across the web than it was to this site, and so I have edited my original post. I also had not been aware of how many comments Razib has to keep off the site, which did make me more appreciative of the discourse here. I apologize.

I understand your contention that from within biology, “race” is a perfectly good term. I hope you will understand the concern that for the past 200 years or so race has been not just a misused term, but a terribly destructive basis to justify slavery, genocide, and inequality.

If it is any comfort, I have also urged anthropologists to drop the term “culture”:

http://www.livinganthropologically.com/2011/02/17/doubling-down-on-culture-in-anthropology/

Although the term “culture” may be a perfectly good one within anthropology, it has been so misused in its popular manifestations that every time an anthropologist uses it, it is likely to be misunderstood. Of course, this is not abandoning the *concept* of culture, which needs as much defense as ever, but to recognize that the term is now misused beyond repair and whistle-blowing efforts. This may sound familiar?

“I am indeed affirming the reality of human biological variation, and even that this variation can cluster in interesting and meaningful ways.” That is what we are talking about, and the fact that when the lay public are persuaded to believe that “race is a social construct” (which should actually be “construction”), they take it to mean exactly that, including when biologists try to talk about the importance of biological race for non-trivial traits; their reaction is to think that the biologist is some kind of racist throw-back, rather than someone who is being scientifically objective and who is trying to tell them something that could be important.

That is what we were discussing, and whether biologists should voluntarily give up the perfectly good term ‘race’ because it has been misused so widely by so many for so long, to the point that it has lost its true meaning.

Nobody here is talking about “traditional categories of race”, i.e. in the pre-genomics era, when we talk about the biological definition of race in this context, at least not in any comments that get past Razib.

So if people were being honest and informed, they would say “race is a social construct except when…..”

But no one is going to say that, so I vote in favour of Miko’s motion – scrap it. My concern is even if we use different terminology, people will still not believe that the reality of human biological variation exists because of the success of the Lewontinites and the propaganda slogan “Race is a social construct.”

Some of us have had a lifetime of bad experience from the social constructions of race, which is what I was trying to point out, but we do not wish to be impeded in the communication of important information from modern science, or branded as racists because people don’t understand what we are talking about.

I really do think that if you had at least skimmed about 10 years’ worth of this blog + GNXP, your experience might have been a little less disappointing. To characterise the commentary as about as bad as every other blog is pretty unfair in my view, when many of us know each other and know where we are coming from.

I appreciate your interest in this material. Please send me an e-mail to jason@livinganthropologically.com and we can work on ways to get you access to the original research.

My feeling is we are barking up slightly different trees–I am indeed affirming the reality of human biological variation, and even that this variation can cluster in interesting and meaningful ways. But the traditional category of race–a lot of which emerged from colonial encounters in the Americas–is a “culturally constructed label that crudely and imprecisely describes real variation” (Relethford, “Race and global patterns of phenotypic variation” 2009:20).

Again thank you for your consideration and please send an e-mail about getting research.

do any of your guys use this software? it uses e various statistical techniques to see how many K’s is the best fit. though as you say, PCA is hypothesis-free.