A Debate Over A Troublesome Book – Nicholas Wade

More on Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History by Agustín Fuentes, a professor of anthropology at Notre Dame. The following on human genetics is helpful:

1) Genes matter, but they are only a small part of the whole evolutionary picture and focusing on DNA segments won’t get you very far in understanding human evolution. The roundworm C. elegans has about 20,000 genes and humans have about 23,000 genes—it is pretty obvious that humans are more than 15% more complex than roundworms.

2) When making scientific argument about genetic variation you need to focus on populations–and be clear about your definitions (a common one for “population” is a geographical cluster of people who mate more within the cluster than outside of it). Many people talking about this subject use the words cluster, population, group, race, subrace and ethnicity in a range of ways, with few concrete definitions and occasionally interchangeably.  If you do not define something then you cannot measure it, test for it, or try to construct and refute or support hypotheses for it—in short you can’t do science.

3) Humans all share 100% same genes and 99.9% of the variation in the DNA. So the variation we are interested in is .1% of the entire genome. And yes, understanding that variation is important

4) Most genetic variation is due to gene flow and genetic drift so the further apart two populations are the more likely they are to have more differences

5) Nearly all the genetic variation in our entire species is found in populations just in Africa, with most of the variation found in all populations outside of Africa making up a small subset of that variation.

Margaret Wente to note (What if race is more than a social construct?)!

A Debate Over A Troublesome Book « The Dish.