I’m not being hyperbolic with the headline. This “study” (propaganda piece) named ‘Getting Genetic Ancestry Right for Science and Society’ (giant red flag in the title alone) is literally claiming that race isn’t real because New York is full of mixed-race people.
This is known as the “continuum fallacy” and can be debunked by a five-year-old child. It goes like this: “X and Y are two extremes on a spectrum. There is no clear point at which X becomes Y, therefore, X and Y do not exist.” Below is a color spectrum. Can you identify blue, green, and red? No, you can’t because colors do not exist. There is only one color, the rainbow color.
Here’s the paper in question. I’ll break it down below with a few key quotes:
https://web.archive.org/web/20211016212037/https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2110/2110.05987.pdf
The study sets up their political agenda from the outset, opening with a few stereotypical race-denialist myths (e.g. Southern and Eastern Europeans being classified as non-White in America):
there is now broad agreement that [race is] a socio-political construct […] social scientists and others have argued that the strongest case for using race is best limited to tracking the impact of racism on health outcomes, rather than as a proxy for anything biological
Their problem with racial classification is that it describes biological realities:
One common proposal is to use genetic concepts — in particular genetic ancestry and population categories — as a replacement for race (5). However, this proposal risks retaining one of the most problematic aspects of race—an essentialist link to biology
They tacitly admit that the existence of race can be empirically demonstrated via genetic testing:
Genetic ancestry and population categories are also relevant to the general public, as demonstrated by the tens of millions of individuals who have paid for ancestry reports from consumer companies such as 23andMe.
They also admit that so-called “continental ancestries” are essentially synonymous with human races:
Within genetics research, continental ancestry categories have become the most common type of group label […] Racial classifications have often taken continents as boundaries between human groups; thus it is not surprising that racial categories and continental ancestry categories are often confounded
And they aren’t happy about this, because racism:
Whenever continental ancestry categories are used, the risk is high that a misconception of race as biological will re-enter through the backdoor
For the next few paragraphs, they whine about genetic modeling tools, like admixture and principal component analysis, being used to display genetic ancestry. They claim that these modeling tools actually show “genetic similarity,” which is totally different.
After admitting that race can be genetically quantified and racial classifications can be practically utilized, they finally get to their core argument:
imposing any categories on genetic ancestry fails to adequately capture human genetic diversity and what we know of human demographic history.
By which they mean “putting people in boxes is racist and bigoted.”
They admit that human racial groups form clearly defined genetic clusters when displayed on a principal component analysis:
If individuals from the most commonly used reference populations are graphed [on a PCA], distinct clusters roughly representing continental categories are visible
This is 100% true. See the PCA below from an older study on Armenians (https://www.nature.com/articles/ejhg2015206).
You can also use PCAs to show ethnic clusters within racial subpopulations. The PCA below features modern West Eurasians (minus North Africans) and shows pretty well-defined clusters with minimal overlap.
Now the authors introduce their genius curveball:
But if people are sampled differently, such as individuals living in New York City, it becomes clear how impoverished this view of a structure of distinct clusters is
So, their argument is that race does not exist because globalized cosmopolitan cities in the West are filled with mixed-race people, who are tiny outliers in the grand scheme of humanity.
To give their fallacious argument an air of scientific validity, they include a principal component analysis showing 31,705 New Yorkers in gray and 4149 people from the rest of the world in color. Their strategy will undoubtedly trick many uneducated and stupid people, but the PCA clearly shows that the colorized populations form distinct racial clusters. The grayed-out population of New York — aka the tiny outlier that they’re trying to pass off as being representative of the entire human species — can only be described as “genetic chaos.”
Note: Ignore the “Americas” category, it nonsensically groups every race on both continents into one population.
There are a few technical problems with this PCA. Firstly, it’s two dimensional, which isn’t great for showing the diversity of the human race. Secondly, even in two dimensions, it still shows that New Yorkers exist on two clines between three racial “poles,” consisting of Africans, West Eurasians, and East Eurasians. Thirdly, by coloring all New Yorkers in gray, regardless of their ethnic heritage, they conceal any potential clustering within this population. They easily could have assigned each mixed-race population its own color on the PCA (e.g. Black-White biracial = green), which would have shown that even mixed populations form unique genetic clusters. Finally, the authors intentionally used a gratuitously large sample size for the New York population to reduce the likelihood of any visible clustering.
Edit (04/19/22): Just in case this wasn’t clear enough, mixed-race people who share similar genetic ancestry cluster together on a PCA. White-Asian biracials cluster together, Black-Asian biracials cluster together, Black-White-Asian triracials cluster together, and so on.
On a 3D PCA, it’s much easier to see that there are basically five main genetic “poles,” which correspond to classic “major races.” Well, technically, there is another “pole” which separates KhoiSan (listed here as African_South) from other Africans, but this is only visible when using different principal components to those used on the below PCA.
Note: The above PCA uses these co-ordinates which you can easily test for yourself. All relevant info is contained within the link.
The authors argue that globalist, cosmopolitan race-mixing between every ethnic group on earth needs to be celebrated and that it is “the norm throughout our species past,” which simply isn’t the case.
mass migration and constant mixing across groups have been the norm throughout our species’ past. It is worth emphasizing that the impact of these histories leads to different structures of genetic variation in different parts of the world.
The norm for our species is divergent evolution between races and conquest and admixture between neighboring tribes and ethnic groups. Fifty years ago, New-York-ification wasn’t even the norm in New York itself.
Here, they paraphrase “one race, human race”:
We need to be able to describe every human; the only way to do this is to adopt a fully continuous view of ancestry.
Apparently, they’re even annoyed that people can be identified as “mixed-race” because they existence of mixed-race people implies the existence of unmixed-race people (which is racist):
Recognizing the growing existence of “admixed individuals” — typically defined as those who have recent ancestry from more than one population — does not escape the notion of continental ancestry categories but rather compounds it, because an individual is considered a mixture of these broad continental groups.
Their most insane argument, by far, is that using peoples’ current racial ancestry is invalid because it is merely a snapshot of an ongoing process of evolution. How do we define “human” anyway? One of your ancestors may have been an aquatic crustacean during the Cambrian Period! I guess “we are all Africans” wasn’t working, so now they’re running with “we are all primordial soup.”
Third, the use of continental ancestry categories oversimplifies complex human history into a snapshot. There is no one answer to “what is my ancestry?” because the answer depends on the time horizon.
Towards the end of their “study,” they make sure to get in a few digs at their fellow geneticists, accusing them of racism-through-ignorance:
An individual researcher’s use of continental ancestry categories is not in and of itself racist, but the cumulative impact of this practice has led to and sustains racism.
In their concluding paragraph, they suggest using a “multidimensional and continuous conceptualization of ancestry” instead of race, which would be “free wherever possible of population categories” and avoid “relying on continental labels that bear striking resemblance to prior racist groups.” If there are no population categories, then we can’t describe where people plot on this “multidimensional conceptualization of ancestry.” So, what’s the point of plotting people on this scale at all? Exactly. There isn’t one, you racist bigot.
This might interest you: https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/outcasts/downloads/heng_race_racism.pdf
If you’ve heard the claim that racism is a modern invention it argues against that. It does so in a silly way, because it talks about racialization as a “practice” done by “essentializing” things selectively, which is obvious BS.
It also talks about race as cultural, which seems wrong — culture and race are both important to people.
Race is descent, even tribes probably know this. So obviously race is real, just as people like those related to them.
Proving that racism is not a modern invention seems unnecessary as it seems obvious. But people claim that kind of BS anyway. So the article provides specific points in favor of the idea that that racism is not a modern scientific thing but something that has been around for a long time.
You also might like this course: https://oyc.yale.edu/molecular-cellular-and-developmental-biology/mcdb-150. It’s basically an anthropology course. I don’t know how accurate the guy’s stories are, and even if they’re accurate I don’t know if it’s misleading, but it’s interesting and in lectures 3 and 4 he talks about how people have tended to kill “out-groups” which I guess in most cases is people who are less related to them than the in-group.
In the interest of transparency I’m an Indian immigrant.
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For all this talk of how much they love diversity they sure do wish to destroy it. As someone who used to be considered a leftists I genuinely believed in loving diversity and appreciate the uniqueness of each race and ethnicity. After seeing how hate filled all these people are about digging up old wounds and essentially start a race war because of White liberals feel so guilt ridden or nonwhites feel jaded and are jealous of what Whites contributed too the advancement of the human species. I now realized that the conservatives were indeed right that leftists are the real racists but not in the same context they do. I still don’t see what’s so progressive about trying to intentionally cause racial conflict other than the Jews who know what they’re doing. I genuinely wish that all people could get along but unfortunately it’s just not possible in a multicultural society. It’s why each group was given its own state to suit its own genetic interests
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From the Marxist, Christian or any other universalist point of view there are no races.
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The main point of this study is to highlight one of the pillars of Race Denialism, which is the notion of humankind not only as a continuum, but also as a fluid genetic dough, without a clear ancestry that could be trace through genetics and other methods like physical anthropology.
Race Denialism proponents often say that talking about races is a form of reviving outdated theories like some sort of XVII-XVIII century creationism, having concepts like immutability of species applied to humans in the concept of immutable races.
According to them, talking about races is talking about immutability, denying evolution and denying the fluidity and diversity of human genetics.
I know it sounds retarded, but is what they say, their main point is that talking about races is a way of denying evolution and genetic change in human species, you need only one reading of “Rational Wiki” article about human races and you will get that idea.
I noticed you didn’t talk about that Race Denialism narrative in the Article series you wrote a year ago.
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What do you think of Gab even though its [co-founder] is a Kurd?
[edited to merge posts]
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good that a free speech platform exists but their marketing strategy is horrible. they should have remained neutral and not tried to push any politics, or pushed politics subtly via account recommendations, like twitter. idk anything about its founders being kurdish but they dont seem to mind their website being full of unironic nazis
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I thought you didn’t really care about free speech…
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its important for the RW (or anyone else without systemic power) to organize politically. it’s not important for retards to shit up my comment section
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I had this same initial reaction (“dumb marketing”) when I got to Gab but now I see value in it. It’s about differentiation. People who want to engage with lefties will stay on Twitter. Some of us are so repulsed by the LGBT and BLMtards that we’d rather not interact with them. It’s easy to envision a future of three significant microblogging platforms: Twitter and two partisan ones. We saw how Musk’s arrival provoked lefty flight.
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And why does it matter if they’re neutral or not?
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I just read your article on Dugin and his associates as I just recently discovered your blog.
I just wanted to say, I think your take on the Palestine issue is wrong. It’s not just “x brown desert people vs y brown desert people,” because one of those brown desert people is Israel, the promoter of Zionist ideology and many other evil ideologies that you probably know about. I think we should support the Palestinians because our interests and goals are similar, end of story. It’s not more complicated than that.
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what interests and goals do we share with the palestinians? they come to our countries and instantly join the anti-white leftists, promote more islamic immigration, and whine about “imperialism.”
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The destruction of Israel
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I wouldn’t give a shit about Israel if Israelis didn’t meddle in Western politics. they could turn the entirety of Palestine into a nuclear crator for all I care
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Only the full retards in the West would support the palestinian ragheads.
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Off-topic question if you don’t mind, why do you think MENA people are considered white by the US census?
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Because the US census categories were redefined to make it seem like Whites are a larger proportion of the population. The same thing was recently done to FBI crime stats with Hispanics being merged with Whites.
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There is also one important thing that should be mentioned: (linear) PCA is not a state-of-the-art dimensionality reduction technique. Most modern methods (ex: manifold learning) provide even cleaner separation between races (see: https://bmcbioinformatics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12859-019-2680-1 the difference is dramatic) even in just two dimensions. The “continuousness” in their graph is just a failure to properly map outliers.
But you can do even better with autoencoders, “deep” clustering, etc (example use in cancer research, what exactly they accomplished is hard to follow but it illustrates the point: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322167179_Extracting_a_biologically_relevant_latent_space_from_cancer_transcriptomes_with_variational_autoencoders). The model will simply learn racial categories unsupervised from the data. If race is a continuum, that is now a hypothesis that can just be tested unequivocally without any human judgment.
Of course good luck getting the resources to ever do that in practice. Is Google DeepMind going to train AI to learn the subgroups of humanity? Lol no, even though it would actually be important work. The real price of egalitarianism is what you’re not allowed to discover (applies to all fields).
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