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Race in the wake of the Human Genome Project

Preprint · June 2020

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.33269.40162

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Race in the wake of the Human Genome Project

Optimism about race at the start of the HGP

It was hot and humid already by 10 a.m. on Monday, June 26, 2000, and tension was building in
the East Room of the White House as preparations were being made to announce the completion of the

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first draft of the Human Genome Project (HGP). As usual, President Clinton was running almost 20
minutes late. Craig Venter, the upstart founder of Celera Genomics and Francis Collins, Director of the
National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) had barely spoken for the previous two years. It
had been less than two months earlier that the two men had been brought together for pizza by Ari

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Patrinos, the head of the genome project at the Department of Energy. The men continued to meet and it
became clear that an announcement would be possible only a week prior to the event. The Securities and
Exchange Commission tried to keep a lid on leaks of the coming announcement until after the market
closed on the previous Friday. In front of the reporters, Venter and Collins displayed none of the animus
that had been obvious as the privately-funded Celera actively competed with the government efforts.
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About one-third of the sequencing effort had been completed by British scientists and they were
represented at the ceremony by Prime Minister Tony Blair via satellite.
The seeds of sequencing the human genome had been sown much earlier, starting with the
confirmation of DNA as the molecule of heredity by Hershey and Chase in 1952 and the description of
the structure of DNA by Watson, Crick, and Franklin in 1953. By 1985 techniques for analyzing DNA
Jim

had been improved and the time was ripe for a project to untangle the mystery of the human genome.
There was a widespread public call among geneticists for a large scale project mapping all the human
genes and two federal agencies became involved in the enterprise. By October, 1990, the 15 year, $3
billion HGP was off and running.
At the White House, the ceremony was getting underway five years ahead of schedule. Forced to
an early completion by the threat of Celera finishing first, a truce had been brokered to permit the joint
announcement. There were many promises about improving health made by the proponents of the HGP
and some scientists also hoped that it would finally remove biology from the concept of race.1 The
optimism about the implications for medicine was clearly stated by Clinton: “Genome science will have a
real impact on all our lives and even more, on the lives of our children. It will revolutionize the diagnosis,
prevention and treatment of most, if not all, human diseases.” Clinton also directly addressed the issue of
race:

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Increasing knowledge of the human genome must never change the basic belief on which our
ethics, our government, our society are founded. All of us are created equal, entitled to equal
treatment under the law. After all, I believe one of the great truths to emerge from this triumphant
expedition inside the human genome is that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race,
are more than 99.9 percent the same.
What that means is that modern science has confirmed what we first learned from ancient fates.
The most important fact of life on this Earth is our common humanity. My greatest wish on this

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day for the ages is that this incandescent truth will always guide our actions as we continue to
march forth in this, the greatest age of discovery ever known.2
While this is a noble sentiment and correct given the facts available, it doesn’t contradict an
abiding essentialist understanding of race in humans. We are genetically very similar to other animals,
like chimpanzees with whom we share over 98 percent of our DNA, and the one tenth of a percent of 3

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billion nucleotide pairs that differs between individuals is still a lot of genetic variation. More important
than the amount of difference, is what the differences mean for our bodies, and how they are distributed
across the species. If the three plus million nucleotides that are different from one person to the next
showed sharp geographic separation because of long isolation, Clinton’s statement could be entirely
consistent with biological races in humans. As it turns out, that’s not how the one tenth of a percent is
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distributed, which we suspected but didn’t know when Clinton spoke.3
Venter also offered a comment on genes and race, the only other speaker at the event to do so:
The method used by Celera has determined the genetic code of five individuals. We have
sequenced the genome of three females and two males, who have identified themselves as
Hispanic, Asian, Caucasian or African American. We did this sampling not in an exclusionary
way, but out of respect for the diversity that is America, and to help illustrate that the concept of
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race has no genetic or scientific basis.

In the five Celera genomes, there is no way to tell one ethnicity from another. Society and
medicine treats us all as members of populations, where as individuals we are all unique, and
population statistics do not apply.4
This statement directly tries to undermine the essentialist perspective on race. But it is just an assertion,
an appeal to emotion with no evidence to back it up, and it makes a mistake common to genomics in the
21st century of treating ethnicity and race both as valid biological categories of humans.5 Collins used the
HGP results to make an argument against race a year later when he said: “It is increasingly clear that there
is no scientific basis for defining precise ethnic or racial boundaries. Those who wish to draw such exact
boundaries cannot use science as a legitimate justification.”6
In spite of the problems with the appeals about race from Clinton and Venter, there was great
hope that cracking the human genetic code would dispel essentialist ideas about race. That optimism
didn’t last long. By 2004, most genomics leaders had renewed the call for a biological view of race. By
October 2004, Collins reversed his earlier anti-race stance and was “using his bully pulpit at the genome
institute to urge scientists to study whether these [genomic] variations can, or should, be categorized
according to racial groupings.”7 One month later, in a special issue of Nature Genetics about race and the

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human genome, Collins was one of several scientists who argued for a connection between race and
genetics.8
What had changed since the optimism at the White House in 2000? At first, it had seemed like
deciphering the human genome was going to lead to the final obliteration of the biological concept of
race. But there were a number of reasons embedded in the science and politics of race in the 1990s that

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prevented genomics from dealing a death blow to racial essentialism. As a result, the struggle to untangle
race and biology has moved intact into the 21st century.
In the remainder of this chapter I will first deal with the issues affecting the interpretation of race
in the 1990s that led to a re-emergence of a biological race concept. Next I will describe how sampling

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and statistical analyses of early global genomes lent themselves to an essentialist interpretation of race
and why that interpretation is incorrect. Then I use the work that has been produced by anthropologists
and sociologists working with the personnel in genome labs to try to understand why an essentialist
concept of race remains so strong among these scientists. Finally, I discuss recent developments that
attempt to keep biological race alive in the face of increasing contrary evidence.
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Race and Science in the 1990s
Race was running through the fabric of American culture in many ways during the 1990s. Racial
wealth inequality was increasing, there was a renewal of concern about race effects on intelligence, prison
populations were exploding in a racialized way as a result of the war on drugs, the form of the census
question on race for 2000 was in doubt, and continuing health disparities between the races were spurring
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race-related medical research. One goal of the Surgeon General’s Healthy People 2000 plan, originally
formulated in 1990, was to reduce health disparities, focusing on populations at high risk for death,
disease, or disability. Some of the groups highlighted included American Indians, Alaska Natives, Asians
or Pacific Islanders, Blacks, and Hispanics. This plan brought about a change in how the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) funds research. In 1993 the NIH Revitalization Act set guidelines for the
inclusion of minorities in research. As a result, researchers were directed to specify how their work would
affect minorities and to come up with outreach programs to include individuals from the high risk census
race categories.9
This requirement to use census categories in biomedical research had an operational problem
because during the 1990s there was an ongoing debate about how race was to be assessed in the 2000
census, including which categories would be used. Many professional groups issued position statements
about race emphasizing the culturally constructed nature of the categories and decrying biological or
behavioral assumptions tied to these categories.10
The racial categories that influence federally funded research are the result of a classification
system that was put in place in 1977. To support the Civil and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s, Congress

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directed the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to produce a set of race categories that would
apply to the 1980 and future censuses to monitor compliance with civil rights laws. The OMB Directive
No. 15 ordered federal agencies to use the census racial taxonomy to collect and monitor minority
participation in public services. Directive 15 provided for four races: American Indian or Alaskan Native,
Asian or Pacific Islander, Black, and White; and two ethnic backgrounds: Hispanic origin and not of

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Hispanic origin. The directive said that the racial categories shouldn’t be interpreted as scientific.
Approaching the 2000 census, the OMB began a revision of Directive 15, publishing a preliminary
statement, collecting comments from many scientific and lay groups and finalizing the revision on
October 30, 1997.

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The revision changed a number of provisions of racial classification. The one that garnered the
most attention bore this headline on the front page of the New York Times: “People can claim one or
more races on federal forms.”11 This change didn’t really affect racial genomics. The same article briefly
notes another change. Three races don’t change: black, white, and American Indian or Alaska Native;
while Asian or Pacific Islander is split into two: Asians, and Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders. This
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second change, while barely noticed by the public, had a direct impact on racial sampling and reporting
by changing the number of racial categories from four to five for sampling, analyzing, and reporting. Here
is how the races are defined:
The minimum categories for data on race and ethnicity for Federal statistics, program
administrative reporting, and civil rights compliance reporting are defined as follows:
-- American Indian or Alaska Native. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of
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North and South America (including Central America), and who maintains tribal affiliation or
community attachment.
-- Asian. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or
the Indian subcontinent including, for example, Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia,
Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and Vietnam.
-- Black or African American. A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa.
Terms such as “Haitian” or “Negro” can be used in addition to “Black or African American.”
-- Hispanic or Latino. A person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban [sic], South or Central
American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race. The term, “Spanish origin,” can
be used in addition to “Hispanic or Latino.”
-- Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander. A person having origins in any of the original
peoples of Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, or other Pacific Islands.
-- White. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or
North Africa.12
The preferred method to assess race is self-identification. If more detailed information is collected (e.g., if
someone writes in “Cherokee” or “Irish” or “Sudanese”) it has to be able to be put into one of the five
categories.
The American Anthropological Association (AAA) responded to the draft of Directive 15 by
making a plea to decouple race from biology by changing the label on the census question to “ethnic

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origins.”13 The AAA also criticized the directive for treating race and ethnicity as different types of self-
identity, noting that today’s ethnic group is yesterday’s race, for example, early 20th century Irish, Italians,
and Jews were all considered to be members of non-white racial groups, whereas today they are
considered ethnicities within the white race. It also challenged the notion that race is a fixed part of
identity, ignoring research showing that it is readily manipulated by individuals. A recent example of this

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is the case of Rachel Dolezal, the woman who stepped down as the head of the Spokane NAACP chapter
over criticism that she self-identified as black, even though she was born to two white parents.14 In the
end, the only AAA recommendations that the OMB adopted were to allow respondents to choose more
than one category under the race question and, yielding to pressure from an active Pacific Islander lobby,

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to split them into their own census category.
The requirements for minority recruitment and reporting set in place in 1993 by the NIH
Revitalization Act were extended by the Minority Health and Health Disparities Research and Education
act of 2000. This meant that just as the initial phase of the HGP was ending and the broader search for
patterns of genetic variation in humans was ramping up, there was a reinvigoration of racial sampling and
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reporting for federal grant recipients. Sociologist Catherine Bliss conducted ethnographic research in
several genomic labs and claimed that “differential results by race are nearly a guaranteed outcome of
such studies” and “contrary to OMB’s original warning, biological conclusions are being drawn from
socially defined racial classifications.”15
It is interesting to consider how timing might have affected the application of these rules for
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biomedical research to the HGP. If the OMB had not accepted the recommendation to split Native
Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander from the 1990 census category of Asia/Pacific Islander, would the
genomic analyses have been looking for and found four genetically distinguishable racial groups as
opposed to five? This question exemplifies the critique of genetic ancestry by historian and law professor
Jonathan Kahn in which he asks ‘when are you from?’ as a way of pointing out how the culturally
constructed categories of race shift with time. He also points out that however racial categories are
defined, they tend to be found and reified by scientists using the technology of the time. Kahn says,
“Ancestry tracing companies make presumptions not only about where you are from but also about when;
because we all share ancestry if we go back far enough in time (and sometimes, that is not as far as you
might think).” This idea of the time frame of a specific racial taxonomy becomes especially important
once global samples of genetic data were available and attempts to trace ancestry became popular.16
How groups are defined for DNA sampling was a major issue during the 1990s and the best
illustration of that can be found in the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP). In the summer of 1991,
the HGDP was proposed by several population geneticists and evolutionary biologists in an attempt to
discover the evolutionary history of our species by analyzing the genomes of isolated human populations,

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with Stanford geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza taking the lead.17 This project had many problems but
managed to accumulate data on hundreds of local communities that were aggregated into 52 populations.
The regions that are best represented are Eastern Asia (18 populations) and Central/South Asia (9) then
Europe (8), Africa (7), Western Asia (3), South America (3) and North America (2) although these last
two groups are aggregated into Native Americans by the HGDP, and finally two Oceanian populations

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from New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.18 The troubled history of the HGDP, largely revolving around
the inability of academics to talk to one another both across disciplinary boundaries and within
disciplines, has been chronicled by many authors. One of the best accounts is Reardon’s Race to the
Finish. She uses her detailed history of the project to illustrate how tangled the pursuit of knowledge
about human genetics is with political and social notions of race and racism.19

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Three years after the proposal for the HGDP, Cavalli-Sforza and colleagues came out with a
compendium of the distribution of human genetic variation based on classic protein and blood group
markers. In The History and Geography of Human Genes they contended that races are extremely
unstable and that genetic clusters are not identifiable as races because every level of clustering creates
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different racial categories with no biological criteria for choosing one over the other.20 This did not stop
them from analyzing the gene frequencies then illustrating the work with color-coded world maps
showing four major regions. This is how they describe this ethnic world map, which serves as the dust
jacket cover for the huge volume:
Africans are yellow, Australians red, Caucasoids green, and Mongoloids, showing the greatest
variation [because that is where they had the greatest number of samples], retain some of the
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similarities with Europeans on one side (a light brown greenish tinge in central Siberia) and with
Australians on the other (a pinkish color in parts of America and on the way to it).21

Two months later race and racism was headline news in the U.S. as noted in chapter 8 as
Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve was published with its arguments about the genetic linkage
between race and intelligence. Shortly afterwards, Rushton published his opus, Race, evolution, and
behavior from an evolutionary life cycle approach, linking racial biology to brain size and a host of
personality, intelligence, cultural, and sexual characteristics—somewhat reminiscent of Linnaeus’ 1758
characterization of the races (see chapter 2). Both in the popular and academic press, race was once again
front and center.
These are the threads that were gathering together on the eve of the completion of the first phase
of the HGP. Wealth inequality between the races in the U.S. had generated measures of intelligence and
health differences which then were interpreted in genetic terms. Federal funding agencies were requiring
biomedical researchers to sample and report data in census race categories. And the OMB, in rewriting
the way that race had to be treated for government purposes, changed the number of categories that had to

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be used from four to five. Race was poised to retake center stage in biology as soon as the genomic data
started accumulating.
After the Human Genome Project Ceremony
In the early days after the publications of the first draft sequence of the human genome in
February 2001,22 there were still hopeful statements ringing the death knell for genetic race. In an opinion

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piece accompanying the Celera draft sequence in Science, one evolutionary biologist suggested that while
race is culturally important, it reflects just a tiny fraction of our genes which says nothing about variation
in other parts of our genome.23 A month later, an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine used
the success of the HGP to argue that medical issues should focus on specific genes, not race. By contrast,

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the following editorial in the same issue presented the notion that racial differences in response to drugs
were an indicator of important race-based genetic patterns and a reason to continue the medical practice
of using race as one of the three prime descriptors of a patient along with sex and age.24 The essentialist-
constructivist war was heating up once again.
Before long, it was apparent that the debate about race as biology was going to be a vigorous one
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early in the 21st century. Journal articles, scientific conferences, and the popular press were all addressing
the issue of race. A key shot was fired by the essentialists in summer 2002 in a comment saying that race
was necessary for biomedical research and care. The authors, including Stanford geneticist Neil Risch and
internal medicine physician Esteban Burchard from UCSF School of Pharmacy, claimed human genetic
variation is divided up into continental clusters. They provide a pseudo-evolutionary tree of human races
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to illustrate this idea (see Figure 1). This tree has Africans splitting off first from all other races, then
Caucasians, Pacific Islanders, East Asians, and finally Native Americans. If this had been drawn a decade
earlier, no doubt Pacific Islanders would have been combined with the East Asians in the single 1990 race
category of Asian/Pacific Islanders. The authors cherry pick several genetic clustering studies to bolster
their notion of patterning along continental racial lines. There was no new or original research, no novel
data or analysis presented, merely an uncritical recitation of facts that the authors felt confirmed the
biological reality of their five race system of human classification. New York Times science journalist
Nicholas Wade wrote a piece about the article headlined: “Race is seen as real guide to track roots of
disease.”. This had the pull-quote: “A ‘biologically meaningless’ concept? Not so, says a leading
geneticist.”25
Later that year, the first study of global patterns of human genetic variability was published by a
team led by Noah Rosenberg, a computational biologist at Stanford. It was based on the genomic data
gathered by the HGDP and the French sponsored Centre d’Etude du Polymorphisme Humain (HGDP-
CEPH).26 This article, “Genetic structure of human populations,” was the most widely cited piece from
the journal Science in 2002. To those looking for support for genetic races, this study appeared to confirm

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the importance of biological race. Nicholas Wade headlined his New York Times piece about the article,
“Gene study identifies 5 main human populations, linking them to geography.” The Times tellingly had
the pull quote: “Nudging scientists onto the delicate terrain of race.” In a follow-up piece, “The palette of
humankind,” Wade translated the clustering bar charts from the article into color-coded continental races.
The Los Angeles Times ran an article that was headlined, “People are same, but different; Humans can be

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sorted into five groups based on ancestry, major genetic study finds.” Bliss wrote, “as the media quaked
with news of races found, genomicists became regular guests in science columns and news programs.”27
The scientific press also responded. In a perspectives piece accompanying the article in Science,
two geneticists focus on the creation of five clusters as representing five major geographic regions

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(carefully avoiding using the word race). In a follow-up commentary, another geneticist asserts that the
five groups do correspond to major subdivisions of the human population, but he also cautions against
assuming that this indicates humans are divided into five biological races.28
An interesting note about the five-continental race hoopla is that in the abstract of the Science
article the authors actually focus on a six cluster solution: “we identified six main genetic clusters,
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[emphasis added] five of which correspond to major geographic regions.” They used the genetic
clustering routine called STRUCTURE29 to analyze 337 DNA markers (short tandem repeat or
microsatellite polymorphisms)30 in 1,056 individuals from 52 populations from seven geographic
regions.31 The STRUCTURE program requires a preset value for the number of clusters (K)—in other
words, you have to tell the program how many races you think there are and then it attempts to sort the
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individuals into that number of races by comparing how similar or different their genetic markers are. The
researchers report results for two to six groups. The two group solutions have Africa and the Americas
forming polar opposites and most individuals showing heritage from both groups. They claimed that “at
K = 5, clusters corresponded largely to major geographic regions.” These regions are labeled Africa,
Europe, East Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, mimicking the OMB Directive 15 race categories. When
they increased K to 6, the sixth group consisted entirely of individuals of the Kalash group from Pakistan,
a group that claims Greek heritage.
An anthropologist, Deborah Bolnick, interviewed Rosenberg to gain insight into the details of this
study. She reveals that the team also analyzed the data using values of K up to 20 (20 “races”), but they
chose not to report those results because there were multiple ways to sort individuals into more than 6
races. While everyone was focusing on the five “continental” clusters, the six cluster solution was
statistically the best of all those presented in the paper—which is why they focused on six clusters in the
abstract. Rosenberg told Bolnick that the best overall statistical solution was one for 16 clusters, but they
chose not to report that because there were multiple ways that the individuals were grouped into 16
clusters by STRUCTURE and other solutions at that level had very low probabilities associated with

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them.32 This intellectual maneuvering highlights how the cultural milieu influences what gets reported—
and what doesn’t. Using statistical criteria, the one 16 cluster solution was the best choice, but choosing
to ignore that, it is a matter of convenience as to how many clusters are stressed. Bolnick concludes that
the 5 cluster solution was emphasized because it fit with the current idea about race and continental
groupings in the U.S.—and the OMB Directive 15 revised categories. This legacy of racialism persists in

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spite of not being supported by the accumulating biological data.33 Had this work taken place a decade
earlier, the authors likely would have emphasized the four cluster solution which divided individuals into
Europe, Africa, Asia-Oceania (the Asian-Pacific Islander 1990 census analog), and America.
Figuring out whose genome to sequence has been a thorny problem since the beginning of the

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genomic era. In science, sampling is usually done purposefully to control characteristics that might affect
the variable that is being studied. For example, if a scientist were studying the impact of ultraviolet
radiation on depression, the sample should be selected to control for skin, eye, and hair color since these
characteristics affect the impact of UV radiation on the body. To understand the patterning of genetic
variation in human populations, the sample should be carefully constructed to represent the distribution of
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humans across the globe and what we already know about our genetic history. Nothing close to this
process has ever been followed in accumulating genome data. Instead most samples have been highly
opportunistic in nature, either analyzing blood or saliva collected for other purposes or sequencing
samples contributed by individuals interested in their own results. This results in extremely spotty global
sampling. For example, in the HGDP-CEPH database, Oceania, the category representing the census
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category of Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander is composed of 17 individuals from Papua New
Guinea and 22 from the Northern Solomon Islands, just off the coast of New Guinea. Aside from the fact
that we have no idea how representative those individuals are, either of their own local groups or of the
Papua New Guinea or Melanesian populations in general, it is clear that they represent a very skewed
version of the population of Oceania. There are similar problems with every region in this database.
Cavalli-Sforza provided a map of the distribution of the 52 populations that were sampled for this
database (see Figure 2). One of the most striking aspects of this map is the significant gaps between
regions—gaps that do not mirror the distribution or evolutionary history of our species but are simply an
artifact of the opportunistic sampling that went in to creating this database. Large areas are totally devoid
of sampled populations. Of the seven African populations, two are Central African pygmy groups,
including the largest African sample of Mbuti Pygmies, which Cavalli-Sforza had been studying for
decades. One North African group is included in the Middle East in Rosenberg’s analysis but they’re
considered one of the seven groups of Africans by Cavalli-Sforza. This means that Africa is even more
over-represented by the Central African pygmy groups than it was intended to be by the HGDP-CEPH
scientists. Given the coarse sampling and large geographic gaps between regional groups of populations,

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it would be amazing if the regions could not be separated by a powerful multivariate statistical routine
like STRUCTURE working on one-third as many variables as subjects.34 One geneticist says that
sampling from people living in separated geographic extremes makes it easy to define ancestral markers
that can define the groups, but this “is an artifact of discontinuous sampling, not a true representation of
the world’s genetic diversity.”35

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In addition to the cluster analyses, Rosenberg’s team provided a different type of statistical
analysis, an analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA),36 that demonstrates the minimal effect of
continental race on genetic variation. As Lewontin demonstrated in 1972, most genetic variation exists
between individuals within local populations (see chapter 8); in this case that applies to the 52 sampled
localities for the HGDP-CEPH database. The authors highlight this finding: “Within-population

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differences among individuals account for 93 to 95 percent [emphasis added] of genetic variation;
differences among major groups [continental races] constitute only 3 to 5 percent.” Law professor and
race scholar Dorothy Roberts notes, “closer inspection of the Rosenberg team’s findings reveals that they
do not verify five classic racial groups at all. Instead, the study’s overall results confirmed the basic rule
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of human genetic unity: within-group genetic variation is much greater than between-group variation.”37
In a supplemental table the authors provide another measurement of genetic patterning that belies
the division into “continental” racial groups. They calculate the coancestry coefficient (FST)38 showing
shared ancestry between pairs of the seven regional samples. This statistic might be better labeled the
“unshared ancestry” coefficient, since the higher the value is from 0 to 1, the more genetically distinct the
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groups are. Values in excess of 0.25 are generally taken to indicate significant genetic differences
between groups—what we would consider racial differences.39 The highest values between pairs of
regions occur between America and Oceania (0.102) and America and Africa (0.101). These values are
much lower than we would expect for biological races. By comparison, three West, Central, and East
African chimpanzee racial groups had FST values ranging from 0.25 to 0.46.40 AMOVA analyses showed
that the difference between chimpanzee races accounted for 30.1 percent of their species genetic variation
(as opposed to 4.3 percent for humans). Both of these analyses on the chimpanzee genetics show the
magnitude of genetic difference we would expect to see between continental groups of humans if our past
evolutionary processes had created deep enough gulfs between us to produce biological races.
The 2002 Science article has been the subject of comfort and consternation on the part of both
racial essentialists and constructivists, geneticists and social scientists, racists and racial healers. The
reason for this is that the team used two different types of statistical analysis, diversity partitioning
(AMOVA and FST) and clustering analysis (STRUCTURE) that seem to say opposite things about the
patterning of human genetic variability. What this has meant is that people who were convinced of the
reality of the genetic basis of race could use the clustering analyses to argue for significant genetic

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differences between census race categories, while most social scientists tended to focus on the diversity
partitioning analyses (dividing up genetic variation within populations, between populations, and between
races). This cultural dissonance was anticipated by Cavalli-Sforza’s team in their 1994 critique of race as
a scientific category. They said that genetic variation within the clusters defined by their analysis is large
compared with the variation between clusters (the Lewontin apportionment argument). Like Blumenbach

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and Darwin in earlier times, they note that their clusters overlap.41 As Darwin said, “the most weighty of
all the arguments against treating the races of man as distinct species, is that they graduate into each other,
independently in many cases, as far as we can judge, of their having intercrossed.”42
Social constructivists from biology to anthropology to philosophy had relied on Lewontin’s

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apportionment of variation argument for decades, but the essentialists were gaining ever more confidence
because of clustering analyses like that in the Science article. Essentialists like Neil Risch and Esteban
Burchard, argued against the diversity partitioning approach, saying that if race was an insignificant part
of the genetic patterning of our species “it would be impossible to create discrete clusters of humans (that
end up corresponding to the major races).” They also said that ‘‘two Caucasians are more similar to each
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other genetically than a Caucasian and an Asian.”43 But in 2004, a team reanalyzed the HGDP-CEPH data
and showed that Europeans were genetically more similar to Asians than they were to other Europeans 38
percent of the time, directly contradicting the essentialist case.44
In 2003 the statistician and evolutionary biologist, A.W.F. Edwards wrote a paean attempting to
privilege clustering over diversity partitioning in his article directed at what he called “Lewontin’s
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fallacy.” He criticized using the small percentage of variation that is accounted for by racial groups (4-5
percent for humans vs. 30+ percent for chimps) as an argument against biological races when there is a
geographic patterning to some of the genetic variation. He said that the patterning can be used to sort
people into groups if enough loci are considered simultaneously—as the Rosenberg team did with their
337 markers.45 The fact that individuals can be successfully clustered this way does not give biological
meaning to the groups that are created. Three physical anthropologists used a clustering technique in 2009
to test its ability to classify individuals into groups based on skull measurements. They were able to
classify correctly African American males versus American white males 97 percent of the time. They also
reported 96 percent accuracy in classifying American white males born between 1840 and 1890 versus
American white males born 1930 to 1980—nearly as good as the Black-White classification. They point
out that these latter two groups are distinguished only by time, but would appear to qualify as different
races using this statistical clustering technique.46
There are many potential variables in genomic analysis (e.g., the 337 markers used in the HGDP-
CEPH study), and many different clustering solutions (5 or 6 or 16?) are possible. But it is the diversity
partitioning analyses, such as Lewontin’s original apportionment or the AMOVA and FST analyses in the

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Science paper, that indicate the magnitude of the genetic patterning by race. Unlike species with
substantial genetic partitioning (such as chimpanzees), human genetic variation does not have a major
signal based on differences between a few continental groups—in spite of what we’ve been taught
growing up in America. Instead, human variation is patterned by distance—the farther apart two
populations are, the more genetic differences there are likely to be between them.47 In a study using three

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datasets sampling many populations, researchers found that given enough genetic data it’s possible to
assign individuals to their populations of origin. But, “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 [emphasis added].”48

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The issue of race in medicine was addressed in a sounding board piece in the New England
Journal of Medicine in early 2003 with the essentialist position taken by Burchard and Risch and
colleagues while the constructivist side was taken by Richard Cooper, a physician who conducted
research on heart disease among the African diaspora. The essentialist team reiterated a number of the
points made in their summer 2002 piece supporting the importance of race in medicine such as the
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erroneous claim that “the greatest genetic differentiation in the human population occurs between
continentally separated groups,” which is directly contradicted by the Science article. They also continued
to conflate race and ethnicity, seeming to view ethnicity as a taxonomic and phylogenetic subdivision of a
race. By contrast, the constructivist team illustrated problems with assuming that racial health differences
in the U.S. were the result of genetic difference. They also emphasized the danger of relying on a genetic
Jim

explanation leading to overlooking the important social, cultural, and contextual effects that impact races
differently, especially in the U.S.49
As more DNA databases with more sequence information accumulated and more diversity
partitioning and clustering analyses were published, little changed in the debate between essentialists and
constructivists. By 2008, the NHGRI convened a “Workshop on Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues in
Natural Selection Research” that focused on how to present the increasingly confusing findings from
DNA sequence analyses to the public. The Science journalist, Constance Holden noted, “Everyone at the
meeting agreed on the need for non-‘fraught’ terminology—‘geographic ancestry,’ for example, instead
of ‘race.’” However, she quoted one of the participants as saying, “When translated into popular culture,
society reads whatever term we pick as ‘race.’”50 It isn’t just the public that misses the boat, as shown by
a study of published research on genetics and diabetes. The researchers found that biomedical scientists
used a wide variety of descriptions for their samples, including geographic descriptors, national labels,
and racial group designations. The labels used to describe the research populations were rarely explained
or justified, and population-specific findings were frequently generalized to larger racial groups. They

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concluded that careful attention to population description is important but concerns about attributing
differences between broad social groups (races) to genetics will continue.51
If the researchers follow the evidence and actually reject race as a valid biological category in
humans, a void is created in scientific vocabulary. In response, most scientists use the term geographic
ancestry while others focus on statistical clusters. As Roberts shows, both of these approaches simply use

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U.S. racial categories but repackage them with different labels.52 She offers this description of how
researchers have attempted to remove the political dimension of race from their work based on a 2009
conversation with Jonathan Pritchard, a Stanford colleague and one of Rosenberg’s co-authors on the
2002 Science article:

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In response to my question asking why Rosenberg’s article focused on the clusters that most
closely matched the five major continents and therefore our historical ideas about race, a member
of his research team told me that “people who share the same continental origin are genetically
similar.” He went on to explain, “Race has got all these loaded connotations, so we’ve dropped
that term from our work.” What this scientist failed to acknowledge was that his own acceptance
of racial categories may have influenced the decision to emphasize five genetic clusters, despite
his team’s attempt to expunge any explicit reference to race.53
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Some of the problems with the use of ancestry are the cultural construction of the continents of
interest (are north Africans part of Europe or part of Africa?), the use of unevenly sampled groups from
the continents (the oversampling of Central African pygmies), and the construction of assumed “parental”
populations from the continents as if there were “pure” racial groups in the past that contribute to the
genomes of modern populations. A set of genetic markers are assembled into a panel of ancestry
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informative markers (AIMs) by geneticists which are then used to provide ancestry estimates, such as for
the sample of Mexicans that Burchard’s lab was examining for asthma genes. They were labeled as
having 3.4 ± 0.97 percent African, 44.9 ± 1.7 percent European, and 51.7 ± 1.7 percent Native American
ancestry on average. The exactness of this reporting is similar to that of recreational DNA genealogies
(I’m 2.7 percent Neanderthal!) that are sold by various labs, and both the precision of the estimates and
hypothetical parental populations are problematic. One thing that genomic analyses have shown is that
there has been dramatic and widespread admixture associated with massive population movements over
the past several thousand years. Historically, humans have always been on the move. For the first 100,000
years or so it was mostly just in Africa, but once humans left the continent, we have been moving and
mixing ever since. The rate of mixing genes between populations began to accelerate rapidly with the
onset of agriculture and population growth over the past 10,000 years or so. But more recently we see
genetic signals of even higher levels of mixing starting about 4,000 years ago. As the global population
increased, mobility also increased, civilizations emerged with long range trade, newer genetic mutations
began spreading. Admixture analyses have documented large scale population movements such as the
Bantu expansion in sub-Saharan Africa, the spread of the Mongol Empire, the Arab slave trade bringing

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slaves from Europe and Africa to the Middle East, the spread of Greece under Alexander the Great,
movements associated with the Roman and Ottoman Empires, and European colonialism and the Atlantic
slave trade. As a result, the overwhelming majority of humans today have inherited genes tracing to
population movements like these and it makes little sense to try to diagnose individuals as having
different percentages of “pure” racial ancestries.54

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When Burchard was relying on AIMs to illustrate the difference in African heritage between
Mexican and Puerto Rican populations, the parental African population was being modeled as a
monolithic continental race. Recent work has shown how wrong that belief is, beyond the major genetic
signal of the Bantu expansion and internal differentiation from 200,000 years of existence of Homo

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sapiens on the continent. Coastal African populations have experienced an influx of genes from Eurasian
populations over the last 7,000 years, and most sub-Saharan African populations share ancestry with
groups from outside of their current geographic region within the last 4,000 years.55 We have known for a
long time that genetic variability is higher in sub-Saharan African groups than any other region of the
globe because our species has lived there for more than twice as long as on any other continent. We also
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have evidence that Africa has experienced the high level of recent admixture events both within Africa
and with non-African populations. In spite of this knowledge there remains a strong tendency for
continental reification in genomics labs and whether it is called clusters or ancestry or race or geography
it continues to inform genomics from sampling to analysis to reporting.
Ethnography of Genomics
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This 21st century version of racial essentialism is different than previous ones, not just because of
the technology involved, but also because of the engagement of social scientists in understanding the
process of constructing biological race in the genomics labs. We have been able to go into these labs and
ask the geneticists what race means and how they decide if someone is Black or Asian or White. And for
the most part they have been responsive. As the resurgence of essentialism with genomics became clear,
calls went out for social scientists to study this phenomenon.56 As a result, ethnographic and survey work
has been done in many DNA sequencing labs, providing an insight into how scientists use race in this
molecularization57 or molecular reinscription58 of race. Several points have emerged from these studies.
First, there is an almost universal lack of agreement as to what race means and how it could or should be
operationalized for sampling and reporting purposes. Second, there is an overwhelming bias towards
genetic explanations of racial health disparities. Finally, most genomicists are convinced that the work
they are pursuing will assist in reducing these health disparities, while most of the ethnographers remain
convinced that by re-biologizing race exactly the opposite end will be served.
The ethnographic work has primarily occurred in North American genomic labs. It shouldn’t
come as a surprise that the scientists leading these labs are confused about race since they are a product of

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the societies in which they live and race has been a confusing and taboo subject in North America for
centuries. Sociologist Johnny E. Williams claimed that white supremacist thinking (his label for white
racial enculturation in the U.S.) led to the majority white genomicists not ever having to think about race.
He suggests that this avoidance of race combined with the growth of color-blind ideology in the U.S.
helped to sustain the idea of biological race in genomics.59 The best demonstration of the confusion about

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race in DNA studies comes from the work of medical anthropologists Linda Hunt and Mary Megyesi who
looked at the use of race and ethnicity in labs in the U.S. and Canada. In most studies subjects self-
identified their race or ethnicity, but in five of the studies self-identification was open-ended and the
responses were to be reclassified later. Unfortunately, none of the researchers on those five projects could

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explain how the reclassification into census categories would be done. The ethnographers found at least
ten different types of classifications being used in projects to categorize the race or ethnicity of the
subjects, based on a wide variety of characteristics ranging from skin color to religion to language to
country or continent of origin. Operational definitions of race and ethnicity were often missing in
the projects or were imprecise and the classification process was frequently implicit and not
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carefully considered.60 One sociologist characterized the importance of genomics to race like this:
“through mainstream reporting on the genomics of race, scientists have posited the field of genomics
as the new authority on race [emphasis added], and experts outside the field and laypeople as those
unable to interpret knowledge correctly.”61 If this is true and the confusion in genomics labs about
race is as significant as it appears, then a situation of garbage in (confused racial sampling), garbage
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out (confusing racial reporting) occurs with regard to racial biology. As long as the genomicists are
looked to for pronouncements on race and they refuse to listen to the lessons of the last 150+ years
of experience that the social sciences, particularly anthropology, have accumulated, there will be a
continuing problem with the reinscription of biology on race.
Trying to live up to the promises of curing disease that were made to get the NIH funding
rolling for the HGP, genomics researchers have looked for genetic causes to many diseases that
show racial or ethnic differences in incidence. They went into this work with a very strong belief that
genetic differences between races constitute the responsible factor. As many of these studies came
up short, the genomicists began to search for explanations. Burchard went into his research on
Hispanic health with the notion that higher rates of African genes in Puerto Ricans contributed to
more severe asthma than that found in Mexicans. When it turned out instead that European genes
were the ones associated with asthma severity, it was a disappointing finding. Medical
anthropologist Duana Fullwiley reports the conference call that upended the hypothesis this way:
Dr A: The story is that European admixture is higher in the Puerto Rican asthmatics cases than in
the controls.
EGB: [long sigh] … [silence]

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Dr A: I don’t see a problem with this – except for the fact that it goes against the initial
hypothesis.
EGB: You mean that blacks were to blame.62
She goes on to explain that this did not dampen the enthusiasm for an ancestry-based explanation of
disease differences:
His revision of the terms and the causal arrows, however, was in no way a total paradigm shift.

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The racial triad still prevails in the final publication, which continues to assume that asthma
severity can be linked with one of three groups: European, African, or Native American.
By the end of her study, Fullwiley writes that the Burchard team was more closely examining the
confounders of culture and environment because the AIM models they were using were not found to be
useful. In spite of all this, Burchard was still able to remark, “I believe, though, that there are biological

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differences between races…It seems obvious to me.”63 Fullwiley reflects that in their attempts to solve
health disparities genomicists continue to use models that come from molecularly re-inscribed U.S. race
categories.64
In response to some of the more primitive racial hypotheses failing to be confirmed, Bliss says
that by 2005, “the field had assumed a sociogenomic approach to race—a view that race has a genetically
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determined component and a socially constructed component.”65 Unfortunately, that sociogenomic
approach has tended to emphasize funding for the genomics and not for the “socio” part of the equation,
leaving research into solutions for wealth inequality as a cause of health disparity still vastly underfunded.
Interviewing genomicists several years after Bliss, Williams concluded that Maslow’s hammer was still
operative in genomics labs, saying “genomicists tend to settle on genetic etiology to the exclusion of other
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variables because they are trained as geneticists.”66 Meanwhile, a team including Burchard has recently
jumped on the epigenetics bandwagon in an attempt to retain some semblance of belief in the biological
reality of race and ethnicity, tying differences in the methylation of DNA segments to ethnicity and
disease.67
One of the most outspoken proponents of genetic races, Esteban Burchard, has dedicated his
career to reducing health disparities, especially those of Hispanics. Fullwiley paints a picture of a man
who is thoroughly steeped in his ethnic background and working hard to help the condition of his people
and other minorities. Similarly, the researchers called “Nora” and “Gary” by medical anthropologist
Michael Montoya are clearly devoted to alleviating suffering from diabetes in Mexicans. The geneticists
surveyed by Hunt and Megyesi were trying to reduce racialized health disparities through their genomic
research. Bliss notes that the genomicists she studied see a biological view of race as a commitment to
racial justice and ethics. In spite of these good intentions, many of the ethnographers feel that the work of
the genomicists is not likely to reduce health disparities. The emphasis in these labs has been on minority
inclusion in DNA databases, rather than health care integration which could lessen social health

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disparities in access and treatment. By focusing on minority DNA sampling, genomicists further
systematize race in medical research, reinscribing biology on race, and diverting funds and attention from
both the study of and the amelioration of the social basis of racial inequality. Bliss contends that
genomicists are engaged in difficult and confusing debates about race and many are trying to reduce racial
inequities. But many of these scientists appear to not yet understand that they are embedded within a

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cultural system that is seeking genetic answers to social problems. Greater cultural awareness can help
these genetic scientists reach their goal of helping minority health outcomes, but it will be a hard-fought
battle to bring this about.68
It is clear that the scientists running these genomics labs are dedicated to helping decrease

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minority health deficits. It is also clear that the implications of the clusters, ancestries, races, and ethnic
groups that they are using in order to pursue this goal have not been carefully considered. Without
realizing the impact of being raised in the racial smog of late 20th century American culture, they have an
implicit belief in not only the reality of the five races (although they differ from one lab to another), but
also the biological divisions between those races. In acting on that belief, these scientists present a picture
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to the public of race as biology that would be more appropriate in the 19th century than it is in the 21st.
The Current State of Affairs
Just as the 1950s was a dynamic period for scientific inquiries and pronouncements about race
(see chapter 7), the first part of this century has also been a turbulent time, with the same type of
confusion and back and forth that occurred with the first two UNESCO statements on race. By 2012, it
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was possible to have competing blogs like the pro-race position of evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne and
the rant about his position by physical anthropologist Jonathan Marks. Coyne answers an unequivocal yes
to the question are there races? He reproduces part of the figure from the 2002 Science paper illustrating
the best 3, 4, and 5 cluster solutions, and extols the “continental ancestry” argument for the 5 cluster
solution. Coyne makes it sound like you must believe in biological human races if you are an evolutionist.
Marks counters with the argument that Coyne is exactly like the creationists that he spends so much of his
time arguing against in that he is not interested in learning anything from anthropologists who have been
studying human variation for over 150 years. Marks emphasizes that race is not just the physical
difference that Coyne equates it with—Coyne uses the example of races of mice differing by coat color—
but importantly race is the meaning that we give to certain differences while ignoring others.69 This point
repeatedly escapes some biologists like Coyne as he makes clear as recently as October, 2016.70 The
example of mouse races that Coyne used is an interesting one. Mouse populations in Europe have been
shown to have a coancestry coefficient (FST) nearly 4 times that of continental human groups (0.37 vs.
0.10), indicating the European mice do have racial differences whereas people don’t.71 Humans have
relatively little genetic variation and it is mostly shared across the species with little racial structure to the

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patterning. The fact that powerful statistical programs can tease out the tiny signal of geographic structure
is not indicative of biological races—in humans or any other critters.
The racial essentialism in genomic circles gets picked up in the public realm based on the
portrayal of clusters and ancestry and race in the lay media.72 One example is a recent national survey that
showed whites attributed personality traits and behaviors more to environment than to genes overall,

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but they saw genetics playing a larger role for black mental and physical capabilities than for
whites.73 The public perception of the genetic basis of race—and acceptance of the essentialist position—
is still going strong. In 2014, Nicholas Wade published A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and
Human History, in which he uses Rosenberg’s five cluster solution to make the case for the genetic basis

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of race. He then speculates about how these genetic racial differences have dictated behavioral and
cultural differences between the races leading to different levels of economic success in different nations
with African countries coming out on the bottom. In spite of an inconsistent use of race that finds him
talking about three, five, and seven races at different points in the book, Wade found a receptive audience
that has become accustomed to seeing claims made about genetic ancestry in online and television
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advertising. As of July, 2016, the book was the #9 bestseller in physical anthropology on Amazon and of
the over 300 reviews on Amazon, more than half are five stars. On the other hand, the reviews in the
scientific literature and blogosphere have been overwhelmingly negative. Five scientists published a letter
in the New York Times castigating the misuse of their work by Wade. One of the authors of the letter was
Noah Rosenberg whose work is misrepresented by Wade. Unfortunately, the scientific criticism has
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apparently fallen on deaf ears.74

Meanwhile, genomic work continues apace and maintains the idea that race is genetic. A 2014
study of ancestral mixing (admixture) attempted to reconstruct historical population movements from
DNA analysis. Their technique is a variation on the color-coded chromosome technique that had
become popular to show genetic heritage in admixed individuals since the start of the genomic era.
The earlier technique is illustrated by this anecdote from a presentation by Pritchard, the second
author on the 2002 Science paper:
He urged the audience to think of African American genomes “as a series of pieces that come
from one or the other population.” To illustrate this point, he showed a picture of a string of
yellow and green blocks, representing an African American individual’s chromosome. “As I go
along the chromosome,” he told the audience, “I can actually estimate which bits come from
European ancestry, and which bits come from African.” On the screen was projected a color-coded
genome, with yellow and green blocks symbolizing “European” and “African” genes.75
The more recent work adopts this same practice, but their algorithm removes ancestral segments that they
assume don’t belong, so that instead of a series of thin lines representing many different ancestral
populations (the actual genetic history), the chromosomes become a series of larger blocks from ancestors
the researchers think should be better represented (see Figure 3)! This type of thinking significantly

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increases the biological reinscription of race both by assuming that there were “pure” races in the recent
past and by suggesting that chromosomes of living individuals can be thought of as a simple combination
of these ancestral blocks.76
Another survey of genomes was reported recently. By the title of the article, “A global
reference for human genetic variation,” the researchers are asserting the global nature of their sampling.

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However, there are serious problems with this “global” sample. They reported on 26 “populations”
grouped into 5 continental groups—reminiscent of the five U.S. census categories, but these groups are
significantly different. The five groups are: African, Americas, East Asian, European, and South Asian.77
This is an unusual global sample, continuing to ignore the fact that there is substantially more genetic

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variation in sub-Saharan Africa than anywhere else. Aside from aggregating the 26 samples into 5
continental groups, the authors did not offer either a cluster or diversity partitioning result or conclusion.
They did provide pairwise FST values between the 26 “populations”, not the 5 continental race surrogates,
showing an average pairwise FST of about 0.10, again significantly below the 0.25 value which would
suggest races.78 In an opinion piece accompanying the article, two molecular biologists continued to reify
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race with their comment, “the papers also sequence admixed populations, in which two previously
separate populations [emphasis added] have become mixed—for example, African American
populations, which have African, European and Native American genetic heritage.”79 The other article
analyzing the database in the same issue covers structural variants. They continue the illusion of race by
comparing these variants across the five continental groups. Even with the extremely limited sampling of
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African populations, the researchers find the highest rates of variants in this “continental group.”80
At the same time, other research continues to support a social construction of race. A re-analysis
of the HGDP-CEPH dataset with a tree fitting technique (another way to test the likelihood of racial
evolutionary divisions in a species) strongly rejected biological races.81 Another recent review of the use
of genomic clusters to define biological races showed that clusters are an artifact of isolation by distance
(the farther apart two human groups are the more likely their genes are to differ) and coarse sampling
procedures with large gaps. The researchers note that some sub-Saharan African populations are
genetically closer to European populations than to other sub-Saharan Africans. They suggest, like
Livingstone did in 1962, that human variation is clinal in nature. They argue that the use of self-identified
racial categories assuming continental clustering of genomes is not borne out by most modern analyses,
and as a result, the use of race in biomedical research as a surrogate for genetic variability can be very
misleading.82
Early in 2016, several scholars concerned with the rebiologization of race authored a policy piece
in Science. Yudell, a public health historian, Roberts, a law professor, DeSalle, an evolutionary geneticist,
and Tishkoff, a geneticist, provide a clear statement about the nature of ancestry and race:

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Ancestry is a process-based concept, a statement about an individual’s relationship to other

individuals in their genealogical history; thus, it is a very personal understanding of one’s
genomic heritage. Race, on the other hand, is a pattern-based concept that has led scientists
and laypersons alike to draw conclusions about hierarchical organization of humans, which
connect an individual to a larger preconceived geographically circumscribed or socially
constructed group.
They go on to point out that today’s scientists who are attempting to use race for a variety of genetic

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analyses are doing so with the best intentions of understanding our evolutionary past or providing better
medical care. Finally, they make an impassioned plea for phasing out race and call for a panel of experts
to be convened to recommend a process to move past the use of race for research into human biological
diversity.83 Good luck with that!

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Among the many attempts to explain the rebirth of race as genetics in the 21st century, one
researcher claims that racial essentialism is on the rise because of the tumult in the American racial
hierarchy at a time that is viewed by some as postracial. She points to the pronouncements of the demise
of biological race that accompanied the completion of the first draft of the Human Genome Project as
decreasing the ability of whites to effectively distance themselves from other races. Next, the election of
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President Obama in 2008 further broke down the hierarchy, leading to a notion that the U.S. is becoming
postracial. Finally, the increases in multiracial identities and interracial relationships in the genomic age
have continued to undo ideas about racial hierarchy.84 Whatever the reasons, perhaps sociologist Ann
Morning says it best:
The historical record shows that when racial essentialism comes under attack, it survives by
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making its way to newer and more authoritative areas of inquiry...When refuted in one field, the
race concept migrates to higher ground, where evidence for racial difference is inevitably sought
and found. When the Bible was the ultimate guide to the natural world for most Americans, the
origins and nature of racial difference were to be found there. As the Bible lost its broad
explanatory authority, race was revealed by the burgeoning sciences of biology and
anthropology. Once anthropometric measurements of skull size and brain weight became suspect,
proof of racial division was found in IQ tests and blood type. Today, DNA offers the most
compelling evidence. [Tomorrow, epigenetics???] Belief in physical racial boundaries has been
maintained over time through an ongoing process in which racial difference is corroborated by—
and gives impetus to—the most respected scientific techniques.85
And so it goes. Current research into ethnic differences in epigenetics may seem like it will
counter the reinscription of race in genetics, but the resilience of the belief in biological differences
between simple racial categories is strong, and not likely to be easily deterred.

1
Troy Duster, “A Post‐Genomic Surprise. The Molecular Reinscription of Race in Science, Law and Medicine,”
The British Journal of Sociology 66, no. 1 (2015): 2; Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and
Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (New York: New Press/ORIM, 2011), 49.
2
“June 2000 White House Event,” National Human Genome Research Institute,
https://www.genome.gov/10001356/.

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3
Chimp similarity data from Scally Aylwyn Scally et al., “Insights into Hominid Evolution from the Gorilla
Genome Sequence,” Nature 483, no. 7388 (2012). Demonstration of Clinton’s faulty logic from Roberts Roberts,
Fatal Invention, 50.
4
“June 2000 White House Event”.
5
The comments made by the four speakers have been described by many authors as declaring the end of a biological
notion of race. This is not borne out by the transcript of the event. Roberts, said “That all three of the chief

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figures at the White House ceremony pronounced on the issue of race shows the intensity of the angst surrounding
these questions. Their conclusion was unanimous: the Human Genome Project revealed that the human species
cannot be divided into biological races,” Fatal Invention, 50. Duster said “President Clinton, UK Prime Minister
Tony Blair and the two molecular geneticists [Collins and Venter] who had led the public and private sector
human genome projects all agreed that: At the level of the DNA, there is no such thing as race [emphasis in the
original],” Duster, “A Post-Genomic Surprise,” 2. Many other authors also misrepresent the actual discussion
about race and genomics at the White House event. Significantly, of the four speakers at this event, only Clinton

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and Venter addressed the impact of the HGP for race. The two speakers who avoided the idea of human race in
their comments were Blair and Collins. Prime Minister Blair made no reference to race or patterns of DNA
variation in his remarks. Collins is frequently remembered as arguing against race at this event, but his actual
comment was, “I’m happy that today, the only race we are talking about is the human race.” The context of this
comment makes it clear that he was not talking about patterns of DNA variation and whether or not they support
the idea of biological races in our species, but instead his comment was about the competition, “race”, between
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Celera and the NIH team to sequence the genome.
6
F. S. Collins and M. K. Mansoura, “The Human Genome Project. Revealing the Shared Inheritance of All
Humankind,” Cancer 91, no. 1 Suppl (2001): 222.
7
R. M. Henig, “The Genome in Black and White (and Gray),” The New York Times 2004.
8
Francis S. Collins, “What We Do and Don't Know About'race','Ethnicity', Genetics and Health at the Dawn of the
Genome Era,” Nature genetics 36 (2004).
9
US Department of Health and Human Services, “Healthy People 2000 Final Review” (paper presented at the
Library of Congress Catalog Card, 2001), 8.
10
For example, the American Anthropological Association statement reads: “In the United States both scholars and
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the general public have been conditioned to viewing human races as natural and separate divisions within the
human species based on visible physical differences. With the vast expansion of scientific knowledge in this
century, however, it has become clear that human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated,
biologically distinct groups…As they were constructing US society, leaders among European-Americans
fabricated the cultural/behavioral characteristics associated with each “race,” linking superior traits with
Europeans and negative and inferior ones to blacks and Indians.” AAA Executive Board, “AAA Statement on
Race,” American Anthropologist 100, no. 3 (1998): 712. Also, the American Association of Physical
Anthropologists published a statement, Ed Hagen, “AAPA Statement on Biological Aspects of Race,” Am J Phys
Anthropol 101, no. 4 (1996).
11
Steven A Holmes, “People Can Claim One or More Races on Federal Forms,” New York Times, October 30 1997.
The 2000 census instruction read “Mark [X] one or more races [emphasis added] to indicate what this person
considers himself/herself to be.” The 1990 question had instructed respondents to “Fill ONE [emphasis in the
original] circle for the race that the person considers himself/herself to be.” “Major Differences in Subject-Matter
Content between the 1990 and 2000 Census Questionnaires,” United States Census Bureau,
https://www.census.gov/population/www/cen2000/90vs00/index.html.
12
“Revisions to the Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity,” White House.com,
https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/fedreg_1997standards. This site is no longer available as of March 20, 2017,
due to the removal of historic material from the White House site by the Trump administration.
13
American Anthropological Association, “Response to OMB Directive 15: Race and Ethnic Standards for Federal
Statistics and Administrative Reporting,” http://s3.amazonaws.com/rdcms-
aaa/files/production/public/FileDownloads/pdfs/cmtes/minority/upload/AAA_Response_OMB1997.pdf.

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14
Ann Morning, “Race and Rachel Doležal,” Contexts 16, no. 2 (2017).
15
Catherine Bliss, Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press,
2012), 23-24.
16
Jonathan Kahn, “‘When Are You From?’ Time, Space, and Capital in the Molecular Reinscription of Race,” The
British journal of sociology 66, no. 1 (2015): 70.
17
L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza et al., “Call for a Worldwide Survey of Human Genetic Diversity: A Vanishing

on
Opportunity for the Human Genome Project,” Genomics 11, no. 2 (1991).
18
L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza, “The Human Genome Diversity Project: Past, Present and Future,” Nature Reviews
Genetics 6, no. 4 (2005).
19
Jenny Reardon, Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton,NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2005).
20
L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, Paolo Menozzi, and Alberto Piazza, The History and Geography of Human Genes
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 19.

nd
21
Ibid., 138. It must be recalled that they are primarily using the HGDP sample which over-represents Asia, hence
their declaration about Asian variability.
22
International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, “Initial Sequencing and Analysis of the Human Genome,”
Nature 409, no. 6822 (2001); J. C. Venter et al., “The Sequence of the Human Genome,” Science 291, no. 5507
(2001).
23
S. Paabo, “Genomics and Society. The Human Genome and Our View of Ourselves,” Science (New York, N.Y.)
Bi
291, no. 5507 (2001).
24
Robert S Schwartz, “Racial Profiling in Medical Research,” New England Journal of Medicine 344 no. 18 (2001);
A. J. Wood, “Racial Differences in the Response to Drugs--Pointers to Genetic Differences,” ibid.344.
25
Neil Risch et al., “Categorization of Humans in Biomedical Research: Genes, Race and Disease,” Genome
Biology 3, no. 7 (2002); Nicholas Wade, “Race Is Seen as Real Guide to Track Roots of Disease,” New York Times
2002.
26
Noah A. Rosenberg et al., “Genetic Structure of Human Populations,” Science 298, no. 5602 (2002); Noah A
Rosenberg et al., “Supplementary Material for "Genetic Structure of Human Populations",” ibid.
27
Nicholas Wade, “Gene Study Identifies 5 Main Human Populations, Linking Them to Geography,” New York
Jim

Times 2002; “The Palette of Humankind,” New York Times, December 24 2002; Lee Hotz Robert, “The Nation;
People Are Same, but Different; Humans Can Be Sorted into Five Groups Based on Ancestry, Major Genetic
Study Finds,” The Los Angeles Times, 12/20/2002 2002; Bliss, Race Decoded, 75.
28
Mary-Claire King and Arno G Motulsky, “Mapping Human History,” Science 298, no. 5602 (2002). Excoffier
says: “It would be highly misleading to conclude that Rosenberg et al. have just rediscovered five basic races. The
concept of race indeed assumes that members of a race are much more similar to each other than they are from
members of other races: this is not what is found here. On the contrary, this study estimates that, if you consider
two genes from two individuals in the same geographic region, they are on average only 4 percent more similar
than two genes drawn from individuals belonging to different regions.” Laurent Excoffier, “Human Diversity: Our
Genes Tell Where We Live,” Current Biology 13, no. 4 (2003).
29
STRUCTURE is a statistical program that works by placing individuals into one of an arbitrary number of clusters
(the K value) based on their overall genetic similarity. Many possible pairs of clusters are tested per individual to
generate multiple clusters. The program is run on a set of data multiple times using the same number of clusters to
try to estimate the best solution in terms of placing individuals into clusters. In the Science paper, the researchers
produced 10 solutions for each K value they used, so there were 10 solutions for 5 clusters and 10 for 6 clusters,
etc. The notion of a genetic cluster calculated this way is that people within the cluster share on average more
similar gene frequencies than they do to to individuals in other clusters. Cluster analyses like STRUCTURE are
not hypothesis testing procedures, but rather are types of data exploration procedures.
30
Short Tandem Repeats (STRs) or Microsatellites are repeats of 2 to 6 bases (e.g., acg/acg/acg/acg/acg/acg…).
STRs are commonly used for forensic work. The number of repeats is counted and that number is the raw data for

22
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comparisons. The specific number of repeats in a particular variant (or allele) usually remains unchanged from
generation to generation but changes do sometimes occur and the number of repeats may increase or decrease.
31
The term population is not uniformly defined throughout the study of human variation. In this case, the term
localities might be more salient, although the labels on the samples include linguistic groups, nation-states, and
ethnic groups. The collection of data for all of the extant DNA databases has been extremely opportunistic,
sampling whole families in some places and unrelated individuals in others, depending upon the primary research

on
goals of the investigator gathering the samples. Thus, the use of population to characterize these samples is highly
misleading from a biological perspective.
The 52 sampled groups come from seven regions with the distribution already discussed above for the HGDP:
Europe, Middle East, Central and South Asia, East Asia, Oceania, America, and Africa.
32
Just how arbitrary the choice to present the solutions that they did can be seen by their own comment in the legend
for figure 1 (Rosenberg et al., “Genetic Structure of Human Populations,” 2382.): “Ten structure runs at each K
produced nearly identical individual membership coefficients, having pairwise similarity coefficients above 0.97,

nd
with the exceptions of comparisons involving four runs at K = 3 that separated East Asia instead of Eurasia, and
one run at K = 6 that separated Karitiana instead of Kalash.” So the authors felt it was all right to include some
values of K where there were multiple solutions, but not report others.
33
Deborah A. Bolnick, “Individual Ancestry Inference and the Reification of Race as a Biological Phenomenon,” in
Revisiting Race in a Genomic Age, ed. B. A. Koenig, S. S. Lee, and S. S. Richardson (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2008), 77.
Cavalli-Sforza, “The Human Genome Diversity Project: Past, Present and Future.”
Bi
34
35
Daniel J Fairbanks, Everyone Is African: How Science Explodes the Myth of Race (Amherst, New York:
Prometheus books, 2015), 55.
36
In an AMOVA, the genetic diversity of the whole group (the 52 populations in the HGDP-CEPH sample) is
divided up into how much occurs within the local sample (52 populations), how much occurs between the 52
populations, and how much occurs between the 7 regions (the race surrogate in this analysis).
37
Rosenberg et al., “Genetic Structure of Human Populations,” 2381; Roberts, Fatal Invention, 60.
38
In calculating the FST statistic, pairwise comparisons between groups are made. In the Science paper, the
Jim

comparisons are all 21 pairwise comparisons of the 7 regions.

39
The criteria for the meaning of FST come from the population geneticist Sewall Wright: “We will take [FST] = 0.25
as an arbitrary value above which there is very great differentiation, the range 0.16 to 0.25 as indicating
moderately great differentiation. Differentiation is, however, by no means negligible if [FST] is as small as 0.05 or
even less.” S. Wright, Evolution and the Genetics of Populations: V. 4. Variability within and among Natural
Populations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 85.
40
Alan R. Templeton, “Biological Races in Humans,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and
Biomedical Sciences 44 (2013).
41
Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza, History and Geography.
42
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: Hill Press, 1871), 232.
43
Risch et al., “Categorization of Humans in Biomedical Research,” 2007.5.
44
Michael Bamshad et al., “Deconstructing the Relationship between Genetics and Race,” Nature Reviews Genetics
5, no. 8 (2004).
45
Anthony William Fairbank Edwards, “Human Genetic Diversity: Lewontin's Fallacy,” BioEssays 25, no. 8 (2003).
46
Stephen Ousley, Richard Jantz, and Donna Freid, “Understanding Race and Human Variation: Why Forensic
Anthropologists Are Good at Identifying Race,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 139, no. 1 (2009).
47
This is especially true when taking into account likely migratory pathways from Africa (see Sohini Ramachandran
et al., “Support from the Relationship of Genetic and Geographic Distance in Human Populations for a Serial
Founder Effect Originating in Africa,” PNAS 102 (2005).
48
D. J. Witherspoon et al., “Genetic Similarities within and between Human Populations,” Genetics 176, no. 1
(2007): 358.

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49
Esteban González Burchard et al., “The Importance of Race and Ethnic Background in Biomedical Research and
Clinical Practice,” New England Journal of Medicine 348, no. 12 (2003); RS Cooper, JS Kaufman, and R Ward,
“Race and Genomics,” The New England journal of medicine 348, no. 12 (2003).
50
Constance Holden, “Personal Genomics. The Touchy Subject of ‘Race’,” Science (New York, N.Y.) 322, no. 5903
(2008).
51
Stephanie M. Fullerton et al., “Population Description and Its Role in the Interpretation of Genetic Association,”

on
Human genetics 127, no. 5 (2010).
52
Roberts, Fatal Invention, 57.
53
Ibid., 62.
54
Fairbanks, Everyone Is African, 132.
55
Busby George Bj Busby et al., “Admixture into and within Sub-Saharan Africa,” Elife 5 (2016).
56
For example, Troy Duster, “Comparative Perspectives and Competing Explanations: Taking on the Newly
Configured Reductionist Challenge to Sociology,” American Sociological Review 71, no. 1 (2006).

nd
57
Duana Fullwiley, “The Molecularization of Race: Institutionalizing Human Difference in Pharmacogenetics
Practice,” Science as Culture 16, no. - (2007).
58
Duster, “A Post-Genomic Surprise.”
59
Johnny E. Williams, “Talking About Race without Talking About Race: Color Blindness in Genomics,” American
Behavioral Scientist 59, no. 11 (2015).
60
Linda M Hunt and Mary S Megyesi, “The Ambiguous Meanings of the Racial/Ethnic Categories Routinely Used
in Human Genetics Research,” Social science & medicine (1982) 66, no. 2 (2008).
Bi
61
Bliss, Race Decoded, 94.
62
Duana Fullwiley, “The Biologistical Construction of Race: 'Admixture' Technology and the New Genetic
Medicine,” Social Studies of Science 38, no. 5 (2008): 718.
63
Fullwiley ibid., 720.
64
Fullwiley, Duana. “Race, genes, power.” The British Journal of sociology 66, no. 1 (2015): 36-45.S
65
Bliss, Race Decoded, p. 72.
66
Williams, “Talking About Race,” 1512.
67
Joshua M. Galanter et al., “Differential Methylation between Ethnic Sub-Groups Reflects the Effect of Genetic
Jim

Ancestry and Environmental Exposures,” eLife 6 (2017).

68
Fullwiley, “The Biologistical Construction of Race.”; M. J. Montoya, “Bioethnic Conscription: Genes, Race, and
Mexicana/O Ethnicity in Diabetes Research,” Cultural Anthropology 22 (2007); Hunt and Megyesi, “The
Ambiguous Meanings of the Racial/Ethnic Categories.”; Bliss, Race Decoded, 206.
69
Jerry Coyne to Why Evolution Is True, February 28, 2012,
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/are-there-human-races/; Jonathan Marks to Anthropomics,
March 2, 2012, http://anthropomics.blogspot.com/2012/03/rant-on-race-and-genetics.html.
70
Coyne revisits the race as biology argument in his October 17, 2016 blog in reference to the race commissions set
in Brazil up to determine the race of individuals vying for government jobs based on physical characteristics. He
takes this use of race as further validating the genetic basis of human races. Jerry Coyne to Why Evolution Is True,
October 17, 2016, https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2016/10/17/race-as-a-social-construct/.
71
Hela Sakka et al., “Phylogeography Analysis and Molecular Evolution Patterns of the Nematode Parasite
Heligmosomum Mixtum Based on Mitochondrial DNA Sequences,” Acta parasitologica 60, no. 1 (2015).
72
Fitzgerald Kathleen J. Fitzgerald, “The Continuing Significance of Race: Racial Genomics in a Postracial Era,”
Humanity Society 38, no. 1 (2014). As an example of how genomics plays to the public, CNN reported that Scott
Brown, acting as a surrogate for Donald Trump, said Elizabeth Warren should “take a DNA test” if she wants to
prove whether she has any Cherokee ancestry (Betsy Klein to CNN.com, 2016,
http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/27/politics/scott-brown-elizabeth-warren-dna-test/.). This is the popular notion that
ancestry testing has left on the public, although it is clear that at least some in the media are aware of the pitfalls of
AIMs and tying race and ethnicity to genetics and try to point out the errors inherent in such analyses (Matt Miller,
“A DNA Test Won’t Explain Elizabeth Warren’s Ancestry: You’re Not 28 Percent Finnish, Either,” Slate (2016),

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http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/06/dna_testing_cannot_determine_ancestry_including
_elizabeth_warren_s.html.).
73
W. Carson Byrd and Victor E. Ray, “Ultimate Attribution in the Genetic Era White Support for Genetic
Explanations of Racial Difference and Policies,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science 661, no. 1 (2015).
74
Graham Coop et al., "A Troublesome Inheritance," (New York Times, 2014).The letter included a list of 143

on
additional signatories who were faculty members in population genetics and evolutionary biology.
75
Roberts, Fatal Invention, 67.
76
Garrett Hellenthal et al., “A Genetic Atlas of Human Admixture History,” Science (New York, N.Y.) 343, no. 6172
(2014). The Hellenthal study used the HGDP-CEPH sample with two smaller samples added in. In presenting the
distribution of the 95 “populations” sampled from 17 “regions”, the authors offer a map with greatly enlarged
number labels for each group. This representation still leaves large unsampled areas in the Americas, Africa, and
north Asia, but by reducing the map and enlarging the labels, it appears that the sampling is much more continuous

nd
than it was represented by Cavalli-Sforza in his 2005 article. It turns out that the large local population number
labels cover approximately 600,000 square miles at the equator! As with so many other studies, the sampling and
labeling are very confusing. The 17 regions include: The Americas, Central Africa, Central South Asia, Central
South Asia 2, East Europe, Ethiopian, North Africa, North East Asia, North West Europe, Oceania, South East
Asia, South Europe, South Middle East, San, West Africa, West Asia, Yakut. This is an amazing collection of
terms from the multiple continental group of the Americas to the San, a group of fewer than 100,000 people in
Bi
South Africa. Interestingly, the research shows admixture almost everywhere people were sampled. One reaction
to this finding might be that the pure populations assumed to form the basis of admixture measures might be less
common and more admixed themselves.
77
The “continental groups” are: African (four West African samples, one East African, Afro-Caribbeans from
Barbados, and African Americans from the U.S. Southwest), Americas (Columbians, Peruvians, Puerto Ricans,
and Mexican Americans from Los Angeles), East Asian (three Chinese groups, Japanese, Vietnamese), European
(Utah residents with northern and western European ancestry, British, Finnish, Spanish, and Italians), South Asian
(Gujarti Indians in Houston, TX, Bengali, Indian Telugu in UK, Pakistan, Tamil in UK)
78
1000 Genomes Project Consortium, “A Global Reference for Human Genetic Variation,” Nature 526, no. 7571
Jim

(2015); “Supplement to ‘a Global Reference for Human Genetic Variation’,” Nature 526, no. 7571 (2015).
79
Ewan Birney and Nicole Soranzo, “Human Genomics: The End of the Start for Population Sequencing,” ibid.
80
Peter H Sudmant et al., “An Integrated Map of Structural Variation in 2,504 Human Genomes,” ibid.
81
Keith L Hunley, Graciela S Cabana, and Jeffrey C Long, “The Apportionment of Human Diversity Revisited,”
American journal of physical anthropology 160, no. 4 (2016). On page 567 the authors point out: “Our analyses
confirm that there is substantial heterogeneity in the amount of variation harbored by human populations, but even
the least diverse population, the Suru’i, harbors nearly 60 percent of the total species’ diversity … It is important
to recognize that the biological race concept fails based on this finding alone because no matter how much
variation might exist among human populations under a given model of evolution, human populations are not
genetically homogeneous within…In sum, we concur with Lewontin’s conclusion that Western-based racial
classifications have no taxonomic significance, and we hope that this research, which takes into account our
current understanding of the structure of human diversity, places his seminal finding on firmer evolutionary
footing.”
82
Koffi N. Maglo, Tesfaye B. Mersha, and Lisa J. Martin, “Population Genomics and the Statistical Values of Race:
An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Biological Classification of Human Populations and Implications for
Clinical Genetic Epidemiological Research,” Frontiers in Genetics 7, no. 22 (2016).
83
Yudell Michael Yudell et al., “Science and Society. Taking Race out of Human Genetics,” Science (New York,
N.Y.) 351, no. 6273 (2016).
84
Fitzgerald, “The Continuing Significance of Race.”
85
Ann Morning, “Reconstructing Race in Science and Society: Biology Textbooks, 1952-2002,” AJS; American
Journal of Sociology 114 Suppl (2008).

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Figure 1. Pseudo evolutionary tree of human races from Risch, Burchard, Ziv & Tang, 2002:2007.3.

on
nd
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Jim

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Figure 2. The HGDP-CEPH samples from Cavalli-Sforza (2005:337).

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Jim

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Figure 3. Chromosome painting from Hellenthal et al. (2014:747). The upper diagram indicates a
chromosome with many different ancestral blocks and the lower “cleaned” diagram removes most of
the ancestry that is assumed to be extraneous to the population of interest. The result is a chromosome
that is predominantly South Asian (red) with African admixture (yellow).

on
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Bi
Jim

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