Anne Wojcicki is the co-founder of "23andMe" a company that will analyze your DNA for a fee. She was recently interviewed and the results are posted on the New York Times website [Genetics Entrepreneur Anne Wojcicki Answers Your Questions].One of the questions asked about "race." Here's her reply.
A lot of the difficulty in talking about race has been a lack of agreement on what “race” means. In the past, the idea of pure races also included an ordering of certain races as inherently superior to others. We reject this idea absolutely. However, that doesn’t mean that there are no genetic differences between populations of different ancestral origin. A few of our features use the genome-wide data of reference populations from around the world to trace the origin of pieces of an individual’s genome. Some customers have complex patterns depending on where their ancestors originated. These reference populations aren’t “races”; they’re representative samples of peoples who have lived in a single place for a very long time and have thus accumulated different sets of genetic variants over time.John Hawks noticed this and blogged about it: Modern genomics and race. He said exactly what I was thinking ...
That's a tricky piece of wordcraft -- they're not 'races'; "they're representative samples of peoples who have lived in a single place for a very long time and have thus accumulated different sets of genetic variants over time."Most species are subdivided into races (also called subspecies, or demes).
Uhh....I'm thinking that's pretty much the definition of race in a lot of textbooks...
Humans are not an exception. Races exist. Pretending that they don't isn't going to solve the problems of racism. It just makes you look stupid.
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