Genetically Speaking All Races Are Equal

 
That's what the genetics expert, Crystal, told us in her video [Crystal Tells Us about the Human Genome] ...

Now, surprisingly enough, genetically speaking all races are equal. As a matter of fact, if you took a random sample of someone's DNA, just by looking at it you could not tell whether they were African-American, Caucasian, Asian or any other race.

I guess Crystal forgot to tell Price et al. (2007) because this is what they say in the abstract of the paper they just published in PLoS Genetics ...

European Americans are often treated as a homogeneous group, but in fact form a structured population due to historical immigration of diverse source populations. Discerning the ancestry of European Americans genotyped in association studies is important in order to prevent false positive or negative associations due to population stratification and to identify genetic variants whose contribution to disease risk differs across European ancestries. Here, we investigate empirical patterns of population structure in European Americans, analyzing 4,198 samples from four genome-wide association studies to show that components roughly corresponding to northwest European, southeast European and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry are the main sources of European American population structure. Building on this insight, we constructed a panel of 300 validated markers that are highly informative for distinguishing these ancestries. We demonstrate that this panel of markers can be used to correct for stratification in association studies that do not generate dense genotype data.

So, not only can we distinguish Caucasians from Africans and Asians, we can also sort out different groups within Caucasians.

Isn't it amazing that scientists can do this when there's no genetic differences between races?

---

Price, V. et al. (2007) Discerning the ancestry of European Americans in genetic association studies. PLoS Genet. In press. [doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.0030236.eor]