The biology of race in the absence of biological races: Rick Kittles at TEDxNorthwesternU

Defining "race" continues to be a nemesis. Knowledge from human genetic research is increasingly challenging the notion that race and biology are inextricably linked, engendering tremendous ramifications for human relations, identity and public health. It has become fashionable for geneticists and anthropologists to declare that race is a social construction. However, there is little practical value to this belief since few in the public believe and act on it. Thus race is mainly a social concept which in the US has been based on skin color and ancestry. Yet biomedical studies continue to examine black/ white differences. Kittles discusses why using race in biomedical studies is problematic using examples from U.S. groups which transcend "racial" boundaries and bear the burden of health disparities.

Rick Kittles, PhD, received a BS in biology from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1989 and a PhD in biological sciences from George Washington University in 1998. He then helped establish the National Human Genome Center at Howard University. Currently, Kittles is an associate professor of medicine in the Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), as well as the associate director of the UIC Cancer Center.

Kittles is well known for his research of prostate cancer and health disparities among African Americans. He has also been at the forefront of the development of ancestry-informative genetic markers, and how genetic ancestry can be used to map genes for common traits and disease. His work on tracing the genetic ancestry of African Americans has brought light to many issues, new and old, which relate to race, ancestry, identity, and group membership.

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[ivanaamidzic]

Why doesn't camera show all what he shows on the screen?

[BKMiller]

great talk really lousy cameraperson.If he is talking about something in his powerpoint, you really should show the powerpoint.

[Ethiokarate]

This guy really broke it down, people in the comments are idiots for bashing his segregation of biological and social factors. And the odd importance to keep race in the discussion in a world that wants it out (baby with the bathwater statement)

[tahliah]

People need to understand the difference between race ethnicity and nationality and inbreeding to understand genetics and origin

[zephsmith]

I continue to be amazed as how often people argue about a word as if there can be only one concept for race, and it must be the one they are trying to prove exists or doesn't exist. So often the arguments are semantically circular, relying on everyone using a specific chosen meaning for the word which makes their assertion true.

If someone says "race is a social construct", that is absolutely true - for some meanings associated with the word "race" and not for others. If they were speaking more clearly, they would say "when 'race' refers to the social construct of race, it is a social construct", in which case the circularity would be more obvious. Leaving out the explicit qualifiers can disguise the meaninglessness of the argument.

Someone else might refer to a set of fuzzy categories based on multifactor cluster analysis of measurable biological traits. Race in that sense is not a social construct in the sense above, it emerges from mathematical analysis of physical traits. A Martian anthropologist with no ax to grind and no knowledge of human cultures would find the same clusters. Of course, by changing parameters and thresholds, you might get different numbers of clusters, so a cluster analysis is meaningful (the strongest clusters will remain in all cases) but not comprehensively definitive (eg: the number of minor clusters depend on your arbitrary thresholds).

These two conceptions of race will correlate to some degree, but inexactly (see Kittles' slides). And of course, we cannot categorize every individual as being exactly one of N races (from somebody's favorite set, socially defined or as biological trait clusters). For example, the boundaries of clusters are fuzzy and there are many data points between the clusters. Just as the concepts of day and night are meaningful concepts that should not be discarded, even tho the existence of twilight means that we cannot meaningfully categorize every single moment of the day as always being either day or night (and our chosen thresholds between day/twilight/night are arbitrary).

Kittles parses this in part by distinguishing between social race and biological ancestry, acknowledging that both exist - rather than fighting endlessly for the existence or non-existence of one these different concepts which are often subsumed under the same word "race".

It's important to keep in mind his purpose - identifying meaningful groupings for things like medical statistics. For example, is some medical condition statistically associated with people with a strong African genetic ancestry, or with a socio-economic status which in turns correlates to some degree with social race (environment, behavior)? He's saying you have to tease these our before you can make scientifically strong associations which could guide research or treatment.

[sleepyeyeguy]

He's talking about disease being more prevalent in particular ethnic groups than others, but he has to define ethnicity before making that claim. Is not the definition of ethnicity just as slippery as race?

[matthewronsson]

"Race and biology are inextricably linked" is a fact.

[stephenmealing]

I am trying to hear more people who disagree with race realism, just trying to hear both sides. Any good people to listen to?

[TIMESAYEAR]

Stop calling it race. It's ethnicity. Not all blacks are "Africans".

[haas]

This is a really disingenuous discussion. Just because the races often overlap and fade into one another it does not mean there isn't a biological element to race. Our skin color is determined by generic components and therefore is biological. Plus race doesn't just involve different skin colors. Different races of people are different sizes on average, they have different features such as hair and shapes of things like noses. The different races have different brain sizes which do in fact have a significant correlation with intelligence on average. It's not a perfect correlation but it is noteworthy. The different races also have different time periods for things like gestation periods or the amount of time it takes for a baby to walk. Africans tend to develop faster with whites developing faster than Asians in the same way. Race is completely biological and genetic. While it's true that the terms and classifications are social constructs the actual things they are based on couldn't be more real.

[Tony-hvmo]

We should stop talking about race as if it is a concept which objectively exists.

[txrcher]

I'm glad that he was willing to admit that there's no such thing as race, but I don't see the need to continue to use such a false term.

[sleepyeyeguy]

He's looking at populations of different "ancestry" without clearly defining ancestry beforehand. Is it based on self report or what? And how is that in any way scientific or reliable?

[bjrnn.]

"Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free."
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -

Culture is just the fenotype of a population.
Iq is genetic like everything else.
There will always be deviants and outliers.
Haplogroup is a better term than race.
Plato described this 2500 years ago in the myth of the metals

Crime is not a result of poverty, its a result of RELATIV poverty.
Mixing groups with large diffrence in iq creates RELATIV poverty and political polarisation.

[dgnrt]

what? ya there are races...what they say is that we are all one species

[TokenTeran]

His credibility dropped when he used Hispanic as an example of a race with large variations. Hispanic is not a race.

[Tony-hvmo]

I disagree with him. We don't "need" race today to study certain American groups. Most groups disenfranchised today are struggling from either past social mistakes or modern class struggle. We may need the idea of race to study the lasting effects of slavery, jim crow, etc...but we only need to understand it as a crazy idea that previous generations made up.

Example: We don't need to see the sun as a god to be educate ourselves about how past civilizations were influenced by this idea.

[MJ-hgmk]

He should do this over! After he firmly defines the terms he is using, and stops conflating them. An American geneticist of color should know better and must do better.

[jakemcnamee]

This is like saying shape is a social construct because you can get hybrid shapes

[matthewmann]

A White person is not a Yellow person the same way a Polar Bear is not a Panda Bear. A White Person is not the same as a Red person the same way a Polar Bear is not a American Black Bear. A White Person is not a Brown Person the same way a Polar Bear is not a Sloth Bear. A White Person is not a Black Person the same way a Polar Bear is not a Sun Bear. I can make more examples but I think you get it.