Sophronius

First of all, that is one heck of a claim! Do anthropologists actually say that? A quick google check does seem to confirm this. However, their use of activist language makes me think that these people are… less than entirely unbiased:pic.twitter.com/ohf3XRSUbj

Internationally, we see a very different picture. Wikipedia acknowledges that e.g. Chinese scientists almost universally acknowledge the existence of race, so this mainly seems to be an American thing. Then again, can we really trust China to be more objective than America here?pic.twitter.com/zj5i4OEPoU

Let’s return to the Nurture article. Being biased is one thing, but most scientists wouldn't just flat-out lie about their findings. “Humans are genetically homogeneous”, they conclude. But in the main body it says “Compared to apes and fruitflies.” Hmm, they left that bit out.pic.twitter.com/ORpQso6Ke7

Only 10-15% of DNA varies between groups, okay. But what part of the variance is relevant to life outcomes? Surely we don’t care about variance in ‘junk DNA’. And AFAIK these ‘within group’ differences are mostly correlated. So I’m really not sure how meaningful this really is.pic.twitter.com/6c0UYD0Y2h

In between lines, the paper notes that human ‘geographical clusters’ evolved separately, and that the largest difference is between Africans and non-Africans. Holy shit. That sounds like something an alt-right blog would say, but this 'anti-race' article agrees with it. Okay?pic.twitter.com/71giao0Fo8

This is where it gets really interesting. They get a computer algorithm to sort individuals into groups in a way that minimizes genetic distance. Without any prompting, the algorithm then sorts people into classical race categories, with an apparent 100% accuracy:pic.twitter.com/MVgRjJetuc

“It might be tempting to conclude that this verifies traditional concepts about races.” Yeah, no kidding! But this doesn’t mean much, they say, because Indians are genetically more between Europeans and Asians. Okay? That sounds more like the exception that proves the rule TBH.pic.twitter.com/q2R83Ajm7A

In sum, they say that genetic variation is ‘geographically structured’ because human populations evolved independently after leaving Africa. But this doesn’t prove anything because races have no definite boundaries and are therefore ‘somewhat inaccurate and arbitrary’. Uh-huh.pic.twitter.com/1xp2KpvxcK

They then say that medicine has long used race because ethnicities are susceptible to different diseases and different medicines. However, this doesn't prove anything because… ancestry tells you much more about a person, so there is no need to rely on race. Are you kidding me??pic.twitter.com/3BBo3ekJ3V

So in sum, the paper that is being used to advance the claim that “race has no validity in human biology” not only admits that “it’s inaccurate to state that race is biologically meaningless”, but almost proves the validity of racial categories along the way. 2019, y’all.pic.twitter.com/S5jvwQT40A