Ranthropologist

Month: February 2015

  • (R)anthropology Class: The Myth of Race

    (R)anthropology Class: The Myth of Race

    I have decided to start a new series that I am calling (R)anthropology Class. I draw on my anthropological training in so many different ways, and I know that this training is what has helped me view the world in a critical and objective way. Because I know that most people have never taken an anthropology class – or if they have, it was long ago – I have decided to focus some of my posts on some of the most basic, but important, anthropological concepts. These usually occur to me when I am in the midst of trying to make sense of some new idea or trying to explain my point of view to others. That was the case recently when I was trying to explain to someone why DNA ancestry tests can be extremely misleading for people who don’t know much, if anything, about population genetics. So with this inaugural (R)anthropology Class rant, I will sketch in the basics of why a commercial DNA ancestry test cannot tell you your race.

    There is no question that race is a real thing. All we have to do is look at the people around us to know that this is true: different skin colors, hair textures, facial characteristics, even height and body type show us that people are different from one another. Yet, from a genetic standpoint, race is not a real thing at all. Instead, what we call race is a cultural construct that reflects the human need to seek and identify patterns in our surroundings that help us to understand and categorize our world. Race, in other words, is cultural rather than biological.

    How can I say such a thing? All you have to do is look at someone to know what race they are – right? Dark skin = African. Epicanthic folds in the eyelids = Asian. Blue eyes = European.** And if a person happens to have parents of two different races, then that person will show a blend of different racial characteristics from his or her parents. Or if a person is descended from several different races, they will still show some traits that help you identify those ancestral races – or so we like to think. But ask any person who identifies as mixed race and you will find that their lives are full of mistaken assumptions about what their race is – and concomitantly full of different types of treatment depending on what people might unconsciously assume their race to be. Again, this is all entirely based on cultural categories, and is part of what anthropologists call ascribed status. An ascribed status is a status that a person can’t do anything to change – such as age, gender, or in this example, race. But people make mistakes in the statuses they ascribe to others all the time. When I teach my students about this in my lecture on race, I ask them if they have ever been mistaken for a race other than the one they assign to themselves. The hands of my students of color always, without fail, shoot into the air. And, sometimes, my students who look white raise their hands, too – and they surprise their classmates by identifying as having African-American, non-white Hispanic or Latino, Asian, or some other non-white racial ancestry.*** I have Filipino students tell me they are mistaken for Latino or Middle Eastern; I have Asian students describe how they are always ascribed to the Japanese or Chinese category when they are actually Korean or Vietnamese or Thai; I have students with roots in countries throughout South America tell me that nobody seems to know that there are countries other than Mexico south of the US border.

    Here’s the deal, biologically: humans are 99.999% genetically identical. That means that only one out of every 1000 DNA nucleotides is different between any two individual humans. But that tiny .001% difference is reflected in some very recent, visible physical differences between human populations. Human physical traits – called phenotypes – have evolved based on adaptation to specific geographic regions and the pressures of natural selection within those regions. So, natural selection results in phenotypic variation in traits like skin color. Skin color has evolved in response to sun exposure and vitamin D metabolism – the further north a population lives, the less sun they get, which means the less essential vitamin D they are able to metabolize. So by virtue of natural selection, lighter skin color that allows for more efficient vitamin D absorption has evolved in human populations that live in low-sunlight areas, whereas the melanin that causes darker skin has remained abundant in populations closer to the equator. Hence, populations in equatorial Africa are very dark, whereas populations in far northern Europe are very light. This same sort of natural selection has operated on other genes as well, resulting in a wide variety of phenotypes throughout the world. And naturally, those phenotypes remain clustered within the populations where they evolved, which makes it simple for pattern-seeking humans to use those phenotypes to categorize people into the physical types that we have labelled “races.”

    Another important point about phenotypic variation is that it is continuous. In other words, there is no sharp, clear dividing line between different types. If you were to line up every person in the world in order from palest skin to darkest, where would you draw the line between dark and light? Or even if you came up with more categories – pale white, medium white, light tan, dark tan, light brown, etc. – where would you put those lines? It’s like trying to pinpoint the exact spot in a rainbow where the color turns from red to orange – it can’t be done! And yet the rainbow continuously shifts in colors until you go all the way from red at the beginning to violet at the end. Continuous human phenotypes operate in exactly the same fashion. Consider, also, that if you were to draw skin color lines in the human rainbow, you would find individuals from several different races or ethnicities within a single skin color category – Australian aborigines, east Indians, and sub-Sarahan Africans could all be found within one dark-skinned group! A bottom-line way of putting it is this: there is no single trait that can be found in one so-called racial group that does not also exist in some other so-called racial group. You can find dark skin in several groups, epicanthic folds in several groups, and blue eyes in several groups. Race as biology is a cultural fiction.

    So, what does this have to do with DNA ancestry tests? I have serious misgivings about the way these tests are marketed because they trade on people’s lack of knowledge about the biological fiction of race and give them the impression that they are finding out about their own supposed racial ancestry. In fact, if not strictly unethical, I think that the companies who peddle these tests are at best taking advantage of people’s forgivable ignorance about the complexity of genetics. Now, I’m not saying that people can’t or even shouldn’t research their ancestry if it interests them; it would be fascinating to find out that what you thought was your completely European ancestry actually had, say, a branch from a part of Asia. But when I say that, I’m talking about genealogical, not genetic, ancestry research. Genetic ancestry research cannot tell you that you have an Asian ancestor; it can only tell you if you have genetic markers that are associated with particular broadly-defined genetic populations.

    DNA ancestry tests use what are called haplogroups to assess genetic ancestry. A haplogroup is a group of similar genes – called haplotypes – that reflect single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) mutations. What is important about SNP haplogroups is that they can be used to broadly delineate genetic populations. This goes back to the discussion above about phenotypic traits that arise in particular geographic regions in response to specific selective pressures. These haplogroups can be traced in two ways: either on the Y chromosome, which is only present in males; or in mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is a separate set of DNA from the nuclear DNA that codes for our particular physical traits. Mitochondrial DNA is only found in our cells’ mitochondria, and we get it only from our mothers. Both Y haplogroups and mtDNA haplogroups are very stable and have a very slow rate of mutation, so they remain relatively unchanged for long periods of time. This means that we can compare these haplogroups in people today to ancient haplogroups associated with particular regions and populations. Commercial DNA ancestry tests look at an individual’s haplogroups and compare the results to known population haplogroups.* These results are used to complete a statistical analysis of a person’s possible ancestry. So, if you have a haplogroup associated with Asia, your DNA test results will say so.

    Here’s where things get problematic. Most people don’t know all the things about DNA and populations genetics that I am writing about in this post, so when they see a result of, say, 12% African, they think it means they are “part Black.” I can’t stress enough that this is not what these results mean. What it means is that the person has a haplogroup that is associated with known ancestral African genetic populations. It’s a statistical correlation, not an absolute. And things get even trickier when you realize that Y and mtDNA haplogroups can be incredibly diverse even within a seemingly homogenous regional population. In fact, population geneticists know that there is more variation within the groups we call races than there is between the groups we call races. I am just as likely to share identical mtDNA ancestry with someone from Asia – where I have no ancestors that I know of – as I am to share it with someone from Sweden, where I know my immediate ancestors came from. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying we can’t learn anything from comparing haplotypes – we can. But it is completely wrong to say that you are “part Black” or “part Native American” or “part Asian” based on DNA ancestry testing. All it tells you is that you have a haplogroup that could have entered your genetic lineage thousands of years ago that derived from that part of the world.

    This has been a long post, and it is a complicated subject. I have no doubt that some people will read this and misunderstand. Let me part with this: if you want to get a DNA ancestry test, feel free. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking it is telling you anything about your race – it’s not. And finally, never forget that even though what we think of as race is not biologically real, it is still a complex, vital, and unmistakable social reality. We continue to treat people differently on the basis of it; and some people even still insist that the behaviors we associate with race and ethnicity have a genetic basis. We are not that far from the days when the civil rights of African Americans, Native Americans, and other people of color were denied because of the belief that they were genetically inferior to white people. In that sense, race is historically, culturally, and painfully real.

    *Since I wrote this post in February 2015, the technology used by commercial testing companies has expanded to include autosomal DNA haplogroups. Autosomal DNA is the DNA found in the nucleus of all your body’s cells. You get 50% of your autosomal DNA from your mother and 50% from your father. Using autosomal DNA allows a DNA test to see your results from both your maternal and paternal lineages, but it does not automatically mean you will get a more accurate picture; because of the process of meiosis, which is how sperm and eggs are made, each sperm or egg only has half of a person’s DNA. That means that every sperm and egg is essentially unique, and does not contain every possible haplogroup that is part of a person’s autosomal DNA. So, the sperm and egg that made YOU does not have every one of your parents’ haplogroups; and if you have kids, they won’t have all of your haplogroups, either. This is why even full siblings often will not have the exact same results, because each person carries a unique combination of DNA. (Edited January 27, 2018)

    **A comment from a reader pointed out that there are problems with the use of the term Caucasian – problems, embarrassingly, that I had never considered, but which seem obvious to me after a little bit of reading and reflection. I have edited the post to replace the word Caucasian with European or white. This article by Yolanda Moses provides a compelling and succinct explanation for why we need to stop using the term. (Edited February 13, 2018)

    ***A comment from a reader pointed out a lack of clarity here, given that there is a subset of Latino and Hispanic that falls within the white European racial category. (Edited January 8, 2019)

  • Daily Reads: No Comment

    Daily Reads: No Comment

    Today’s Daily Read isn’t the most scintillating article I’ve ever read, but the information it contains is revealing and important, so I believe it is worth the quick read. Cathleen O’Grady of Arstechnica reports on two studies that looked at the influence of online comments on the effectiveness of public service announcements (PSAs). The study created mock PSAs on the safety and efficacy of vaccines – one pro-vaccine and one anti-vaccine – and paired them with anonymous comments that supported or refuted the message of the PSAs. The researchers made sure to attribute each PSA to health organizations that were perceived as credible by the study participants. In the first study, participants were more likely to have their opinions swayed by the PSA if they thought the source was credible; however, if they found the commenters to be credible they were less likely to be swayed by the PSA. In the second study, the participants were provided with general information about the commenters – e.g. one commenter was identified within the comment as a college student, another as a health care lobbyist, and a third as a medical doctor specializing in disease and vaccines. In this study, the participants were more swayed by the commenters they perceived as credible – in this case, the self-identified doctor – than they were by the PSA. This occurred regardless of whether the doctor agreed or disagreed with the PSA. As the article notes, this research is not definitive, but it points out an important weakness in how people perceive information they receive from anonymous comments – which is, how can we know that a self-identified commenter truly is the expert he or she claims to be? I think this is hugely important, and very troubling. It’s one thing to trust the credibility of an anonymous restaurant review on Yelp; it’s quite another to trust anonymous opinions on critical health and social issues.

    Don’t read the comments—they can make you mistrust real experts

  • Daily Reads: Anybody Want A Peanut?

    Daily Reads: Anybody Want A Peanut?

    Today’s Daily Read relates to the one I posted a few days ago about hygiene, but this time it’s about food allergies – specifically, peanut allergies. Rob Stein writes for NPR’s blog The Salt that children who are fed foods containing peanuts from a young age are much less likely to develop a peanut allergy by the age of 5. This mechanism may operate by training babies’ immune systems very early to recognize peanuts and thus prevent an allergic overreaction. This is superficially similar to how vaccination works, and also how the hygiene hypothesis* works – early exposure means a stronger, more resistant immune system. The article appropriately cautions that parents who haven’t already fed their young children peanuts need to proceed carefully; but it seems that starting to give peanut-containing foods between 4-12 months may just prevent peanut allergies later. I’m loving all these new studies showing that coddling kids is not actually protecting them; instead, it seems that what we think is protecting them might be making them weaker in the long run.

    Feeding Babies Foods With Peanuts Appears to Prevent Allergies

    *And here’s a bonus article about the hygiene hypothesis that relates to allergies as well – but this one proposes that using automatic dishwashers instead of letting kids do dishes the old-fashioned way might also be contributing to the uptick in allergies. Who knew that washing dishes could be good for you?

  • Daily Reads: The Barbie Vagina

    Daily Reads: The Barbie Vagina

    If the title of today’s Daily Read didn’t get your attention, then perhaps this will: “In 2013, the most recent year for which statistics are available, more than 5,000 labiaplasties were performed in the United States. That may not seem like a huge number, but it’s an astounding 44% increase over just one year prior, making labiaplasty the second fastest growing plastic surgery that year.” This fascinating statistic comes from an article on Alternet by Kali Holloway. Labiaplasty is a form of plastic surgery in which women have their inner labia – the inner lips of their vagina – cut and shaped to be more aesthetically appealing. The article attributes this to a rise in “perfect” genitalia being showcased in pornography. In recent years, both male and female porn actors have shaved and shaped their pubic areas to reveal more of their genitals, and with this trend has come an uptick in surgeries among women who perceive their vaginas as deviating from the porn standard, which values a smooth, hairless, and small-lipped vagina – the Barbie vagina. I find this fascinating for multiple reasons, not least of which is the fact that a smooth, “pure” vagina is one of the goals of female genital cutting (FGC), which is practiced in multiple places around the world. I teach about this practice in my cultural anthropology classes to help students learn about cultural relativity. Of course we find FGC to be horrifying – especially because it is associated with men’s control over women’s sexuality and behavior, and the young girls who are subjected to it are not given any choice. The cultural relativity part doesn’t mean we have to accept this practice; it just means that we need to try to understand it from the perspective of its practitioners rather than judging it from our own cultural standpoint (this is a complicated subject so I won’t go into it here; just suffice to say that exercising cultural relativity does not mean finding a practice acceptable). In any case, I’m sure I’m not the only one who sees an uncomfortable parallel with voluntary labiaplasty and FGC. In my classes, I typically juxtapose FGC with voluntary plastic surgeries such as breast implants. Now, I’ll be able to use labiaplasties as the example instead and ask my students why they are different from FGC. I’m sure it will generate some vigorous and thoughtful discussion.

    The Labiaplasty Boom: Why Are Women Desperate for the Perfect Vagina?

  • Daily Reads: Healthy Dirtiness

    Daily Reads: Healthy Dirtiness

    This article I ran across on Vox makes me very happy because it reflects something I’ve been teaching students in my classes for years: that being too clean can make you less healthy. This is especially true for children. The article discusses what is known as the hygiene hypothesis, which proposes that exposure to allergens, viruses, bacteria, etc. – in other words, a less than fully sanitized environment – strengthens children’s immune systems by allowing them to develop defenses from a young age (although I hasten to note, as the article does, that this does not mean children should not be vaccinated. In fact, vaccination operates on the same principle: that exposure to a small amount of inert virus primes the immune system to respond when that virus is encountered in the wild. So this is not an excuse to avoid vaccination in favor of deliberately infecting your kid with a disease like measles). Research is starting to show that children who are kept in environments that are too clean are more likely to develop autoimmune diseases such as asthma. I have long railed against the use of products like antibacterial soaps and household cleaning products, hand sanitizers, and antibacterial wipes partly for this reason. I jokingly recommend to my students that if they ever have children, the kids should be rolled about in a dirt pile every day – but I’m not really joking. Here’s one good takeaway from the article: “In the wealthy world, adults who clean their houses with antibacterial sprays have higher asthma rates, and people who are more often exposed to triclosan  (the active ingredient in antibacterial soap) have higher rates of allergies and hay fever. Kids who grow up on farms or have pets, meanwhile, have lower rates of allergies and asthma.” Read the entire article to learn more about how our obsession with cleanliness may be affecting our health.

    The hygiene hypothesis: How being too clean might be making us sick

  • Logical Fallacies: No True Scotsman

    Logical Fallacies: No True Scotsman

    I had planned to post a Daily Read tonight, but then I heard the news that three young Muslims had been shot to death in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, by a man who has apparently referred to himself on Facebook as an “anti-theist.” This is a radical form of atheism in which the person goes beyond just not believing in god/gods/religion; instead, anti-theism is explicitly opposed to religions of any kind. According to the several articles I have read about this, the shooting is being linked to a parking dispute between the shooter and the victims, two of whom lived in the same apartment complex as the shooter. Yet, because of the shooter’s outspoken anti-theism and various remarks on his Facebook page in which he expresses extreme antipathy towards religion, and towards fundamentalist Christians and Muslims in particular, the Chapel Hill police department is investigating these murders as a possible hate crime.

    I am an atheist. My first reaction when I read that the shooter is an anti-theist was one of dismay. Atheists love to point out that no one has ever been killed in the name of atheism, while millions of people have died in the name of various religions. Already, prominent atheists such as Richard Dawkins are publicly expressing their shock over the shootings and repudiating the notion that it is acceptable to kill someone because of their religious beliefs; at the same time, Dawkins is also tweeting about the parking dispute motive and blaming that instead. And parking may well be the proximate motive for these murders, but I really don’t think it’s smart to remove the shooter’s anti-theism from the equation. Instead, we should acknowledge it. If we don’t, then I fear we fall into the no true Scotsman fallacy. This fallacy occurs when someone makes a proposition such as “No atheist would ever kill a Muslim simply because they are Muslim.” The rejoinder would be “The shooter in Chapel Hill is an atheist who killed Muslims.” The fallacy comes with the response that “No true atheist would kill a Muslim for being Muslim.” In other words, the person attempts to preserve their original argument by saying that this person cannot be defined as an actual atheist. In the case of these murders, atheists can also make the argument that while the shooter may be an anti-theist he is also clearly mentally ill, and that is the real reason for this tragedy. It’s not quite the no true Scotsman fallacy, but it’s the same idea; that is, it proposes that anti-theism can’t truly be the shooter’s motive.

    No true Scotsman is often used in a religious context. “No true Christian would murder an abortion doctor”; “No true Muslim would blow people up in the name of Islam”; etc. But whether we want to believe it or not, some people who identify themselves as Christian do commit violence that they attempt to justify with their version of Christianity, and some people who identify themselves as Muslim do commit acts of terror in the name of their version of Islam. They are Christian. They are Muslim. Just as atheists shouldn’t fall for the no true Scotsman fallacy in the case of this anti-theist murderer, so should Christians and Muslims not fall for it when confronted with the bad things that people will do in the name of these religions. And let’s also not get bogged down in bean-counting which religion is worse – horrible things have been done in the name of many religions throughout history and in the present, whether by individuals or entire groups.

    I think the problem is that other Christians and Muslims end up getting tarred with the same broad brush when tragedies like this happen – and now the same thing is going to happen to atheists. But just as there are Christians, Muslims, and now, apparently, atheists who commit violence in the name of their beliefs, it is equally true that not every Christian, Muslim, or atheist will commit violence in the name of their beliefs – or even that they support violence by others in the name of their beliefs. We call these people extremists for a reason – because their ideologies are extreme and, by definition, they exist on the far fringes of the overall belief systems they claim to be a part of. People tend to tack from the no true Scotsman fallacy on the one hand when the violence is done in the name of their particular religion, to the equally fallacious conclusion that if one Muslim/Christian/atheist is violent they must all be violent on the other hand.

    Personally, I think this shooter very likely is mentally ill. I also think he probably was motivated by a parking dispute – but it’s arguable that the dispute itself may not have existed had his neighbors not been clearly identifiable as Muslim based on the attire of the female victims. I also think it’s likely that mental illness is the culprit for lots of other allegedly religious-motivated crimes, particularly when they are perpetrated by individuals acting alone (and for the record, I don’t think mental illness is involved in the case of organized religious violence a la ISIS or the Lord’s Resistance Army). But let’s not dismiss the man’s anti-theism as irrelevant. If the shooter was motivated by his beliefs then it’s better to acknowledge it than to look silly by trying to deny it. Just as Muslim community leaders speak out to condemn violence perpetrated in the name of Islam, it’s smart for atheists to condemn this shooting, even if mental illness and/or a parking dispute is truly the culprit. No true atheist should do otherwise.