DNA and prejudice
- From: Lance <LanceGary@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:35:43 -0000
NYT
November 11, 2007
The DNA Age
In DNA Era, New Worries About Prejudice
By AMY HARMON
When scientists first decoded the human genome in 2000, they were
quick to portray it as proof of humankind's remarkable similarity. The
DNA of any two people, they emphasized, is at least 99 percent
identical.
But new research is exploring the remaining fraction to explain
differences between people of different continental origins.
Scientists, for instance, have recently identified small changes in
DNA that account for the pale skin of Europeans, the tendency of
Asians to sweat less and West Africans' resistance to certain
diseases.
At the same time, genetic information is slipping out of the
laboratory and into everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable
message that people of different races have different DNA. Ancestry
tests tell customers what percentage of their genes are from Asia,
Europe, Africa and the Americas. The heart-disease drug BiDil is
marketed exclusively to African-Americans, who seem genetically
predisposed to respond to it. Jews are offered prenatal tests for
genetic disorders rarely found in other ethnic groups.
Such developments are providing some of the first tangible benefits of
the genetic revolution. Yet some social critics fear they may also be
giving long-discredited racial prejudices a new potency. The notion
that race is more than skin deep, they fear, could undermine
principles of equal treatment and opportunity that have relied on the
presumption that we are all fundamentally equal.
"We are living through an era of the ascendance of biology, and we
have to be very careful," said Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the
W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research
at Harvard University. "We will all be walking a fine line between
using biology and allowing it to be abused."
Certain superficial traits like skin pigmentation have long been
presumed to be genetic. But the ability to pinpoint their DNA source
makes the link between genes and race more palpable. And on mainstream
blogs, in college classrooms and among the growing community of
ancestry test-takers, it is prompting the question of whether more
profound differences may also be attributed to DNA.
Nonscientists are already beginning to stitch together highly
speculative conclusions about the historically charged subject of race
and intelligence from the new biological data. Last month, a blogger
in Manhattan described a recently published study that linked several
snippets of DNA to high I.Q. An online genetic database used by
medical researchers, he told readers, showed that two of the snippets
were found more often in Europeans and Asians than in Africans.
No matter that the link between I.Q. and those particular bits of DNA
was unconfirmed, or that other high I.Q. snippets are more common in
Africans, or that hundreds or thousands of others may also affect
intelligence, or that their combined influence might be dwarfed by
environmental factors. Just the existence of such genetic differences
between races, proclaimed the author of the Half Sigma blog, a 40-year-
old software developer, means "the egalitarian theory," that all races
are equal, "is proven false."
Though few of the bits of human genetic code that vary between
individuals have yet to be tied to physical or behavioral traits,
scientists have found that roughly 10 percent of them are more common
in certain continental groups and can be used to distinguish people of
different races. They say that studying the differences, which arose
during the tens of thousands of years that human populations evolved
on separate continents after their ancestors dispersed from humanity's
birthplace in East Africa, is crucial to mapping the genetic basis for
disease.
But many geneticists, wary of fueling discrimination and worried that
speaking openly about race could endanger support for their research,
are loath to discuss the social implications of their findings. Still,
some acknowledge that as their data and methods are extended to
nonmedical traits, the field is at what one leading researcher
recently called "a very delicate time, and a dangerous time."
"There are clear differences between people of different continental
ancestries," said Marcus W. Feldman, a professor of biological
sciences at Stanford University. "It's not there yet for things like
I.Q., but I can see it coming. And it has the potential to spark a new
era of racism if we do not start explaining it better."
Dr. Feldman said any finding on intelligence was likely to be
exceedingly hard to pin down. But given that some may emerge, he said
he wanted to create "ready response teams" of geneticists to put such
socially fraught discoveries in perspective.
The authority that DNA has earned through its use in freeing falsely
convicted inmates, preventing disease and reconstructing family ties
leads people to wrongly elevate genetics over other explanations for
differences between groups.
"I've spent the last 10 years of my life researching how much genetic
variability there is between populations," said Dr. David Altshuler,
director of the Program in Medical and Population Genetics at the
Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass. "But living in America, it is so
clear that the economic and social and educational differences have so
much more influence than genes. People just somehow fixate on
genetics, even if the influence is very small."
But on the Half Sigma blog and elsewhere, the conversation is already
flashing forward to what might happen if genetically encoded racial
differences in socially desirable - or undesirable - traits are
identified.
"If I were to believe the 'facts' in this post, what should I do?" one
reader responded on Half Sigma. "Should I advocate discrimination
against blacks because they are less smart? Should I not hire them to
my company because odds are I could find a smarter white person? Stop
trying to prove that one group of people are genetically inferior to
your group. Just stop."
Renata McGriff, 52, a health care consultant who had been encouraging
black clients to volunteer genetic information to scientists, said she
and other African-Americans have lately been discussing "opting out of
genetic research until it's clear we're not going to use science to
validate prejudices."
"I don't want the children in my family to be born thinking they are
less than someone else based on their DNA," added Ms. McGriff, of
Manhattan.
Such discussions are among thousands that followed the geneticist
James D. Watson's assertion last month that Africans are innately less
intelligent than other races. Dr. Watson, a Nobel Prize winner,
subsequently apologized and quit his post at the Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory on Long Island.
But the incident has added to uneasiness about whether society is
prepared to handle the consequences of science that may eventually
reveal appreciable differences between races in the genes that
influence socially important traits.
New genetic information, some liberal critics say, could become the
latest rallying point for a conservative political camp that objects
to social policies like affirmative action, as happened with "The Bell
Curve," the controversial 1994 book that examined the relationship
between race and I.Q.
Yet even some self-described liberals argue that accepting that there
may be genetic differences between races is important in preparing to
address them politically.
"Let's say the genetic data says we'll have to spend two times as much
for every black child to close the achievement gap," said Jason
Malloy, 28, an artist in Madison, Wis., who wrote a defense of Dr.
Watson for the widely read science blog Gene Expression. Society, he
said, would need to consider how individuals "can be given educational
and occupational opportunities that work best for their unique talents
and limitations."
Others hope that the genetic data may overturn preconceived notions of
racial superiority by, for example, showing that Africans are innately
more intelligent than other groups. But either way, the increased
outpouring of conversation on the normally taboo subject of race and
genetics has prompted some to suggest that innate differences should
be accepted but, at some level, ignored.
"Regardless of any such genetic variation, it is our moral duty to
treat all as equal before God and before the law," Perry Clark, 44,
wrote on a New York Times blog. It is not necessary, argued Dr. Clark,
a retired neonatologist in Leawood, Kan., who is white, to maintain
the pretense that inborn racial differences do not exist.
"When was the last time a nonblack sprinter won the Olympic 100
meters?" he asked.
"To say that such differences aren't real," Dr. Clark later said in an
interview, "is to stick your head in the sand and go blah blah blah
blah blah until the band marches by."
Race, many sociologists and anthropologists have argued for decades,
is a social invention historically used to justify prejudice and
persecution. But when Samuel M. Richards gave his students at
Pennsylvania State University genetic ancestry tests to establish the
imprecision of socially constructed racial categories, he found the
exercise reinforced them instead.
One white-skinned student, told she was 9 percent West African, went
to a Kwanzaa celebration, for instance, but would not dream of going
to an Asian cultural event because her DNA did not match, Dr. Richards
said. Preconceived notions of race seemed all the more authentic when
quantified by DNA.
"Before, it was, 'I'm white because I have white skin and grew up in
white culture,' " Dr. Richards said. "Now it's, 'I really know I'm
white, so white is this big neon sign hanging over my head.' It's
like, oh, no, come on. That wasn't the point."
.
- Prev by Date: Re: Happiness as a government policy
- Next by Date: Re: Happiness as a government policy
- Previous by thread: Stone age feminism?
- Next by thread: Absence of contagious yawning in children with autism spectrum disorder
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
