RE: Race and IQ, The Alt-Right, and the Post-Racial future of humaity
"To those who promote this argument, I say breeds of dogs are just different appearances of dogs, but that there are no inherent character differences or temperament differences between breeds."
There are lots of behavioral and medical consequences of genetics. Border Collies are a little OCD; German Shepherds have hip problems at higher rates than other breeds.
http://www.instituteofcaninebiology.org/genetic-disorders-by-breed.html
In humans, northern Europeans get cystic fibrosis at higher rates, Ashkenazic Jews carry the Tay-Sachs disorder at higher rates, and people of African descent are more likely to have sickle-cell. Those are single-gene disorders, which are relatively easy to explain through mutation and historical accidents, like a particular population living with malaria, which selects against "normal" hemoglobin genes.
Intelligence is different. It involves tens of thousands of genes, expressed in complicated patterns all over the brain. The effects of any one are usually quite small. And unlike the sickle-cell gene, intelligence as a trait is useful in many many situations, so that pretty much any environment that we live in as humans (except maybe a super-isolated island) requires that we be as smart as the other humans we're competing against.
https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2013/04/15/genetic-expression-in-the-human-brain-the-challenge-of-large-numbers/
No one said genetics aren't real or that there a aren't differences between ethnicities, families, individuals. None of that has anything to do with race or breed though. Dog breeds only exist because humans selected them. Certain mutations may be more common in certain breeds, but certain dogs are more likely to have genetic disorders so there is no real necessity to use the breed categories. A dog from a certain family of dogs is going to have a certain probability of inheriting some genetic disease but the breeds were made up by pet owners to identify the dogs visually. This doesn't provide you with a high enough degree of accuracy to predict the genetics of an individual dog, so while you might be able to say that a certain disease is more common in certain breeds, it doesn't really say very much. It's also true that in human beings, giant humans are more likely to have a genetic disorder which caused them to grow so much due to a tumor in the pituitary gland.
We don't say these giant humans are a breed of humans, but if we mated these giants together then eventually over time these humans would all be giants, and would inherit the same disease. But we don't currently consider giant humans to be a "race" or a "breed", so why is that? Robert Pershing Wadlow and Andre the Giant had the same exact disease, and both were not ordinary in size. What constitutes a breed or a race other than some arbitrary set of traits which some humans determined constitutes a breed or a race?
No doubt this is true but this speaks to ethnicity not race. African tribes share genes because of the fact that over thousands of years many families lived in the same location and share the same ancestors. European tribes share the same genes for a similar reason. Gene pools are geographically distributed but race has nothing to do with geography or genetics.
For example, an African immigrant who just arrived from Africa might not be genetically similar to a black American. Why is that? The black American has been in America for much longer, may have mixed with Native American, or European or many different races, and now has genetic vulnerabilities distinct to Americans. What I mean to say is that American is a gene pool of it's own, just as African is a gene pool of it's own, and European is a gene pool of it's own, and it goes down to geography where certain states, countries, etc, might have different mating patterns and gene pools.
For this reason, and because of constant migration, race based medicine is not going to ever be as accurate as individualized medicine. The only way to know if a black person has sickle cell is to check for it individually. Just looking at them and assuming based on some probability that they might have it is not 100% accurate while if you treat each patient individually it is 100% accurate. So for this reason race isn't scientifically useful and at best only provides a rough estimate. You can for example determine that certain diseases are more common to certain races based on the fact that most black people live in Africa, or most white people live in Europe, or most ancestors share certain genes, but as people migrate away from Europe or Africa into other places, this becomes harder to predict.
For example, Barack Obama is half African, so there is a probability that he is lactose intolerant and has sickle cell, but this isn't something we can just assume. To know with 100% accuracy we have to test his genetics individually. Why? Because while he is black, it doesn't mean his genes are all from Africa. Even in the case where his genes all were from Africa it wouldn't mean his genes were all from the tribes which have that disease or which lack the mutation to digest milk.
In summary I agree with most of what you say. Single gene mutations can be found and in certain ethnicities certain diseases are common. My point is race doesn't tell us anything scientifically useful because it's a limit on the accuracy which doesn't exist if you treat each patient individually.
References
Even personalized medicine will rely heavily on statistical relationships, just hopefully a little more nuanced than the crude racial generalizations you criticized above. How do these two genes usually interact in this context? How have other people with similar gene sequences (no two people are identical) responded to this drug or this vaccine in the past? Even the same body will respond differently at different times (as one of my relatives' ongoing struggle with her thyroid medicine shows).
There are some really cool advances. Aleksander Skarsgard's "body on a chip" models
https://steemit.com/science/@plotbot2015/tedx-guilford-college
are grown from the patient's own cells. Still, those are only predictive models in controlled lab conditions. They won't catch everything.
Science grows out of folklore, and is a refinement of folklore. The cutting edge is not magically sharp the way a lot of people imagine. It's fuzzy and fractal, as people struggle, one fact at a time, to determine what is true and what is not.
Most doctors do not get a lot of training in Bayesian statistics, and rely on simple heuristic rules based on their personal experience and some reading of the medical journals when they have time. Because there are statistical regularities in nature, these are often a good starting point. I agree that they are not a good stopping point, and that at least theoretically, the more information we have the better. The problem of which information is important is a hard one, though, and one that won't go away.
I am in full support of personalization and individualism. For this reason I support the concepts like personalized science, personalized education, personalized medicine. I also support individual rights.
In the past we had to use a concept like race because we didn't have super computers capable of studying each person's situation individually. Today we can do that and at some point in the future your life to some extent could be tailored to you, like education, medicine, news, entertainment. To me this is way better than doing things by race and using rough estimates.
And I agree with you, as in this post from a couple of months ago, where I disagree with Peter Turchin of Evonomics that hierarchy is inevitable, but at the same time point out that technology is not magic and that systems to support our decision-making will be difficult to build.
https://steemit.com/anarchism/@plotbot2015/heterarchy-for-seven-billion-people
If I add detail or nuance on individual points, that's just me playing wide receiver, trying to catch what you're throwing and move the ball downfield.
Science should research every pattern, every individual, every family, every breed, in order to combat biological threats and sicknesses, because each ethnicity and each family has DNA Patterns. This is the truth, we should not hide this, it should not be hidden that races have different Patterns, which influence Health, Skill, the way of living, it influences each life. If we hide this, science can't progress correctly, health and medicines improvements aren't taken seriously, neither sociology or any kind of science that studies behaviors and communities.
Sources to read:
https://www.ukessays.com/essays/sociology/ethnicity-affects-identity.php
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC348856/
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/how-your-ancestry-and-ethnicity-affect-your-health/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK24688/
https://www.ageuk.org.uk/information-advice/health-wellbeing/mind-body/staying-sharp/thinking-skills-change-with-age/genes-and-thinking-skills/
I agree that families and genes exist. I do not think race has anything to do with genetics or family. Race isn't imposed on people based on results from a genetic test. Personalized genetic testing I support and I recommend genome sequencing for anyone who can afford it. Family patterns as you call them have nothing to do with "race" because the black white binary categories are meaningless while family patterns have plenty of medical value.
For instance heart defects are known to have a genetic basis. So if it's in your family tree then you have to be very careful about heart conditions. Pistol Pete Maravich and WWE Star Jim Hellwig (Ultimate Warrior) had these sorts of conditions. But these sorts of conditions do not divide by race but by families, and are more popular in some tribes than others.
In a certain sense maybe you can say if you go to Africa and you find an ancient tribe like the San then in the case where they've mated within their tribe for a long enough period of time you may find certain genetic conditions which affect members of that tribe. This isn't so clear in the United States where people are very mixed and you cannot know who is what tribe anymore.
A Black American male in the United States cannot assume they have the same genes as the San tribe in Africa merely because they look similar. Race would classify them as the same (black) or "African American" when in reality they could have completely different gene pools. The Black American could be mixed with native American, European, and a bunch of other stuff, while only being 70 or 80% African, and even then maybe not the same kind of African as the San tribe.
Do you now see how worthless the racial categories are? They don't tell you anything about your genome except your skin and some superficial features. So if you have a life threatening condition you will not know it just by knowing your race.
In sum, ancestry and ethnicity ARE NOT race.
'We don't say these giant humans are a breed of humans, but if we mated these giants together then eventually over time these humans would all be giants, and would inherit the same disease. But we don't currently consider giant humans to be a "race" or a "breed", so why is that? '
You've hit on a really fundamental question in biology. Those two men were individual mutations within a population (most general term). When does a population become a species? By definition, when that population can no longer interbreed with other neighboring populations.
But it's a dynamic process. All human ethnicities (to use your word) can interbreed, as can all dog breeds. We call dogs, wolves, and coyotes separate species, and under normal ecological conditions they wouldn't interbreed, but they can and sometimes do (which is the exact problem of humans wanting to label transitional states in a process as separate stable things that you describe, just at a different level that most of us agree on and don't think about any more).
So yes, the pop culture use of the word race is a grossly simplified, socially constructed set of arbitrary categories, which are only loosely coupled to the seething, dynamic genetic reality. But even our species definition is kind of the same thing, only somewhat more reliable because of the condition we put on it that "they must not interbreed successfully." Nature doesn't respect our labels and boundaries.
So dog breeds are not different in kind from human ethnicities because humans directed the process. They're further along in the same dynamic process of natural selection (which often has equally arbitrary and weird outcomes) because humans sped it up. Artificial selection is just natural selection happening really fast.
Again, dam Wikipedia... Dudes, for one time, please, search on science and research websites. Preferable from the States/Public Labs, which are Mandatorely Politicaly Neutral.