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Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

> The pigeonholing of heritability studies with eugenicist policy

Where does the author do this?

The author either treats it as inevitable that legitimate human biodiversity research will lead to heavy-handed eugenic policy, or pretends to do so for cheap rhetorical scoring. Try re-reading her argument without taking this causation for granted, and you'll see it doesn't hold up; she is blaming scientists -- and even claiming their science to be debunked -- for on political consequences that she is speculating their research will have.

"As I found while writing my 2019 book Superior: The Return of Race Science, geneticists today rightly treat eugenics as a laughable proposition, and the concept of biological race — the belief that humans can be subdivided into distinct groups with meaningful differences between them — as easily debunked nonsens"

Many studies cluster people with different genetic histories into groups with meaningful differences. This is important (for example) when treating people with different genetic histories for disease. AFAICT the article's author gets genetic history and social race mixed up, which does nothing to help their article's point.

Race isn't well-defined. You can't just wave it away with "uhh some PCA/STRUCTURE plot yields clusters so race is real", that's not how popgen or phylogeny works. Nor can you get away with "butbut muh genetic diseases!" when these involve only a few genes that make up a tiny fraction of one's genome. Of course modern scientists in relevant fields know this, that's why race has been discontinued as a concept even though some people (old school doctors or taxonomists or pioneer fund recipients) haven't gotten, or perhaps don't want to get the memo.

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