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Comment by graemep | Hacker News Reader

Are they consistent across time and cultures? Are they corrected for differences in health, education, culture, wealth, etc? How big are racial differences compared to differences between people from different social classes?

How do you define racial groups? its something that constantly shifts. I have an encyclopedia for the 1950s that defines South Asians as "Caucasoid" which is not how most people now think.

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You can do a dimensionality reduction on genetic variants and certain recognisable groups fall pretty clearly out of the data.

Do those groups relate closely to what people generally mean by race? Race as defined in which culture? I know from personal experience that its not the same definitions across cultures. How big are those differences compared to differences within racial groups?

Take a look yourself.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Principa...

Obviously some racial groups which are heavily socially constructed are not borne out by the data. There's no cluster for 'Latinos'. But in general I think there is quite a high correspondence with race as it is constructed in society and culture.

So on that graph, the distance between East and West Africans is about as great as the distance between Indians and Europeans. Somalis are closer to East Asians than they are to Southern African Khoisan people. Bedouin Arabs and Southern Europeans are closer to each other than either are to North Africans or Northern Europeans.

There are certainly some cases where the genetic data matches conventional thinking about race, but also many where they flatly contradict. It also suggests that saying something like "white people are genetically smarter on average than black people" is highly suspect. The group of people that we call "black" has a greater range of genetic profiles than the rest of the world put together, and the group we call "white" is kind of confused—to be genetically meaningful it would probably need to either include North Africans and Arabs or exclude Southern Europeans.

The social "white race" (declared superior to other "races" to rationalize and justify the UK empire parasitation on a half of the world) corresponds with the northwestern european genetic cluster (with the exclusion of the Irish who were conquered by the UK and not considered white despite being the least pigmented population in the world). The intra european clusters are an ultra fine genetic resolution analysis. The genes that in todays population correlate with high IQ spread from ~2000bc likely with the Iran-neolithic genetic component.

There is more genetic diversity among Africans than among all of the non-African groups. And yet I haven't seen a racial typology that didn't lump all of the Africans into one race, very often while they're trying to declare differences between people in the same European cluster.

Where are South and SE Asians on that?

Looking at this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_variation#/media...

It looks as though there are two rough clusters, Africans and everyone else, with Europeans and Middle Easterners in the intersection. Pretty much reflecting geography.

> Take a look yourself.

> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Principa...

Is there a reason you're sharing a random uploaded file instead of a "vetted" actual Wikipedia article?

Is there any reason to think this is from a real or valid scientific study?

Well, one way of looking at it is, asking: to what extent does biological population correlate with self-identified race. The answer is, very much so.

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