We can't determine race from DNA?

College Confidential Community
1

<p>

I’m not talking “detailed”. I’m talking Caucasian, Sub-Saharan African or East Asian. We can’t determine that from DNA?</p>

2

<p>Some people argue that you can, others insist that you cannot. I suppose the answer is dependent on who you ask.</p>

3

<p>It would depend on whether you can match up the different pigmentation levels of the skin encoded in the DNA with a phenotype. So while you may not be able to determine a specific race you could determine skin color.</p>

4

<p>You could also look for specific area/population-based diseases: Tay-Sachs for Ashkenazic Jews, Familiar Mediterranean Fever for Sephardic Jews, that weird thumb-muscle-tightening thing for French Canadians, etc.</p>

5

<p>The meaning of ‘race’ itself is very debatable…For example, most blacks are descended from both people of European ancestry and people of African ancestry, yet they are considered black and not white. Based on DNA, James Watson was determined to be about a quarter ‘of African descent’ but he has always been considered white.</p>

6

<p>race is a social construct invented to keep people oppressed forever</p>

7

<p>

I agree it is probably a social construct, but the idea that it was invented to keep people oppressed forever is extremely cynical and not plausible (whether it is being used for that today or not is a different matter). More likely, people just noticed there were people of different colors and racial traits, and that rather than being all over the place, people could reasonably be grouped into a few groups, at least casually and broadly speaking. So in an attempt to describe what they observed, they came up with the concept of race.</p>

8

<p>I think the fact is that either there are no human races, or there are over hundreds of them. The neat model of three-to-five human races based mostly on skin color and on a Eurocentric point of view is mostly bunk. Most people’s idea of “racism” is nothing more than “lookism” or “facism”, where a combination of superficial features and historical precedent constitute their idea of what a race is.</p>