Please answer the following questions and watch video below. Do not use outside source. Thank You! Assignment part 1. please watch video link, read Lewiston, Buzzfeed document. Video link . https://

Please answer the following questions and watch video below. Do not use outside source. Thank You! Assignment part 1. please watch video link, read Lewiston, Buzzfeed document. Video link . https://
Lewontin 5 Confusions About Human Races By R.C. Lewontin Published on: Jun 07, 2006 http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Lewontin/ R.C. Lewontin, Alexander Agassiz Professor Emeritus of Zoology at Harvard University, has written a number of books and articles on evolution and human variation, including Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA and The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment Over the last thirty five years a major change has taken place in our biological understanding of the concept of human “race,” largely as a consequence of an immense increase in our knowledge of human genetics. As a biological rather than a social construct, “race” has ceased to be seen as a fundamental reality characterizing the human species. Nevertheless, there appear from time to time claims that racial categories represent not arbitrary socially and historically defined groups but objective biological divisions based on genetic differences. The most recent widely noticed rebirth of such claims is an essay by Armand Marie Leroi on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times (March 14, 2005), an essay that illustrates both the classical confusions about the reality of racial categories and the more recent erroneous conclusions about the relevance of such racial identifications for medical practice. There are four facts about human variation upon which there is universal agreement. First, the human species as a whole has immense genetic variation from individual to individual. Any two unrelated human beings differ by about 3 million distinct DNA variants. Second, by far the largest amount of that variation, about 85%, is among individuals within local national or linguistic populations, within the French, within the Kikuyu, within the Japanese. There is diversity from population to population in how much genetic variation each contains, depending upon how much immigration into the population has occurred from a variety of other groups and also on the size of the population. The United States, with a very large population whose ancestors came from all over the earth including the original inhabitants of the New World, is genetically very variable whereas small populations of local Amazonian tribes are less genetically variable, although they are by no means genetically uniform. Despite the differences in amount of genetic variation within local populations, the finding that on the average 85% of all human genetic variation is within local populations has been a remarkably consistent result of independent studies carried out over twenty-five years using data from both proteins and DNA. Of the remaining 15% of human variation, between a quarter and a half is between local populations within classically defined human “races,” between the French and the Ukrainians, between the Kikuyu and the Ewe, between the Japanese and the Koreans. The remaining variation, about 6% to 10% of the total human variation is between the classically defined geographical races that we think of in an everyday sense as identified by skin color, hair form, and nose shape. This imprecision in assigning the proportion of variation assigned to differences among population within ”races” as compared to variation among “races,” arises precisely because there is no objective way to assign the various human populations to clear-cut races. Into which “race” do the Hindi and Urdu speakers of the Indian sub-continent fall? Should they be grouped with Europeans or with Asians or should a separate race be assigned to them? Are the Lapps of Finland and the Hazari of Afghanistan really Europeans or Asians? What about Indonesians and Melanesians? Different biologists have made different assignments and the number of “races” assigned by anthropologists and geneticists has varied from 3 to 30. Third, a small number of genetic traits, such as skin color, hair form, nose shape (traits for which the genes have not actually been identified) and a relatively few proteins like the Rh blood type, vary together so that many populations with very dark skin color will also have dark tightly curled hair, broad noses and a high frequency of the Rh blood type R0. Those who, like Leroi, argue for the objective reality of racial divisions claim that when such covariation is taken into account, clear-cut racial divisions will appear and that these divisions will correspond largely to the classical division of the world into Whites, Blacks, Yellows, Reds and Browns. It is indeed possible to combine the information from covarying traits into weighted averages that take account of the traits’ covariation (technically known as “principal components” of variation). When this has been done, however, the results have not borne out the claims for racial divisions. The geographical maps of principal component values constructed by Cavalli, Menozzi and Piazza in their famous The History and Geography of Human Genes show continuous variation over the whole world with no sharp boundaries and with no greater similarity occurring between Western and Eastern Europeans than between Europeans and Africans! Thus, the classically defined races do not appear from an unprejudiced description of human variation. Only the Australian Aborigines appear as a unique group. A clustering of populations that does correspond to classical continental “races” can be acheived by using a special class of non-functional DNA, microsatellites. By selecting among microsatellites, it is possible to find a set that will cluster together African populations, European populations, and Asian populations, etc. These selected microsatellite DNA markers are not typical of genes, however, but have been chosen precisely because they are “maximally informative” about group differences. Thus, they tell us what we already knew about the differences between populations of the classical “races” from skin color, face shape, and hair form. They have the added advantage of allowing us to make good estimates of the amount of intermixture that has occurred between populations as a result of migrations and conquests. The every-day socially defined geographical races do identify groups of populations that are somewhat more closely similar to each other genetically. Most important from the standpoint of the biological meaning of these racial categories, however, most human genetic variation does not show such “race” clustering. For the vast majority of human genetic variations, classical racial categories as defined by a combination of geography, skin color, nose and hair shape, an occasional blood type or selected microsatellites make no useful prediction of genetic differences. This failure of the clustering of local populations into biologically meaningful “races” based on a few clear genetic differences is not confined to the human species. Zoologists long ago gave up the category of “race” for dividing up groups of animal populations within a species, because so many of these races turned out to be based on only one or two genes so that two animals born in the same litter could belong to different “races.” In his article, Leroi is inconsistent and shifting in his notion of race. Sometimes it corresponds to the classical social definitions of major races, but elsewhere he makes “race” coincident with a small local group such as the Negritos or Inuit. In this shifting concept of “race” he goes back to the varying use of the term in the 19th century. Then people spoke of the “Scots race,” “the Irish race” and the “race of Englishmen.” Indeed “race” could stand for a family group defined by male inheritance, as in the description of the last male in a family line as “the last of his race.” This inconsistent usage arises from the fact that there is no clear criterion of how much difference between groups of genetically related individuals should correspond to the category “race.” If it had turned out that groups of related populations were clearly different in the great majority of their genes from other groups, then racial categories would be clear and unambiguous and they would have great predictive power for as yet unstudied characters. But that is not the way it has turned out, at least for the human species. The fourth and last fact about genetic differences between groups is that these differences are in the process of breaking down because of the very large amount of migration and intergroup mating that was always true episodically in the history of the human species but is now more widespread than ever. The result is that individuals identified by themselves or others as belonging to one “race,” based on the small number of visible characters used in classical race definitions, are likely to have ancestry that is a mixture of these groups, a fact that has considerable significance for the medical uses of race identification. A common claim, repeated by Leroi, is that racial categories are of considerable medical use, especially in diagnostic testing because some genetic disorders are very common in ancestral racial populations. For example sickle cell anemia is common among West Africans, who were brought as slaves to the New World, and Tay-Sachs disease is common among Ashkenazi Jews. So, it is argued, racial information can be a useful diagnostic indicator. Certainly classical “race” contains some medically relevant information in some cases, as for example “white” as opposed to “African American” if the contrast is between Finland and West Africa, but not if it is a contrast between a “white” Mediterranean and an “Asian” Indian. There is a confusion here between race and ancestry. Sickle cell anemia is in high frequency not only in West Africans but also in some “white” Middle Eastern and Indian populations. Moreover, a person with, say, one African great-grandparent, but who is identified by herself and others as “white” has a one in eight chance of inheriting a sickle-cell mutation carried by that ancestor. There are, in addition, a number of other simply inherited hemoglobin abnormalities, the thalassemias, that are in high frequency in some places in the Mediterranean (Sardinia), Arabia and southeast Asia. The highest frequency known for a thalassemia (80%) is in Nepal, but it is rare in most of Asia. The categorization of individuals simply as “white” or “Afro-American” or “Asian” will result in a failure to test for such abnormal hemoglobins because these abnormalities do not characterize the identified “race” of the patient. Even group identities below the level of the conventional races are misleading. Two of my incontrovertibly WASP grandchildren have a single Ashenazi Jewish great-grandparent and so have a one in eight chance of inheriting a Tay-Sachs abnormality carried by that ancestor. For purposes of medical testing we do not want to know whether a person is “Hispanic” but rather whether that person’s family came from a Caribbean country such as Cuba, that had a large influx of West African slaves, or one in which there was a great deal of intermixture with native American tribes as in Chile and Mexico, or one in which there was only a negligible population of non-Europeans. Racial identification simply does not do the work needed. What we ought to ask on medical questionnaires is not racial identification, but ancestry. “Do you know of any ancestors who were (Ashkenazi Jews, or from West Africa, from certain regions of the Mediterranean, from Japan)?” Once again, racial categorization is a bad predictor of biology. There has been an interesting dialectic between the notion of human races and the use of race as a general biological category. Historically, the concept of race was imported into biology, and not only the biology of the human species, from social practice. The consciousness that human beings come in distinct varieties led, in the history of biology, to the construction of “race” as a subgrouping within species. For a long time the category “race” was a standard taxonomic level. But the use of “race” in a general biological context then reinforced its application to humans. After all, lots of animal and plant species are divided into races, so why not Homo sapiens? Yet the classification of animal and plant species into named races was at all times an ill-defined and idiosyncratic practice. There was no clear criterion of what constituted a race of animals or plants that could be applied over species in general. The growing realization in the middle of the twentieth century that most species had some genetic differentiation from local population to local population led finally to the abandonment in biology of any hope that a uniform criterion of race could be constructed. Yet biologists were loathe to abandon the idea of race entirely. In an attempt to hold on to the concept while make it objective and generalizable, Th. Dobzhansky, the leading biologist in the study of the genetics of natural populations, introduced the “geographical race,” which he defined as any population that differed genetically in any way from any other population of the species. But as genetics developed and it became possible to characterize the genetic differences between individuals and populations it became apparent, that every population of every species in fact differs genetically to some degree from every other population. Thus, every population is a separate “geographic race” and it was realized that nothing was added by the racial category. The consequence of this realization was the abandonment of “race” as a biological category during the last quarter of the twentieth century, an abandonment that spread into anthropology and human biology. However, that abandonment was never complete in the case of the human species. There has been a constant pressure from social and political practice and the coincidence of racial, cultural and social class divisions reinforcing the social reality of race, to maintain “race” as a human classification. If it were admitted that the category of “race” is a purely social construct, however, it would have a weakened legitimacy. Thus, there have been repeated attempts to reassert the objective biological reality of human racial categories despite the evidence to the contrary.
Please answer the following questions and watch video below. Do not use outside source. Thank You! Assignment part 1. please watch video link, read Lewiston, Buzzfeed document. Video link . https://
Buzzfeed 4 How Not To Talk About Race And Genetics Buzzfeed contributor Buzzfeednews.com March 30, 2018 Race has long been a potent way of defining differences between human beings. But science and the categories it constructs do not operate in a political vacuum. This open letter was produced by a group of 67 scientists and researchers. The full list of signatories can be found below. In his newly published book Who We Are and How We Got Here, geneticist David Reich engages with the complex and often fraught intersections of genetics with our understandings of human differences — most prominently, race. He admirably challenges misrepresentations about race and genetics made by the likes of former New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade and Nobel Laureate James Watson. As an eminent scientist, Reich clearly has experience with the genetics side of this relationship. But his skillfulness with ancient and contemporary DNA should not be confused with a mastery of the cultural, political, and biological meanings of human groups. As a group of 67 scholars from disciplines ranging across the natural sciences, medical and population health sciences, social sciences, law, and humanities, we would like to make it clear that Reich’s understanding of “race” — most recently in a Times column warning that “it is simply no longer possible to ignore average genetic differences among ‘races’” — is seriously flawed. For centuries, race has been used as potent category to determine how differences between human beings should and should not matter. But science and the categories it constructs do not operate in a political vacuum. Population groupings become meaningful to scientists in large part because of their social and political salience — including, importantly, their power to produce and enforce hierarchies of race, sex, and class. Reich frames his argument by positing a straw man in the form of a purported orthodoxy that claims that “the average genetic differences among people grouped according to today’s racial terms are so trivial when it comes to any meaningful biological traits that those differences can be ignored.” That orthodoxy, he says, “denies the possibility of substantial biological differences among human populations” and is “anxious about any research into genetic differences among populations.” This misrepresents the many scientists and scholars who have demonstrated the scientific flaws of considering “race” a biological category. Their robust body of scholarship recognizes the existence of geographically based genetic variation in our species, but shows that such variation is not consistent with biological definitions of race. Nor does that variation map precisely onto ever changing socially defined racial groups. Reich critically misunderstands and misrepresents concerns that are central to recent critiques of how biomedical researchers — including Reich — use categories of “race” and “population.” For example, sickle cell anemia is a meaningful biological trait. In the US it is commonly (and mistakenly) identified as a “black” disease. In fact, while it does have a high prevalence in populations of people with West and Central African ancestry, it also has a high prevalence in populations from much of the Arabian Peninsula, and parts of the Mediterranean and India. This is because the genetic variant that causes sickle cell is more prevalent in people descended from parts of the world with a high incidence of malaria. “Race” has nothing to do with it. Thus, it is simply wrong to say that the higher prevalence of sickle cell trait in West African populations means that the racial category “black” is somehow genetic. The same thing goes for the people descended from West African populations whom Reich examined in his work on prostate cancer. These people may have a higher frequency of a version of a particular gene that is linked to a higher risk of prostate cancer. But lots of people not from West Africa also have this same gene. We don’t call these other people a “race” or say their “race” is relevant to their condition. Finding a high prevalence of a particular genetic variant in a group does not make that group a “race.” Human beings are 99.5% genetically identical. Of course, because the human genome has 3 billion base pairs, that means any given individual may differ from another at 15 million loci (.5% of 3 billion). Given random variation, you could genotype all Red Sox fans and all Yankees fans and find that one group has a statistically significant higher frequency of a number of particular genetic variants than the other group — perhaps even the same sort of variation that Reich found for the prostate cancer–related genes he studied. This does not mean that Red Sox fans and Yankees fans are genetically distinct races (though many might try to tell you they are). In short, there is a difference between finding genetic differences between individuals and constructing genetic differences across groups by making conscious choices about which types of group matter for your purposes. These sorts of groups do not exist “in nature.” They are made by human choice. This is not to say that such groups have no biological attributes in common. Rather, it is to say that the meaning and significance of the groups is produced through social interventions. In support of his argument for the biological relevance of race, Reich also writes about genetic differences between Northern and Southern Europeans. Again, this should not be an argument for the biological reality of race. Of course, we could go back to the early 20th century when many believed that the “industrious” Northern Teutons were a race distinct from the “slothful” Southern Europeans. Such thinking informed the creation of racially restrictive immigration laws in 1924, but we think even Reich would not consider this sort of thinking useful today. Instead, we need to recognize that meaningful patterns of genetic and biological variation exist in our species that are not racial. Reich’s claim that we need to prepare for genetic evidence of racial differences in behavior or health ignores the trajectory of modern genetics. For several decades billions of dollars have been spent trying to find such differences. The result has been a preponderance of negative findings despite intrepid efforts to collect DNA data on millions of individuals in the hope of finding even the tiniest signals of difference. To challenge Reich’s claims is not, as he would have it, to stick our heads in the sand. It is to develop a more sophisticated approach to the problem of human group categorization in the biomedical sciences. Precisely because the problems of race are complex, scientists need to engage these issues with greater care and sophistication. Geneticists should work in collaboration with their social science and humanities colleagues to make certain that their biomedical discoveries make a positive difference in health care, including the care of those studied. This is not to say that geneticists such as Reich should never use categories in their research; indeed, their work would be largely impossible without them. However, they must be careful to understand the social and historical legacies that shape the formation of these categories, and constrain their utility. Even “male” and “female,” which Reich invokes as obviously biologically meaningful, has important limitations. While these categories help us to know and care for many human beings, they hinder our capacity to know and care for the millions of human beings born into this world not clearly “sexed.’ Further, overemphasizing the importance of the X and Y chromosomes in determining sex prevent us from seeing the other parts of the genome involved in sex. While focusing on groups with a high incidence of a particular condition may help researchers identify genetic variants that might correlate to the condition, it must also be understood that all genetic contributions to physical traits, including disease, are always influenced by environmental factors. For example, an ancestral gene may not have ever contributed to disease risk in its former environment, but now does when individuals carrying it are differentially exposed to harmful environments. This raises the question of whether it is more efficacious to remove the environmental insult or alter the individual’s physiology by medical intervention (or both). Making claims about the existence of biological races won’t help answer questions about health, like how the health of racialized groups is harmed by racial discrimination — how it increases the risk of disease, the risk of exposure to environmental toxins, or the risk of inadequate and inappropriate health care. This doesn’t mean that genetic variation is unimportant; it is, but it does not follow racial lines. History has taught us the many ways that studies of human genetic variation can be misunderstood and misinterpreted: if sampling practices and historical contexts are not considered; if little attention is given to how genes, environments, and social conditions interact; and if we ignore the ways that sociocultural categories and practices shape the genetic patterns themselves. As scholars who engage with social and scientific research, we urge scientists to speak out when science is used inappropriately to make claims about human differences. The public should not cede the power to define race to scientists who themselves are not trained to understand the social contexts that shape the formation of this fraught category. Instead, we encourage geneticists to collaborate with their colleagues in the social sciences, humanities, and public health to consider more carefully how best to use racial categories in scientific research. Together, we can conduct research that will influence human lives positively. Jonathan Kahn, Alondra Nelson, Joseph L. Graves Jr., Sarah Abel, Ruha Benjamin, Sarah Blacker, Catherine Bliss, Lundy Braun, Khiara M. Bridges, Craig Calhoun, Claudia Chaufan, Nathaniel Comfort, Richard Cone, Richard Cooper, Marcy Darnovsky, Robert Desalle, Troy Duster, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Agustin Fuentes, Joan H. Fujimura, Stephanie Malia Fullerton, Duana Fullwiley, Omer Gokcumen, Alan Goodman, Monica H. Green, Erika Hagelberg, Evelynn Hammonds, Helena Hansen, John Hartigan Jr., Anthony Hatch, Torsten Heinemann, Jay Kaufman, Trica Keaton, Terence Keel, Nancy Krieger, Sheldon Krimsky, Jon Røyne Kyllingstad, Catherine Lee, Ageliki Lefkaditou, Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, Jonathan Marks, Amade M’charek, Michael Montoya, Ann Morning, Osagie K. Obasogie, Pilar N. Ossorio, Tony Platt, Robert Pollack, Aaron Panofsky, Kimani Paul-Emile, Ramya M. Rajagopalan, Rayna Rapp, Jenny Reardon, Amos Morris-Reich, Susan M. Reverby, Jennifer A. Richeson, Sarah S. Richardson, Dorothy Roberts, Wendy D. Roth, Charmaine DM Royal, Danilyn Rutherford, Janet K. Shim, Karen-Sue Taussig, Charis Thompson, France Winddance Twine, Keith Wailoo, Patricia J. Williams, Michael Yudell