Hi. I did my master's in computational biology focusing on androgen independent prostate cancer. After that I worked in an autoimmunology lab. My projects included rheumatoid arthritis GWAS and b-cell phylogeny. To demonstrate that we did case-control matching correctly, I looked at how well self-reported ancestry corresponds to hapmap populations. The mapping is very noisy. "Race" is a social classification, sure it's correlated with biological markers but there are better measures. So, yeah, "race" as such isn't important.
I don't follow the conclusion that you're trying to draw. It sounds like you're saying that people do not self-report their own ancestry accurately better than chance.
On the surface of it this sounds absurd, because (unless adopted) people do not determine their ancestry by looking at photos of themselves. I can see getting proximal affiliations wrong, confusing or missidentifying oneself as being half Italian when they're actually half Iberian, or or confusing turkic ancestry with Persian. But I don't think people are going to not know whether they are primarily of say East asian, african, or european ancestry.
"Race" is a social construct. We assign "race" based on physical and cultural traits, not genetic. We back into the relationship of "race" and "genetics".
You could easily have a genetic predisposition to prostate cancer without being a certain race, even though that "race" may have a higher propensity for that genetic trait.
>We assign "race" based on physical and cultural traits, not genetic.
Not really, everyone knows that an albino African is still an African. Physical traits are just the most visible aspect of genetics. And your second point is just explaining outliers, it doesn't say anything.
Race is entirely a social construct. You can't do a genetic test and with certainty determine someone's race. Certain genetic traits are common among what we call races, but not exclusive.
Take a look at services like 23andMe or other services, the genetic components of race are entirely based on self-reporting, that is, we call certain genes "Asian" because people who identify as Asian had those.
Suppose you are looking at a 52 card deck, and members of each of the four “shapes” self-identify (with some random noise, and maybe even systematic deviations — like sevens and aces are identified differently from just their shape, etc) as different “suits”.
The pairing between shapes & suits will of course be tautological because the names of the suits are cultural artifacts, but the shapes would still be distinct regardless.
> Race is entirely a social construct. You can't do a genetic test and with certainty determine someone's race. Certain genetic traits are common among what we call races, but not exclusive.
This seems confusing and contradictory. If traits are common in certain groups and not in others (needn’t be exclusive), then by Bayes rule these traits should identify groups with high probability (especially when combining multiple traits)
But genetic testing doesn't identify groups with high probability, because the overlap is so high. And it often misidentifies racial groups because of that.
Tell that to prostate cancer researchers.
To say race "isn't important" is completely ignorant.