race is in the eye of the beholder
Dec. 16th, 2002 07:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
novapsycheRace Not Reflected in Genes, Study Finds
The idea of race is not reflected in a person's genes, Brazilian researchers said on Monday, confirming what scientists have long said -- that race has no meaning genetically.
The Brazilian researchers looked at one of the most racially mixed populations in the world for their study, which found there is no way to look at someone's genes and determine his or her race. Brazilians include people of European, African and Indian, or Amerindian, descent.
"There is wide agreement among anthropologists and human geneticists that, from a biological standpoint, human races do not exist," Sergio Pena and colleagues at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerias in Brazil and the University of Porto in Portugal wrote in their report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Yet races do exist as social constructs," they said.
They found 10 gene variations that could reliably tell apart, genetically, 20 men from northern Portugal and 20 men from Sao Tome island on the west coast of Africa.
But the genetic differences did not have anything to do with physical characteristics such as skin or hair color, the researchers found.
[...] "In essence our data indicate that, in Brazil as a whole, color is a weak predictor of African ancestry," they concluded.
"Our study makes clear the hazards of equating color or race with geographical ancestry and using interchangeably terms such as white, Caucasian and European on one hand, and black, Negro or African on the other, as is often done in scientific and medical literature."
The idea of race is not reflected in a person's genes, Brazilian researchers said on Monday, confirming what scientists have long said -- that race has no meaning genetically.
The Brazilian researchers looked at one of the most racially mixed populations in the world for their study, which found there is no way to look at someone's genes and determine his or her race. Brazilians include people of European, African and Indian, or Amerindian, descent.
"There is wide agreement among anthropologists and human geneticists that, from a biological standpoint, human races do not exist," Sergio Pena and colleagues at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerias in Brazil and the University of Porto in Portugal wrote in their report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Yet races do exist as social constructs," they said.
They found 10 gene variations that could reliably tell apart, genetically, 20 men from northern Portugal and 20 men from Sao Tome island on the west coast of Africa.
But the genetic differences did not have anything to do with physical characteristics such as skin or hair color, the researchers found.
[...] "In essence our data indicate that, in Brazil as a whole, color is a weak predictor of African ancestry," they concluded.
"Our study makes clear the hazards of equating color or race with geographical ancestry and using interchangeably terms such as white, Caucasian and European on one hand, and black, Negro or African on the other, as is often done in scientific and medical literature."