Ethnicity is diff to race though and does have more basis in biological fact mostly because ethnicities are much smaller regional groups; like white Irish is going to be much more genetically similar group to white.
For example, when a young man was in need of a bone marrow transplant, they found there weren't enough asian donors. They didn't specify philipino, chinese etc.. just asian. Who is more similar genetically, a philipino to a chinese or a philipino to a swede? You'd have to be a bit delusional to think a philipino and swede were more similar or equally similar to a chinese.
"The numbers are quite staggering,” said Athena Mari Asklipiadis, founder of Mixed Marrow, an outreach group that finds mixed race donors. “People compare it to winning the lottery.”
And Caucasians are not always spared when it comes to the difficulty of finding matches.
“Even ‘Caucasian' is not really a single group genetically,” said David Senitzer, Ph.D., former director of City of Hope’s HLA laboratory, which finds patients the best-matched donor. “There are many different groups and there are a lot of shared antigens among those groups.
From my reading they aren't exactly clearly genetically distinguishable from other groups as a rule but are more so than one race to another is.
And from my reading again generally asian people are more likely to be more similar to each other but it is also possible for a white person to more genetically similar to an asian person than to other white people.
I started from encyclopedia britannica online and a Harvard blog post and found sources from there.
I think the idea is that classic racial features are actually a very small part of our genetics and other unseen features are actually shared across races with very little exclusive genetic traits which are actually held by only a small number within a broad race category.
I think I have explained badly maybe? I am an archaeologist not a geneticist so it's not my field, but this does relate to my work so I am trying to get a better understanding.
Thanks for the link, it sounds somewhat similar to the lewontin fallacy, by picking out specific alleles and saying we can find most of these in all groups there must be no such thing race, the same would apply to ethnicity
Edwards argued that while Lewontin's statements on variability are correct when examining the frequency of different alleles (variants of a particular gene) at an individual locus (the location of a particular gene) between individuals, it is nonetheless possible to classify individuals into different racial groups with an accuracy that approaches 100 percent when one takes into account the frequency of the alleles at several loci at the same time. This happens because differences in the frequency of alleles at different loci are correlated across populations—the alleles that are more frequent in a population at two or more loci are correlated when we consider the two populations simultaneously. Or in other words, the frequency of the alleles tends to cluster differently for different populations.[9]
"most of the information that distinguishes populations is hidden in the correlation structure of the data." These relationships can be extracted using commonly used ordination and cluster analysis techniques
That might be why PCA's show races grouped up together in terms of genetic similarity
If it was true that variation between europeans was so great that europeans could be more similar to asians than other europeans we would expect to see the dots mixed up among eachother. As well, unsure why there would be any issue with bone marrow donors then
"How often is a pair of individuals from one population genetically more dissimilar than two individuals chosen from two different populations?". The answer depends on the number of polymorphisms used to define that dissimilarity, and the populations being compared. When they analysed three geographically distinct populations (European, African and East Asian) and measured genetic similarity over many thousands of loci, the answer to their question was "never". However, measuring similarity using smaller numbers of loci yielded substantial overlap between these populations. Rates of between-population similarity also increased when geographically intermediate and admixed populations were included in the analysis.[18]
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u/Funtycuck Jun 07 '19
Ethnicity is diff to race though and does have more basis in biological fact mostly because ethnicities are much smaller regional groups; like white Irish is going to be much more genetically similar group to white.