[nitwit005]

A racial label doesn't tell you much of anything about their underlying ancestry or genetics. Here in the US you can easily find people who identify as white or black who have a mix of European, African and Native American ancestry.

There are people looking for genes influencing intelligence, which is a more practical thing to look for.

[Animats]

It's been tried using 23andMe genetic data for over a million people.[1] No one gene seems to have a large effect, “Yet when we analyze the combined effects of many genetic variants, taken together they can predict the length of a person’s formal education as well as demographic factors.”

[1] https://blog.23andme.com/23andme-research/massive-study-on-t...

[Nasrudith]

Well yeah - at that point you could trivially start mapping relations in those groups which to families who are advantaged materially or culturally in the sense that nine year olds usually only have access to genetics textbooks and latest papers lying around their home if their parents are genetics professors.

I am pretty sure the British royal family has distinctive combinations of genes which are of course strongly correlated with a college education!

[soyiuz]

Or, it might be evidence of systematic racism. Would it surprise you that the genetic bouquet associated with people of color would also correlate with a long history of racism, which includes poverty and denial of education?

[barry-cotter]

https://www.ias.ac.in/public/Volumes/jgen/089/04/0417-0423.p...

Comparing genetic ancestry and self-reported race/ethnicity in a multiethnic population in New York City

Self-reported race/ethnicity is frequently used in epidemiological studies to assess an individual’s background origin. How- ever, in admixed populations such as Hispanic, self-reported race/ethnicity may not accurately represent them genetically because they are admixed with European, African and Native American ancestry. We estimated the proportions of genetic admixture in an ethnically diverse population of 396 mothers and 188 of their children with 35 ancestry informative mark- ers (AIMs) using the STRUCTURE version 2.2 program. The majority of the markers showed significant deviation from Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium in our study population. In mothers self-identified as Black and White, the imputed ancestry proportions were 77.6% African and 75.1% European respectively, while the racial composition among self-identified His- panics was 29.2% European, 26.0% African, and 44.8% Native American. We also investigated the utility of AIMs by showing the improved fitness of models in paraoxanase-1 genotype–phenotype associations after incorporating AIMs; however, the im- provement was moderate at best. In summary, a minimal set of 35 AIMs is sufficient to detect population stratification and estimate the proportion of individual genetic admixture; however, the utility of these markers remains questionable.

[toasterlovin]

> A racial label doesn't tell you much of anything about their underlying ancestry or genetics.

It absolutely does, which is why medical practitioners ask for race. Different races have different susceptibility to various medical conditions, for genetic reasons (even if we don’t understand the causal mechanisms yet).

[soyiuz]

Please review your basic understanding of race as per my comments above. If you still think there are five races or whatever, you are living way in the past century.

[toomim]

Your argument is that people do not teach Race in the same way anymore. I think that your implication is that the previous way of teaching Race was wrong -- however, this very article is making the point that political activism is changing the way that people teach, and politics has certainly affected how we teach Race -- the most politically-charged topic of them all!

So when you say "you are living in the past century", that could be a compliment -- it could say that the author is not being censored or brainwashed by a political orthodoxy.

If you actually want to improve his understanding of Race, I'd suggest providing him with some data that contradicts his statements, rather than just dismissing him as old-fashioned. Because on the other side of that, it implies that you could just be getting lost in a fashion.