Also, dog breeds exist because humans have actively bred dogs to have certain traits
Selection pressure is selection pressure, whether being done by environment or by the active efforts of another species. There’s a reason why whether or not you are lactose tolerant has a lot to do with where in the world your ancestors are from, as does your likelihood of several diseases and likelihood of certain resistances/immunities, there are even certain drugs that will work better or worse for people dependent largely on where their ancestors came from. Short of doing thorough genetic testing, “race”/ethnicity is often a good-enough broad brush proxy for where a majority of your ancestors came from for a variety of purposes.
It’s really not, when you really go down into the actual numbers. Are the differences significant? yes, do they matter? most likely not. Because even if they are significant, it says nothing about their magnitude, just the likelihood that they are caused by the independent variable.
What this means is, sure, there are genetic differences that correlate significantly with common social categories of race (scientists use ethnicity, because of eugenics), due to continental size selection pressure, which is very broad and non-specific. However, this brush is actually so broad that it doesn’t contraindicate common treatment at all. An individual person could or could not be hypersensitive to nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, for example. This has been found to have some pharmacogenetic correlation with some ethnicities. But if you were to alter treatment to one ethnicity assuming that they are more likely to have this genetic difference, you would lose far more patients than you would save. Because the correlation exists, it is significant, but it’s magnitude is not very large. Instead, we have individual tests that are far more straight forward and will tell you with higher degree of certainty than ethnicity whether someone has or does not have NSAID sensitivity. There’s also no basis to decide to whom to apply this test, based on ethnicity, either. Because all and any ethnicity can have NSAID hypersensitivity. So, we just do the test to everyone and every single patient gets the question “are you allergic to any drug?” regardless of ethnicity, doctors just don’t think about ethnicity all that much if they are doing evidence based medicine and are not blatant eugenic racists. That’s is how useless of an analysis category race is in science. Genetically speaking, large masses of people are actually not that different from each other that it grants much differential treatment. You rather treat the individual.
To provide a counter-example, hydralazine and isosorbide dinitrate are combined into a single dose as a treatment specifically for black folks with heart failure (initially sold under the brand name BiDil), because the combined drug treatment in general works measurably better on black folks than white folks, to the point that the combo drug was rejected by the FDA based on initial trials (that had a majority white patient base), but was later approved specifically for for black patients because that specific pair of drugs worked enough better in that population to be approved after further trials. It’s fallen somewhat out of use as a treatment, not because it was ineffective or “racist” to approve a race-specific treatment, but because better options have been developed in the last 20 years - the drug combo remains approved specifically for heart failure in black folks, however. It’s just no longer the first choice.
common social categories of race (scientists use ethnicity, because of eugenics),
Literally, they use ethnicity because of negative political associations with race as a term, and also because from a practical standpoint ethnicity is like race, but with more narrow groupings in modern parlance (as noted in the past “race” referred to much narrower groupings, closer to how ethnicity is used now).
Also, eugenics would totally work if we weren’t terrible at deciding what “good genes” are and instead inevitably make it about something dumb like skin color and there weren’t the massive ethical issues in actually doing it.
Here’s a fun question: If you had to choose a hypothesis that would be functionally impossible to properly test because of ethical or political issues but that you strongly suspect is true, what would it be?
It works if it weren’t unethical doesn’t make the argument you think it makes.
The notion that we suck at choosing the good genes is entirely misled, even if it is just sarcasm. The final question is also morally misled because science and the notion of truth is not amoral. Science, without humans, doesn’t exist. And humans are moral beings (constrained by social and moral considerations).
Eugenics is one such field which notions cannot be true because its axioms are inherently unethical. “It works” is not an isolated amoral argument. If it needs the morals of a society to be radically altered to work, then it is not science. It is just racism in a lab coat. The case of dog breeds, for example, doesn’t support eugenics. On the contrary it dispproves it.
We have genetically altered dogs (and many other animals) by selective breeding in ways that, according to eugenics, should’ve eliminated inbreeding and genetic defects. Guess what? it hasn’t done that and actually might have made it worse. Historical analysis lead us to the idea that running wild with eugenics will always lead to genocide, regardless of which genetic traits are selected as the best, eugenics is genocide. So, it cannot be severed from its ethical considerations. Science cannot exist devoid of ethics.
Selection pressure is selection pressure, whether being done by environment or by the active efforts of another species. There’s a reason why whether or not you are lactose tolerant has a lot to do with where in the world your ancestors are from, as does your likelihood of several diseases and likelihood of certain resistances/immunities, there are even certain drugs that will work better or worse for people dependent largely on where their ancestors came from. Short of doing thorough genetic testing, “race”/ethnicity is often a good-enough broad brush proxy for where a majority of your ancestors came from for a variety of purposes.
It’s really not, when you really go down into the actual numbers. Are the differences significant? yes, do they matter? most likely not. Because even if they are significant, it says nothing about their magnitude, just the likelihood that they are caused by the independent variable.
What this means is, sure, there are genetic differences that correlate significantly with common social categories of race (scientists use ethnicity, because of eugenics), due to continental size selection pressure, which is very broad and non-specific. However, this brush is actually so broad that it doesn’t contraindicate common treatment at all. An individual person could or could not be hypersensitive to nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, for example. This has been found to have some pharmacogenetic correlation with some ethnicities. But if you were to alter treatment to one ethnicity assuming that they are more likely to have this genetic difference, you would lose far more patients than you would save. Because the correlation exists, it is significant, but it’s magnitude is not very large. Instead, we have individual tests that are far more straight forward and will tell you with higher degree of certainty than ethnicity whether someone has or does not have NSAID sensitivity. There’s also no basis to decide to whom to apply this test, based on ethnicity, either. Because all and any ethnicity can have NSAID hypersensitivity. So, we just do the test to everyone and every single patient gets the question “are you allergic to any drug?” regardless of ethnicity, doctors just don’t think about ethnicity all that much if they are doing evidence based medicine and are not blatant eugenic racists. That’s is how useless of an analysis category race is in science. Genetically speaking, large masses of people are actually not that different from each other that it grants much differential treatment. You rather treat the individual.
To provide a counter-example, hydralazine and isosorbide dinitrate are combined into a single dose as a treatment specifically for black folks with heart failure (initially sold under the brand name BiDil), because the combined drug treatment in general works measurably better on black folks than white folks, to the point that the combo drug was rejected by the FDA based on initial trials (that had a majority white patient base), but was later approved specifically for for black patients because that specific pair of drugs worked enough better in that population to be approved after further trials. It’s fallen somewhat out of use as a treatment, not because it was ineffective or “racist” to approve a race-specific treatment, but because better options have been developed in the last 20 years - the drug combo remains approved specifically for heart failure in black folks, however. It’s just no longer the first choice.
Literally, they use ethnicity because of negative political associations with race as a term, and also because from a practical standpoint ethnicity is like race, but with more narrow groupings in modern parlance (as noted in the past “race” referred to much narrower groupings, closer to how ethnicity is used now).
Also, eugenics would totally work if we weren’t terrible at deciding what “good genes” are and instead inevitably make it about something dumb like skin color and there weren’t the massive ethical issues in actually doing it.
Here’s a fun question: If you had to choose a hypothesis that would be functionally impossible to properly test because of ethical or political issues but that you strongly suspect is true, what would it be?
It works if it weren’t unethical doesn’t make the argument you think it makes.
The notion that we suck at choosing the good genes is entirely misled, even if it is just sarcasm. The final question is also morally misled because science and the notion of truth is not amoral. Science, without humans, doesn’t exist. And humans are moral beings (constrained by social and moral considerations).
Eugenics is one such field which notions cannot be true because its axioms are inherently unethical. “It works” is not an isolated amoral argument. If it needs the morals of a society to be radically altered to work, then it is not science. It is just racism in a lab coat. The case of dog breeds, for example, doesn’t support eugenics. On the contrary it dispproves it.
We have genetically altered dogs (and many other animals) by selective breeding in ways that, according to eugenics, should’ve eliminated inbreeding and genetic defects. Guess what? it hasn’t done that and actually might have made it worse. Historical analysis lead us to the idea that running wild with eugenics will always lead to genocide, regardless of which genetic traits are selected as the best, eugenics is genocide. So, it cannot be severed from its ethical considerations. Science cannot exist devoid of ethics.