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Conclusions in paper

Edwards seems to say more in the paper than that individuals can be classified, namely that the difference in phenotype can be arbitrarily large so the old statistic cannot be used to draw any inference about this ("It is not true .. that two random individuals from any one group are almost as different as any two random individuals from the entire world"). Is this a correct interpretation? If so it should perhaps be expanded in the article.

Filur 12:12, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Before you consider expanding this article, would you express an opinion (below) on the question of whether a single paper than has only been cited four times is notable enough for an entire article in Misplaced Pages? Thanks. Guettarda 14:16, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

It's a fairly short paper. At some point it'd be easier just to provide a link (perhaps from the Edwards article) and allow readers to read it themselves. -Willmcw 21:34, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

I do not think the article should be about the paper, but about the fallancy. Many people (and Nature) makes the mistake of believing that because a loci to loci analysis shows that 85% of the variance is within populations groups (true) it follows that humans are more alike than dislike (undetermined). When the differences are systematic, as they are, the way genotype is mapped to phenotype will determine how much differences there will actually be. My guess is that the differences will actually be smaller than what is indicated from the loci-to-loci analysis since natural selections will push towards the same solutions, and most of the difference will be in neutral parts of the DNA. Filur 07:07, 11 July 2005 (UTC)

NPOV

I don't know anything about this paper, but any article about a paper that entirely consists of a section attacking it can't be NPOV. DJ Clayworth 14:40, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

66.214.170.174 wrote an extensive critique of Edwards with no citations. It is available in the prior versions for those who want to read it.Jim Bowery 02:15, 27 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I concur that there's a NPOV problem - the existence of this article, with this title, is non-neutral, and it should be merged into the appropriate general articles as discussed below. Danny Yee 12:48, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

Statistical methods

The statistical methods described therein are now being used in forensic analyses.. This sentence is vague. Which statistical methods? I read the article and it seems to address a different issue: determining which race a person might belong to by examining certain sections of their DNA. Can you explain this assertion better, please? Thanks, -Willmcw July 1, 2005 00:43 (UTC)

Lewotin's fallacy is so basic that virtually any synergistic use of more than one locus to do statistical inference of ancestry can be classified as the statistical method described by Edwards. The point is that there have been a very large number of peer-reviwed scientific papers that could not have been done without implicitly flying in the face of Lewontin's rhetoric and these include papers published before Lewontin's paper, such as those cited by Edwards. Perhaps there should be a better link to DNAPrint's technical use of between-loci correlation in their estimate of admixture of geographic race. Here's a quote from a stock analyst's report:

DNAPrint’s Platform Technology—SNPs and AIMs

DNAPrint genomics’ core technology encompasses proprietary gene mapping strategies and patented Ancestry Informative Markers (AIMs) developed through population-level quantitative genomics mathematical modeling. Genetic mapping is the process by which each gene locus is defined relative to another whose position is already known on the basis of the frequency of recombination (the random exchange of parts of two homologous chromosomes during meiosis) that is observed between the two loci. There are a number of relatively new methods for gene mapping as physical gene maps, which rely on cloning of genes and recognizing their effect at the cellular level, have only limited utility. Newer methods rely upon population and family studies which incorporate genetic linkage into mapping techniques.

Jim Bowery 1 July 2005 11:13 (UTC)

Thanks. I don't see the similarity - they seem to be coming at it from opposite sides. Lewontin was saying that individuals within a race are more different than races are from each other. Edwards said that if you combine many factors that a racial correlation appears. DNAPrint seems to be saying that with a couple of genetic Loci they can determine a person's race. That is not saying that that person is more like other members of his race than races in general - they only care about the few genes which make the difference, not the thousands which are shared. Is there a way that we can re-write the sentence to say what specific statistical tools DNAPrint uses that Edwards used? Otherwise I think the sentence is out of place. Cheers, -Willmcw July 1, 2005 20:25 (UTC)

The fairly generic term "cluster analysis" is probably the correct one to use. DNAPrint has found a way of doing cluster analysis using fewer loci than competitors so they can offer the service more cheaply. From Edwards' paper: "A cluster analysis will be necessary in order to uncover the groups, and a convenient criterion is again based on the analysis of variance as in the method introduced by Edwards and Cavalli-Sforza.(10) Here the preferred division into two clusters maximises the between-clusters sum of squares or, what is the same thing, minimises the sum of the within-clusters sums of squares... The entries of the half-matrix of pairwise distances will therefore divide into two groups with very little overlap, and it will be possible to identify the two clusters with a risk of misclassification which tends to zero as the number of loci increases." Jim Bowery 2 July 2005 12:57 (UTC)

Merge with Edwards

While this paper is interesting, I don't see how a single article which has been cited 7 times (ISI Web of Knowledge) really deserves an article of its own. Guettarda 2 July 2005 18:45 (UTC)

Is that all? In that case I'd agree. -Willmcw July 2, 2005 18:56 (UTC)

Well, it is only a 2003 paper so it may still have more of an impact, but it does strike me as at least premature to have a separate article on this paper.

1. Leroi AM, A family tree in every gene, JOURNAL OF GENETICS 84 (1): 3-6 APR 2005
Times Cited: 0

2. Jorgensen S, Mauricio R, Hybridization as a source of evolutionary novelty: leaf shape in a Hawaiian composite , GENETICA 123 (1-2): 171-179 FEB 2005
Times Cited: 0

3. Jorde LB, Wooding SP, Genetic variation, classification and 'race', NATURE GENETICS 36 (11): S28-S33 Suppl. S NOV 2004
Times Cited: 0

4. Mountain JL, Risch N, Assessing genetic contributions to phenotypic differences among 'racial' and 'ethnic' groups NATURE GENETICS 36 (11): S48-S53 Suppl. S NOV 2004
Times Cited: 2

5. Serre D, Paabo SP, Evidence for gradients of human genetic diversity within and among continents GENOME RESEARCH 14 (9): 1679-1685 SEP 2004
Times Cited: 8

6. Bamshad M, Wooding S, Salisbury BA, et al., Deconstructing the relationship between genetics and race , NATURE REVIEWS GENETICS 5 (8): 598-U2 AUG 2004
Times Cited: 20

7. Andreasen RO, The cladistic race concept: A defense, BIOLOGY & PHILOSOPHY 19 (3): 425-442 JUN 2004
Times Cited: 0

Guettarda 2 July 2005 19:26 (UTC)

The number of academic citations for a paper shouldn't be the sole criteria for deserving a separate article. Lewontin went over the head of his academic peers, directly to the public as well as crossing disciplinary lines via academic politics, when he promoted the idea that race as a taxonomic construct was invalid based on single locus Fst. Lewontin's position with respect to his peers regarding the "more variation within than between races" argument is very much like Gould's. Maynard Smith points out, more is at stake. Gould "is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory". This is basically the same attitude held toward Lewontin's public activism. Edwards' paper should be viewed as he says: "This article could, and perhaps should, have been written soon after 1974." He says 1974 rather than 1972, the date of Lewontin's academic paper due to the fact that 1974 was the date Lewontin went to the public with this misrepresentation of the state of evolutionary biology in his book: "The Genetic Basis for Evolutionary Change". Edwards is clearly concerned about the long-standing public miserading of the reality of racial taxonomy's solid foundations in evolutionary data and theory. The fact that his reach to the public is limited compared to Lewontin's should not be held against his paper. Jim Bowery 2 July 2005 20:54 (UTC)

But we don't judge potential importance, we report on actual impact. It's worth sticking into articles related to race, to Edwards, maybe to Lewontin...I'm not saying that the information is or isn't important, I'm just saying that, based on its impact to date (as judged by citations) I don't think we should have an article devoted to this one paper. Guettarda 2 July 2005 21:31 (UTC)

But Edwards' whole point is that his paper is not of academic importance -- his point is that this is very old news and none of Lewontin's peers took seriously, from a scientific stance, Lewontin's attack on race as a taxonomic construct. How could they? Aside from Lewontin's 1972 which merely reported single locus Fst, virtually the entire significance of Lewontin's fallacy is political rather than scientific. The real scientific importance is through the political impact on the funding of genetic research -- which is significant. So significant that virtually every honest researcher admits he has to weasel word anything he says about population structure. Jim Bowery 2 July 2005 22:11 (UTC)

This article is too opaque

The conclusion reported in this article is likely too opaque for the intended audience of Misplaced Pages. Now, ours is not the business to make an original and more accessible exposition ("explain it better") of the argument (which breaks WP:NOR and in some sense WP:NPOV), but we can build an argument on the basis of other people's expositions. Maybe we could use the following opinion piece from NYT, which does quite a good job:

Even the NY Times, that bastion of PC, is beginning to admit the truth about Lewontin’s error, albeit only in an OP-editorial. On March 14, 2005, ARMAND MARIE LEROI wrote specifically about Lewontin, in the aptly titled, A Family Tree in Every Gene:

“The error is easily illustrated. If one were asked to judge the ancestry of 100 New Yorkers, one could look at the color of their skin. That would do much to single out the Europeans, but little to distinguish the Senegalese from the Solomon Islanders. The same is true for any other feature of our bodies. The shapes of our eyes, noses and skulls; the color of our eyes and our hair; the heaviness, height and hairiness of our bodies are all, individually, poor guides to ancestry. But this is not true when the features are taken together. Certain skin colors tend to go with certain kinds of eyes, noses, skulls and bodies. When we glance at a stranger's face we use those associations to infer what continent, or even what country, he or his ancestors came from - and we usually get it right. To put it more abstractly, human physical variation is correlated; and correlations contain information.

Genetic variants that aren't written on our faces, but that can be detected only in the genome, show similar correlations. It is these correlations that Dr. Lewontin seems to have ignored. In essence, he looked at one gene at a time and failed to see races. But if many - a few hundred - variable genes are considered simultaneously, then it is very easy to do so. Indeed, a 2002 study by scientists at the University of Southern California and Stanford showed that if a sample of people from around the world are sorted by computer into five groups on the basis of genetic similarity, the groups that emerge are native to Europe, East Asia, Africa, America and Australasia - more or less the major races of traditional anthropology.”

I found it here. I'm not saying we should quote it verbatim, but it is a good enough basis for a neutrally reported explanation of why Lewontin is wrong. Arbor 8 July 2005 12:58 (UTC)

Lewontin's point is valid inasmuch as "race" is biologically something like "subspecies", and showing that within-group variance exceeds between-group variance means that you cannot separate these groups statistically. If, on the other hand, you look ar covariance (not correlation) you can create clusters. But these covariances do not necessarily represent shared ancestry. If you look at gene trees you will see that Senegalese and Europeans are more closely related to each other than either group are to Solomon Islanders. This is old fashioned (and outdated) systematics.

The second point, about the USC/Stanford study needs to be cited - if you look through the archives of Talk:Race you will see a discussion of a 2004 or 2005 paper which "upheld" race...when it actually simply upheld the fact that selected groups within races are more related than other groups. Again, this sort of "type concept" is unrealistic because it pre-selects distinct groups. If you used a random sample of the people of the world, including the Indians and the Egyptians, the Tureg, the Kazakhs...and you could still find races, then you would have evidence of race. But if you pick small homogenous samples and demonstrate that they differ from other small homogenous samples, then you are only saying that your samples are different. It is possible to separate the Welsh from the English if you look at genetics, but that doesn't mean that they are separate races. Guettarda 8 July 2005 13:44 (UTC)

Can we widen the scope?

Hm... I think this article is necessary, not so much because Edwards' argument merits it in itself, but because Lewontin's argument permeates a large part of the public debate. Lewontin's argument is important, so it merits an article. However, from that point of view, the article cannot be called Lewontin's fallacy, because that is hardly a neutral way presenting the issue. Can we find another title for this article, and the both present Lewontin's claim, chronicles its public reception, and presents Edward's counterargument? For example, Lewontin's fallacy could be a section of such an article (so we can link to it from other articles if we want).

The only problem is that we aren't to invent neologisms in Misplaced Pages. Otherwise I would call the article Lewontin's argument or Lewontin's claim. Neither term exists, so that won't work. Suggestions? Other than Lewontin's argument against taxonomic validity of races within homo sapiens based on genetic variation? Arbor 12:53, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

We have a Contemporary views on race and Validity of human races. The information in this article is already in the latter article. I could see delving into the matter in one of those articles, not starting yet another article here. Having skimmed Edwards' paper I am not even convinced that he undercuts Lewontin in any substantive way - there's no data in the paper, merely a theoretical graph. PCA is not an hypothesis-testing tool, and it can never be better than the data. What Lewontin did - picking discrete "groups" of humans - maximises between-group variation, so when he says that within-group variation exceeds between-group variation, his arguments are solid. Now if you turn around and use a classification tool on these groups ("races") you will not be drawing valid inference. For that you need to sample the whole gradient, not the end points, if you want to say that race exists. Otherwise you are looking at artificial differences. Regardless, Edwards' paper hasn't got a drop of data in it. Guettarda 13:48, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

Good points. Should we simply merge this article in the Validity article? With a separate section named Lewontin's fallacy and a redirect? Or even without a separate section? (I don't think a vote for deletion will ever suceed, so a merge seems to be the only feasible way—maybe I'm wrong.) On a side note, Edwards is merely pointing out a rather trivial misconception in Lewontin's argument (at least in the eyes of a mathematician), so he needn't present any data at all. Arbor 19:51, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

Merge 2

Again, as has been discussed before, this paper is too thin to stand on its own. A paper which has been cited 7x really isn't a big enough deal to have its own article. Since the material is already in the race article (and others), I find it hard to justify this article. If someone wants to expand this, as Arbor suggested a while ago, it should be under a more neutral title. Guettarda 13:03, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

Again, since "Lewontin's Fallacy" addresses not Lewontin's 1972 paper, but rather Lewontin's subsequent books starting in 1974, none of which were peer-reviewed, it is not reasonable to assess the importance of "Lewontin's Fallacy" by a search for academic citations. If there is an article that needs rewriting it is the article on Lewontin since it emphasizes his early academic achievements -- which were relatively unimportant in his cultural impact compared to his "politics of racial science" books. If that article is rewritten to place appropriate emphasis on those books then it might be reasonable to move this article to the article about Lewontin's real importance. Jim Bowery 15:57, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

If this paper isn't scientifically important, but is part of a popular culture debate, then that's further argument against it having its own entry. It should be merged with the various entries on the "race debate". Which can discuss Lewontin's contributions to that debate as well. (I realise that some people here are obsessed with the "race issue", but we don't want to warp various biograhical entries to place a disproportionate emphasis on that.) Danny Yee 01:12, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Its not scientifically important in the same sense that the denial that race is a valid taxonomic construct is a scientifically unimportant social fashion. Jim Bowery 02:17, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

The article isn't a priori too thin to stand on its own. It happens to be very short, but could be expanded. I don't recommend merging with race right now because I recently added ~50k of material to the race article, and it's still in need of strong editing for conciseness. It would be a mess to try to merge right now. --Rikurzhen 18:30, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

But merging with A.W.F. Edwards works. --Rikurzhen 19:22, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

I agree with the merge. Very few academic papers deserve articles of their own. -Willmcw 21:02, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

I support a merge, but not with A.W.F. Edwards. That would unbalance that entry drastically (I hardly think this paper is the culmination of Edward's life's work). A much better merge would be with validity of human races or one of the other "race debate" pages, since that debate is the context for this paper. Or maybe it could go in a stats entry like factor analysis (which might also guarantee more impartial editing). Danny Yee 01:02, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

The validity of human races article is, unfortunately, pretty crappy right now. We'd need to clean it up before we could merge in this material, else we'd just be making a bigger mess. I don't have any time for that kind of project, but I can help with the science or philosophy if someone wants to work in that. --Rikurzhen 01:24, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Merge 3 (Significance)

Pinker writes here (emphasis is mine):

In March, developmental biologist Armand Leroi published an op-ed in the New York Times rebutting the conventional wisdom that race does not exist. (The conventional wisdom is coming to be known as Lewontin's Fallacy: that because most genes may be found in all human groups, the groups don't differ at all. But patterns of correlation among genes do differ between groups, and different clusters of correlated genes correspond well to the major races labeled by common sense. )

If he is right (and I understand that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy) then the current article deserves its own page. Dawkins uses the term as well in The Ancestor's Tale. I think that's notable enough. Arbor 14:20, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

• I agree that Lewontin's fallacy deserves its own page because a number of writers other than Edwards have described it from somewhat different points of view, and different levels of technical detail. Merging it into Race would only make that poor entry even more confusing. DonSiano 16:02, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

• As a student of Lewontin's I'm not especially fond of Edwards' choice of title, but nonetheless Edwards is entirely correct. It's important to note that the scientific questions asked by Lewontin and Edwards were different. Lewontin asked "What proportion of genetic variation (in the analysis of variance sense) in humans is within and among populations?" The answer is that ca. 85% is within populations, the rest among populations and races. This is the answer Lewontin gave, and it is entirely correct. Edwards asked "Can individual humans be assigned to races from genetic data?", or, alternatively, "Can human races be diagnosed (in the taxonomic sense)?" The answer is yes, they can. Edwards shows that his answer to his question is entirely compatible with Lewontin's answer to his (i.e. Lewontin's) question. A paper by Rosenberg et al. (2002. Science 298:2381–2385) clearly illustrates for a large data set the truth of both Lewontin and Edwards' answers to their respective questions. Lewontin goes on from his finding (with which Edwards entirely agrees), to argue further that this level of difference between races is not worthy of taxonomic recognition. Edwards doesn't actually express an opinion about whether human races should be recognized taxonomically, but does show that the 85/15 division of within/among population variation is no bar to doing so. Lewontin and Edwards agree on the moral equality of human beings; Edwards just doesn't want that moral equality to depend on any contingent facts of genetic similarity. Lewontin wouldn't want it to either, but regards the high genetic similarity among human races (which is much lower among races in some other species) as empirical reinforcement for his moral conclusion.
• Parenthetically, of the two links concerning some commercial genotyping method, one was dead, and the other was to a poorly written patent application. The patent applicants do have some papers on the method in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. A reference to one or more of these might be more useful, but there are loads of such methods, and no claim by the authors of this one that it is any particular way inspired by or related to Edwards' critiques of Lewontin, so I deleted both. Also, Edwards discusses ordination more than cluster analysis, so I added that in.
• As regards the merge with A.W.F. Edwards, I wouldn't normally endorse a page for a single paper, but a merge would, as Danny Yee correctly notes, drastically imbalance that article (Edwards' signal accomplishments are in the origination of quantitative phylogenetic methods and the use of likelihood in scientific inference, not this paper), and the evidence presented here by other editors shows that the term has leaked into the general culture, so I would somewhat reluctantly endorse keeping a separate page.-- MayerG 07:10, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

.

I have taken the liberty of writing a paragraph at the end of this article trying to succinctly summarize the different questions that Lewontin and Edwards are asking, and arguing that the Fallacy is or is not a fallacy depending on what question is being asked. (I am a student of the one and an old friend of the other so I'm trying not to get partisan). I would be happy to see my paragraph modified or withdrawn depending on the reaction here. I have no immediate opinions on the merging issue. Felsenst

Oppose merger of the Edwards article and the Lewontin's Fallacy article. Edwards has been a pioneer in a wide variety of disciplines. That can and should be distinguished from his work on Lewontin's Fallacy, because the latter has taken on a life of its own in academia, genetics and popular politics and media. To ensure that Edwards' other work is given due attention, i.e., to prevent the "tail from wagging the dog", the Fallacy should be left as a stand-alone article. Lethiere 20:25, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

I agree. I've heard of Edwards on many occasions, without ever hearing of Lewontin's fallacy. Michael Hardy 21:51, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Based on Pinker's summary ("The conventional wisdom is coming to be known as Lewontin's Fallacy") and along the lines of Lethiere's above comment (" has taken on a life of its own in academia, genetics and popular politics and media") a merge seems unnecessary. Does anyone have arguments against closing the merge proposal?--Nectar 22:35, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Different questions?

I notice that Nectarflowed added a request for a reference to my assertion that "Whether or not the Fallacy is a fallacy depends on the question being asked." I have reverted this, as I don't think it needs a reference. Greg Mayer has made essentially the same point as I did in his contribution above. If you have a bunch of traits that each differ by a modest amount between two populations (say the differences of population mean are 0.1 within-population standard deviations) then with enough traits on an individual you can assign it almost unambiguously to its correct population. Does that mean the differences between the populations are "large"? It entirely depends on whether you want that statement to imply that the differences of a typical trait are large (they aren't) or you want it to imply that one can distinguish individuals from different populations using enough traits (you can). Felsenst 20:01, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

The problem is WP:NOR. I have no doubt that a reasonable argument can be made that they were asking different questions, but as far as I know, such an argument has never been published. Perhpas you or Dr. Mayer could write a response to Edwards, which we could then cite. --Rikurzhen 20:16, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

How about this one? Chakraborty, R. 1982. Allocation versus variation: The issue of genetic differences between human racial groups. American Naturalist 120: 403-404. The difference between these two ways of describing differences between groups were rather thoroughly hashed out in that journal in the late 1970s and early 1980s and don't need a new paper by Greg or me. Felsenst 21:20, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Probably good enough. --Rikurzhen 21:30, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Caricatures ... of what?

My "caricature" of Edwards's position was removed, leaving the caricature of Lewontin's position. I think we need to discuss this. If no one wants to do so, I will reinsert my caricature. If the ability to distinguish two populations by using multiple characters implies that "race is a valid taxonomic construct" and if we can distinguish Swedes and Norwegians using multiple genetic loci, why is that not relevant? Why does it mean that we don't get to call them different races? Felsenst 14:56, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

I agree with your point and the inclusion of your caricature. Let's put it back in Terry 04:43, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Misleading article.

This article does not represent the scientific consensus on this topic. What it represents is largely the agenda of the Pioneer Fund and the American Enterprise Institute. There are any number of articles published in the last 5 years that specifically refute all the claims made in this article, most especially the claim that "genetic differentiation is greatest when defined on a continental basis". It's demonstrably false.

This article was written as a sock-puppet reference for a larger argument about the validity of race in genetics. On those grounds it should be rewritten or deleted, since its scope is both narrow and crafted with intention to deceive.

Insofar as this article is a synthesis of cherry-picked racist sources, it also qualifies as original research, and it should be deleted entirely. --76.222.55.170 (talk) 08:12, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

The original motivation behind the article may be as you say (I don't know). But your summary exaggerates. The fourth paragraph, about whether or not there is a fallacy, is mine except for the last sentence, and is aimed at countering the idea that "race" has some special status as a level of human differentiation. Felsenst (talk) 13:36, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm wondering about the statement "If, on the other hand, "real differences" are considered to exist when individuals can be accurately classified using a number of traits, then human races are distinct." I'm concerned with the claim about "races" being distinct if Lewontin's observations is a fallacy. Generally Edwards' classification strategy doesn't address Lewontins claim about "race". Edwards states that using his scheme it is possible to classify groups of people into what are sometimes called "ancestral groups" and sometimes called "clusters". Witherspoon's 2007 paper addresses Lewontin's observation to a greater extent because it specifically addresses the problem about inter individual difference. Lewontin's claim, as I remember it, was that if ~85% of genetic variation is distributed within grup, then any pair of individuals from different groups are almost as likely to be more similar to each other than any pair of individuals from a different group, he uses this observation to say that "biological race" is meaningless and that classification of people into "races" is therefore fruitless. Edwards does not address this observation. Edwards is really saying that most individuals in a population are more genetically similar to their own population "average" genetic type than they are to the "average" genetic type for a different population when many loci are considered. Witherspoon directly addresses Lewontin's claim and finds support for Lewontin's it. In the end it's not really about "race". The paper cited in the article by, Wilson et al. (2001) also makes the point that "Our implementation of STRUCTURE is primarily meant to show that familiar ethnic labels are not accurate guides to genetic structure. We have not attempted to provide a definitive description of human population structure. The results of STRUCTURE can, in fact, be quite difficult to interpret." The best set of papers to discuss if "race" is the issue are those by Noah Rosenberg and the various responses to his publications. Most importantly when we look at Rosenberg's data (I included a picture of the results of one of his clustering analyses on this talk page) it is apparent that most individuals actually belong to many "clusters" at the same time. This must lead us to conclude that, if we consider each "cluster" to actually represents something historically valid in human genetic history (such as an ancestral group), or if you like, if each cluster is a "race", then the majority of individuals are "multiracial". In response to Rosenberg's 2002 paper (that was actually cited in the NYTimes, of all places, as "proving" that there are 5 "races"), Serre and Pääbo (2004) pointed out that membership of many "clusters" can be taken as evidence for clinality in human population structure, and in response Rosenberg in 2005 actually agreed: "Serre and Pääbo argue that human genetic diversity consists of clines of variation in allele frequencies. We agree and had commented on this issue in our original paper." and go on to say that clustering analyses should not be used to infer the existence of "biological race": "Our evidence for clustering should not be taken as evidence of our support of any particular concept of “biological race.” In general, representations of human genetic diversity are evaluated based on their ability to facilitate further research into such topics as human evolutionary history and the identification of medically important genotypes that vary in frequency across populations.... The arguments about the existence or nonexistence of “biological races” in the absence of a specific context are largely orthogonal to the question of scientific utility, and they should not obscure the fact that, ultimately, the primary goals for studies of genetic variation in humans are to make inferences about human evolutionary history, human biology, and the genetic causes of disease." We need to reflect the fact that Edwards's paper is a theoretical paper, he wrote it without knowing specifically what the results for large scale clustering analyses might be. There seems to be a growing body of evidence that clustering analyses don't tell us the whole story, and that they certainly don't provide anything like evidence for the existence of "races". Rosenberg's more recent papers support the observation made in the article that clusters are highly dependent upon sampling strategy. For example in their 2002 paper Rosenberg found 6 clusters for the populations that they had samples for (52 populations I believe), with only a couple of sample populations from the northern Indian subcontinent. But when they add a great deal more samples from the Indian subcontinental peninsula, they suddenly get an extra cluster popping up for the Indian population. The peoples from northern India that been primarily been in the same "cluster" as Europeans etc in their original 2002 paper, but now they have significant membership of this new Indian cluster. Rosenberg's lab has more recently produced a paper that includes a great deal more population samples from the Americas, and that paper produces different clusters again, though unfortunately they don't include the extra Indian subcontinental samples in this. Clearly clustering analyses are highly influenced by sampling strategy and the only way to address this is to sample by geography and not by "ethnic group", but that's what anthropologists like Jonathan Marks have said all along. In the end the problem is not about the existence or nonexistence of "race", but whether self reported ancestry is a good way to assess medical risk. The jury is still out, but there is more and more evidence that "races" is certainly not a good measure of genetic homogeneity. Alun (talk) 12:30, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

removed pov edit

I removed this obviously pov edit. It takes a single sentence out of context and presents it as if it the conclusion of Witherspoon's paper. Actually if one looks at what Witherspoon says in context then it is more apparent that he is making the opposite point to this pov-edit, indeed the whole thrust of the paper is to show that accurate classification is misleading with regards to genetic similarities between individuals. However, if genetic similarity is measured over many thousands of loci, the answer becomes ‘‘never’’ when individuals are sampled from geographically separated populations. On the other hand, if the entire world population were analyzed, the inclusion of many closely related and admixed populations would increase v. This is illustrated by the fact that v and the classification error rates, CC and CT, all remain greater than zero when such populations are analyzed, despite the use of .10,000 polymorphisms (Table 1, microarray data set; Figure 2D). In a similar vein, Romualdi et al. (2002) and Serre and Paabo (2004) have suggested that highly accurate classification of individuals from continuously sampled (and therefore closely related) populations may be impossible. However, those studies lacked the statistical power required to answer that question (see Rosenberg et al. 2005). Omitted text in bold. I mean come on, this sort of thing is totally unacceptable. Alun (talk) 20:19, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

It's not a POV edit, and I certainly did not try to represent it as THE conclusion of the paper. In the quote I added it is said explicitly that the result holds only "when individuals are sampled from geographically separated populations". Implicitly it's clear from this quote that if the individuals in question are from geographically close populations the result is different. However, if you feel that it is POV, I have nothing against quoting the entire thing. It may be wiser to use a shorter paraphrase though.

In any case, the section on the Witherspoon et al. paper is definitely POV if the stuff I quoted is not included. In its current form the section suggests that even when "the most distinct populations" are considered, individuals are frequently more similar to members of other populations than to members of their own population, which is contradicted by the paper's finding that all members of two geographically separated populations are more similar to anybody in their own population than anybody in the other population if enough markers are used.

--Victor Chmara (talk) 19:52, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Actually your claim that "the section on the Witherspoon et al. paper is definitely POV if the stuff I quoted is not included" because "is contradicted by the paper's finding that all members of two geographically separated populations are more similar to anybody in their own population than anybody in the other population" is incorrect. Look at the article again and look at what Witherspoon et al. actually say, Witherspoon et al. do not say that "all members of two geographically separated populations are more similar to anybody in their own population than anybody in the other population", that's wrong. What the Witherspoon et al. paper says is that members of geographically separated populations are always more similar to members of their own population than they are to members of another population if enough loci are used to discriminate them, but that this observation only applies to very extreme populations, i.e. Africa, Europe and East Asia: "Thus the answer to the question 'How often is a pair of individuals from one population genetically more dissimilar than two individuals chosen from two different populations?' depends on the number of polymorphisms used to define that dissimilarity and the populations being compared." Actually the section you appear to be objecting to as "pov" is Witherspoon et al.s primary conclusion, i.e. that when hundreds of loci are used then even individuals in the most geographically separated populations can be more similar to members of another population than to members of their own population. But Witherspoon uses samples from only three extremely distant regions for these geographically separated populations, sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and Europe. Even for these three regions it is apparent that it is impossible to classify accurately even with 10,000 loci, (fig 2E), which is why he concludes that for these three distinct populations it is possible, but only for "many thousands" of loci. But Witherspoon's most important point is that to accurately classify humans on a global scale requires sampling from much more than the geographic extremes, it requires sampling from all regions, i.e. it requires continuous sampling, and that this will make it impossible for any individual to always be more similar to someone from their own population than to someone from a different population "On the other hand, if the entire world population were analyzed, the inclusion of many closely related and admixed populations would increase ${\displaystyle {\hat {w}}}$." This is because for three populations we are comparing say an European with another European and an European with an East Asian or a sub-Saharan African, but the inclusion of many populations from lots of regions will not only increase the number of samples, it will increase the number of genetically intermediate populations. So instead of the question being "how often is an European more similar to an African or an East Asian than to another European?" the question becomes "how often is an European more similar to a Middle Eastern person, or a North African person, or a central Asian person or an Indian person, or a Far Eastern person, or a Native Australian person, or a Native American person (etc. etc.) than to another European person?" This will dramatically increase ${\displaystyle {\hat {w}}}$. This becomes even more tricky when a Middle eastern person might be say a Turk, but the European person is say Greek. This observation directly contradicts what Edwards claims because Edwards claims that "It is not true that 'racial classification is .. . of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance'. It is not true, as Nature claimed, that 'two random individuals from any one group are almost as different as any two random individuals from the entire world', and it is not true, as the New Scientist claimed, that 'two individuals are different because they are individuals, not because they belong to different races' and that 'you can’t predict someone’s race by their genes.'" When we use primary sources to cite information on Misplaced Pages we need to be very careful, and we're urged to be vigilant when we do. When we do cite these sources we need to pay attention to their general conclusions and not get bogged down too much with specifics. Witherspoon et al. paper seeks to address the apparently contradictory observations that when we can use multiple loci to classify individuals very accurately, but that individuals are still more often more similar to members of a different group than they are to members of their own group. Witherspoon et al. provide the observation that inter-individual differences are masked by population level traits, and that this is due to the high level of inter-individual variation within all human populations. To put it another way, even those members of the same "cluster" are not always more genetically similar to each other than they are to members of a different "cluster", rather they are all more similar to the "typical" member of their own cluster than they are to the "typical" member of another cluster. Witherspoon et al. show that Edwards's claims for using many loci for classification may actually be incorrect, and that it is true that 'racial classification is .. . of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance', it is true, as Nature claimed, that 'two random individuals from any one group are almost as different as any two random individuals from the entire world', and it is true, as the New Scientist claimed, that 'two individuals are different because they are individuals, not because they belong to different races' and that 'you can’t predict someone’s race by their genes.' Alun (talk) 06:15, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Firstly, please use paragraph breaks! Secondly, you strategically misquote what I wrote to make it seem as if I misrepresented the paper. I said "all members of two geographically separated populations are more similar to anybody in their own population than anybody in the other population if enough markers are used". Why did you omit the bolded bit?

Edwards' conclusion is correct due to the fact that people can be accurately grouped into races or whatever you call them using (a relatively small number of) genetic markers. This in itself proves that the race concept has some genetic validity. The fact that some individuals in those groups may be more similar to people in other groups does not invalidate this finding. You can predict someone's race or geographic ancestry by their genes with high precision. Did you notice the recent 500,000-SNP study where they were able to discern different European ethnicities from each other pretty accurately?

Moreover, the fact that black Africans, Europeans, and East Asians are in fact always more similar to members of their own group than to members of the other two groups is important for several reasons. In America, for example, the vast majority of people descend from those groups, and thus are generally more similar to their own group than to the rest of the population. The three groups correspond to classical and popular racial classifications, too. Additionally, the majority of people in the world belong to these three groups, which means that the claim that "two random individuals from any one group are almost as different as any two random individuals from the entire world" is false. Edwards was correct again.

In fact, Witherspoon et al. only surmise that geographically closer populations overlap considerably even in a more fine-grained analysis ("those studies lacked the statistical power required to answer that question"). Personally, I think there must be some overlap between geographically close populations, but blacks, whites, and East Asians are unlikely to be the only populations that are distinct from each other. Lewontin's 1972 paper analysed Caucasians, Africans, Mongoloids, South Asians, Aborigines, Amerinds, Oceanians, and Australian Aborigines, and I'd expect most if not all of those populations to be distinct from each other in the way the three major groups are. Of course, to find these differences you must use enough genetic markers. If you use only a small number of markers, you may not be able to tell a human being apart from a horse.

--Victor Chmara (talk) 09:10, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

1) I did nothing of the sort, you make this claim twice and I quoted your first use of this claim, where you say "individuals are frequently more similar to members of other populations than to members of their own population, which is contradicted by the paper's finding". I certainly didn't do this to imply that you "misrepresented" anything. I apologise if I inadvertently misrepresented you.

2) It is irrelevant whether you believe Edwards's assertion is correct or not. You're entitled to believe this, but we cannot include our own beliefs in Misplaced Pages articles. It's incorrect to claim that "people can be accurately grouped into races or whatever you call them using (a relatively small number of) genetic markers". Clustering can be observed when many markers are used, for example Rosenberg et al. use over three hundred before they get good clustering. Even then there are no "races" and clusters do not conform to so called "races". The fact is that in all clustering anaslyses the vast majority of individuals belong to more than one "cluster", look at the image from Rosenberg's 2007 paper further up this talk page, very few individuals actually belong to a single "cluster", so if a "cluster" is a "race" then we are mostly "multiracial". Furthermore the claim that this "proves that the race concept has some genetic validity" is highly subjective. Clustering analyses are highly dependent upon sampling strategy. When we sample from some locations we might get a general clustering that more or less corresponds to some concepts of "race" but it really does dpend on how one defines "race". There are models for "race" that produce over 100 "races" and there are models of "race" that produce two "races". Before one can pretend that clustering analyses support any particular "race" concept then one has to define what one means by "race" and which "race" concept one thinks they support. Rosenberg's first paper in 2002 produced six clusters, including a cluster in which Kalash people had majority membership, but in which o other group did, does this mean the Kalash people are a "race"? By your reasoning they are. Secondly in Rosenberg's first paper people from Pakistan mostly belonged to the same cluster as people from Europe, but in Rosenberg's 2007 paper, which included more samples from southern India, they suddenly belonged to a new cluster associated maily with the Indian subcontinent, producing seven clusters. Again most individuals belonged to more than one cluster. Besides what does it mean that "race" has "some genetic validity"? It's a throwaway phrase. The fact that I'm from Great Britain and my wife is from Finland has "some genetic validity". People from different parts of the world tend to vary somewhat genetically, but the existence of geographically distributed genetic diversity is not support for any particular "race" concept. "Race" as biologists use it means subspecies, and these are usually defined phylogenetically, with identifiable boundaries between each phylogenetic group, We don't see that in the global human population.

3) The point you try to make here is so totally incorrect that it's hard to know where to begin. Firstly it is incorrect to claim that Africans, Europeans and East Asians are almost always more similar to members of their own group than to members of the other groups, that's only true if enough loci are investigated, it would not be true, for example if common alleles are investigated, as Witherspoon point out. As for "In America, for example, the vast majority of people descend from those groups, and thus are generally more similar to their own group than to the rest of the population". It is true that the vast majority of Americans are descended from African, European and Native Americans (and not from East Asians as you claim), but of course the conclusion that these groups in America are therefore more similar to the populations from those parts of the world than thy are to each other is not necessarily true, that assumption derives from the so called "color line", which assumes that there has been no mixture between these groups, and that assumption is demonstrably incorrect. For example the typical African-American has about 20% European ancestry and about 30% of European Americans have between 2-20% of African ancestry, clearly a large proportion of the genes these people carry are derived from other groups, that would increase ${\displaystyle {\hat {w}}}$ significantly. The level of Native American ancestry for European Americans is even higher. The terms European American, Native American and African American are therefore culturally defined and not genetically defined. Or to put it another way, Barac Obama is an African American, but it is incorrect to claim that he's more similar to an African than to an European because of this, his mother identifies as European American. Furthermore Obama's father comes from Kenya, and Kenyan's are not genetically identical to people from West Africa, the origin of most of the African ancestry of African Americans. So the European American and African American populations are admixed populations, and that's a fact. Pretending that the color line is real is a game they play in the USA all the time, but it does not reflect the true ancestry of the population of the USA.

4) "In fact, Witherspoon et al. only surmise that geographically closer populations overlap considerably even in a more fine-grained analysis" So you haven't actually read the paper then? When they actually do include intermediate populations, Indian, Native American, New Guinean, African American, and Hispano–Latino as well as their original samples, they find that they cannot always distinguish members of these groups from each other. "those studies lacked the statistical power required to answer that question" - yes they did, which is why Witherspoon et al. wrote this paper, to provide the the statistical power to address the claims made in those previous papers. Witherspoon et al. not only provided the statistical tools to answer the question, they answer it with a resounding "no we cannot accurately classify humans on an individual level".

Witherspoon's paper and conclusions are clear and relevant, they do show that inter individual differences are important, and they do cast doubt on the utility of clustering analyses. They clearly show that population level traits can be misleading when it comes to measuring differences between individuals, and they say this clearly. Obviously you believe strongly in racialism, but when science does not support your belief, then it is not right to try to claim that scientists are saying somethign they clearly are not saying, and it is not right to take what they do say out of context to promote your personal point of view on Misplaced Pages. Alun (talk) 11:04, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

• A quick not on Misplaced Pages policies. Misplaced Pages has a strictly neutral point of view policy. This means that we include all relevant points of view. While it is true that some comentators have claimed that clustering analyses support the idea of "race", one has to be clear what these commentators mean when they say this. For example the most blatant claim was made by Nicholas Wade in the NY Times, where he claims that Rosenberg et al. 2002 provide support for a "five race" model. On the other hand Neil Risch as claimed that he believes that clustering analyses show that "race" is real, but does not attempt to describe what he means by "race", and we are left with the vague idea that "race" is being used as a synonym for geographically distributed variation, or some sort of genetic sub structure within the global human population. Clearly the human population does have a genetic substructure, no one has claimed that humans are genetically homogeneous, that claim has no worth. But substructure does not necessarily provide support for "race" concepts. Armand Leroy refines this when he says that "Study enough genes in enough people and one could sort the world's population into 10, 100, perhaps 1,000 groups, each located somewhere on the map... Race is merely a shorthand that enables us to speak sensibly, though with no great precision, about genetic rather than cultural or political differences." So Leroy and Risch seem to have a vague undefined concept of "race" that seems to define "race" as any group that can be genetically identified wen enough loci and enough populations are included in any analysis. This is a valid point of view to include on Misplaced Pages and I certainly don't want to keep it out. But Witherspoon provide evidence that this view may be simplistic, that these classifications mask a great deal of gene sharing and similarity between individuals from different clusters. Witherspoon's point of view is equally valid, and I can't help but feel that your edit took something from Witherspoon's paper out of context and undermined the point the paper was making. I'm not necessarily against including the comment that you added, but we need to include it in context, and I think we've got too much into a discussion about who is "right", when that should not really be our main point of discussion on the talk page. Cheers, Alun (talk) 05:31, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Shriver et al. found that the 30% of white Americans who have some African ancestry average around 2.3% of it. African Americans, on the other hand, have 80% African ancestry on average. This is means that there's not much overlap between the populations. The vast majority of Americans are of European, sub-Saharan African, or East Asian ancestry; in fact, the vast majority of Americans are of European ancestry.

The Witherspoon et al. paper supports the common-sensical position that a more in-depth population genetics analysis reveals clear differences between ancestrally separated populations, whereas a more superficial analysis hides some of these differences. As I said, most people on this planet are East Asian, white, or black, all of whom are more similar to anybody in their own group than anybody in the other groups, so it's nonsense to claim that there's virtually no differences between humans from different parts of the earth. More extensive studies, perhaps comparing entire genomes, will no doubt reveal even more differences between populations.

As to "racialism", if the race-denialist agenda was applied to classifying flora and fauna, lots of current classifications would have to be scrapped.

I'm not interested in debating this topic further, but I suggest we add something like the following at the end of the paragraph discussing the Witherspoon et al. paper:

However, Witherspoon et al. also found that in analyses of geographically separated populations (such as Europeans, sub-Saharan Africans, and East Asians), where thousands of loci are investigated, a pair of individuals from one population are genetically always more similar to each other than two individuals chosen from two different populations. On the other hand, they maintain that closely related and admixed populations cannot be perfectly distinguished from each other in this manner even if more than 10,000 polymorphisms are used.

--Victor Chmara (talk) 13:55, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

OK, now I'm pretty sure you're User talk:MoritzB because you make exactly the same arguments as him. Your arguments seem to be nothing more than your personal opinion, and frankly I'm not interested in what you believe about so called "races". Alun (talk) 15:29, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Calm down, Alun! Victor Chmara is the only username I've ever had in Misplaced Pages, but many other users undoubtedly share my views on this topic. Like I said, I'm not interested in debating you any further. I'm just asking if you are opposed to me modifying the article in the above mentioned manner. --Victor Chmara (talk) 15:43, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Well I had a go at adding the info. If you're unhappy with my edit let's discuss the best way to include it further. Cheers. Alun (talk) 21:18, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

A naive question: has someone used the Witherspoon method to compare human anf chimp populations? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Portoflip (talk • contribs) 20:38, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Infobox misleading?

The Infobox which tries to clarify the calculations does not do so. In particular the statement that

"For three loci blue, red and green, it becomes apparent that there is a correlation between certain allele frequencies. In this example Population I displays a correlation between wild-type blue (+) 70%, mutant red (-) 70% and wild type green (+) 70%."

seems to say that there are some mysterious correlations within each of the two populations. In other words, it argues that there is linkage disequilibrium within each of the populations and that the classification somehow relies on that. Of course, if the author makes up haplotypes they can have any disequilibria that they want. But my understanding is that the "correlations" Edwards relied on were among populations. Thus if population 1 has frequency 0.7 for A and 0.7 for B, and population 2 has 0.3 and 0.3, but within each population there is no linkage disequilibrium, then there is no correlation of the presence of A and the presence of B on haplotypes within a population, but when we pool both populations there will be linkage disequilibrium (and hence correlation) overall. Having a A then makes you more likely to also have a B on the same haplotype, as it makes you more likely to come from population 1. Edwards calling this "correlation structure" is not a clear way to describe it, and the main body of this article says that

"This happens because of correlations between locus frequencies within each population"

which implies that there is some sort of correlation within each population. The author of the Infobox has used the same terms. To most readers it will imply that there is some mysterious extra correlation in addition to the populations simply having different gene frequencies at two (or more) loci. Felsenst (talk) 13:12, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

If there is a mistake then it's my fault. I did my best to try and accurately report what I read in Edwards's paper and I don't think I made any mistake, his explanation was pretty straighforward. I'm not sure that I follow what you are saying. I don't think it's about linkage disequilibrium, I don't think it says that these allele frequencies are non-random, as they are in linkage disequilibrium. As I understand it, and I may be mistaken, the correlations between allele frequencies are within populations. This is because in say population 1 the wt blue tends to accompany (ie correlate with) the mutant red and the wild type green. That's how we find correlations between alleles within populations. Anyway, I'm open to the idea that I might have made a mistake and if I have it was unintentional. Please feel free to change the infobox if you think it's inaccurate. Cheers. Alun (talk) 17:28, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

This makes it apparent that you did interpret Edwards that way. I think that his description is what is really the problem. Let me go reread Edwards and see whether he was saying what you took him to be saying. My guess is that he did not intend the information to come from different linkage disequilibrium patterns in different populations, just from the differences in allele frequency between populations. However of course linkage disequilibrium patterns can also differ between populations. (By the way, I also don't think you can just multiply the probabilities (0.3 x 0.3 x 0.3) the way you do in the Infobox). Felsenst (talk) 12:18, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, any clarifications you can provide are more than welcome :) Alun (talk) 16:51, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

Looking at Edwards' paper, he does not say explicitly whether the "correlations" are within populations or between populations. But his numerical examples all (implicitly) make the assumption that genotypes at different loci within a population are independently distributed, and hence that there is no linkage disequilibrium within populations. For example, he says (on page 800, right column halfway down):

"With ${\displaystyle k}$ loci, therefore, the distance between two individuals from the same population will be binomial with mean ${\displaystyle k(p^{2}+q^{2})}$ and variance ${\displaystyle k(p^{2}+q^{2})(1-p^{2}-q^{2})}$ and if from different populations binomial with mean ${\displaystyle 2kpq}$ and variance ${\displaystyle 2kpq(1-2pq)}$. These variances are, of course, the same."

Adding up the variances in that way (as when he multiplies the variance by ${\displaystyle k}$) implies that the variation at the different loci is independent within each population. So it follows that the "correlations" he mentions are correlations in the pooled aggregate of the populations, not within a population. If you were misled by his presentation, I can't say I blame you. Felsenst (talk) 15:55, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

OK, thanks, I've removed the infobox. I'll have to have a think about the best way to change it. Any suggestions are more than welcome. Cheers, Alun (talk) 16:28, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

OK, I had a look at Edwards again and I think I can see where I went wrong. I'm going to have a go at rewriting the infobox at some time soon because I think it would be good to try and explain how Edwards proposes classification. I think I'll stick to his first example, with classification based on summing all the + alleles. If you don't mid I'll run it by you after I've had a go at rewriting it. Cheers. Alun (talk) 05:18, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

I have corrected the wording about "correlations" in the second paragraph of the article. I think what I put in is now correct but the sentence is long-winded, and probably should be made into two sentences. A good Infobox would help people understand where the mysterious "correlations" are. Felsenst (talk) 12:33, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

removal of text

I removed some text that cited a blog post. We use reliable sources here, not claims made by people on blogs, especially biased racist blogs like those fascists at gene expression. This site it¨s the antithesis of what Misplaced Pages stands for. Alun (talk) 06:23, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

you are right about blogs, but with your attitude of "genetics is fascism" you should probably excuse yourself from editing these topics. Stop turing every article you touch into ideological mud-flinging. It is your behaviour and your ideological prejudice that is the antithesis to Misplaced Pages. --dab (𒁳) 11:27, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

Clearly being unbiased is the antithesis of wikipedia in your eyes then dab. Gene Expression is not a reliable source, and to anyone who has ever had the misfortune to accidentally come across it would know that. You don't even correctly represent what I say, you put quotes around "genetics is fascism", but I didn't say that, so you're obviously not quoting me, but are pretending that this is what I said by putting quote marks there. I must say that having seen your contributions to articles on Wikipeda, you calling anyone else biased has a massive smack of hypocrisy dab. And suggesting that I should not edit is bullying. You are not in charge here, though you often act as if you are. I guess if you give someone a title like "admin" they think it gives them authority or something. Go and take it to an RfC if you want, or if I have broken any rules then block me. But don't try to bully or intimidate me again. Alun (talk) 12:52, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

Besides which, I am a professional geneticist, so why would I think genetics is fascism? It's my job. But obviously many fascists have misused genetics, and I am doing my best to make sure that my profession is not misrepresented. Apparently you think that makes me unreliable. I really don't understand your attitude dab. Alun (talk) 12:54, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

Dab, I’d like to point out that whether Gene Expression can be considered a reliable source in this case is not clear-cut. This is a quote from Misplaced Pages:Verifiability:

Self-published material may, in some circumstances, be acceptable when produced by an established expert on the topic of the article whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications. However, caution should be exercised when using such sources: if the information in question is really worth reporting, someone else is likely to have done so.

Similarly, some self-published sources may be acceptable if substantial independent evidence for their reliability is found. For instance, widespread citations without comment by other reputable sources are a good indicator of reliability, while widespread doubts about accuracy weigh against the self-published source. If outside citation is the main indicator of reliability, particular care should be taken to adhere to other guidelines and policies, and to not represent unduly contentious claims. The goal is to reflect established views of sources as far as we can determine them.

The Gene Expression post that was being cited passes both of these tests. The material in question was written by Gregory Cochran, who is the author of several peer-reviewed papers about race and genetics, as well as of the book The 10,000 year explosion, which is also about this topic. Gene Expression is also arguably the most respected genetics blog that exist; at least one of its articles has been republished in the professional journal Medical Hypothesis, and its founder, Jason Malloy, has been interviewed about race and genetics by The New York Times.

In my opinion, material at Gene Expression written by Gregory Cochran about race and genetics is reliable enough to be cited on Misplaced Pages, although I won’t add it back to the article if you disagree. --Captain Occam (talk) 17:55, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

I've just put the paragraph cited to Cochran at Gene Expression back in the article. Dab, you can remove it again if you think I'm mistaken about him meeting Misplaced Pages's standards for verifiability, but if you do I'd appreciate you explaining your reasoning here so we can discuss this. --Captain Occam (talk) 07:06, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

I have removed it, the blog in question was not written by Cochran, but by someone else who is claiming this is Cochrane's result. That is not good enough. Read the blog Occam, what you are saying is a lie, you are claimig that the blog is by Cochrane, but it's not, the blog states

Gregory Cochran and Birch Barlow have brought to my attention that the claim that people from different races are more genetically similar 1/3 of the time, whether the intended interpretation of Bamshad's paper or not, is not true except for single DNA segments.

That is an unsubstantiated claim. This is not published by a reliable or reputable source. And yet according to dab it is me who is at fault? I'm at fault for keeping unreliable info that comes from unreliable sources that is not fact checked, that could have been written by anyone out of Misplaced Pages, and yet it's me who is the antithesis of what Misplaced Pages stands for. Sorry dab, but you're way out of line here. Alun (talk) 12:52, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

There is no way that that is even close to being a reliable source for this article. As a side note - Alun, I believe that dab agreed with everything in your opening statement to this section up to the first instance of "blogs", but asked that you tone down an apparent WP:BATTLEGROUND attitude. I am confused by the above vitriol. - 2/0 (cont.) 19:05, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

Well 2/0 dab's post made me angry, his post was hardly going to calm matters down. In fact, by any objective measure, dab's post was deliberately abusive and designed to inflame the situation. Whereas all I did was claim that a specific blog was racist, an opinion that I am entitled to hold and express, dab launched an attack on my ability and character. Now I ask you, is that how any editor should behave? Look at what he said about me

• "your attitude of "genetics is fascism""

That's not my attitude at all, my attitude is that the blog in question is racist.

• "you should probably excuse yourself from editing these topics"

Why? I've added a great deal of content to this article, including the infobox which is an explanation of the method used in Edward's actual paper. But apparently I'm not fit t contribute? Dab doesn't have the authorty to tell editors what they can or can't do.

• "It is your behaviour and your ideological prejudice that is the antithesis to Misplaced Pages."

Seriously? So what's wrong with my behaviour? This blanket statement is little more than an unsupported attack upon my character. What does dab know about my "ideological attitude"? He's obviously trying to imply something, this sort of inuendo is damaging and much worse than anything I wrote because what I wrote wasn't directed at another editor. Besides, surely the antithesis of Misplaced Pages is adding unreliable content, and if an admin really thinks that making sharp comments on the talk page is more damaging than adding unreliable content, then I'd suggest that they should seriously think about their position as an admin. Dab has a history of inflaming situations and making personal attacks against editors he doesn't like Misplaced Pages:Requests for comment/Dbachmann 3.

If dab had wanted to comment seriously about my post, all he needed to do was agree with me about the blog and make a comment about dialing my language down, that would have de-escalated the situation and been sufficient. But instead he launches into an attack on me. Then I find he's been encouraging Occam to post about me on AN/I. (here he makes several more unseemly and unsupported "guesses" about my character and motivations, and again states that I am unfit to edit here). It seems to me that this is borne out of some personal animosity dab has against me. I'm amazed that you are surprised by my response considering you have obviously read what dab wrote. Alun (talk) 05:32, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Ok, we can still de-escalate this. Your fascism comment was out of line. I apologize for any escalating remarks on my part. If there is anything personal that still needs sorting out, come to my talkpage, ok? Let's go back to discussing the issue here.

This article contains some very insightful material, but its presentation is severely lacking. I agree we cannot use blogs, but as so often in genetics topics, the secondary sources are too recent to be summarized in any stable manner in tertiary sources we can use. If our genetics articles are to be anything beyond random piles of references to research papers, we need to give knowledgeable users some leeway to summarize the material in a coherent way.

This article is about a single 2003 paper making an important point on Human genetic clustering. Now unsurprisingly, Human genetic clustering is rather unreadable, just our generic pile of research papers. What we need to do with this article is take its core message and {{merge}} it into a cleaned-up version of Human genetic clustering. This will be a lot of work and we could spend our time more profitably digging into it than by bickering over "fascism" comments. --dab (𒁳) 07:47, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Agreed dab, my fascists comment was out of line. I appologise, there was no call for it. I think your suggestion is sound, when I get some time I'll look into some of the papers about this subject. Alun (talk) 08:05, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Essence of criticism (not)

The article has been improved by removal of some of the excessive material. But the sentences that say

Talking of two genomes being "more similar" or "less similar" implies the existence of a metric. The most naive metric, and the one used implicitly by Lewontin, is that of simply counting the number SNPs. Edwards's criticism of Lewontin amounts to the statement that it is a "fallacy" to use this naive metric, because some SNPs may be in a meaningful way more significant to other SNPs.

are simply wrong. Edwards is making the point that with (enough) multiple loci one can distinguish between two populations. Lewontin is talking about average difference per locus, a different matter. Both of them are to be blamed for not talking enough about what question is being answered. But Edwards's method is not to look for particularly meaningful SNPs. That helps, but only a little bit. It is the multiple loci that do the job Edwards is trying to do. Felsenst (talk) 16:31, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

Notability of this paper?

Is this really a paper notable enough for a separate Misplaced Pages article? How could that be shown through reliable secondary sources? -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk) 02:39, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

It's important, but I suppose it's ultimately also a merge candidate. Merge into race and genetics and/or Human genetic clustering (in fact, these two also largely overlap in scope). Sometimes it's a good idea to develop a minor topic as a standalone article which can still be merged if it becomes apparent that it doesn't have the full potential for an article. --dab (𒁳) 08:18, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your friendly suggestion. I look forward to hearing comments from other editors to see if a consensus develops. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk) 16:21, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

I see the article here has been improved by recent edits. I have also become more familiar myself with the underlying professional literature, and I can see a basis for merging the content of this article into a section of an existing more comprehensive article, with redirect. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk) 15:06, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

Re-title or merge?

The title is indeed somewhat POV. Although WP:Common name suggests otherwise, it might be better to re-title this to Lewontin's thesis or something like that. The problem is that whenever the word fallacy appears in the text, it implicitly gives some weight to Edwards'. Putting fallacy in scare quotes everywhere might be an option, but I'm not sure it would be much of an improvement. Tijfo098 (talk) 15:20, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

This might be cured just by merging the article into the appropriate section of another article, but I hear you. The current article title is not a standard term in the literature. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk) 04:08, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

well, the article isn't about "Lewontin's thesis" directly, it is about an article titled "Lewontin's Fallacy", so the title makes perfect sense. I agree there is a problem though. The problem isn't in the title but in the fact that this is a standalone article about a single academic paper. We don't usually do that unless the paper is of extreme importance. This isn't the case here, so the article should probably just be merged. --dab (𒁳) 06:12, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

I've read the whole chapter in Vogel and Motulsky's, and I'm in a position to write a WP:SPOV summary of this issue. Now, to write the WP:NPOV version I need to read what Lewontin later wrote about this too. I ask that any merger be stayed until I do that, because the article in which this is intended to be merged already has a summary of this at the "he said, she said" level, which is not NPOV for science matters. Tijfo098 (talk) 11:59, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

Tijfo098, feel free to do some rewriting in the target article, and then let's do the merge. We can fix more of the encyclopedic tone and point of view issues with better sourcing after the merger. I'm gathering sources meanwhile. I too have Vogel and Motulsky (just renewed at my friendly alma mater's library) at hand, along with several other current, reliable, secondary sources. -- WeijiBaikeBianji (talk) 02:27, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Edwards's paper is called Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy. Perhaps we could use that as a title.--Victor Chmara (talk) 13:20, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

No. This article should not be just about one paper. It should be about L's argument, evidence, counter-evidence and counterarguments. Andreasen calls it (p. 463) "Lewontin’s genetic argument" (quotes in original)

• Robin O. Andreasen, Biological Conceptions of Race in Mohan Matthen, Christopher Stephens, Philosophy of biology, Volume 3 of Handbook of the philosophy of science, Elsevier, 2007, ISBN 0444515437, pp. 455-481

Tijfo098 (talk) 14:55, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

I think merging into a section about Lewontin's argument in the article on Human genetic variation makes a lot of sense.·Maunus·ƛ· 15:15, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

There is very little discussion of the actual content of Edward's paper in this article. Much of the discussion concerns other studies. I agree that some of the information is better placed in other articles such as human genetic variation or race and genetics. If this article is to exist then it should specifically discuss "Edwards AW (August 2003). "Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy". BioEssays 25 (8): 798–801. doi:10.1002/bies.10315. PMID 12879450".The issue of having a dedicated article for a single publication is also relevant. Wapondaponda (talk) 17:02, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

The current title is among other things clearly POV and possible a WP:BLP issue. If the article should exist it should be renamed to that of the study, "Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy" and mainly discuss this paper like any other Misplaced Pages article about a single publication. The more general question regarding whether genetics support the existence of races among humans is properly mainly discussed in the Race and genetics article. Due to the possible BLP issue I will quickly change the title.Miradre (talk) 06:36, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

• Unassessed Anthropology articles
• Unknown-importance Anthropology articles