domingo, 20 de agosto de 2017

BioEdge: Can genetics refute white supremacist theories?

BioEdge: Can genetics refute white supremacist theories?



Can genetics refute white supremacist theories?
     
This week’s headlines were filled with news from Charlottesville, Virginia, after a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of people opposing a march of supremacists and noe-Nazis, killing one woman and injuring many others. Which leads one to ask: how white are American white supremacists?

For most of them, the most convincing way to prove their “whiteness” is DNA tests from companies like 23andMe.com and Ancestry.com. To their consternation, the results are often not what they expected. White supremacist Craig Cobb was outed on daytime TV in 2013 as “86 percent European, and … 14 percent Sub-Saharan African.”

What’s interesting is how the white supremacists respond to these disconcerting test results. Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan, sociologists at UCLA, studied online discussions of genetic ancestry test results on the white nationalist website Stormfront. They found that the participants used fairly sophisticated reasoning to challenge the results and regain their “whiteness”.

Cobb, for instance, denounced his test as “statistical noise” and described it as a Jewish conspiracy to spread “junk science” whose “intent is to defame, confuse and deracinate young whites on a mass level—especially males”. Using a test from another company he was able to claim that he was European, apart from a “3% Iberian thing.”

Panofsky and Donovan conclude that genetics cannot refute racist views. Even though mankind probably came from Africa and even though the notion of “racial purity” is absurd, racists can manipulate and interpret data for their own purposes. They conclude:

clear communication, simple forms of education, and collective denunciations of scientific misuses, scientists’ preferred forms of anti-racist action, are insufficient for the task. Challenging racists’ public understanding of science is not simply a matter of more education or nuance, but may require scientists to rethink their research paradigms and reflexively interrogate their own knowledge production. 


Bioedge

Saturday, August 19, 2017

President Donald Trump was elected because he promised to break moulds and drain swamps. “And now for something completely different” was basically the platform on which he campaigned. And something completely different is what Americans got.
Now is this difference due to mental illness or to a combination of personality and cunning political strategy? Yale University psychiatrist Dr Bandy Lee believes that it is the former. Trump is both bad and mad. In fact, not only Trump. In an interview with Salon, she said that the Administration and the Republican Party have lost touch with reality.
Is it a good idea for a psychiatrist to politicise her profession? The American Psychiatric Association asks its members to abide by the “Goldwater Rule” which forbids them from making public comment on the health of public figures whom they have not examined. It’s a good rule and Dr Lee is breaking it by publishing a book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump in October.
It’s a good rule because it protects the profession. Although half of Americans probably think Trump is mad without the benefit of Dr Lee’s input, the other half, including some psychiatrists, doesn’t. Inevitably many voters will think that Dr Lee is just a shill for the Democrats and that psychiatrists’ opinions can be bought.
What do you think? 


Michael Cook
Editor
BioEdge



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BioEdge: Can genetics refute white supremacist theories?

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