Genetics Without Genes: How Rightwing Racists are Abusing Science
Black/White/other - traditional race categories have no basis in biology.
Racism in American still survives among the left and the right, and especially at the extreme fringes of both. This article debunks the junk science of right-wing racists who want to believe that some races are genetically smarter than others. For an example of right-wing racists obsessed with such junk science, see this Emil Kirkegaard Substack article, which has fans among other Substack authors such as the anonymous individual writing under the pen name John Carter. Ultimately, these more recent efforts derive from the original obfuscator of junk racist statistics: Charles Murray in his infamous 1994 Bell Curve book.
Race is 100% a Social Construct, Not Scientific
While there are many problems with the junk science that these authors are obsessed with, their fundamental problem is the near-universal scientific consensus that “race” is 100% a social construct without a basis in biology or any other science. (Shiao et al. 2012. The Shiao et al. article actually argues against this scientific consensus, but in the decade since its release, it has apparently had no influence on the fields of genetics or sociology.)
To actually be scientific and try to overlap with an attempt to make the category of “race” scientific, a study would need to draw data from three categories: (1) skin color genes, (2) genes that have a high correlation with intelligence, and (3) intelligence test results. The Emil Kirkegaard paper does not deal with genes for intelligence at all!
Furthermore, at no point does Emil Kirkegaard claim that his genetic categories dataset includes any genes for skin color either!
Even at this most fundamental level, Emil Kirkegaard lacks any connection with reality because none of his analysis uses actual genes for intelligence, or genes for skin color, or any genes for anything at all. Proper science ultimately requires hypothesizing and proving causal relationships, and unless these junk science racists want to admit that there are significant nurture causal relationships with intelligence, they are left solely with genes as their only possible nature explanation. But they do not even look at genes!
Fundamentally, Kirkegaard’s Races Are Social Constructs
Emil Kirkegaard uses two types of 100% socially-defined racial categories. The first he is honest about: Self Identified Race & Ethnicity (SIRE), an acronym he uses often. But then he pretends to get scientific and biological with his “genetic ancestry” race categories; however, at their root, those are socially-determined as well.
Emil Kirkegaard’s analysis uses genetic data from the Illumina company, which itself uses a set of seemingly 1,000 quasi-racial/ethnic/something categories from the 1,000 Genomes Project that are 100% socially identified by the donors and researchers involved in compiling the genetic data. Really, these should be called “ancestry” categories. (Here are links to the project’s explanations of its genetic ancestry categories, and the part of the website where you can download those categories. The company refuses to permit the word “race” to be assigned to any of its categories; Emil Kirkegaard’s repurposing of those categories into races like “European” and “African” runs directly against the scientific consensus refusing to do so.)
Because there are so many, the categories are very fine-grained combinations of multiple geographic areas as well as self-reported donor ancestry; one official example is “CEU means Northern Europeans from Utah”, which means that Eastern Europeans from Utah must be a different category. Critically, it is the “Northern European” part of these categories that make them 100% self-identified and socially-determined as well.
Emil Kirkegaard also used “genetic ancestry” categories from the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP), which also uses self reported ethnic group categories combined with geographic origin to categorize its data.
At no point does Emil Kirkegaard explain how his analysis transforms these many hundreds of purely socially-defined categories that geneticists use into the two that he the social “scientist” uses: “European” and “African”, especially when it comes to the Americas were there is a lot more genetic mixture. Emil Kirkegaard has a triangle matrix of mixed ancestry measurements, but that’s a second-order mixed-ancestry measurement that uses the original socially-defined Illumina/HGDP/1,000 Genomes Project categories as the defining baseline. So what about the likelihood of pre-existing admixture in those original baselines, admixture that was lost with the self-reported identities that created the categories used by those projects in the first place? Emil Kirkegaard does not and cannot deal with that.
As noted in the beginning, all racial categories ultimately are 100% socially defined. True, you can find some biologists like this Dr Jerry Coyne who argue that there are biological definitions to the term “race”, but funnily enough, they will insist that the biologically-valid definitions do not overlap with the “old” or “traditional” notions of race that Emil Kirkegaard, Charles Murray, and the other junk science racists use. To quote Dr Coyne:
But what Dr Coyne is doing here is negligently using the English language by using the terms “race” and “ancestry” to mean the same thing in his article. Ideally, in science, different words should mean different things; there should be no synonyms. Synonyms are useful for poetry, not science. The term “ancestry” is a much better term because it does not trigger junk science racists to mistakenly believe that the science justifies their old concepts of race: African/black and European/white.
Racists Use Viruses & Non-Gene DNA to Define Race
The only remotely rational way to define race would be a specific set of gene alleles, which would have to include skin color alleles. However, 99% of human DNA does not code genes! Roughly 8% of human DNA sequences were originally from viruses!
The Illumina/HGDP/1,000 Genomes Project use Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) nucleotide pair variations to profile the hundreds of categories that they use. SNPs are genetic errors.
Odds are that 99% of these SNPs are not part of any gene sequences at all, and that 8% were originally virus sequences. In other words, almost all of the “genetic” part of the “genetic ancestry” that Kirkegaard uses to assert that Europeans are smarter than Africans has nothing inherently to do with being European or African at all, or with any genes, or with anything that matters other than the esoteric profiling that Illumina enables to assist with medical research.
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These fundamental facts about the human genome are how junk science racists throw up a façade of genetic science legitimacy by talking about “ancestral genetics” while not actually dealing with genes at all — The SNP profiles subjectively categorized that Emil Kirkegaard uses are genetic DNA information, but NOT of genes! The SNPs and sequences are mostly non-coding DNA with nothing to do with intelligence or skin color. In fact, SNPs are genetic errors!
Emil Kirkegaard, and the pen-named John Carter author at Substack, want us to define ourselves into races using genetic errors in non-coding and virus DNA! This is what the junk science racists have to offer up as a scientific, biological basis for race: errors & virus DNA! Way to go guys. Way to offer up an inspiring vision for humanity. Not.
Improperly Conflating Genetics With Genes
But junk science racists are not the only ones misrepresenting the groups of SNPs that legitimate scientists are using to group people into categories that do not overlap with traditional race categories. Here you have a retired biology professor, Dr Jerry Coyne, making the leap without evidence that SNP error profiles have real effects. Here is where this biologist makes the unproven leap:
“Over 99% of people in the sample from this paper can be accurately diagnosed as to self-identified race or ethnicity by looking at just 326 regions of the genome. This in turn means that there are biological differences between different SIREs, so race cannot be simply a ‘social construct.’”
No, actually, it is almost certainly the case that these 326 regions create zero biological differences between self-identified race groups precisely because 99% of DNA is non-coding. None of those 326 regions are complete genes, and not a single study has ever tied specific genes of interest to racists (like intelligence) that differ within humanity with “biological differences” tied to the causal function of those genes that also overlap with traditional race categories.
Categories Like Race Do Not Permit Overlap
In fact, no one, not leftwing nor rightwing, who is obsessed with race can offer a truly genetic definition of race for the simple fact that exceptions can always be found. Suppose that a racist (leftwing or rightwing) were to make a list of gene alleles, some for skin color and others for intelligence, and then define a race by that list. It will definitely be the case that some people in the world with a different skin color gene will have the same intelligence gene. What will a junk science racist do then?
To which racial group would an individual with a different skin color gene but the same intelligence gene belong?
What are these junk science racists going to do about the fact that there are multiple light skin color genes, some of which Asians & Europeans widely share, but others that they do not share as much? There is no logically coherent way for a junk science racist to make a list of skin color genes, some of which overlap with other traditional “races” while others do not, to define a specific race.
Nature AND Nurture, Not “Or”
As mentioned previously, junk science racists need a way of measuring intelligence. Their favorite go-to is traditional intelligence quotient (IQ) testing.
The original Emil Kirkegaard article that this take-down is critiquing cites studies that do properly focus on the nature and/or nurture debate. These junk science racists are running into the reality that almost everything about human characteristics is both nature and nurture, not just one or the other.
Almost everything. Not literally everything. “Race” itself is 100% a social construct category, so it has no nature component, and it is not possible to form a coherent or rational genetics-based definition of “race” that in any way aligns simultaneously with traditional “race” categories like white or black.
But intelligence very much is affected by both nature and nurture. Junk scientific racists want to completely exclude nurture. Well, then, how would they explain that excessive early childhood television viewing noticeably lowers IQ, and that racial minority children watch significantly more television?
These two facts alone could completely explain any barely statistically significant difference in measured IQ between races in America. But Emil Kirkegaard does absolutely nothing to construct studies that isolate genetic/nature versus nurture causes. Nothing.
Proving causation would require controlled studies, in which all the black subjects and all the white subjects have the same television watching habits, and same overall early childhood development environment in every other possible area of nurture that affects intelligence.
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It is not surprising that Emil Kirkegaard did not do a controlled study, though, because he did not actually collect much or any of the information he analyzes, and controlled studies are more expensive than uncontrolled data collection. However much it is understandable that Emil Kirkegaard did not do any data collection himself, let alone controlled studies, the overall impact is the same: His analysis does absolutely nothing to prove causation, or to isolate genetic versus nurture causes.
As a result, Emil Kirkegaard has no way of proving that the correlations he statistical claims to prove (between “race” and intelligence) are the result solely of genetic causation. The correlations he claims to prove could easily be happenstance: It is actually the nurture environment that is causing differences in intelligence, and the nurture environment happens to correlate with genetics as well. All of the correlations he claims to prove between “race” and intelligence could easily have nothing at all to do with genetics and be the result entirely of the nurture environment.
Oh, and Emil Kirkegaard completely fails to deal with another significant influence on intelligence: epigenetics, which is actually a nurture/environment influence on the genes themselves!
And Emil Kirkegaard completely fails to isolate away the influence of gut biome on intelligence either!
Weaker than Weak Proxy for Racial Intelligence: Brain Size
To provide some sort of actual biological basis for his analysis, Emil Kirkegaard correlates a frankenmonster of studies around brain size and intelligence that seem mostly, if not completely, to use self-reported racial identities (in other words, not even plausibly connected with genetics). Emil Kirkegaard admits that the correlation between brain size and intelligence is weak, and then cites a bunch of studies with very little talk of statistical significance (p values), effect size (d size), or the self-identified or genetic basis of various other studies purporting to correlate brain size with race. Weak (brain size to intelligence) times whatever (even if strong, correlating brain size to race) makes the overall meaning even weaker than weak. In other words, meaningless.
Furthermore, none of the brain size stuff cited by Kirkegaard deals with what is probably the metric more relevant to intelligence, if even any of it actually is: the ratio of brain size to body size. Even more than that, not all areas of the brain are relevant to intelligence: Theoretically some brains could be larger in absolute size or by ratio, but it is the non-intelligence parts of the brain (like the brain stem, and some other non-frontal-lobe parts) that are larger. None of Kirkegaard’s research deals with these potentially very confounding variables.
Finally, Kirkegaard does not acknowledge how much nurture can affect brain size. Nutrition, for example, significantly affects brain size, and African-Americans face greater malnutrition in the United States than many other groups. Kirkegaard does nothing to control for nutrition or other nurture effects on brain size in order to isolate genetic causes; therefore, Kirkegaard has no basis upon which to claim that it is genetics even causing any observed differences in brain size.
Rational Groupings of DNA Exist
What junk science racists are actually doing is taking advantage of the groups of DNA sequences that real geneticists are using and that the 2012 Shiao et al. article advocated to be called “clinal classes”.
The academic authors of that article want science to admit that traditional race categories overlap with some ways of grouping DNA sequences. (For reasons this article has already articulated, it is not factual to call 99% of those DNA sequences genes.) This is trivially true because with millions of DNA pairs, there are bound to be some that can be completely contained with traditional racial categories. But those DNA pairs would almost all be non-gene-encoding, and 8% would be virus.
The scientific community, however, has evidently not embraced the Shiao et al. concept of “clinal classes” in the decade since their article. The scientific community has almost universally refused to associate groups of genetic sequences with anything like traditional notions of “race”.
Big Problem for Racists: Africa’s More Diverse Than the Rest of the World Combined
And even if the scientific community were to embrace the concept “clinal classes” and accept the use of the term “race” in connection with them, the traditional notions of “European/white” and “African/black” could not co-exist in the same analysis. That is because Africa has more genetic diversity than all the rest of humanity combined.
Any group of DNA sequences constituting a “clinal class” corresponding to “African/black” would be far larger than any group of DNA sequences constituting a “clinal class” corresponding to “European/white”. While the 2012 Shiao et al. article correctly observes that there are groups of DNA sequences that overlap somewhat (not perfectly, but somewhat) with traditional race definitions, what 2012 Shiao et al. fail to observe is that it is not possible for these DNA sequence groups to overlap with traditional race notions at the same level of resolution, but only at different levels of resolution.
The 2012 Shiao et al. article uses an appropriate analogy, though, that does tease at this insight: watersheds. (By the way, establishing political boundaries using watersheds as the core geographic unit of self-determination could bring a stable, yet flexible, structure of peace to humanity.)
Each larger river watershed contains many smaller rivers. Because Africa is more genetically diverse than the rest of humanity, comparing intelligence in Africans/blacks to Europeans/whites would be like comparing the mighty continental Mississippi river to a much smaller island river like the Thames river in England; those rivers are such different sizes, it would make more sense to compare the Thames to a tributary of the Mississippi like the Allegheny River in Pennsylvania that is the same rough size as the Thames.
Earlier this article quoted Dr Coyne talking about genetic “groups within groups” to describe how genetics can overlap with identity. This is what he is talking about.
If Emil Kirkegaard were to use scientifically-valid groups of DNA sequences that reside at the equivalent level of measurement abstraction, he would have to work on correlating intelligence genes to many different African/black subgroups separately to compare them with a scientifically-valid group of European/white DNA sequences that stands at the same level of resolution and abstraction. There could not be just one category called “African/black”.
And if Emil Kirkegaard really wants to compare the intelligence of Africans/blacks to other groups of DNA sequences with the same level of diversity, then really what he would have to do is compare the intelligence of Africans/blacks to literally the whole rest of humanity.
In the end, “European/white” and “African/black” could theoretically be valid scientific categories in which to put a group of alleles, but in order to use those terms with proper scientific validity in this context, they could never be used together because sub-Saharan Africa contains more than half of human genetic diversity.
Genetics Without Genes: Fail
Somehow Emil Kirkegaard wants everyone to take his analysis, which sometimes uses genetic categories, seriously even though none of his analysis uses actual genes. He wants to say that intelligence is genetically determined by race without looking at any genes for intelligence, or skin color, or anything like that.
Somehow Emil Kirkegaard wants everyone to take his analysis seriously that relies upon weak statistical effects from other studies, and completely unscientific self-reported race identifications, for his brain size claims.
Although Emil Kirkegaard sometimes uses what are called “genetic ancestry” categories, measuring intelligence is actually a part of the field of psychology. His total failure to deal with actual genes makes his paper really just a common psychology paper.
It has become increasingly clear in recent years that the field of psychology as a whole is suffering from a legitimacy crisis for two main reasons (1) an obsession with showing statistical significance to (2) the neglect of articulating plausible paradigm-consistent hypotheses about causation, let alone get the point of testing or proving causation. The overall result is a crisis in psychology/cognitive science studies due to their statistics games, the very sorts of games that Emil Kirkegaard and his junk science racist followers are fans of.
Ultimately, Emil Kirkegaard’s whole analysis has no foundation in biology or genetics. It is just a psycho-stats game trying to define race without genes, and make claims about intelligence without any attention paid to genes affecting it either. It should not be surprising that Emil Kirkegaard’s work is nothing more than a statistics game because he and his two co-authors are all social “scientists”*, not biologists or geneticists, nor even psychologists!
It is truly ironic that many on the American Right (mostly non-racists) have spent years properly trashing the field of psychology and sociology because of those two problems, and then the few among the American Right who are actual racists then do a 180 and use the same psycho-stats babble to try to prove their pet theories about racial superiority.
And so we are back to where we started: Race is 100% a social construct. The authors of the 2012 Shiao et al. paper warn us about racists taking advantage of the genetic groupings scientists are indeed using and point out that what these racists are actually doing is foisting their own pre-determined social hierarchies onto misaligned genetic groupings. Emil Kirkegaard, the pen-named John Carter author on Substack, Charles Murray, and other junk science right-wing racists are doing exactly what Shiao et al. warned us about:
“We agree that recent research may permit a “backdoor” for biological racism, but we regard that possibility as resulting from a social perception of the findings rather than an essential [biologically-determined] characteristic of them.”
Race is a social perception. We all have 100% free will autonomy to choose how we perceive it. What will your choice be?
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*One of the co-authors is an economist in Russia.