Human Nature: Science, Technology, and Life.

Race, Genes, and Cancer

Black people, on average, are more likely to die of cancer than white people. Is part of that difference genetic? The Journal of the National Cancer Institute just published a big study on this question. If you haven't heard about the study, maybe that's because you get your news from television, National Public Radio, the Associated Press, or the New York Times, which have ignored it. Why would they ignore it? Because the study suggests the answer is yes. It's OK to report that racial differences in cancer outcomes are caused by poverty and discrimination. It's not OK to report that they're inherited.

More here.

Bias and Biodiversity

Steve Sailer has replied to my last comment on our differences over racial inequality. He accuses me of triangulating against him. He's right. The only part he left out is that sometimes you get triangulated because you're actually wrong.

Here are three passages that crystallize where we disagree. First:

To Saletan, my having spent years toiling at the unpopular task of correctly figuring out one of the central conundrums facing modern America—how race, IQ and public policy interact—makes me a bad person.

Stop right there. Race and genes interact. Genes and IQ interact. But to say that race and IQ interact, without even mentioning genetics or environment, is a scientific and moral mistake. It's like saying that race and criminality interact, without acknowledging any intervening variable. Race is not a causal unit.

Second:

For purposes of sensible public policy, arguing over whether genetics plays a role in racial differences in achievement is a red herring. What's crucial to understand is that racial differences—for whatever reasons—are unlikely to vanish Real Soon Now, as all right-thinking people are supposed to assume.

Say it's discovered in 2010 that the entire cause of the black-white IQ gap is some hitherto unknown micronutrient needed by pregnant women that African-Americans don't get enough of, and a crash program is put into place immediately to solve the problem. If that happened, the IQ gap among working-age adults still wouldn't disappear until the late 2070s. ...

Of course, if there really are genetic differences in average intelligence among the races, that would make the "disparate impact" notion look silly. But it's not actually necessary to know that. It's merely enough to know that fair and valid predictors of future job performance have routinely found substantial gaps for decades.

That's a pretty clear statement that public policy has no responsibility to redress any cause of racially unequal outcomes. Hey, I'm all for colorblindness. But segregation? Denial of schooling? Some injustices demand redress. Sailer's argument rationalizes too much. Did childhood poverty deprive you of equal educational opportunity? Did Jim Crow impair your family's ability to accumulate financial and cultural assets? Too bad. You and the other kids screwed by this legacy have flunked "fair and valid predictors of future job performance." Here, take this mop. And hang onto it, because your kids will need it.

It's one thing to say we can't affect the distribution of talent. It's quite another to say we have no responsibility to affect or compensate for the distribution of resources.

Third:

As long as legal immigrants are carefully selected for optimum benefit to current American citizens, as well as (to quote the Preamble to the Constitution) "our posterity", and are quite limited in number, then I don't see much reason to consider race in choosing legal immigrants.

Others would disagree. Overall, it's not a particularly big issue as long as we change the law from the current system of "family reunification" chain migration.

Don't see "much" reason? Not a big issue?

What reason would there be to consider race in choosing immigrants? And if we did that, are you saying you wouldn't mind?

Sailer and other exponents of "human biodiversity" seem to want more attention and respect than they've been getting. Here are two ways they can earn it. First, show as much interest in biodiversity within racial and ethnic groups as in biodiversity between them. And second, take into account the reality of racism, not just the reality of race. That's part of human nature, too.

Portrait of Artest as a Young Man

It's hard to keep your mind on work when your favorite sports team is playing out of its mind. My team, the Houston Rockets, lost its star guard, Tracy McGrady, midway through the season. Then it lost its backup center, Dikembe Mutombo. Then, three days ago, it lost its center, Yao Ming. Yao and McGrady are done for the season; Mutombo is done for good. You might as well ask a country to fight a war without its army, navy, and air force. But on Sunday afternoon, the Yaoless, McGradyless, Mutomboless Rockets—a bunch of role players who'd been shrugged off by general managers around the NBA—stomped the Los Angeles Lakers, this year's front-runners for the league title. Their playoff series stands tied at 2-2.

Why am I bringing this up in a science blog? Because we've been talking lately about stereotypes, and the subject came up in a New York Times account of a confrontation between the Rockets' Ron Artest and the Lakers' Kobe Bryant during the series. Artest was angry that Bryant

had elbowed him near his neck. He jawed angrily at Bryant, at close range. Then, having made his point—and having been ejected by the referees—Artest calmly walked off the Staples Center court. ... Artest's turbulent past—a blur of technical fouls, scuffles, a smashed television camera and a domestic violence arrest—is fading but not forgotten. The consensus among the Rockets was that the Game 2 ejection stemmed not from Artest's actions but his résumé. Artest joked that it was akin to racial profiling—"past history profiling," he said with a chuckle.

"The thing about Ron is, he will never get the benefit of the doubt again," [Rockets forward Shane] Battier said. "Any questionable situation, people will automatically stereotype and refuse to give him the benefit of the doubt."

I love these guys. But there's no such thing as stereotyping a man based on his own past. Stereo means more than one person. Being judged by your own behavior is the opposite of stereotyping. And "racial profiling," as defined by the ACLU, means "targeting individuals for suspicion of crime based on the individual's race, ethnicity, religion or national origin." If Artest were being targeted based on race, Battier would be getting the same treatment. But Battier gets the opposite treatment: If your grandmother bumped into Battier while asking for his autograph, she'd be whistled for a charge.

It seems a bit unfair that Battier gets the benefit of the doubt and that Artest doesn't. Referees, like the rest of us, are influenced, often unconsciously, by opinions they've formed about each player. Battier has earned a reputation for lawyerly adherence to the league's rules. Artest has earned a reputation for hotheadedness. For this reason, Artest is far more likely than Battier to be deemed guilty of a foul, even in identical circumstances.

Is this kind of discrimination wrong? If so, you'd better take it up with Martin Luther King Jr. His dream was that people would "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Character isn't whatever you did just now. It's the pattern of your life: your personality, your reputation, your profile. Judging a man by his character means taking account of that pattern. "Past-history profiling," the neologism Artest coined in jest, is actually a pretty good translation of what King envisioned.

So don't fret about the profiling, Ron. The civil rights generation fought for your right to be judged on your own history. The rest is up to you.

The Race Conversation, Continued

Based on the evidence so far, there's good reason to believe that genes influence everything and exclusively control nothing. Intelligence, in particular, is a field with lots of evidence for heredity but little evidence for the precise impact of any known gene. We're very early in this research. If you start poking around in scholarly debates over IQ and general intelligence, or "g," you start to realize how much the field resembles astronomy or particle physics, with entities and qualities being calculated from complex inferences rather than directly observed. That's not to say inferences and calculations aren't scientific. But we should beware mistaking them for unshakeable facts.

More here.

Genes, Inequality, and Colorblindness

We've already identified genes that correlate with traits and vary in prevalence between ethnic groups. Are you confident that intelligence will turn out to be exempt from this list? Confident enough to leave no backup plan, no understanding of equality that can withstand a partial role for heredity? Confident enough to keep tallying and reporting test scores by race? And if intelligence turns out not to vary genetically between groups, do you imagine that we'll get just as lucky with every other significant mental trait?

More here.

First They Came for the Mexicans

Wasn't it just this morning that we were talking about the perils of classifying and treating people according to race?

Look at the news from China this afternoon. According to the New York Times:

The Chinese authorities have confined dozens of Mexicans to hotels and hospitals despite having no signs of human swine virus, Mexican consular officials said Monday. ... Since last Thursday, when an AeroMexico flight from Mexico City arrived in Shanghai with an infected man, Chinese health officials have been rounding up his fellow passengers as well as travelers on other flights who showed no signs of illness. But authorities also sequestered a number of Mexican passport holders who had not been home in months ...

This is exactly what I worried about in last week's discussion of thermal scanners:

If you think heat is a bad proxy for flu infection, ask yourself whether it's worse than nationality. Travel companies are canceling flights to Mexico. Today, Japan began denying visas to Mexicans on arrival. Governments and businesses want an easy way to identify, segregate, and scrutinize the people most likely to be carriers. Which group would you rather they target? People with excess body heat? Or Mexicans?

Looks like China has already decided to target Mexicans. And please don't try to defend this as a logical response to a flu that came from Mexico. When you're rounding up Mexicans who haven't been home during the flu's existence, logic is out the window.

Strictly speaking, this isn't inappropriate classification and discrimination based on race. It's inappropriate classification and discrimination based on nationality. But the point is the same: Beware the easy recourse to crude categories.

Race, Genes, and Criminal Justice

Is it OK to guess a perpetrator's race and appearance from DNA found at the crime scene?

A few weeks ago, Gautam Naik of the Wall Street Journal updated us on a fertility clinic's program to screen embryos for "eye color, hair color and complexion." The clinic hoped to use a method that could supposedly "identify [genes] that relate to northern European skin, hair and eye pigmentation in 80%" of IVF embryos.

Two weeks later, when the clinic suspended the program, I suspected its concession was more technical than moral. Predicting traits from genes is hard. That's one reason why so many threats and promises of genetic engineering haven't materialized.

But now it seems I may have underestimated the field. Naik has returned with further research on the genetics of appearance. Gene-trait correlations are becoming increasingly precise. And the practice to which they're being applied most aggressively isn't embryo screening. It's law enforcement.

Here's his latest report:

Murray Brilliant, a geneticist at the University of Arizona, is developing a predictive test for skin, eye and hair color. Supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice, he and his colleagues recently analyzed DNA material provided by 1,000 university students from different ethnic backgrounds. They found a total of five genes that account for 76% of the variation for hair color, 75% for eye color and 46% for skin color. Similarly, scientists from Erasmus University published a paper in March in the journal Current Biology based on a DNA analysis of 6,000 people in the Netherlands. For that population group, they found that only six DNA markers are needed to predict brown eye color with 93% accuracy and blue eye color with 91% accuracy.

Some of those numbers are quite impressive. If they're packaged into an affordable embryo test, I guarantee you buyers will start lining up. But look where the money's coming from. Brilliant got his grant from DoJ. The Erasmus group got its funding from the Netherlands Forensic Institute, which "provides services to clients within the criminal justice chain, such as the Public Prosecution Service and the police." In fact, Naik points out, "[t]he push to predict physical features from genetic material," known as "DNA forensic phenotyping," has

already helped crack some difficult investigations. In 2004, police caught a Louisiana serial killer who eyewitnesses had suggested was white, but whose crime-scene DNA suggested—correctly—that he was black. Britain's forensic service uses a similar "ethnic inference" test to trace murderers and rapists. In 2007, a DNA test based on 34 genetic biomarkers ... indicated that one of the suspects associated with the Madrid bombings was of North African origin.

Whoa, there. Do we really want cops hunting for people of a particular race or ethnicity based on uncertain inferences from a DNA sample? Apparently several states don't. Nor does Germany. These jurisdictions, according to Naik, forbid "the forensic use of DNA to infer ethnicity or physical traits."

I understand the concern. But these prohibitions are a mistake. DNA forensic phenotyping doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be better than—or a substantial way of double-checking—the unscientific inferences we already make.

The Louisiana case sets off racism alarms because DNA phenotyping said the culprit was black, whereas witnesses said he was white. But that isn't the usual pattern. Decades of research suggest that a witness is more likely to misidentify a person as the perpetrator when the accused person is of a different race. And according to the Innocence Project,

Racism continues to be a significant cause of wrongful convictions. While 29% of people in prison for rape are black, 64% of the people who were wrongfully convicted of rape (and then exonerated through DNA) are black. Moreover, most sexual assaults nationwide are among perpetrators and victims of the same race (the federal government says just 12% of sexual assaults are cross racial), but two-thirds of all black men exonerated through DNA evidence were wrongfully convicted of raping white people.

DNA phenotyping didn't invent the problem of erroneous racial inferences in law enforcement. That problem is as old as racism and lives on through mug books, lineups, and eyewitness testimony. As the Innocence Project points out, DNA is beginning to clean up the problem. Granted, DNA phenotyping isn't nearly as reliable as DNA matching. But is it really worse than relying on witnesses alone? At the very least, wouldn't it be useful and wise to check witness recollections of the perpetrator's race or ethnicity against a DNA phenotype analysis?

The same goes for facial features. Naik reports:

Mark Shriver, an anthropologist and geneticist ... [is] trying to construct a "picture" of a person's face by analyzing DNA. He calls the technique "forensic molecular photo fitting," and it is supported by a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Justice. ... His team collected DNA samples and photographs from 243 people ... and used computer techniques to correlate the genes with his subjects' facial features. They have found six genes that seem to influence such traits. One gene is associated with the height of the face; another is associated with its width. Yet another gene affects the shape of the lips and the nose. By piecing together these elements, Prof. Shriver hopes to create a modern-day version of the police artist sketch.

Initial results of this method will probably be pretty crude. But will it end up being worse than old-fashioned police sketches based on eyewitness accounts? Would we have caught the Son of Sam killer earlier, for instance, if his police sketch hadn't been wildly inaccurate, making him look Latino or Asian?

No, DNA phenotyping isn't perfect. But it's better than nothing. And it's better than trusting witnesses alone.