Race Mixture and Physical Disharmonies

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive on 2011-12-31 21:33Z by Steven

Race Mixture and Physical Disharmonies

Science Magazine
Volume 71, Number 1850 (1930-06-13)
pages 603-606
DOI: 10.1126/science.71.1850.603

W. E. Castle (1867-1962)
Bussey Institution, Harvard

Professor H. S. Jennings in his recent book on “The Biological Basis of Human Nature” devotes a chapter to the subject of race mixture and its consequences. Considering first the purely physical results, he mentions both advantages and disadvantages resulting from wide racial crosses. As an advantage he reckons hybrid vigor and the covering up in the immediate offspring of any recessive defects which may be present in cither parent race. As a disadvantage he mentions possible disharmony in details of structure. It is to this latter point that I wish to give brief consideration, as it is a matter of considerable biological importance apart from its human interest Jennings says, on page 280:

Working probably to the disadvantage of some race mixtures in man is the fact that certain human races differ in such ways that union of their characteristics may yield combinations that are in details inharmonious. In the mixture of races found in the United States, as Davenport has pointed out, some of the stocks differ greatly in physique from others. Some are smaller, having organs that go with a small body—small heart, small kidneys, small jaws, small teeth; such on the whole are the racesj that come from the Mediterranean region of Europe. Others have large bodies, with large kidneys, heart, jaws, teeth, and other organs.

Judging from what occurs in other organisms, when such diverse races are crossed, the offspring, receiving genes from both sides, may well develop combinations of parts that lack complete harmony. If a large body is combined with small kidneys, the latter may be insufficient for the needs of the individual. Or a large body might be combined with a small heart that would not keep the blood properly circulated. Large teeth, resulting from the genes of one parent, may be crowded in a small jaw that results from the genes of the other parent. In consequence the teeth decay. Partly to it, Davenport (by whom the examples) given above are suggested) ascribes the prevalence ut defective teeth in the United States. According to him, crowded and defective teeth are less common in nations with races less mixed.

It is difficult to measure with certainty lack of harmony between body size and size of kidney or heart, so that direct proof that the possible inharmonious combinations mentioned above actually occur in man as a result of mixture of races is not available. But the occurrence of inharmonious combinations of certain bodily parts as a result of race crossing has been observed both in man and in other organisms. A striking case of this kind in the dog—comic rather than tragic in its consequences—is described by Lang. A great St. Bernard dog was crossed with a dachshund. Some of the progeny had the large heavy body of the St. Bernard, resting on the short crooked legs of the dachshund. The result (figure 49) was neither beautiful nor efficient.

Tho occurrence of inharmonious combinational, in human race crosses, has been shown with respect to parts of the body that are measurable, in the recent study…

Read or purchase the article here.

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Results of Inbreeding on Norfolk Island

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Oceania on 2011-12-30 01:00Z by Steven

Results of Inbreeding on Norfolk Island

Science  Magazine
Volume 65, Number 1693 (1927-06-10)
page x
DOI: 10.1126/science.65.1693.0x-s

Providing the original stock is sound, inbreeding among human beings results in no deterioration, physical or mental. Nor does mixture of widely differing races produce an inferior type.  Such are the conclusions of Dr. Harry L. Shapiro, ethnologist of the American Museum of Natural History, from a recent study of the inhabitants of Norfolk Island, a small island north of New Zealand.  They are the Tahitian-English half-castes whose history dates back  the mutiny of the crew of the ship Bounty in 1789.  At pesent there are more than 600 of these islanders and they are the descendants of twelve Tahitian women and nine Englishmen, part of the mutinous crew.

In 1789 the crew of the Bounty, a vessel sailing in the southern Pacific, mutinied, casting the captain adrift in a small boat and making for Tahiti. Here nine of the crew, fearing capture, sailed to Pitcairn, a small uninhabited island east of Tahiti. They took with them twelve Tahitian women and nine Tahitian men.  On Pitcairn the women were divided among the Englishmen as wives.  The Tahitian men were allowed no women. This lead to jealousy and the Tahitian men where killed, leaving no descendants.  The Tahitian women and the Englishmen all of them sound stock established a  line of half-castes.  They were completely isolated and they multiplied rapidly.

By 1856 the population was to great for the small space of Pitcairn. More that 150 moved to Norfolk Island which was at that time uninhabited. To-day there is a population of 600 on Norfolk Island and 175 on Pitcairn, all descendants of the original Tahitians and English.  It is of the Norfolk Islanders that Dr. Shapiro has made a study.

Dr. Shapiro has found these islanders to be of sound physique, taller than the average English and Tahitians, and of good mentality.  There is only one feeble-minded person, he said, on Norfolk Island.  Their education has of necessity been rudimentary for generations, but they are now provided with teachers by the Australian Government under the jurisdiction of which they come.  And the teachers are getting excellent results.

Thus, according to Dr. Shapiro, the Norfolk Islanders prove that, when the stock is sound to begin with, intensive in-breeding makes for no decrease in stamina.  Likewise, race mixture, in his opinion, brings go deterioration.

The idea that the half-caste is inferior, he maintained, comes largely from the fact that pure races have always look down on the half-caste. In Norfolk Island, he said, the half-caste has a chance to show his worth, for there is no discrimination against him, as the entire population is half-caste.  And Norfolk Island, he pointed out, is one of the only places in thw world with no stigma is attached to half-castes.

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Race as a Social Construct in Head and Neck Cancer Outcomes

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive on 2011-12-29 20:14Z by Steven

Race as a Social Construct in Head and Neck Cancer Outcomes

Otolaryngology—Head Neck Surgery
Volume 144, Number 3 (March 2011)
pages 381-389
DOI: 10.1177/0194599810393884

Maria J. Worsham, PhD
Department of Otolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery
Henry Ford Health System, Detroit, Michigan

George Divine, PhD
Biostatistics and Research Epidemiology
Henry Ford Health System, Detroit, Michigan

Rick A. Kittles, PhD
Section of Hematology/Oncology, Department of Medicine and Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics
School of Public Health, University of Illinois, Chicago

Objective. The authors examined ancestry informative markers (AIMs) to estimate the amount of population admixture and control for this heterogeneity for stage and survival in a primary head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) cohort.

Study Design. Historical cohort study.

Setting. Integrated health care system.

Subjects. The cohort comprised 358 patients with HNSCC who self-reported race as Caucasian American (CA), African American (AA), or other.

Methods. DNA was interrogated for West African (WA) and European genetic background by genotyping AIMs. Associations of race (self-report or WA ancestry) with stage and survival were analyzed using logistic regression and Cox regression modeling. A subgroup analysis for diagnosis (late vs early stage) and survival (time to death) and WA ancestry was performed for self-reported AAs.

Results. There were significant associations between stage and self-reported race (P = .04 [univariate]) and with cancer site (oropharynx: P = .014; hypopharynx: P = .026 [multivariate]). For prognosis, there were significant multivariate associations between stage (P = .002), age (>65 years, P < .001), and cancer site (hypopharynx: P < .001; oral cavity: P = .049), but self-reported race was not associated with overall survival. Interestingly, there was no association with degree of WA ancestry and stage or survival. In the subgroup analysis of genetic ancestry among self-reported AAs, cancer site remained an independent risk factor for stage (other site: P = .026) and survival (oropharynx: P = .036). Late stage persisted as an independent variable for poor survival (P = .032).

Conclusions. Stratification within AAs by WA ancestry revealed no correlation with stage or survival, suggesting that HNSCC outcomes with race may be owing to social/behavior factors rather than biological differences.

Read or purchase article here.

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Letter to the Editor: Alleged Extinction of Mulatto

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, United States on 2011-12-29 01:51Z by Steven

Letter to the Editor: Alleged Extinction of Mulatto

Science Magazine
Volume 20, Number 517 (1892-12-30)
page 375
DOI: 10.1126/science.ns-20.517.375

A few months since an article appeared in a medical journal affirming that the pure mulatto colonies of southern Ohio were dying out after the fourth generation. Can any reader point me to the article in question, or to any definite information bearing on the permanence of the mulatto as a species (or variety)?

Polytechnic Society,
Louisville, Kentucky
JAS. Lewis Howe

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Talking Race w/ Social Critic/Legal Scholar Dorothy Roberts

Posted in Audio, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Interviews, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy on 2011-12-27 01:30Z by Steven

Talking Race w/ Social Critic/Legal Scholar Dorothy Roberts

Blogtalk Radio
Tuesday, 2011-10-11

Michelle McCrary, Host
Is That Your Child?

Dorothy Roberts, George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology; Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights
University of Pennsylvania

ITYC is honored to welcome leading legal scholar and social critic Dorothy Roberts to the podcast. Author of the over 75 articles and essays in books and scholarly journals, including Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, and Stanford Law Review, Robert’s latest work Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century, is an eye-opening look at the way race continues to be reproduced and legitimized in our society.

Roberts is the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Northwestern University School of Law and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research. She is also the author of Killing the Black Body and Shattered Bonds and has received fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation, Searle Fund, Fulbright Scholars Program, Harvard University Program in Ethics and the Professions, and Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

..this was a book that really, completely, changed and challenged everything that I knew and I thought I knew about race. And I thank you for that, because it’s just one of those books that really, really kind of changes your life in a way because it sort of opens things up and makes you think about the world a completely different way, it’s a really powerful book.

Download the interview here (01:17:41).

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TV Review: Mixed Race Britain – Mixed Britannia

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Interviews, Law, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, Social Science, Social Work, United Kingdom, Videos on 2011-12-15 03:24Z by Steven

TV Review: Mixed Race Britain – Mixed Britannia

BioNews
Number 630 (2011-10-24)

Anoushka Shepherd

Mixed Race Britain: Mixed Britannia, BBC2, 6-20 October 2011, Presented by George Alagiah

I am mixed race, and thereby a member the fastest growing ethnic minority in the UK. My British dad met my Sri Lankan mum while travelling in the 1970s. They married and settled in Manchester where I grew up. And although I was definitely alive to the fact that their marriage was a joining of two very different cultures, I had no idea of the deep and contentious history of mixed relationships in this country.

In this three-part documentary, George Alagiah recounts the largely untold story of mixed race Britain and the many love stories that overcame extreme social hardship to create it…

…In summary, all three programmes are packed with interviews and are rich in photographs and footage from the archives. This is a very real and intimate recollection of the history of this country told in the refreshingly honest words of those who were there. All the stories told are different, interesting and moving in their own ways…

Read the entire review here.

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Book review: What’s the use of race? Modern governance and the biology of difference

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy on 2011-12-15 02:08Z by Steven

Book review: What’s the use of race? Modern governance and the biology of difference

BioNews
Number 634 (2011-11-21)

Dr. Rachael Panizzo

Decoding the human genome has revealed details of our evolution and patterns of migration across the world. The study of genetic diversity between ethnic groups can help explain the ways in which race influences our biology and susceptibility to disease. It promises to deliver a new era of personalised medicine, where an individual’s unique DNA profile is used to make predictions about their future health; where specialised drugs are tailored to individual patients, based in part on their genetic ancestry.

But what do we mean by ‘race’, exactly? Is race a relevant biological or medical category, and how is it defined in practice?

These issues are considered in the collection of essays What’s the use of race? Modern governance and the biology of difference, edited by Dr Ian Whitmarsh of the University of California San Francisco, and Dr David Jones at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The contributors explore the use of race in biomedical research and some of the emerging practical applications in medicine and forensic science. Their diverse and sometimes conflicting perspectives result in an engaging book that highlights the complexity of the issue.
 
Genetics has become the foundation of a new ‘biocitizenship’, where it is our civic duty to know and share our own genetic information and engage with our health at a molecular level. Common genetic make-up replaces common social experience, and group identities are carved along lines of shared genetic traits, ‘reinterpreting existing political identities and creating new ones’, says Professor Dorothy Roberts, from Northwestern University. Social and political categories of difference—such as gender or race…

…In the medical setting, subtle statistical differences are often interpreted as blanket differences between races, and individual patients are assumed to reflect the average characteristics of their race. But Jay Kaufman, associate professor of epidemiology at McGill University, and Professor Richard Cooper, of Loyola University, Chicago, demonstrate that in practice, a patient’s ethnic identity adds little to the diagnosis or prognosis of disease and is rarely medically relevant.

The essays of Professor Jonathan Kahn (Hamline University), and Pamela Sankar, associate professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania emphasise how embedded racial categories are in forensic science, giving examples of DNA fingerprinting and phenotyping. Originally, racial information was used in DNA fingerprinting technology to improve accuracy, but as it has improved substantially, Professor Kahn argues it is now superfluous, irrelevant, and risks perpetuating racial stereotypes – ‘conflating race, genes and violent crime’…

…Should race be used at all in medical research? Many authors argue that its inclusion reifies the concept of race as a fundamental human characteristic. But Dr Kaufmann, Professor Cooper, and Harvard School of Public Health Professor Nancy Krieger suggest race does have a place in biomedical research, as a social category—including information about race or ethnicity is a way of documenting health inequalities, which would otherwise be invisible and ignored….

Read the entire review here.

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Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History

Posted in Anthologies, Anthropology, Books, Health/Medicine/Genetics, History, Media Archive, Social Science on 2011-12-12 03:12Z by Steven

Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History

Rutgers University Press
2012-03-15
368 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-5255-2
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-5254-5

Keith Wailoo, Townsend Martin Professor of History and Public Affairs
Princeton University

Alondra Nelson, Associate Professor of Sociology
Columbia University

Catherine Lee, Assistant Professor of Sociology; Faculty Associate
Institute for Health
Rutgers University

Our genetic markers have come to be regarded as portals to the past. Analysis of these markers is increasingly used to tell the story of human migration; to investigate and judge issues of social membership and kinship; to rewrite history and collective memory; to right past wrongs and to arbitrate legal claims and human rights controversies; and to open new thinking about health and well-being. At the same time, in many societies genetic evidence is being called upon to repair the racial past and to transform scholarly and popular opinion about the “nature” of identity in the present.

Genetics and the Unsettled Past considers the alignment of genetic science with commercial genealogy, with legal and forensic developments, and with pharmaceutical innovation to examine how these trends lend renewed authority to biological understandings of race and history.

This unique collection brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to explore the emerging and often contested connections among race, DNA, and history. Written for a general audience, the book’s essays touch upon a variety of topics, including the rise and implications of DNA in genealogy, law, and other fields; the cultural and political uses and misuses of genetic information; the way in which DNA testing is reshaping understandings of group identity for French Canadians, Native Americans, South Africans, and many others within and across cultural and national boundaries; and the sweeping implications of genetics for society today.

In this interview for Dalton Conley’s book, You May Ask Yourself, Alondra Nelson describes her research on genetic testing and how it is changing the way people think about race.

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Examining Population Stratification via Individual Ancestry Estimates versus Self-Reported Race

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Latino Studies, Media Archive on 2011-12-09 04:43Z by Steven

Examining Population Stratification via Individual Ancestry Estimates versus Self-Reported Race

Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention
Volume 14, Issue 6 (June 2005)
pages 1545-1551
DOI: 10.1158/1055-9965.EPI-04-0832

Jill S. Barnholtz-Sloan
Cancer Prevention and Control Program
H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute

Ranajit Chakraborty
Center for Genome Research, Department of Environmental Health
University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio

Thomas A. Sellers
Cancer Prevention and Control Program
H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute

Ann G. Schwartz
Population Studies and Prevention Program, Karmanos Cancer Institute and Department of Internal Medicine
Wayne State University School of Medicine, Detroit, Michigan

Population stratification has the potential to affect the results of genetic marker studies. Estimating individual ancestry provides a continuous measure to assess population structure in case-control studies of complex disease, instead of using self-reported racial groups. We estimate individual ancestry using the Federal Bureau of Investigation CODIS Core short tandem repeat set of 13 loci using two different analysis methods in a case-control study of early-onset lung cancer. Individual ancestry proportions were estimated for “European” and “West African” groups using published allele frequencies. The majority of Caucasian, non-Hispanics had >50% European ancestry, whereas the majority of African Americans had <20% European ancestry, regardless of ancestry estimation method, although significant overlap by self-reported race and ancestry also existed. When we further investigated the effect of ancestry and self-reported race on the frequency of a lung cancer risk genotype, we found that the frequency of the GSTM1 null genotype varies by individual European ancestry and case-control status within self-reported race (particularly for African Americans). Genetic risk models showed that adjusting for individual European ancestry provided a better fit to the data compared with the model with no group adjustment or adjustment for self-reported race. This study suggests that significant population substructure differences exist that self-reported race alone does not capture and that individual ancestry may be confounded with disease status and/or a candidate gene risk genotype.

Read the entire article here.

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Understanding Racial-ethnic Disparities in Health: Sociological Contributions

Posted in Articles, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2011-12-09 04:22Z by Steven

Understanding Racial-ethnic Disparities in Health: Sociological Contributions

Journal of Health and Social Behavior
Volume 51, Number 1 Supplement (November, 2010)
pages S15-S27
DOI: 10.1177/0022146510383838

David R. Williams
Harvard University

Michelle Sternthal
Harvard University

This article provides an overview of the contribution of sociologists to the study of racial and ethnic inequalities in health in the United States. It argues that sociologists have made four principal contributions. First, they have challenged and problematized the biological understanding of race. Second, they have emphasized the primacy of social structure and context as determinants of racial differences in disease. Third, they have contributed to our understanding of the multiple ways in which racism affects health. Finally, sociologists have enhanced our understanding of the ways in which migration history and status can affect health. Sociological insights on racial disparities in health have important implications for the development of effective approaches to improve health and reduce health inequities.

Read the entire article here.

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