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J Scott Hill

'Ten Commandments' of race and genetics issued - science-in-society - 17 July 2008 - Ne... - 0 views

www.newscientist.com/...-race-and-genetics-issued.html

race genetics

shared by J Scott Hill on 22 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Even with the human genome in hand, geneticists are split about how to deal with issues of race, genetics and medicine.
  • Some favor using genetic markers to sort humans into groups based on ancestral origin - groups that may show meaningful health differences. Others argue that genetic variations across the human species are too gradual to support such divisions and that any categorisation based on genetic differences is arbitrary.
  • 1. All races are created equal No genetic data has ever shown that one group of people is inherently superior to another. Equality is a moral value central to the idea of human rights; discrimination against any group should never be tolerated.
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  • 2. An Argentinian and an Australian are more likely to have differences in their DNA than two Argentinians Groups of human beings have moved around throughout history. Those that share the same culture, language or location tend to have different genetic variations than other groups. This is becoming less true, though, as populations mix.
  • J Scott Hill on 22 Feb 13
     
    This is a short list of good points to be made about Genetics and the concept of race.  I find that it is often difficult for students to wrap their heads around genetic variation and race.  I will try my best to explain it in the coming week.
J Scott Hill

A Family Tree in Every Gene - 0 views

raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Leroi

race culture racism genetics adaptation evolution

shared by J Scott Hill on 26 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Who speaks of "racial stocks" anymore? After all, to do so would be to speak of something that many scientists and scholars say does not exist. If modern anthropologists mention the concept of race, it is invariably only to warn against and dismiss it. Likewise many geneticists. "Race is social concept, not a scientific one," according to Dr. Craig Venter—and he should know, since he was first to sequence the human genome.
  • But now, perhaps, that is about to change
  • The dominance of the social construct theory can be traced to a 1972 article by Dr. Richard Lewontin, a Harvard geneticist, who wrote that most human genetic variation can be found within any given "race." If one looked at genes rather than faces, he claimed, the difference between an African and a European would be scarcely greater than the difference between any two Europeans.
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  • Three decades later, it seems that Dr. Lewontin's facts were correct, and have been abundantly confirmed by ever better techniques of detecting genetic variety. His reasoning, however, was wrong. His error was an elementary one, but such was the appeal of his argument that it was only a couple of years ago that a Cambridge University statistician, A. W. F. Edwards, put his finger on it.
  • 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.
  • J Scott Hill on 26 Feb 13
     
    "A Family Tree in Every Gene By Armand Marie Leroi Published on: Jun 07, 2006 Armand Marie Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist at Imperial College in London, is the author of Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body." This Article is a fairly sensible, nuanced, defense of the race concept based on recent genetic analyses of hundreds of genetic variables at a time.   
J Scott Hill

Welcome - 0 views

raceandgenomics.ssrc.org

race genetics anthropology science racism ssrc

shared by J Scott Hill on 22 Feb 13 - Cached
  • J Scott Hill on 22 Feb 13
     
    To understand the genetic basis of human genetics and the limitations of race concepts describing that variation...I encourage you to read some of the essays attached to this page.  If you find something of interest, highlight it and share it to our class page.
Erin Brennan

What are the major questions concerning the Darkness in El Dorado controversy? - 63 views

The American Anthropological Association is called on to take action on the allegations made by Patrick Tierney, an investigative journalist, about the genetic and medical experiments conducted by ...

Questions

started by J Scott Hill on 31 Jan 13 24 follow-ups, last by Erin Brennan on 06 Feb 13
Mia Gooding

Kenan Malik's review of 'Darkness in El Dorado' by Patrick Tierney - 0 views

www.kenanmalik.com/...tierney_darkness.html

research anthropology paradigm

shared by Mia Gooding on 05 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • In the twentieth century, the consequences of racial science led anthropologists to reject naturalistic explanations and to see human behaviour as dictated largely by culture, not biology
  • all too often anthropologists saw what they wanted to
  • The most prominent of the new generation of sociobiological anthropologists was the American Napoleon Chagnon
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  • Chagnon presented the Yanomamo as a fierce, primitive tribe whose mores opened the window onto our own past ('our contemporary ancestors' as Chagnon has described them).
  • linked Yanomami violence to genetic success
  • Chagnon revealed that men who had killed had more than twice as many wives and three times as many offspring as non-killers. The idea that murderous violence enhanced Yanomami men's reproductive success was manna for sociobiologists.
  • Chagnon's paper is one of the most widely cited scientific studies of all time - and one of the most fiercely criticised.
  • Tierney presents a convincing case that Chagnon has consistently overestimated Yanomami violence, and that he himself was responsible for fomenting much of it
  • Patrick Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado
  • Tierney accuses Chagnon, among other things, of scientific fraud, sexual abuse, political corruption and, most sensationally, genocide
  • Chagnon, and his mentor the geneticist James Neel, may have deliberately infected Yanomami with measles, beginning an epidemic that wiped out hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people, as part of a grotesque experiment to test the impact of natural selection on primitive groups.
  • Tierney's book, they claim, is 'a case study of the dangers in science of the uncontrolled ego'.
  • humans are an inherently violent and aggressive species. Chagnon himself has said that violence 'may be the principal driving force behind the evolution of culture'
  • Chagnon had changed the political balance between different Yanomami groups by favouring some over others, and by selectively providing steel goods and weapons to certain groups. Chagnon was apparently given to bursting into villages decorated in war paint and brandishing a shotgun. Yanomami men soon realized that their own displays of aggression would be rewarded with machetes and other highly prized tools.
  • Chagnon was an active participant in the wars. Yanomami men were fighting for access not to women but to Chagnon himself.
  • In 1968 a measles epidemic decimated the Yanomami population. At exactly the same time, Chagnon had embarked on an expedition to the Amazon under the leadership of the geneticist James Neel. During that expedition the two men initiated a programme of inoculation against measles to protect the Yanomamo. According to Tierney, however, it was that very programme of inoculation that caused the epidemic in the first place.
  • Tierney quotes several people who hint darkly that an epidemic might have been exactly what Neel wanted. Moreover, once the epidemic was under way, Neel and Chagnon 'refused to provide any medical assistance to the sick and dying Yanomami', insisting that 'they were there only to observe and record the epidemic, and that they must stick strictly to their roles as scientists, not provide medical help.'
  • Neel rejected the medical orthodoxy that the Yanomami were genetically susceptible to measles, believing that the Yanomamis' survival-of-the-fittest lifestyle had given them immune systems more robust than those of us in pampered modern societies have. The epidemic would prove Neel's theories.
  • Tierney produces very little direct evidence to back up his monstrous claims.
  • The consensus is that the measles epidemic began before Chagnon and Neel arrived in Venezuela, and that they initiated their inoculation programme precisely because they were aware of the earlier outbreak
  • used Edmonston B
  • after receiving advice from the Venezuelan government
  • In many ways Darkness in El Dorado raises more questions about Tierney's motives, and those of Chagnon's other critics, than it does about Chagnon's own work.
  • What Tierney is questioning is the very possibility of a scientific anthropology. Anthropologists cannot simply be observers, as traditional scientific objectivity requires, but must actively take sides in any political struggle involving the peoples they are studying. And in such a struggle the norms of scientific objectivity become subordinate to the political aims
  • Mia Gooding on 05 Feb 13
     
    I find this article interesting because it not only describes Tierney's point of view of Chagnon in 'Darkness in El Dorado' but it questions Tierney's own credibility of accusing Chagnon for such outrageous crimes.  It describes his reasoning behind all his claims but also points out the last of factual evidence he presents with them.
Brendan Raleigh

Coronil et al., Perspectives on Darkness in El Dorado - 1 views

anthroniche.com/...0457.htm

darkness el dorado tierney neel chagnon measles Yanomami

shared by Brendan Raleigh on 06 Feb 13 - No Cached
J Scott Hill liked it
  • The first strand of the book, which occupies less than one-tenth of Tierney's text but has received the most public attention, argues that Neel and Chagnon collected blood samples for the Atomic Energy Commission to compare mutation rates in populations contaminated by radiation with those in one uncontaminated by it and at the same time carried out an experiment on immunity formation among an isolated population involving a measles vaccination program. According to Tierney, although a safer and cheaper vaccine was already available, Neel chose the Edmonston B vaccine because it produced antibodies that would allow for comparison of European and Yanomami immune systems and prove the latter's ability to generate levels of antibiodies similar to those of populations previously exposed to the disease. Tierney's most controversial and damaging charge is that these activities may have led to a deadly outbreak of measles. While medical experts agree that no vaccine could have caused an epidemic, it is still not clear why this outdated vaccine was chosen or what measures were taken to care for those affected by its known reaction.
  • For Tierney, however, seemingly any biomedical research is unethical; all studies for Tierney are "experiments" (however observational their methods), and all "experiments" that do not directly benefit the community involved in the study are "criminal" (p. 43). Thus James Neel, a recently deceased distinguished human geneticist as well as physician, who carried out an extensive series of biomedical studies of the Yanomami, is criminalized.
  • ere is where Neel parted company with classical eugenics. He never advocated selective breeding practices. He merely pointed out the selective consequences of Yanomami polygyny (Neel 1980 ) and noted with irony the extreme unlikelihood that populations in the industrialized world would adopt Yanomami marriage practices. His prescriptions for the gene pool (Neel 1994 ) all involved manipulating the environment rather than genetics. These included efforts to control population growth, "euphenics" or the reshaping of environments to "ameliorate the expression of our varied genotypes" (Neel 1994 :353), keeping mutation rates as low as possible through control of exposure to environmental mutagens, and providing counseling to prospective parents to decrease the transmission of genetic diseases. None of these ideas bear any resemblance to classic eugenic schemes.
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  • Elsewhere Tierney's misrepresentations cannot be dismissed as this kind of error. For instance, he associates unethical experiments in the University of Rochester Medical School with Neel, who was "company commander" and "ran much of the hospital" (p. 301). But rather than running the hospital, the page cited by Tierney from Neel's autobiography ( 1994 :22) says that he drilled the students in military exercises required by their army service. This is a particularly useful example of Tierney's misuse of citations, since it is so easily checked.
zach ruch

Anthropological Niche of Douglas W. Hume - Biographies - 2 views

anthroniche.com/...biographies.html

Biographies

shared by zach ruch on 05 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Timothy Asch, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California
  • While studying at Columbia University, he worked as a teaching assistant for Margaret Mead who got him interested in the potential use of visual media for instruction. He was intrigued by this field, and that’s probably why he made this his life long passion and career.
  • Napoleon Chagnon is a Professor of Sociobiology at the University of California, Santa Barbara
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  • During his studies, Napoleon spent time in very remote villages so he could better understand the warfare, as well as other social features of the Yanomamo.
  • James Van Gundia Neel, professor emeritus of human genetics and internal medicine, died of cancer Feb. 1 at his home in Ann Arbor. He was 84. An internationally renowned scientist, Neel was a pioneer in the study of human genetics and one of the first to foresee its importance in the diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions
  • Patrick Tierney, author of Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon-W.W. Norton & Co., 2000
markyearick

Perspectives on Tierney's Darkness in El Dorado - 0 views

www.jstor.org/...320007

perspectives darkness anthropology Yanomami

shared by markyearick on 06 Feb 13 - No Cached
J Scott Hill liked it
  • markyearick on 06 Feb 13
     
    "Even before its publication, Darkness in El Dorado became a Janusfaced text that in calling attention to methodological and ethical shortcomings of scientific research in the Amazon also brought attention to faults in its own production." "Tierneys harrowing account forces us to ask how personal and professional ethical questions are defined and connected. His merit is to have brought together a vast amount of information about Western anthropological and medical practices carried out among the Yanomami and to have situated these practices within the network of institutional connections that made them possible and the ideologies of science and history that have rendered them so popular." "While Tierneys focus is on individuals, his book locates them in two relevant contexts: the cold war and the Vietnam War, during which currents of evolutionary genetics, sociobiology, and cultural anthropology claiming that aggression plays a positive role in human evolution found broad support, and the Venezuelan petrostate culture of clientelism, which fostered a network of corrupt politicians and businessmen with interests in the Yanomami and their territory for reasons of profit and power."
Stephanie Hegarty

Response to Allegations against James V. Neel in Darkness in El Dorado, by Patrick Tierney - 3 views

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...PMC384880

epidemic darkness allegations

shared by Stephanie Hegarty on 05 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • The most serious charge accuses Neel of deliberately initiating a 1968 measles epidemic among the Yanomami by using a hazardous and contraindicated vaccine to test theories about human evolution, “leadership genes,” and infectious diseases.
  • Various other allegations against Neel in Tierney’s book include the following:1.That he failed to provide medical care to the Yanomami during the measles epidemic.2.That the Yanomami population-genetics studies directed by Neel were performed as controls for comparison with work on mutation detection among the survivors of the atomic bombing in Japan.3.That Neel performed unethical experiments on the Yanomami, involving radioactive iodine injections.4.That he sought to demonstrate the existence of a “leadership gene” among the Yanomami headmen.5.That Neel was somehow involved in administering plutonium injections into patients in the Rochester hospital where he was a medical house officer in the 1940s.6.That he discounted the risks of atomic radiation.7.That Neel denounced modern American society and advocated improving the human race by principles of coercive eugenics.
  • Stephanie Hegarty on 05 Feb 13
     
    "The most serious charge accuses Neel of deliberately initiating a 1968 measles epidemic among the Yanomami by using a hazardous and contraindicated vaccine to test theories about human evolution, "leadership genes," and infectious diseases."
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