Race or no ... race

Interesting bit of information taken from the GUARDIAN science site.

Are there genetic differences between "races"?

Mark Pagel, evolutionary biologist at Reading University. His research includes work on language and cultural evolution.

"Flawed as the old ideas about race are, modern genomic studies reveal a surprising, compelling and different picture of human genetic diversity. We are on average about 99.5% similar to each other genetically. This is a new figure, down from the previous estimate of 99.9%. To put what may seem like minuscule differences in perspective, we are somewhere around 98.5% similar, maybe more, to chimpanzees, our nearest evolutionary relatives.

"The new figure for us, then, is significant. It derives from among other things, many small genetic differences that have emerged from studies that compare human populations ... Like it or not, there may be many genetic differences among human populations - including differences that may even correspond to old categories of "race" - that are real differences in the sense of making one group better than another at responding to some particular environmental problem.

"This in no way says one group is in general "superior" to another ... But it warns us that we must be prepared to discuss genetic differences among human populations.

Ghost management and racial essentialism

Very interesting current issue of PLOS MEDICINE. There are several highly interesting pieces on the use and abuse of racial 'eye balling' of patients in medical practice, including papers by Ellison and Fausto-Sterling. Also, my colleague Sergio Sismondo has a piece on ghost management in medical research. He describes at length how pharmaceutical companies ghost manage medical research that they finance, all the way throughout the research process, from study design to the writ-up (for publication) of the results. So, as consumers of pharmaceuticals as well as health care professionals relying on published research results we have reason to be very concerned. All of this is well worth your time, and well worth reading.